Best open world RPGs without level scaling

Key insights

• Elden Ring encourages exploration as the world is open from the start and the difficulty gradually increases to empower players.
• Xenoblade Chronicles ensures precision in progression and balances enemy levels to create clear boundaries for player exploration.
• Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth offers a smooth and challenging progression system that avoids loops while maintaining the tension of the narrative.

Some players don’t like the idea of ​​enemies leveling up with them. In their eyes, level scaling defeats the purpose of leveling up and makes getting stronger feel irrelevant. The following games should then fit right into your wheelhouse. They abandon the concept in favor of other ways to balance the gameplay.

These games either start out difficult and get easier as players get stronger, or cleverly slow down the rate at which players level up so they don’t become overpowered. Additionally, if a new area offers a particularly challenging group of new enemies, players are encouraged to explore it and complete side quests to eventually match the strength of the new monsters.

7 Elden Ring

As brutal and merciless as it is mysterious

FromSoftware’s epic open-world RPG brings the joy back to the simple act of exploring an unknown land. The world is open to players practically from the start, although some bosses and story events close off certain areas. During opening hours, only the weakest fodder enemies are vulnerable, but as players level up, players can explore dangerous areas more safely.

As hard as Elden Ring That said, there are enough paths to go down so players should never feel like they have to enter a dungeon at too low a level. If easy enemies cause too much trouble, that’s a sign to leave and come back later when you’re stronger. Elden Ring takes player agency in open-world games to a new level by even letting you mark interesting points on the map yourself, instead of the game automatically leaving a series of them.

6 Xenoblade Chronicles

A strange science fiction land

Xenoblade Chronicles feels very similar Final Fantasy 12 when it comes to traversing vast landscapes on foot, fighting enemies and overcoming gigantic threats that are clearly too strong to handle at the moment. Progression in the game is pretty precise. If the group is a few levels below the enemy, it has little chance of victory. If they’re just a few levels higher, they’ll steamroll them and only gain a fraction of experience points.

This leaves little room for experimentation or trying to interrupt the game, but it also clearly shows players when an area is too intense for them. It can feel limiting, but for a game with such a large world, it’s important to let players know which areas can and cannot be explored.

5 Dragon’s Dogma 2

Bizarre, difficult and surprising

The long-awaited sequel to 2012’s cryptic open-world RPG offers a refined version of what players love about the series. Players are free to experiment and travel the world as they wish. However, that doesn’t mean the world won’t fight back.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 starts brutally difficult. It’s likely that players will fail often, but that failure is just a learning opportunity. As players become stronger and learn more about the game system, the threats in the world become less deadly. However, the game still has a few surprises in store to increase the challenge even further later. The end game, in particular, offers a whole new set of quests that pose a challenge for even the most prepared explorers.

4 Gothic 3

A group of wolves is as dangerous as a monster

Gothic came at a time when there were so many 3D open world RPGs and its influence was felt in many other open world titles. The third game was released in 2006 and features a familiar structure that allows players to explore the game world, complete quests and ultimately make decisions that affect the game world.

Part of Gothic 3 The appeal lies in the difficulty and the lack of level scaling. Depending on the type of player you are, taking the game away from a seemingly harmless forest animal can feel unfair or perfectly reasonable. Wolves in real life are no joke, even to trained hunters, so perhaps it’s true that they destroy the player so easily.

3 Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth

Complete side quests to balance levels with monsters

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth takes the game’s beautiful graphics and expands them into an open-world environment with various biomes. The game features four difficulty levels to ensure that every type of player has an experience tailored to them. On the first playthrough, most people will probably play on Normal, which provides just enough pushback to give players a bit of training and complete some side quests. People who do anything are likely to become overwhelmed.

If you want to go through the story in no time, you’ll have a harder time. Once Hard Mode is unlocked, the game offers a new challenge that forces players to think about the combat system and exploit its nuances to emerge victorious.

The game does have a dynamic mode that adjusts enemies based on the party’s level, but this is completely optional and not required for straight trophies. The three other difficulty levels do not scale levels or enemy stats.

2 Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Smoothly balanced so players don’t have to grind

Infinite wealth takes place on three different open-world maps. Throughout the chapters, players switch back and forth between them, but at some point they have access to everything available to them. As a role play Infinite wealth offers extremely smooth progression that increases the challenge at the right moments of the narrative.

Sometimes it’s difficult even to compete on the streets against common enemies, but players level up quickly enough to see the results of training quickly, so it never feels like an effort. This only becomes a problem once the game is completed. Most of the endgame content is hidden behind the launch DLC, making it almost impossible to reach maximum level with the base game.

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