Highest experience level in an RPG
Who
Fallout 4, Guardian's Crusade
Where
Unzutreffend ()
When

The highest experience level one can reach in RPG videogaming is 65,535, and can be achieved in two games - Fallout 4 (Bethesda, 2015) and Guardian's Crusade (Tamsoft, 1998).


Most videogames that feature a level system tend to instil a level cap, so that the player cannot continuously grow. This is often because certain statistics in the game - and not just the character's - are tied to this level, so allowing it to go too high can cause memory issues. Fallout 4 simply crashes should the player exceed this level, and Guardian's Crusade becomes unstable much earlier on, with level 32,768 causing the game to be locked in a post-battle screen.

These levels are effectively impossible to reach without hacking, however, as the time required to accrue the required experience otherwise is probably longer than the lifespan of the hardware. The reason for the oddly specific figure in both games – 65,535 – is that this is the highest number than can be represented by an unsigned 16-bit integer (and stored as a single byte of memory). The level cap in Guardian's Crusade is tied to the highest positive number than can be represented as a "signed" 16-bit integer (where the first bit – a one or zero – is used as a "sign bit" to indicate if the number is positive or negative).