At party level, why not (and again, how is this realistic? Why would the monsters care about your level before attacking?), but it currently isn't the case.
I cruised through Peldvale with a level 5 party without encountering a single Black Talon, and through the Firewine Bridge Dungeon while only encountering really reduced groups of kobolds (4 at most). Today, my now level-6 party was ambushed by a single half-ogre, attacked by a couple of xvarts, peppered with arrows by three skeletons, and chewed on by a mighty pack of two war dogs. And I have only met one winter wolf in my entire run so far (they are deadly in Vanilla).
At the very least, the system seems broken, and the beta testers definitely missed something.
And also they are not consistent with AD&D, with the Forgotten Realms, with the Points-of-Light idea, with the vanilla, with the Core difficulty, with the Monstrous Manual, with all the description given in the Game's Rulebook, with all the information you get from the NPCs, etc. And also not consistent within itself, read again what @bigdogchris said: the system is not scaling with level, with party sizes, with difficulty or anything.
As I said before (repeatedly, good god, how many times have I said it?), I've submitted it for review and it's being looked at.
And on that note, I'm closing this thread. I feel more than a little badgered, here. If there's an issue, it will be resolved; if things are working fine as they are, it will be examined for possible improvements.
Just going to quickly submit an update here despite the thread being closed:
For those waiting with bated breath, we figured out what went wrong here. Yes, there was an introduced bug, due to differences in the way the math was handled for the scaling/spawning system from BG1 to BG2. We attempted to make the BG1 maps use the BG2 system, but, when it came to this particular aspect we basically didn't go far enough.
Interestingly: in the course of investigation we found out that BG2 doesn't really use the random spawn system the same way that BG1 does. While it fits the style of gameplay in BG2 (sort of a more linear storyline), it's a kind of cool discovery in terms of giving us options for new content.
So: this fix should be present in our next patch. Thanks all involved for bringing it to our attention. Feel free to shoot me a message if you have questions.
Comments
At party level, why not (and again, how is this realistic? Why would the monsters care about your level before attacking?), but it currently isn't the case.
I cruised through Peldvale with a level 5 party without encountering a single Black Talon, and through the Firewine Bridge Dungeon while only encountering really reduced groups of kobolds (4 at most).
Today, my now level-6 party was ambushed by a single half-ogre, attacked by a couple of xvarts, peppered with arrows by three skeletons, and chewed on by a mighty pack of two war dogs. And I have only met one winter wolf in my entire run so far (they are deadly in Vanilla).
At the very least, the system seems broken, and the beta testers definitely missed something.
And on that note, I'm closing this thread. I feel more than a little badgered, here. If there's an issue, it will be resolved; if things are working fine as they are, it will be examined for possible improvements.
For those waiting with bated breath, we figured out what went wrong here. Yes, there was an introduced bug, due to differences in the way the math was handled for the scaling/spawning system from BG1 to BG2. We attempted to make the BG1 maps use the BG2 system, but, when it came to this particular aspect we basically didn't go far enough.
Interestingly: in the course of investigation we found out that BG2 doesn't really use the random spawn system the same way that BG1 does. While it fits the style of gameplay in BG2 (sort of a more linear storyline), it's a kind of cool discovery in terms of giving us options for new content.
So: this fix should be present in our next patch. Thanks all involved for bringing it to our attention. Feel free to shoot me a message if you have questions.