My only complaint is that you can't unlock a skill perk tree until you have a really high skill level (usually 80) and invested up to 5 perks into the first slot, which makes mid-gameplay really unprogressive and frequently frustrating. Even though the mid level of a perk tree may require 30-40-50-60-70 level ratings to unlock handy abilities, you're often required to reach level 80 just to get past the first unlock and then spend the hoarded perk points in one go, filling up half the perk tree. You find only after this does the levelling system seem less of a chor to overcome. With that in mind i'd have said it had less to do with the enemy level system and more to do with many other variables such as the perk tree. Mid-level enemies would be less difficult if you had a couple abilities to unleash.

So far i've enjoyed the game as an archer and as a warrior. Things like magic and unarmed take a little more tact and thought to get right. Such as using ice spells to slow enemy, the disam dragon shout to prevent enemies from landing heavy blows, and finishing with fire magic. I would have thought it'd be obvious a mage with low health and very low armour ratings wouldn't be able to tank large amounts of damage. You need to be more intelligent about it.

I will say this game is a massive improvement upon oblivion for low level play. Even more so for classes other than warrior.

Another fair point.

For the record, I didn't absolutely loathe the game during the one or two hours that I played it (that I said I needed only thirty minutes doesn't mean I threw my friend's sh*t at the wall immediately after that). I've seen plenty of things that would make the game worth buying for... As soon as a modder fixes the broken leveling system and adresses the overall balance.

Mid-level play is tiresome and frustrating (and I actually hit mid-level play during those hours, since "just playing" means you level up like crazy), but the lack of mid-level abilities wouldn't have been a problem if enemies didn't scale with you - you could just hit up some dungeons and in doing so learn what areas would be suited to your current level.

I just cannot, for the life of me, fathom why the hell Bethesda insists on sticking to either the same or reincarnations of a system that plenty of people have complained about ever since the day it came into being. A world-centered experience has worked from the earliest RPGs all the way up to MMOs like World of Warcraft - why change a winning team?

5 points into the first slot? If you are talking about how some of the first perks in the trees have 5 levels, than you are wrong. You only have to add one point into that perk and still continue onto the next perks in that tree, you don't have to get it to 5/5 points into that perk to continue. 1/5 is enough. I currently have 4/5 in the first perk in the one handed tree but I still have the the dual wield perks as well as 2/3 for the Hack and Slash perk, as well as the Savage Strike, Critical Charge and Fighting Stance perk and my skill level with one handed is only 74.

I understand you want to play how you want to play. But honestly you level up your crafting... then what? If you don't want to focus on combat...? That would include magic, that is a form of combat, no? So level up crafting... game over? I don't understand the argument. Maybe stick to the wilderness and train until you can fend for youself. Bring a companion? When we saw Enchanting and smithing...even alchemy, we all new it would level us up. I read some people having issues and some are not having issues going the same route. Some are on adept, others are on master...some are even on novice.

IMO, Bethesda planned these to be a crafting skills... as in something most players do in most games. Do it on the side. Some people did it to power game. Some people did it because they were curious. Then some people RP it...and honestly, when you RP a TES game, that's when it becomes a challenge. And RPing a crafter who doesn't fight... imagine that realistically. Throw that man/woman into the state Skyrim is in now and see how long they last against a dragon. Or how long they survive in a bandit filled cave.

Just my 2 cents

You realize you're not making sense, right? You keep changing what you're talking about when your original article really only addresses one thing.

Your claim about "play any way you want" is a logical fallacy, because it's a game with restrictions. You can't ride a Dragon into the sky either. You can't grow wings and fly, etc. etc.

The levelling system is fine, it works great. You only played one or two hours, so you're out of your element Donny. It's like reading ten pages of a book and throwing it on the ground and claiming you know the whole thing.

You're basically a proven troll who wants to bash Skyrim, fine. But don't pretend to be smart about it. Same reincarnation of a system? That phrase makes no sense, it's a system that's similar to Fallout 3, NOT to Oblivion. So yes it's similar, and it works fine.

Almost all skills in Skyrim are combat-related in some way, including alchemy. In fact, the whole game is an action-RPG, heavily centered on combat. There's almost never a way to use speech or sneak or similar to avoid combat.

You create potions to buff your stats in preparation for or during combat, and you use poisons to deal more damage. So even though your stamina and hitpoints might be low, your potions will make you at least equal to the best, most heavily armed fighter. If you specialize in alchemy and then completely ignore it during combat, you will have problems. You need to actually exploit it fully *in combat*.

As for the level scaling - when you think about it, it's kind of unavoidable if you're going to have an open world and a non-linear game. Otherwise there will be situations where you're essentially "locked in" due to your level being too low to travel anywhere without getting owned by monsters or bandits. Then it's not an open world, because your level determines where you can go, and when in the game you visit certain cities or places (e.g. you can't visit Windhelm until you've done all the side quests in Whiterun in order to reach a certain level). Traditional, linear RPG's also use level scaling in a sense - enemies are constantly getting progressively tougher as you progress through the game.

I think the point is that the required skill level to unlock the next upgrade in the tree is too steep, meaning you'll find yourself spending points on the 5/5 skills or not spending points at all because you simply can't unlock the rest yet.



Makes for a very clear-cut experience, though. If you're getting one-shotted in one of those games, you know the answer is nearly always to just level up and try again. Not so much in Skyrim, where even if you level up you can still get one-shotted just because you neglected some skills early-on.

That's why they allow you to save points, in case you can't unlock what you want yet.

But he said that you need to put five points into the first slot and be 80 in that skill to unlock the tree, which is not true. That's all I am arguing. Not the steepness of the upgrades.

I like the leveling system, and guess what. If you think the game is to easy, TURN UP THE DIFFICULTY! And at a really high level when I guess you think everything should be really easy, turn it down to Novice or something.

You are hopefully not serious. Whats even the problem with level scaling? It, in fact, makes the game more challenging and keeps up with the loot.
I am sure that people complaining about it are not very experienced in TES or gaming in general.

This guy has a fair point. Raising speech and alchemy and [censored] shouldn't make enemies get 5x harder to kill. It doesn't make any sense from a balancing standpoint.

Let's say that levelling was based upon combat skills. Makes more sense, right?

The difficulty slider is not everyones friend, it appears.

Actually, I think you prove their comment. You can play "any way you want." If you want to play as a weak alchemist, you can. You can't necessarily beat the game as a weak alchemist, but they didn't say you can play however you want and the still beat the game easily. Similarly, you play the game by running through a dungeon to the end, aggroing all the enemies and then trying to fight them there, but you aren't going to beat the game like that.

There is a huge difference between Skyrim and Oblivion. In Skyrim, proper strategy is to use the skills that define who you want your character to be. In Oblivion, proper strategy was to use skills that you don't select as primary skills. In Skyrim, if you want to be a skilled swordsman, use your sword and shield. In Oblivion, if you want to be a skilled swordsman, spend most of the game sneaking around and backstabbing enemies like a thief, using your sword and shield only when you are ready to level up.

Bingo, you nailed it.

And OP, you can kill pretty much every NPC in this game too. I think main questers would be the only exception. Hell whole towns have been killed by dragons.



No, because the leveling tends to be STATIC. Meaning they're in a certain level range and it doesn't go higher than that. They won't get 5 times harder.

I'm impressed; I would've expected to be called a troll much earlier on in this thread. Perhaps there is hope for people like you after all.

Playing "any way you want" has been called "just a tag-line" before, but I was led to believe that it embodied the essense of Elder Scrolls games. Apparently, I am mistaken. Of course, a game with proper balance would have accounted for the possibility that players would try out different things and adjusted the opposition accordingly.

But hey, why bother listening to someone who's only played for a couple of hours? There's no way he'll know how to con a broken system and turn the game into a cakewalk anyway. Like jumping on top of a pile of rocks and watching an all-powerful Frost Troll scurry about like an ant trying to figure out how to deal with this impossible situation. And how doing that should compensate for -

Oh, never mind. If you still don't get the point after three pages worth of explanations, you'll never get it. One last try: just because using workarounds or throwing everything but the kitchen sink against an enemy can turn something that is broken into something that is playable does not mean the problem is solved. It is still broken, it is still unbalanced, and that is in very large part thanks due to the fact that both enemies and areas are not completely static.

By the way, Fallout 3 was just as broken - but in a different way. In Skyrim, you get your ass handed to you by enemies who are more powerful than they should be; in Fallout 3, you could punch a Deathclaw to death at Level 1. Details, right?

Balancing issues exist in other RPG's too. It's not a result of level scaling. For example, in NWN2 I ended up in a situation where I felt my characters were too weak to move on to the next chapter, yet there were no more side-quests left to do in order to gain another level. Since enemies in the game get tougher as you progress (essentially level scaling), you need to be at a certain level that the game expects you to be at, and distribute your points correctly every time you level up so as to not gimp your character. If you neglect a few side quests (you can't always go back and do them later) or neglect some skills, you'll find the game gets harder very fast. That's nothing unique to NWN2, nearly every story-driven, linear/branching RPG is like that.

Just level up on combat skills alone? That would opened a whole other thread about how dumbed down this game would have been. Or, we can level up to 81, but since we just base the difficulty of the game on combat skills alone, that would make the game even easier. As you can see on the main board, there complaints that this game is easy enough as it is. I'm sure that change wouldn't sit well.

Why don't you provide examples of what game(s) do it right? How about your programming techniques to fix the issue?

None of the things you point out are anything wrong with the game, there things that are wrong with you. By playing a game you're existing in a limited world the developers made for you, of course there are restrictions genius. You can't flap your arms in real life and begin flying, or pick up the Empire State building with your hands either. A frost troll not being able to reach you is a broken system? Are you dense?

When the [censored] could you punch a deathclaw to death in FO3 at Level 1? Enemies more powerful than they should be? How do you define how powerful they should be?

And you're damn right, no one should listen to someone who's only played the game for two hours. The enemies and areas are pretty much completely static too.

In summation: You're a troll who hates Bethesda for some reason ranting about things that don't actually make sense. If you can't see how insane you sound, you should see a therapist and never pursue game reviewing. You obviously don't get it.

You are the one who let yourself believe that. Level scaling has been in the Elder Scrolls since Arena. Oblivion just gave level scaling a bad reputation because of how EVERYTHING scaled, instead of just having the game looking at your level, then spawning enemies that had a static level that matched your own (with some hand placed enemies related to quests.) From what I have seen, Skyrim has been using the much nicer way of level scaling.

I am sorry you can't play as your alchemist, but I have not had a frustrating time with level scaling even with my healer character.

Reading stuff like this is really discouraging because it means that the majority of the loud noise if from people who don't get what RPGs should be and instead just focus on how RPGs have been done in the past.

The OP is close-minded and that's made obvious by his "you either agree with me or you're a blind fan-boy" comment.

Listen, unless the industry figures out a way to script AI that'll act as a proper Dungeon Master (that'll alter a campaign based on your personal needs), level scaling is possibly the best thing that could happen in an RPG.

"Oh noes! I leveled up from non-combat skills!" we'll that's how your character is so you better start using those skills to get the advantage back. If you can't figure out how to get the advantage or how it impacts the various systems of game then you're not really in a possition to "anolyze" this portion of the game.

I'm sorry but, no. You might also want to read up on HOW Skyrim scales the difficulty, by the way.

Ah, yes. "If you can't do it yourself, you have no right to complain about it". A lot of people would be out of a job if that sorry excuse for an argument was ever implemented by force.

I already mentioned the classic Fallout, but there's no need to stick to classic cRPGs. Remember The Legend of Zelda? Leevers are as easy to kill at the start of the game as they are at the end of the game, but anyone who says they didn't pull out their hair in frustration over the second quest's Level 7 is a liar. And yet, there's people who beat it with only a fraction of the items and heart containers you could have at that point.

There are so many ways to balance a game, and so many ways to break it. But to punish players right out of the box for using a mechanic you're forcing them to use - but not in the exact way you designed it to be used is crossing not one line, but several. Even if you can game the system and use other workarounds to make progress, it's still a dreadful decision that should never have been made to begin with.



I'm so open-minded my brain is liable to leak out at any moment. Like I stated in my article, there is no problem with the concept of level scaling - nor do I oppose it. I do, however, oppose its particular execution in this game. Because it's broken.

They could turn RPGs into flight simulators for all I care, just don't sandbag me with broken game mechanics.



I think I already explained that the "weak ass alchemist" was just an example. Oh well.

I'm loving the levelling system and i havent had any issues. At the start i was having a hard (but fun) time of killing bandits, got my ass handed to me by trolls, giants, dragons, and bears, now that im lvl 42 i kill shield bash wolves and they die, one hit standard bandits and forsworn, and easily take down two trolls or bears at once, though dragons are still challenging, and giants are fun to fight though one hasnt killed me in ages. and im fighting bandit outlaws and stuff now and they are a challaege, not in one on one but when im fighting two or three its pretty hard. the high level mages and necros give me a hard time. So IMO the levlling system is very good. I don't know what your talking about, either your game is severely glitched, or you still have your head up oblivions ass. Sorry OP

How do you know it is broken when, like you said, no one has access to the Creation Kit? You have not proven that it is really broken, just given examples on how it might be.

I don't see the game as broken. As a matter of fact with three characters and, one that's a crafting, I see no issues. My crafter at level 17, on expert mind you (on characters are on expert), with a 2hnd skill on 31 is smashing faces with his hammer while he goes out looking for materials. All three characters are doing fine. The only character that struggles a little bit is my Paladin type character, only because I refuse to use archery (no paladin uses archery... no honor in ranged combat). Mages are a pain. But that's self inflicted, not a broken game mechanic.

I see no issue, as I'm not having these issues you're talking about.