If you played it, you must have had lots of issues with Fallout 3..... (First playthrough, I hit the level cap in under 15 hours. Finally got around to finishing the main quest at ~25 hours. Then played that character another 50 or so.)


Only reason I ever wanted to slow my level gains down in Oblivion was so that I could control the attribute bonuses to get +4/+5 every time. If it weren't for that, it wouldn't have mattered. To me, at least. :shrug:

I would imagine that when you get beyond a certain level the leveling will slow down to a crawl, and it will take a very, very long time to reach the theoretical maximum level.

Man, so many people jumping to conclusions. I highly doubt that it will take only 20 hours to max out your levels, going from 1 to 50 is going to take some time. It's been mentioned that getting to level 50 in Skyrim will take about the same amount of time that it did to reach level 30 in Oblivion. And by the sounds of it, there isn't going to be any hard level cap, you just don't get any more perks after level 50.

I have the same fear as gpstr, and it's less about jumping to conclusions, and more about BGS long and well-established history. Also, as gpstr pointed out, it's not about hitting a level ceiling, it's about hitting a challenge ceiling. You get to a certain point in a BGS game, maybe about halfway (including a fair but not extreme number of side quests and exploration), and the challenge evaporates. It's not just about HP and level, it's about whether your character is ever actually in danger. In Morrowind, Oblivion, and FO3, at moderate levels (20s-30s), I would start making deliberately stupid decisions to gimp my characters in order to create artificial challenge and make the game more entertaining. My characters wear weak armor, choose weapons because they're not the best, and do various other stupid things to raise the challenge level. It's not very good for "immersion" or for fun.

Combat doesn't become a chore only because HPs grow beyond reason, but because it's tedious and not engaging when there's no challenge. The same is true for speechcraft, and other skills/events in the games.

In one of Todd's recent interviews he actually says whether the level up is like Fallout (forced), or Oblivion (on sleeping). I will go attempt to find it, though I doubt I will.

That's not necessarily about leveling though, it's about not having sufficiently challenging opponents at that point. I understand what you're saying and have experienced the same thing myself, but that's more because the enemies I encounter at that point just aren't enough of a match for me, not necessarily because of my level. Granted the two go hand in hand, but if both areas are balanced properly, then it doesn't need to be an issue. Unfortunately, in the Bethesda games I've played so far, they haven't been balanced well. Maybe they'll get it right in Skyrim.

I probably should've said "much, MUCH more than 20 hours."

Have you looked at my sig? Those are a few of my characters (I have a couple dozen total, and more all the time). They're dear to me. They're rich, complex, unique, distinctive, well-defined individuals. I've probably got a minimum of 40 or 50 hours into each of them, and I know that Kyla, Claudia and Bogmok are all well over 100 hours. And just earlier today, after not traveling with her at all for probably close to a year, I broke Kyla out again, to finish up the FG quest she was in the middle of and maybe to tackle the main quest. She's level 18 at the moment.


I do.


Because upping the difficulty just makes it more tedious. I don't want to make it take longer for my level 20 warrior in full Daedric to kill things. I want to take longer to get to level 20 and full Daedric.


Sure, but why would Kyla - who grew up on the streets in Cheydinhal, learned how to fight and wanted more than anything else to go fight in the Arena, who then found that the Arena wasn't fulfilling and left to wander the land, putting her weapon skills to use to help people, and finally rediscovered her family heritage of nobility - decide that what she really wants to do is brew potions, wear a robe and cast spells? That's just not her personality.


Or a couple of dozen of them.


I'm a person who loves to create interesting characters. It doesn't matter that much what sort of characters they are, so long as they're internally consistent and interesting. I've got a Nord warrior in heavy armor with a war hammer (that he talks to) who can't cast a spell at all. I've got a Breton Archmage who's never swung a weapon in his life. I've got an Imperial assassin who refuses to do anything that resembles work, so he relies entirely on illusion and conjuration. I've got a bubbleheaded female Bosmer who wears light armor and fights with a battle axe - she goes from airhead to psycho killer and back again without even blinking. I've got an Orc mage who's perpetually depressed because he thinks all the mages dislike him because he's an Orc and all the Orcs dislike him because he's a mage (actually, most people dislike him just because he's perpetually depressed). I've got a Redguard swordsman who refuses to wear armor, believing that if he gets hit at all, that means he's failed. I've got a Dunmer vampire assassin - a freelance Orc adventurer - an Argonian who fights with a selection of specialized enchanted daggers - an Altmer heavy armor tank - an antisocial Bosmer hunter - a naive and flighty Redguard waif - a Dunmer unarmored hand-to-hander - a Nord goddess/battlemage - an Imperial fighter in the middle of a mid-life crisis who just put away her Imperial Dragon armor, put on a slinky body suit and joined the Dark Brotherhood.... and that's still not all of them.


That's easy. Creating unique characters and getting to know them through the course of many hours and many adventures.

Each one of those characters that I weighed this post down with started out as nothing more than a bare outline. Bogmok, the Orc mage, was an Orc mage. That's it. I thought it would be interesting to play an Orc mage, so I did. Mindi, the Bosmer with the battle axe, started out as a female Bosmer with a battleaxe. Again, that was it - just that bare outline. All the rest - all the details of her personality that make her a recognizable and distinct character, came over the course of traveling with her. That's what I do with characters, and in order to do that, I need to be able to travel with them as long as possible. If the game just rushes along and next thing I know they're uber, then I never get the chance to get to know them.

There are plenty of games in which I can just jump into the shoes of a generic character and run around and kill stuff. There are damned few games - none that really compare to TES - that allow me to create pretty much any character I might imagine and watch them and learn about them as they travel through the world. That's the thing I most value about TES games, and that's the part of TES games that I'm afraid Skyrim is leaving behind.

Agreed, it's really a balance issue, and it doesn't have to be that way. I'm just more of a pessimist than you. I'm really hoping they prove me wrong.

So far I've played Oblivion and Fallout 3 and noticed a distinct improvement between them. So it stands to reason that Skyrim will see an even further improvement. They are learning a few things with each game they create, so there's bound to be a positive progression as they gain more experience. There's also the issue of balancing the game for a wide variety of people. Not everyone wants to play each battle out like it's a life and death matter, in fact, the general player is more content with something easier. Which makes it difficult to balance things out so that everyone is happy with the end result.

I think what the OP means, is that he/she is worried about http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EmptyLevels

Which was a huge problem in Oblivion.

However, I think Bethesda is doing two things to combat this. First I believe they've said that the leveling of monsters will be more akin to Fallout 3 then Oblivion. That is to say you start to see bigger and badder monsters in random places, but the game isn't going to throw them at you in every other random encounter like they do in Oblivion. Also monster leveling is going to be more gradual then it was in Oblivion.

Secondly they're doing away with the attributes like strength, endurance, etc. So you know longer have to obsess about X5 stat multipliers and increasing a bunch of skills your weren't planning to use before you level up like you did in the last two games.

In other words, you'll no longer have to worry about leveling up to fast, fact with the new perk system your actually going to want to level up.

The only reason that anyone (other than obsessive powergamers) had to worry about +5s in Oblivion is because of the broken leveling system and the leveled creatures. It wasn't necessary simply because those attributes existed, but because the majors/minors leveling system increased your level too quickly with too few skill increases (particularly if you made the mistake of picking quickly increasing non-combat skills for any of your majors) and because the creatures you faced relentlessly increase their own levels. Since the problem was a result of the broken leveling system and the level scaling, removing attributes does absolutely nothing to address it.

It is possible that the new leveling system and the more fluid level scaling will address at least some of those issues. We'll just have to see.


Sure. But I want to level up at the speed at which I want to level up, not at the speed at which Beth thinks 12 year old rage quitters are going to want to level up. I've seen nothing to indicate that the player is going to have any control at all over leveling speed (other than, ironically enough, by "increasing a bunch of skills your weren't planning to use").

Pretty sure you don't have to. Although, with the new leveling system, surely staying at level 1 would completely gimp your character.

I expect the level up will happen the same way it does in fallout. As soon as you have enough you will know your gona level... and if your in a fight it will wait till after that fight. If not in a fight bam you level. Remember without atributes to fiddle you dont need to put it off anymore.