I absolutely agree. I remember that time in Oblivion where the mages' guild sent me, a level 3 mage, to go kill a fire atronach in the middle of a dungeon maze... oh sorry. Wrong game.

I honestly don't see how one could claim Oblivion was hard. Maybe if you played a merchant character. Then it was just stupid because the ridiculous level scaling kept pumping up the enemies while you hit the books. The only way it would be hard is if maybe you ran out of potions while going toe-to-toe with the ogre that takes 500 swings to kill but will do 1 point of damage to you a hit because apparently health makes the challenge.

At the very least other TES games gave you a challenge from the start BECAUSE the world was either not leveled in certain parts or quests, or because it was aggressively leveled. It WAS easy for an experienced player to live (but its the same for every game in all genres...except for Ninja Gaiden), but I felt accomplished as I went from weak snotling to powerful aura-of-death monster who hit so hard he crashed the game. Oblivion rarely gave me a good challenge because of its leveled lists. I will admit that it improved heavily on combat and the magic system (but not magic itself. Oh thanks so much for butchering mysticism and alteration so hard that destruction is now the one good offensive school), but the level scaling really ruined it for me. I really enjoyed the game, but one day I realized (as I was getting higher in level and finally hit that magic point), that it was just so stupid. Bandits in daedric and glass. I rarely saw wolves. Caves FULL of dozens of ogres. Even worse, one day my brother, a level 56 or some-odd battlemage with 100 long blade and an enchanted daedric claymore, fought a goblin for 2 whole minutes. In a cave chock full of goblins. The leveling system really just took it off the deep end and made combat so dreadfully boring that I didn't even want to pick up the game just to mindlessly kill stuff.

I agree about the butchering of the magic system and the level-scaling being taken too far, but in Daggerfall, level-scaling was just as bad(except, due to technological limitations, different equipment didn't change the look of NPCs). I'm not claiming Oblivion is hard, but I am claiming that Daggerfall is just as easy as Oblivion, if not easier. Honestly, Daggerfall isn't giving me a challenge. Every enemy I come across in Daggerfall doesn't give me a challenge, combat isn't interesting, and level-scaling is as much of a problem in Daggerfall as it is in Oblivion. Remember when [insert generic faction] sent you to destroy [insert generic enemy] in [insert generic place] at any level? Remember how easy it was, and how every quest/location in Daggerfall is like the one you just completed/explored? Daggerfall really isn't any harder than Oblivion. It is more complex(which I like), but not harder, and that complexity comes with a price. There is nothing interesting to do in Daggerfall.

Well, you're not alone on that one.

But then again, that's why I love Morrowind so much. The world is awesome. I never had a problem with the quests. Never had a problem with the combat. In fact, there isn't much I recall having a problem with in Morrowind except that the NPCs were too stiff.

But I'm not about to write another essay, because we're over the post count.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1082695-bethesda-going-down-a-bad-path/
This ones going over post limit. Use that one!
Please, feel free to take any current opinions, concerns, and discussions over to that thread, so we may discuss them.