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11 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 design may shift before launch.
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33 How Tiers Work
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55 Each region is given a range of tiers, for example a range from 5 to 10. When the player enters that region for the first time, the region locks to a tier appropriate to the player's current character level, within that range. If the character is below the lower bound, the region locks to the bottom of the range. If the character is between the bounds, the region locks at or near the character's level. If the character is above the upper bound, the region locks to the top of the range. After that first entry, the region's tier does not re-scale.
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77 Example Scenarios
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99 Region RangePlayer Tier on First EntryRegion Locks To5 to 10Below 55 (challenging until the player levels up)5 to 1077 to 8 (tier-appropriate)5 to 10Above 1010 (easy)
1010 The developer has compared this approach to Skyrim's region-locking model. Whether this design ends up being used exactly as described is still uncertain; the developer has been candid that it might not pan out and is open to changing the rules.
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1212 Cross-Skill Tiers
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1414 Tiers are not only about combat. A Hacker at tier 2 attempting to crack a tier 3 security system might be able to do so but will find it tough; a tier 8 police station might flat-out refuse to assign missions to a tier 4 Cop character due to being underqualified. The same scaling applies to other skill-based interactions across the world.
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1616 Weapons feed into the same progression: a weapon's subcategory, such as Pistols or Knives, ties into the tier system, so the gear that suits a region scales with it as well. The wider mechanics that interact with tiers are covered under Gameplay Systems.
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1818 Dynamic World Effects
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2021 Tier alone does not fully define a region. The developer has stated the game world is intended to be dynamic: random events impact factions and mayoral standings, and these in turn can affect a region's difficulty regardless of its initially-assigned tier. As a result, two playthroughs of the same world may experience the same region at very different effective difficulties.