They are saying free roam requires level-scaling, which level-scaling causes overall challenging gameplay, something Morrowind lacked unfortunately. Then to fix it Oblivion went overboard and now Skyrim I think hit it on the nose where it just keeps the game from ever being easy but still allows for you to be in dangerous situations where you can be destroyed by much higher level enemies. Imo, this new level-scaling system is a godsend.

Thanks for the reply. I'm totally in agreement then. I've seen posts in other threads that stated that a sandbox game shouldn't have difficult areas, and I was afraid I was seeing a whole group of people argue for that.

I agree overall with the OP.

Also... Rare items should continue to be rare... I dont want to see bandits run around with super rare armour as i get higher level -.-.

And yes if we find lets say a dungeon i want to have my brain eaten by a super powerful creature because *GASP* its super powerful.

That's not what level-scaling does. It doesn't make everyone run around in super rare armor, that's how it was experimented with over the top level-scaling in Oblivion. Level-scaling has been in every TES game, no one complained before. Also, like I said, the new level-scaling system in Skyrim allows for super powerful creatures to eat your brain, it just keeps the game from being easy, you can still run into areas that are way over your head and you get one shot.

Akka is right.

Here is proof of concept.
[img]http://i55.tinypic.com/k9q2f.jpg[/img]


Fragment of Skyrim map, enlarged and color-coded as in non-scaled world. Blue - safe, red - high-level death and liches and dragons. So, what do we have here?

1. Cities are safe - you can freely explore them at all time. No ogres will assault you inside any city.
2. Roads are mostly safe.
2a. There are some bandit troubles between Amber Guard and Lainallen, but even low-level character, adequately prepared, can pass there successfully. Caravan guard quests and (later) more high-level quest to finish bandit infestation (and "recolor" road in deep blue) are basically birthing themselves.
2b. Road from Snowhawk to Markarth Side is dangerous. Goblins (green) and trolls (yellow) are settled in some caverns along the way. There are spawns of goblin and troll patrols, weaker than cavern denizens. Again, quests to travel with some courier work (easiest), caravan guard (moderate) and make roads safe again by cleaning these caves (hard).
3. In general, danger is located far away from cities. Which is pretty damn logical. Although, it isn't always the case. There are some ruins strictly to the south of Amber Guard. Lich with a host of necromancer students took residence inside. Also, to the east-north-east from Amber Guard there is a peak, generally inhabited by semi-dangerous mountain creatures (yellow zone around letter "R"), but there is a dragon lair nearby.

This world is living and believable. You can travel just about anywhere, but high mountains are still dangerous. And everythere is something interesting for character of any level.

I'm not sure how this proves Akka right. This is all being done in Skyrim with level scaling and no level-scaling= easy gameplay in many parts of the game. Refer to my posts above, level-scaling in Skyrim keeps the game from being easy without giving up the high level creatures that kill you if you stumble across them. So no level-scaling=Bad, Skyrim level-scaling= Awesome.

And thats exactly the thing I loved about Morrowind.
It makes perfect sense that if a lowly level one entered a dangerous area like a bandit cave he would get killed.
Thats not poor design, thats just plain sense. One needs to level a bit first.
I really dislike games that baby the player and remove any and all challenges.
But I guess gamers of this generation disagree and turn a game off and never play it again if it has any sort of learning curve and difficulty.
What made Morrowind brilliant was that you could level up and feel a real sense of accomplishment taking out the baddies that were impossible to beat a few levels ago.
You sure missed out.

1) Skyrim will NOT be more like fallout 3 than oblivion
2) Fallout new vegas was NOT better than fallout 3
3) stop whining and acting like you are smarter than the geniuses at Bethesda. They are smarter than you, they know how to make games. You have no right to tell them anything, and stop pretending that they would ever read the post of a person so insignificant as you, much less take your advice. That is all

What WAS FO3's leveling system exactly? I honestly (bout to get hated on for this) didn't mind Ob's lvling system...

Meh. No one is getting babied, never have been, it's just people not liking change and not taking off the nostalgia goggles so they blame the younger players that didn't get to play the harder games like some of us did. Oblivion never babied anyone, it increased the overall difficulty of the game from Morrowind but however, it was the first iteration of an experiment in level scaling. Skyrim now does what Oblivion attempted to do, keeps the game from ever being easy and also allows us to be pummeled by powerful enemies if we run across them.

Morrowind in comparison to the games before it was easy as pie and Oblivion that followed was much more difficult even though some people didn't die as much in Oblivion as they did Morrowind, which is only attributed to not running into a cave and finding out the enemies were way higher level than you. That's not difficulty, that's just a "Oh look, too high, I'll reload and go somewhere else" moment. That really wasn't any difficulty at all, you just moved on until you found an area where you two shot everything and stayed there for awhile training. Luckily however, in Skyrim, there will never be any shortage of challenge and difficulty in the game and yet we will still have the danger of getting torn limb from limb by the level 20 we run across at level 3.

While I agree with your fundamental premise, you might want to edit out all the insults before you get a warning.

Which is exactly the reason so many of us who enjoyed Morrowind--where level scaling was discreetly done, in just a very few instances--felt Oblivion was fundamentally flawed. Every dungeon, every encounter, was scaled, both for monster, and treasure. All dungeons regenerated, and according to the character level. It completely took away the sense of immersion, and replaced it with a Diablo-like feeling of "time to get more experience, and face a new boss!" Vanilla Oblivion was an incredibly easy-to-play, dumbed down game: battles where raising agility didn't matter at melee (unlike Morrowind), and where you never had to worry about facing characters that were far above you in combat.

And that's why there were close to a dozen leveling system mods within 6 months of the game's release. I've seen a total of one to date for Morrowind. Yes, that game has its problems, but scaling encounters and treasures to character level so blatantly and fully isn't among them.

I guess gamesas hasn't yet gotten a clue on the matter. Oh, well. At least you know modders will be out repairing all of this. Shame they have to.

Ah yeah, it's not like they've improved it in Fallout 3 or anything...

Actually the constant qualification of 'nostalgia goggles' is starting to get a bit annoying.
Morrowind being the superior game over Oblivion in nearly every respect has nothing to do with nostalgia. It has to do with what type of game I like, and what I dont like.
Oblivion was babyfied. There are no ifs and buts about it, this is not an opinion.
The level scaling, the quest compass, the inability to fail, the minigames replacing character ability with player skill.
Oblivion took you by the hand and guided you through the game. Morrowind put you in Seyda Neen and went: You're on your own now, good luck.
Again you're using semantics to change the meaning of a term. Morrowind was a more difficult game.
Change is only good if its change for the better.

Level-scaling definitely erodes idea of leveling.

Normal game, like Baldur's Gate: "yay, I leveled up!"
Level-scaled game: "oh noes, I leveled up, now there would be ogres!"

And most importantly, it kills immersion — it shows that the world is based on your character's level.

Easy gameplay in many parts of the game? Yes, that's the point of leveling in RPG. When my character is at level 3, a pack of wolves, roaming forests near some road and occasionally walking out on that road is dangerous. They aren't dangerous for good, well-protected caravan, though. When my character is at level 10, he should not care about these wolves anymore. And they should NOT magically turn into mountain lions or minotaurs or whatever. Because they are what they are: nuisance for armed groups and well-prepared warriors, danger for weak solo travellers.

If they are magically turning into mountain lions (or bears, whatever), they are becoming dangerous for 10-level character, sure. But they are also becoming dangerous for caravan. And what is the logical level-scaling response for that? "Hey, caravan guards should scale up too, so they are now wielding dwemer armor and glass claymores for some reason." Yeah. And why do these guys in dwemer-glass are guarding caravan of grain, don't they have anything better to do, like fighting trolls and ogres?

And when main character is at level 40, there are packs of Drake Lich Daedra at every road, because for some reason road, as everything else, always must be dangerous for main character? And caravans of calipers are now guarded by Overlords from Andyfall, with full ebony-daedric equipment?


In my opinion, only (random) quests should be level-scaled. When you are at third level, you are not getting quests about "cleanse that cave, full of Conjurers and Spider Daedra", you get something like either "kill some goblins" or "try to reach some village located in dangerous territory, and bring this package to the elder, no inherent fighting involved". And when you are at high level, you don't get "help peasant to break up huge pumpkin, his axe doesn't work", but you do get "Jarl is pissed off by these damn Ogre Knights, kill them all and destroy their tower".

But that tower of Ogre Knights should be in game even when you are low-leveled. And you should be able to venture there, if bones of adventurers mixed up with rusty remains of destroyed equipment with teeth marks aren't stopping you. And you should die inside, unable to fight even one Ogre Knight. You will remember them and when Jarl will provide you with quest of taking them down, you'll happily agree: "Yeah, Jarl Aedin, they pissed me off too."

Once again, guys, stop labeling level-scaling as a bad thing. OBLIVION WAS A TESTING GROUND FOR OVERKILL LEVEL-SCALING! It was an experiment and people really need to let it go for christ's sake. Yes, it was a bad system but because of it, it went on to FO3 to be improved and into Skyrim to be improved even more now that we have Morrowind's "You get killed because you wandered in the wrong place lolzors" that so many people like getting their asses handed to them and not have Morrowind's fundamental flaw of the game being too easy. Look at the facts people and you would see that level-scaling is better than no level-scaling. I posted it twice above how the new system works, I can't really go any deeper than that. So it's basically you see that the new level-scaling is exactly what most people advocated for or people can continue to stew over it and complain until they play the game and realize that it's what they want, it's really your guys' choice if you want to be angry for 6 months until the game comes out or not.



Like I said, that's not how level-scaling works at all, that was in Oblivion only. This is where all the rage and misconceptions come from, you need to know what level-scaling actually is. Skyrim will have all enemies already in the game, your not going to see ogres popping up. That's not what level-scaling is at all. Level-scaling is exactly what it sounds like, the scaling of levels, not of adding enemies to the game. To what degree it scales levels and of who depends on which game you look at but Skyrim's is labeled above in one of my posts, read it.

Well off to bed, sun is coming up :pinch:

No, it wasn't. In OB you could still get killed at higher lvls by a boss lvl enemy(like a gloom wraith), but in MW you were almost immortal once you rounded lvl 20. A goos example is that my brother played a warrior nord and killed Diviath Fyr, which is a lvl 65 sorcerer in daedric armor at lvl 18.
The problem about the scaling in OB was that 1) it affected the loot of the cave too much, 2) some boss creatures got way too much health and 3) that certain creatures was missing until a certain lvl.
The only thing that was more difficult in MW was finding out where you were going and that doesn't have anything to do with lvl scaling.
Edit: grammar

This. The occasional "I walked into this one cave to explore it and find out it's too high level and die" isn't difficulty, it's just one of the rare deaths you get in Morrowind.

Now I'm really off to bed lol.

Only possible if you know exactly what you are doing. The learning curve on Morrowind was such that this was simply not feasable on your first playthrough, at level 18. Unless you look up 'how to's' on the net, and there is no helping those people.
For that to work you need intimate knowledge of combat and magical/ alchemical effects and that requires time played.
Yes, if you know the game and its mechanics by heart you can defeat Dagoth Ur at level one.
The game knowledge required for that means that you would have to have a lot of playtime before figuring out how to, if ever.
Morrowind had quite a steep learning curve, Oblivion didnt have any at all.

I only played Morrowind one time through (because I could never bring myself to be able to do it again, I just went back to Daggerfall) and I blew through everything. All you had to do was do the main quest and once you finished the main quest, you could do the rest of the content and never be in danger. So yeah, it's easy.

And yes, I know I'm still awake, was replying to another thread then had to reply to this one lol.

Higher level characters not having a challenge in vanilla Morrowind was a problem. I dont mind being a god at level 50, but at level 30 there should be challenge.
That is what was so good about tribunal and bloodmoon. If you try to breeze through those on a level 40 god (for vanilla)
youd fail and die very quickly.

I think you are wrong as my brother actually did that on the only character he have ever played. He haven't used any guides(he didn't have a pc of his own at the time), but he had learned a bit from playing OB. He got bored since it isn't any challenge in the game.
However you look at it the vanilla OB will always be harder than vanilla MW, even if they overdid the lvl-scaling.

No, that is an optinion. You can like Morrowind to kingdom come, but that doesn't mean Oblivion wasn't better. I can like Oblivion till the cows come home, but that doesn't make it better either. Its you liking Morrowinds scaling. Its me liking Oblivions. Its you liking being told to go west when you're suppose to go south south west. Its me liking to have a compass to at least get to the general area within the time I have to play the game.

Its all opinion. Every little bit of it. Better is a point of view.

I still failed plenty of times in Oblivion. The things were walking tanks of health most of the time. In morrowind I just grinded other quests till I could finish the ones I wanted to do. Not to different really. Both games had challenge. They did very well for a reason. They were both very well created games. The only thing that makes one "better" than the other one is opinion. Its like trying to compare two works of art. After a specific point, everything's the same and its just a matter of opinion.

There's simply no way to compair any two games without being bias.

Good point. I suppose youre right.

This is true. I think many things about MW is better than OB, like how many of the quests could take very unsuspected turns or the sense of culture.
I still think that OB did a better job keeping the player challenged in combat, which is the topic of this thread.