I HATE Level Caps

[Lord Retro]

Ok, let me start by going into my early days of computer roleplaying games. The year is 1988. The Game: Pool of Radiance. Probably the first more or less faithful adaptation of a Pen and Paper RPG. Yeah, there has been Wizardry, Might and Magic, Ultima and Bards Tale, but PoR was the first game that, to my memory, had the DnD tag written on it.

And i loved it. Every bit. It was insanely hard. had a compelling story, it was pretty big, but it had one flaw. The Level Cap. Well, to be fair, it was more of an XP Cap, when you reached a certain amount of xp, you couldnt level anymore. With that, a Mage could reach level 6, a Fighter level 8, and i think thieves could go for level 9.

And boy did i hate it. I reached the level cap somewhere around late mid game, because i went for EVERY fight, and i drained every xp i could find cause i loved leveling.

I loved it in Bards Tale, i loved it in Might and Magic, and in Wizardry. In none of those games did i ever reach a level cap, even tho i think there was one, At least in Bards Tale im pretty sure it used to be level 99 or something.

Now. When i reached the level cap in PoR, the game felt... over for me. I couldnt improve anymore. i quickly lost interest, and it took me a lot of investment later to bring up the interest to even finish it. It felt broken to me. I was constantly improving over the first half of the game, and in the second half there was nothing. Sure, the story was still good, but i feld handicapped by the fact that due to some arbitrary game mechanic, my characters forgot how to improve themselves.

It became a habit to me with the games that followed up (1989: Curse of the Azure Bonds • 1990: Secret of the Silver Blades • 1991: Pools of Darkness • 2001: Ruins of Myth Drannor), that the first thing i did when i bought the game was to immediately grab the little manual that had all the tables in it, to check for one thing: Did they raise the level cap, and how high?
And the same thing happened to me every time- i reached the cap, i lost interest. (Except in Pools of Darkness, where the level cap was 40, that felt ok-ish).

And with every rpg later on that was released that used similar mechanics, the first thing i usually google is 'Game xyz level cap.
And if i dont like what i see there, i might even not buy it.

So.

The level cap in this game is 10. The level cap of the pen and paper version is 20, which is hard to reach, i know that, being a pen and paper player myself.
But, considering that i am already level 4, halfway to level 5 after my first 2 major quests in this game, i already know where this is going. I predict i am not going to finish the game.

Yes guys, i know this is odd, and you dont need to tell me that there is reasons for the cap, and that i should focus on other things, and so on and so forth, but i cant step over my shadow here. I hate Level Caps. They suck. They ruin games for me.

[qwerty]

30 cap is ideal for DnD-like games IMO. 10 is kinda lame. But at least Solasta is decent DnD adventure unlike certain name stealing game about barrels.

[HaplessWanderer]

In a similar vein, I hate that I can't go complete side quests after finishing the main quest :)

This combined with the fact that the cutscene at the end was more of a prologue than an epilogue just made the ending suuuuuper disatisfying for me