Arena - An Encounter Zone Overhaul

Arena is a complete overhaul of Skyrim’s encounter zones designed to increase the game’s difficulty and provide an organic sense of progression. It is designed to further the sense of progression in the game by tiering dungeons according to enemy type. This encourages the players to make judgments about the difficulty of an encounter based on experience and intuition, rather than consulting a complex chart on a mod page. This approach allows Arena to provide players with a more robust sense of progression while retaining the freedom and independence of an open world game.

Okay, so what does this mod do?

Encounter Zones are unfortunately a bit technical, so to explain what Arena does, we need to explain how the game populates its dungeons.

What is an Encounter Zone?

An Encounter Zone is essentially a set of rules that allow the game to determine what enemies it will populate a dungeon with. The Encounter Zone that controls Bleak Falls Barrow, for instance, has range of 6 to 20. When you enter a dungeon for the first time, the game will dynamically set the level of the dungeon as close as it can to your level, within the range provided by the Encounter Zone. This means that if you enter Bleak Falls Barrow at level 2, the dungeon will be set to level 6. If you enter Bleak Falls Barrow at level 15, it will be set to level 15. And if you enter Bleak Falls Barrow at level 35, the dungeon will be set to 20. Once the game determines what level the dungeon is, it can begin populating the dungeon with enemies. This is controlled by the Leveled Actor Multiplier.

What is a Leveled Actor Multiplier? 

The Leveled Actor Multiplier is a second set of rules that determine how the game will populate a dungeon. There are actually four different Leveled Actor Multipliers: one for “easy” enemies, one for “normal” enemies, one for “hard enemies,” and one for “very hard” enemies. Without these four multipliers, dungeons would be filled with the same type of enemy. In our earlier example, we said that if you entered Bleak Falls Barrow at level 2, the dungeon would be set to level 6. When you walk into the dungeon, even though it’s level 6, almost every enemy would be level a 1 Draugr. This is because most spawns are flagged as “easy” enemies. A few enemies would be level 6 Restless Draugr, because these spawns are flagged as "hard" enemies. The boss, on the other hand, will be a level 7 Draugr Overlord, because he is flagged as a “very hard” enemy, and thus will be higher level than the rest of the dungeon. The Leveled Actor Multiplier is what populates the dungeon with enemies of different levels, providing the player with a more varied experience. In