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The World Tier System is a region difficulty design that the developer has described as being fleshed out during development. The idea is to apply a typical RPG-style progression, where higher-level areas contain tougher challenges, broadly across the open world and across many different skills and aspects of the game, not just combat. As with other in-development systems, the developer has cautioned that the exact approach may change.
How Tiers Work
Tiers apply to a wide range of gameplay, not only enemies. The developer has given examples that span multiple classes and activities.
A Hacker around tier 2 might find a tier 3 security system achievable but quite tough to crack.
A tier 8 police station might refuse to assign missions to a tier 4 Cop character for being underqualified.
Higher-tier regions are expected to contain stronger monsters, weapons, and armor, similar to a standard RPG.
This ties into the destructible-environment design described in The Open World, where sturdier building materials such as steel tend to appear in higher-level areas.
How Region Difficulty Is Set
The developer has said the method for determining region tiers was still being decided, and described leaning toward a scaling approach in which each region is given a range of tiers and locks its level based on the character's tier the first time the region is entered. As a general example: if a region has a tier range of 5 to 10, entering below tier 5 might lock the region to 5 and make it tough, entering at tier 7 might lock it to around tier 7 or 8 for a fair challenge, and entering above tier 10 might lock it to 10 and make it easy. The developer noted this description is simplified and the approach may change.
A Dynamic Difficulty
Region difficulty is not intended to be entirely fixed. Because the world is dynamic, random events that affect factions and the standing of Mayors can potentially influence a region's difficulty regardless of its initially assigned tiers. This connects the difficulty system to the progression described in Mayors and the President. Players who want to adjust difficulty directly are pointed toward the Mutators system.