Mages/Sorcerers getting level 6 spells will instantly ruin the game. Death spell will most likely wipe out 95% of enemies in the game. Perhaps letting Mages get up to level 10, which will give both Mages and Sorcerers (they come 1 level behind in spells) level 5 spells, is a good goal.
@Bercon : not really arguing with your point, but as it is right now with the TOTSC cap, bards and Avenger druids can insta-kill Sarevok with a chromatic orb. There isn't much balance when it comes to the current cap anyway >.<
I think options should exist for people who want to play the game either with or without a level cap. I strongly disagree with the whole concept of a level cap, but I respect the fact that other people may see things differently. It seems logical that a level cap could be included as a game option that could be either used or not based on the preferences of the player.
Alternatively, if the game designers felt that they 'had' to impose a level cap on the game, maybe the level cap could be scalable based on how many people were in the party. That way, a party of four, for example could get more XP per character than a party of six.
I've always hated level caps and have never seen their point. I use Shadowkeeper to circumvent them, which leads to annoying and time consuming side effects that could have so easily not existed had someone simply not written them into the game.
I imported a level 15 Fighter/Mage into Tutu from ToB once and many parts of the game were still challenging with these 'extra' levels. The idea that having a level 10 instead of a level 8 by the end of BG1 will somehow make the game too easy frankly sounds ridiculous.
The only time I have had a BG game where my characters were truly overpowered was when I imported two BG2 characters into Tutu after they had completed their 3rd BG2 playthroughs and were like level 120ish. Even then, that demon in Ulgoth's Beard almost killed one and the other actually was killed by a trap in Durlag's Tower, so although they were mostly god-like they were still vulnerable in certain situations.
The only purpose the level cap seems to serve is to limit the fun that people can aspire to, so I really don't see why a game, with the purpose to entertain, should do that. If someone actually wants to limit how far they can go, they can always choose not to click the button to get their next level up.
I don't think you're using the word "troll" correctly, @Bercon. @ArkdeEreh made a number of valid points.
The concept of level caps was not originally intended as a way to keep things balanced; it was the result of making things easier for designers by not having to include level information beyond a certain point.
For clerics, that means not having to include level 6 or 7 spells. For mages, that means not including spells from levels 6 through 9. That's a lot of resources that don't have to be accounted for, which is useful for a developer when first creating a game.
In this case, however, those resources already exist in the engine; the spells have been created, it's just a matter of including the files in the installation.
I say again that I would support an option, on import, to reset the imported character's XP to the minimum required for the respective game (level 1 for BG1, level...7? for BG2). This would handily allow players to find everything there is to find in BG1 without fear of becoming "too powerful" if that's a concern (I put that in quotes because everyone's definition of too powerful is different), while also allowing players who want to play through the game more than once as near-gods to do so without being concerned about whether this or that quest will be useful, since every quest will grant XP as expected.
The biggest balance concern, here, is that mages will be stuck capped at level 5 spells in BG1 simply because their spellbook is entirely dependent on what scrolls are available, and there are no level 6 scrolls in BG1. That's something that would need to be considered, because otherwise a sorcerer's player sees a tremendous advantage over a mage's player at higher levels.
But again, that's a balance concern because it creates a different experience for one player than for another. It's not because encounters are less challenging; part of the fun of replaying with the same character is that you get to see what the game is like when you're much more powerful.
What are you talking about? If you want a level cap and I don't that doesn't make me a troll in the same sense that you aren't a troll because you disagree with me. All it means is that we have a difference of opinion. As I said, I think both options should be included in the game so players can choose what they want. That way no one is disappointed.
The level cap is one of the two aspects of BG that I find the most frustrating. The other being the inability to directly import NPCs into new games with the PC. Both of these can be overcome with Shadowkeeper, but it takes an unnecessarily long time to fix them each game, sometimes as much as two hours per character if they're high enough level and much longer if you level up the character whenever you normally would (I limit mine to once per game now to avoid the hassle). Since it would only take a few seconds if the level cap were removed and the NPCs could be imported normally, I very strongly support having these issues fixed. It would make the game much more fun for me since it would make leveling up advanced characters less of a hassle and it wouldn't take such an unreasonable amount of time.
If this isn't something that concerns you that's fine, but I thought the whole point of this thread was to discuss our opinions about the level cap and why we think it should be a certain way.
@Cheesebelly Tutu =/= Baldur's Gate. The original game had its share of problems, but Tutu is imbalanced from the first loading screen. And the mods just make that worse.
@ARKdeEREH Level caps exist for game balance. If you don't have things like caps, gear progression, and gating, it's impossible to know what abilities any given party will have during boss fights. That makes it much more difficult to design encounters.
@Aosaw That's an interesting insight about developer resources, and while that may play a part, I don't think it's the primary reason behind caps. As you can see in Tutu, with more XP and no caps, players end up steamrolling the content.
i think what the programmers should do just to throw everyone into a loop is lower the xp cap to 91 000, oh the chaos, i love being level 2/3 taking on level 6 stuff its fun, ah good times in cloakwood mines at level 3
@Brude, that issue you're talking about has less to do with the XP cap and more to do with the amount of XP granted by unlocking chests and scribing spells. In other words, it has less to do with level balance and more to do with encounter balance.
A player who spends the time to actually pursue all the quests in the game should be rewarded for doing so. Balancing those rewards is part of game design; balancing the cap isn't.
You can make a decision about generally how much content you want to include in the game, which is another way of setting an upper limit on XP.
@Aosaw Not sure I followed your post there -- I'm saying there's no good way to balance late game encounters when there's no cap, because you'll have, for example, no idea whether the player has access to more high level spells and better heals.
Either you assume that they do, and you make the encounter impossible for lower level players, or you assume that they don't, in which case your final few boss fights are a cakewalk for the no-cappers.
Neither of those is a particularly satisfying outcome for either developer or player.
Most video games target a specific power level, which is what the average player will be able to achieve during a typical play-through. They might create strength thresholds, which increase the encounter's challenge based on specific milestones of level and party strength, and beyond a certain point they might simply let you destroy the fight.
It should be noted, however, that in BG1 the amount of experience that is actually available is not enough to ruin the game, and if you actually make the effort to get all the XP that's there, you shouldn't be short-changed.
It's not like there's a lot of grinding in Baldur's Gate. The amount of XP that's there is more or less the same for everybody. It's finite. To have an XP cap that is lower than the amount of XP available is to tell the gamer, "Hey, we don't want you to play all of the content." And that's not really good design.
Completely uncapping the experience would be my last option. While I do think the game progression was not balanced very well, as hitting the cap is actually easy IMO, I think completely removing the cap would really unbalance the difficulty of the end game. On top of that you have BG2 kits and skills (dual wield) which already overpower your characters compared to BG1 content.
I don't want BG2 to be a walk in the park, and the beginning of the game would really be unbalanced, difficulty wise, if you allowed unlimited EXP importing.
That are exactly my thoughts. I'm a little afraid about BG2 engine ported into BG1. Dual wield and many other BG2 skills may be too overpowered for BG1
It's not like there's a lot of grinding in Baldur's Gate. The amount of XP that's there is more or less the same for everybody. It's finite. To have an XP cap that is lower than the amount of XP available is to tell the gamer, "Hey, we don't want you to play all of the content." And that's not really good design.
Depends on what we're talking about. The XP gain in the original game is limited and pretty smooth. The XP gain in Tutu is massive and unlimited (because the default behavior is to respawn areas every time you enter them).
Anecdotally, I've noticed that most people playing without caps are the same people playing heavily modded Tutu games. Most of them aren't aware that there are fewer random encounters and far less available experience per encounter in the original game.
Since mobs don't scale with party level (which, oddly, also seems to be a design everybody hates in games), playing without a cap is an invitation to cheese.
It's not like there's a lot of grinding in Baldur's Gate. The amount of XP that's there is more or less the same for everybody. It's finite. To have an XP cap that is lower than the amount of XP available is to tell the gamer, "Hey, we don't want you to play all of the content." And that's not really good design.
Depends on what we're talking about. The XP gain in the original game is limited and pretty smooth. The XP gain in Tutu is massive and unlimited (because the default behavior is to respawn areas every time you enter them).
Anecdotally, I've noticed that most people playing without caps are the same people playing heavily modded Tutu games. Most of them aren't aware that there are fewer random encounters and far less available experience per encounter in the original game.
Since mobs don't scale with party level (which, oddly, also seems to be a design everybody hates in games), playing without a cap is an invitation to cheese.
That's kind of my point, actually. (the first paragraph, I mean.)
If you begin with the assumption that the game is already balanced with the XP rewards that are there, then the only thing that the XP cap seems to do is restrict the game's replay value. I will grant you that most people are fine creating new characters, but for those players who like to play again with the same character when they're done, the only thing that the XP cap does is keep those players from enjoying their replay.
On a first playthrough, exactly how high of a level can you reach with a full party? I'd wager it's not high enough to ruin anything, even without a cap. The reason for that is exactly what you said: the XP in the game is limited and fairly smooth. By the time you get to a point where you're high-level, you're already fighting high-level encounters. And if you're powerful enough that those encounters are no longer a challenge, that's more or less par for the course in video games. You can increase the difficulty, or just enjoy the ride.
Where it seems to "break" things is when you play mostly with less than six party members, which is not how the game was designed anyway--and yet it's actually working by design, that if you fight your way through challenges by yourself, they'll be harder, and the rewards will be greater, which will make you better able to tackle future challenges.
I will say, again, that there should be an option on import to reset your XP or to leave it as is. But if you want to leave your XP where it's at, you're already starting the game with the assumption that it's going to be easier. And that shouldn't be a bad thing.
That's kind of my point, actually. (the first paragraph, I mean.)
If you begin with the assumption that the game is already balanced with the XP rewards that are there, then the only thing that the XP cap seems to do is restrict the game's replay value. I will grant you that most people are fine creating new characters, but for those players who like to play again with the same character when they're done, the only thing that the XP cap does is keep those players from enjoying their replay.
On a first playthrough, exactly how high of a level can you reach with a full party? I'd wager it's not high enough to ruin anything, even without a cap. The reason for that is exactly what you said: the XP in the game is limited and fairly smooth. By the time you get to a point where you're high-level, you're already fighting high-level encounters. And if you're powerful enough that those encounters are no longer a challenge, that's more or less par for the course in video games. You can increase the difficulty, or just enjoy the ride.
Where it seems to "break" things is when you play mostly with less than six party members, which is not how the game was designed anyway--and yet it's actually working by design, that if you fight your way through challenges by yourself, they'll be harder, and the rewards will be greater, which will make you better able to tackle future challenges.
I will say, again, that there should be an option on import to reset your XP or to leave it as is. But if you want to leave your XP where it's at, you're already starting the game with the assumption that it's going to be easier. And that shouldn't be a bad thing.
How far you can get depends on the will of the player and the expansion content. Ideally, you want to avoid a "Watcher's Keep" kind of situation where a player gets too powerful too fast and can then breeze through the rest of the game.
XP only breaks in Tutu, which uses the BG2 engine. That engine assumes you always have a full sized party. Tutu's maintainers also decided to populate every possible spawn point in each area, and repopulate them each time you came back. This allows you to casually (and unintentionally) farm XP and gives a much large XP per encounter reward for smaller parties.
The original game does not work that way. Spawns scale up and down automatically based on the size of your party. The net result is your XP gains scale pretty well, regardless of how many NPCs you have with you.
Someone restarting the game with a max level character is such an edge case it's not worth talking about in terms of overall game design. BG has replay value because of all its potential PC builds, all the possible party comps, and the huge, open nature of the world. Not because you can import max level charcters at level 1 and play through again (seriously, who does that?).
BG has replay value because of all its potential PC builds, all the possible party comps, and the huge, open nature of the world. Not because you can import max level charcters at level 1 and play through again (seriously, who does that?).
Importing my character from the end of the game to the beginning is what I do every game. Mostly in BG2, but also occasionally in BG1. I like the more advanced spells and weapons, so it really isn't fun for me to start over again with magic missile when I'm used to using dragons breath and energy blades in most encounters.
Of course, I play on insane and I have mods that make the game more challenging, so even though my characters are greatly in excess of the the level cap they still frequently get into very difficult battles where they almost get killed and it is not uncommon that my whole party gets wiped out.
The point of importing a level 200ish character with +5 weapons and advanced armor into the begining of the game, for me, isn't to play as a god (although that is certainly possible without mods and on normal skill level). The point is to have fun by challenging myself while still using the the advanced spells and equipment, saving throws, etc. that I earned in my earlier playthroughs. By directly confronting all opponents and not shying away from a fight the game remains very challenging.
Fighting improved Irenicus on SCS with his dragon and other minions with all the settings set to the most difficult way possible and fighting the army of 100ish drow in Ust Natha with a party of two is still very difficult. As are many of the encounters in Watcher's Keep and elsewhere. Of course, there are other encounters that are easy, but not enough to diminish the interest level in playing the game through again with advanced characters.
@Brude I guess I don't see where the disagreement lies. If BG1 was designed correctly, the amount of XP granted throughout your quest should be sufficient, but not in great surplus, to get you to the starting level for BG2. Pursuing additional quests should be sufficient to give you another level or half-level's worth of XP, and hunting down every last tidbit of the Sword Coast should give you enough XP to just brush up against the current XP cap for the game--the assumption being that you ought to save one or two quests and storylines for your next play-through.
If it's not designed correctly, then the average player will hit the XP cap every time just by doing the main quest, which begs the question of why the side quests exist at all. If the encounters and XP rewards are too high to be balanced with the rest of the game, then the solution isn't to cap your XP, but to reexamine the XP rewards that are already in place.
Most players won't hit the XP cap unless they're re-importing their character for a second play-through. And not surprisingly, it's those players that might be interested in seeing just how powerful they can get, and thus those players who are being cheated out of their fun by imposing an arbitrary cap on XP.
I hope that makes it somewhat clear as to why XP caps exist. It's not to balance the game; it's to save development time. It's the same reason why World of Warcraft didn't start off with a level cap of 85; there was no content created for that high of a level, so they capped it. In this case, all the content has already been created, so there's really no reason to limit it except that mages (and only mages, notably) will be completely unable to take advantage of their highest-level spell slots, simply because the scrolls for those spells don't get dropped anywhere in the game.
@Aosaw I understood what you meant about resources, scrolls etc the first time -- I just disagree that that is the *sole* reason to put a cap in place.
Warcraft is a good example. The cap at any given level is rather arbitrary (and you're right, it does when new content is released).
But its primary purpose is to make designing end-game encounters easier and even possible. You can't have a boss fight that works well for both level 60 players and level 90 hardcore raiders. That fight would be too difficult for the lowbies and way too easy for the hardcore raiders, satisfying no one.
A prime example of this are Blizzard's holiday based raid encounters. Since those fights must address the needs of both fresh max-level characters and grizzled veterans, they are intentionally made draw droppingly simple for everyone.
In the world of Baldur's Gate, you've got several problems related to this -- mostly that the original final fights were released well before ToSC, and the designers of BG2 couldn't assume that players had played the previous expansion at all.
How do you balance the opening of SoA when you don't know whether the party is going to be filled with level 7 characters, or level 12 characters? You can't. That's why the level caps are put in place.
If the primary reason for level caps were resources and player atrributes, as you suggest, then they would be little reason to implement them in SoA and zero reason in ToB. But both games have caps.
@Brude : Tutu isn't BG1, but BGEE will have the improved version of chromatic orb, unless they change it. Which means Sarevok will be killable in one shot.
i dont think sarevok will be killable in one shot with chromatic orb, enemies get a +6 bonus to their save, save if sarevok's save vs spell is 6 or lower, he will never die from it
While I think the current cap is just about perfect, I'm not completely opposed to raising it. Maybe one more level wouldn't hurt things too much, but it would be nice if there was also difficult content added that justifies higher levels (in the form of DLC).
I'm going to have to go with no cap (or make it absurdly high), I always hated (and still hate it for any other game in existence) reaching the level cap and knowing that I have not even reached mid point of the game yet. If I reach such high levels because I've explored everywhere and done every little side quest I could find, I want to feel awesome and powerful for my efforts to make the world a bit better. Failing that I'd say if there has to be a cap, make it around level 12 for a fighter (if I recall they got to level 8 Sword Coast) and whatever level people reach with that xp cap. ^^
Comments
Alternatively, if the game designers felt that they 'had' to impose a level cap on the game, maybe the level cap could be scalable based on how many people were in the party. That way, a party of four, for example could get more XP per character than a party of six.
I've always hated level caps and have never seen their point. I use Shadowkeeper to circumvent them, which leads to annoying and time consuming side effects that could have so easily not existed had someone simply not written them into the game.
I imported a level 15 Fighter/Mage into Tutu from ToB once and many parts of the game were still challenging with these 'extra' levels. The idea that having a level 10 instead of a level 8 by the end of BG1 will somehow make the game too easy frankly sounds ridiculous.
The only time I have had a BG game where my characters were truly overpowered was when I imported two BG2 characters into Tutu after they had completed their 3rd BG2 playthroughs and were like level 120ish. Even then, that demon in Ulgoth's Beard almost killed one and the other actually was killed by a trap in Durlag's Tower, so although they were mostly god-like they were still vulnerable in certain situations.
The only purpose the level cap seems to serve is to limit the fun that people can aspire to, so I really don't see why a game, with the purpose to entertain, should do that. If someone actually wants to limit how far they can go, they can always choose not to click the button to get their next level up.
The concept of level caps was not originally intended as a way to keep things balanced; it was the result of making things easier for designers by not having to include level information beyond a certain point.
For clerics, that means not having to include level 6 or 7 spells. For mages, that means not including spells from levels 6 through 9. That's a lot of resources that don't have to be accounted for, which is useful for a developer when first creating a game.
In this case, however, those resources already exist in the engine; the spells have been created, it's just a matter of including the files in the installation.
I say again that I would support an option, on import, to reset the imported character's XP to the minimum required for the respective game (level 1 for BG1, level...7? for BG2). This would handily allow players to find everything there is to find in BG1 without fear of becoming "too powerful" if that's a concern (I put that in quotes because everyone's definition of too powerful is different), while also allowing players who want to play through the game more than once as near-gods to do so without being concerned about whether this or that quest will be useful, since every quest will grant XP as expected.
The biggest balance concern, here, is that mages will be stuck capped at level 5 spells in BG1 simply because their spellbook is entirely dependent on what scrolls are available, and there are no level 6 scrolls in BG1. That's something that would need to be considered, because otherwise a sorcerer's player sees a tremendous advantage over a mage's player at higher levels.
But again, that's a balance concern because it creates a different experience for one player than for another. It's not because encounters are less challenging; part of the fun of replaying with the same character is that you get to see what the game is like when you're much more powerful.
The level cap is one of the two aspects of BG that I find the most frustrating. The other being the inability to directly import NPCs into new games with the PC. Both of these can be overcome with Shadowkeeper, but it takes an unnecessarily long time to fix them each game, sometimes as much as two hours per character if they're high enough level and much longer if you level up the character whenever you normally would (I limit mine to once per game now to avoid the hassle). Since it would only take a few seconds if the level cap were removed and the NPCs could be imported normally, I very strongly support having these issues fixed. It would make the game much more fun for me since it would make leveling up advanced characters less of a hassle and it wouldn't take such an unreasonable amount of time.
If this isn't something that concerns you that's fine, but I thought the whole point of this thread was to discuss our opinions about the level cap and why we think it should be a certain way.
@ARKdeEREH Level caps exist for game balance. If you don't have things like caps, gear progression, and gating, it's impossible to know what abilities any given party will have during boss fights. That makes it much more difficult to design encounters.
@Aosaw That's an interesting insight about developer resources, and while that may play a part, I don't think it's the primary reason behind caps. As you can see in Tutu, with more XP and no caps, players end up steamrolling the content.
A player who spends the time to actually pursue all the quests in the game should be rewarded for doing so. Balancing those rewards is part of game design; balancing the cap isn't.
You can make a decision about generally how much content you want to include in the game, which is another way of setting an upper limit on XP.
Either you assume that they do, and you make the encounter impossible for lower level players, or you assume that they don't, in which case your final few boss fights are a cakewalk for the no-cappers.
Neither of those is a particularly satisfying outcome for either developer or player.
It should be noted, however, that in BG1 the amount of experience that is actually available is not enough to ruin the game, and if you actually make the effort to get all the XP that's there, you shouldn't be short-changed.
It's not like there's a lot of grinding in Baldur's Gate. The amount of XP that's there is more or less the same for everybody. It's finite. To have an XP cap that is lower than the amount of XP available is to tell the gamer, "Hey, we don't want you to play all of the content." And that's not really good design.
Anecdotally, I've noticed that most people playing without caps are the same people playing heavily modded Tutu games. Most of them aren't aware that there are fewer random encounters and far less available experience per encounter in the original game.
Since mobs don't scale with party level (which, oddly, also seems to be a design everybody hates in games), playing without a cap is an invitation to cheese.
If you begin with the assumption that the game is already balanced with the XP rewards that are there, then the only thing that the XP cap seems to do is restrict the game's replay value. I will grant you that most people are fine creating new characters, but for those players who like to play again with the same character when they're done, the only thing that the XP cap does is keep those players from enjoying their replay.
On a first playthrough, exactly how high of a level can you reach with a full party? I'd wager it's not high enough to ruin anything, even without a cap. The reason for that is exactly what you said: the XP in the game is limited and fairly smooth. By the time you get to a point where you're high-level, you're already fighting high-level encounters. And if you're powerful enough that those encounters are no longer a challenge, that's more or less par for the course in video games. You can increase the difficulty, or just enjoy the ride.
Where it seems to "break" things is when you play mostly with less than six party members, which is not how the game was designed anyway--and yet it's actually working by design, that if you fight your way through challenges by yourself, they'll be harder, and the rewards will be greater, which will make you better able to tackle future challenges.
I will say, again, that there should be an option on import to reset your XP or to leave it as is. But if you want to leave your XP where it's at, you're already starting the game with the assumption that it's going to be easier. And that shouldn't be a bad thing.
XP only breaks in Tutu, which uses the BG2 engine. That engine assumes you always have a full sized party. Tutu's maintainers also decided to populate every possible spawn point in each area, and repopulate them each time you came back. This allows you to casually (and unintentionally) farm XP and gives a much large XP per encounter reward for smaller parties.
The original game does not work that way. Spawns scale up and down automatically based on the size of your party. The net result is your XP gains scale pretty well, regardless of how many NPCs you have with you.
Someone restarting the game with a max level character is such an edge case it's not worth talking about in terms of overall game design. BG has replay value because of all its potential PC builds, all the possible party comps, and the huge, open nature of the world. Not because you can import max level charcters at level 1 and play through again (seriously, who does that?).
Of course, I play on insane and I have mods that make the game more challenging, so even though my characters are greatly in excess of the the level cap they still frequently get into very difficult battles where they almost get killed and it is not uncommon that my whole party gets wiped out.
The point of importing a level 200ish character with +5 weapons and advanced armor into the begining of the game, for me, isn't to play as a god (although that is certainly possible without mods and on normal skill level). The point is to have fun by challenging myself while still using the the advanced spells and equipment, saving throws, etc. that I earned in my earlier playthroughs. By directly confronting all opponents and not shying away from a fight the game remains very challenging.
Fighting improved Irenicus on SCS with his dragon and other minions with all the settings set to the most difficult way possible and fighting the army of 100ish drow in Ust Natha with a party of two is still very difficult. As are many of the encounters in Watcher's Keep and elsewhere. Of course, there are other encounters that are easy, but not enough to diminish the interest level in playing the game through again with advanced characters.
If it's not designed correctly, then the average player will hit the XP cap every time just by doing the main quest, which begs the question of why the side quests exist at all. If the encounters and XP rewards are too high to be balanced with the rest of the game, then the solution isn't to cap your XP, but to reexamine the XP rewards that are already in place.
Most players won't hit the XP cap unless they're re-importing their character for a second play-through. And not surprisingly, it's those players that might be interested in seeing just how powerful they can get, and thus those players who are being cheated out of their fun by imposing an arbitrary cap on XP.
I hope that makes it somewhat clear as to why XP caps exist. It's not to balance the game; it's to save development time. It's the same reason why World of Warcraft didn't start off with a level cap of 85; there was no content created for that high of a level, so they capped it. In this case, all the content has already been created, so there's really no reason to limit it except that mages (and only mages, notably) will be completely unable to take advantage of their highest-level spell slots, simply because the scrolls for those spells don't get dropped anywhere in the game.
Warcraft is a good example. The cap at any given level is rather arbitrary (and you're right, it does when new content is released).
But its primary purpose is to make designing end-game encounters easier and even possible. You can't have a boss fight that works well for both level 60 players and level 90 hardcore raiders. That fight would be too difficult for the lowbies and way too easy for the hardcore raiders, satisfying no one.
A prime example of this are Blizzard's holiday based raid encounters. Since those fights must address the needs of both fresh max-level characters and grizzled veterans, they are intentionally made draw droppingly simple for everyone.
In the world of Baldur's Gate, you've got several problems related to this -- mostly that the original final fights were released well before ToSC, and the designers of BG2 couldn't assume that players had played the previous expansion at all.
How do you balance the opening of SoA when you don't know whether the party is going to be filled with level 7 characters, or level 12 characters? You can't. That's why the level caps are put in place.
If the primary reason for level caps were resources and player atrributes, as you suggest, then they would be little reason to implement them in SoA and zero reason in ToB. But both games have caps.
My guess is that they raised it to 300-310k. That would give every class 1 level and no more than 1 new level for multi-class builds.