I agree that the way leveled loot is handled by vendors is an issue. Here is a situation in which static leveling makes sense. Give the vendors good stuff from the very start of the game so that you can see it and want it and set it as a goal to own it, but keep anything more valuable than steel locked up so players have to buy it, don't leave it lying around the shop for players to steal. (Or have it locked in trapped chests in a locked cellar with an armed guard and magic wards.)

You could even improve the Speech skill. For example, say that vendors own very valuable equipment right from the start of the game, but when they deal with the player they add a huge markup for higher leveled items. Example: all of the orcish, elvish, dwarven stuff is priced at twice what it's worth, and they will only buy it from the player at regular prices. Anything better than that is 4x or higher. Then you add perks to the Speech tree that allow you to 'unlock' regular prices with merchants on these items (the rationale being that you are now able to persuade the vendor that you DO actually know how much it is worth). So, one perk could be used to unlock orcish/elvish/dwarven gear at regular prices, another perk could unlock enchanted items and higher quality items. (Probably leave it at two perks, or even just make it a single perk.) Suddenly, the Speech skill seems a little more useful than a simple % off since it gives you access to more powerful weapons and armor.

Of course, I think the smithing/enchanting skills need to be reworked a bit, too, to keep everything balanced. They really just need to eliminate the option to spam these skills.

The only thing that scaled to your characters level in Morrowind was randomly generated loot and the frequency of encountering higher level enemies. Every NPC and enemy have set levels, stats, health, equipment, and abilities.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Morrowind_for_Oblivion_Players

"There is no scaling and much more limited leveling. Many caves and ruins have fixed-level inhabitants. The creatures that spawn and the loot you find in crates depend on your level, but all creatures and attributes have a static level and higher level creatures never completely replace the low level ones. As a result, low level characters will have a much harder time, but high level characters will actually have it easier. No NPCs have leveled armor or weapons -- what they have is what they will always have. Caves and ruins become less profitable as you level up, except for randomly-generated treasure."

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Creatures
http://newsquid1.uesp.net/wiki/Category:Morrowind-NPCs

So please, save the condescending attitude when it is you, that do not know what you are talking about. There is a difference between encountering high level enemies more frequently as you level and enemies leveling to match your level (Level Scaling).

Exactly, and this is why they trust the pc modders to make these, because that's what they do. Bethesda made a game they knew millions would enjoy, and one that they knew thousands could make into their own. I see nothing wrong with that. They didn't make a "classic mode" because, as someone else said, even if there were thousands of these threads, it would still be a minority compared to the millions this game appeals to the way it is.

Let me ask this, if the game was perfect, literally perfect, then what would happen to the modding scene? If everyone was satisfied, modding would only make the game worse. Believe in Bethesda to make a game that's enjoyable as is, and believe in the modders to make it into a game you enjoy even more. Simple stuff.

As a player who played and beat Demon's Souls many times, I have to point out something: you are completely wrong. You can beat DS at level 1 -- the entire game -- without ever leveling up once. It's been done and you can find proof on youtube, if you care to disagree with me. Just wanted to point that out.

EDIT:
Here's a link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Gnwe2BkUI

My question "Why did my mage get weaker by getting stronger?" was a rhetorical question. I'm sorry you failed to grasp that or that I failed to communicate it properly. I am completely aware of the reasons WHY it happens, I just don't agree with them.

And no, I'm not mad, just trying to explain myself to someone over the internet, which isn't exactly the most effective way of communicating (at least for me). Level scaling in Skyrim is dumb to me, and from the looks of it quite a few others. Providing examples of completely different (read: CLASS based games, like pnp DnD and Baldurs Gate, etc) games doesn't do anything to strengthen your reasoning why I should be punished for leveling more skills than the invisible Bethesda gaming gods want me to.

You need to realize that not everyone prescribes to the same "rules" for roleplaying as you do. Just because your thief doesn't know any magic (because hey, thieves don't know magic, they only know stabby stabby and YOINK!) doesn't mean that everyone else in the world needs to play their thieves the exact same way.

Level scaling creates problems for people who try to get the most out of their game in ways other than you do. You just fail to understand that not everyone plays the game the way you do, and thus, you think that we are "doing it wrong".

Although everyone and his mother will disagree with me on this, I think the problem that afflicts character progression as it relates to leveled mobs is almost unavoidable. Let me start by saying: yes, it could be better but I don't think it's ever going to go away.

The reason why leveling any skill makes enemies harder is because every single skill will improve your character in some way. (I'm not saying they all do it equally, only that even speech and pickpocketing and lockpicking grant you perks that improve your character, even if it is only access to more gold and therefore better gear.)

Because it is impossible for the developers to predict every possible build, the progression is flat. If you level enough skills you gain a level and all the mobs gain a level, too. The devs can't say: "well, if you improve your lockpicking we won't make enemies harder, only if you improve your one-handed skill" because improving your lockpicking will make it possible to open more chests, find more gold and potentially magic items, and, if you have the perks, even more gold and magic items. And more gold (better gear) and more magic items makes you better a beating enemies, even if it doesn't necessarily make it as easy as focusing on one-handed.

The problem is here: even if improving your lockpicking doesn't give you as much of an edge as improving your one-handed does in combat, if you make it a zero-cost skill, guess what: every one spams lockpicking and calls it an exploit. "Hur, don't level up your one-handed skill, just spam your lockpicking and use the extra gold and magic items to get your character better gear". You see?

If you don't provide a cost for every skill, any skill that doesn't have one becomes an exploit. People will go around spamming lockpicking and pickpocketing and speech skills to gain the extra gold, deck out their character and go tromp mobs who have not been appropriately prepared for the challenge. And I haven't even mentioned the crafting skills. Some people argue that crafting armor and enchantments shouldn't level you up in relation to enemies because it doesn't make sense. Well, yes it does, because smithing/enchanting/alchemy provide far greater benefits and advantages in relation to mobs than speech, lockipicking, and pickpocketing, which, as we've seen, become exploits as soon as they no longer provide consequences. Any skill that doesn't level you is an exploit, it's that simple.

Could the skill trees and perks be better balanced? Probably, but there is no way to do away with leveling non-combat skills altogether. What about the poor warrior who invests all of his perks in combat skills? Every time he gets better, his enemies get better. Is that fair for him? Other players are going around maxing out all of the non-leveled skills before they do any serious combat just so that they can be way better equipped. All of a sudden, the new rules dictate that everyone should become a master thief or crafter before becoming a warrior. Does that make the game better?


The last two are already possible, fortunately. It might be neat if they exposed attributes as visible stats on the character sheet. I don't think they could make a game that allows you to choose between static and dynamic scaling, though. They are implemented in totally different ways. You can have both in the same game, but you can't make it a setting without having to populate the world twice.

And other opinions would say that leveling is a waste of time forcing people to grind when they should be able to explore the world freely. Doesn't feel rewarding, feels like someone stole what you should have from the start. The real nasties are encounters to be experienced, not forced barriers. You have a lot of exploration in the world to look forward to as well as gameplay intelligently balanced at all times to be challenging without frustration and calm without boredom.

Exploration over a "BEING THE BEST I'M SO COOL" attitude.

Lets get a simple example:
You are level 1. You meet a bandit level 1. He has 100HP and you kill him in -lets say- 10 seconds.
Congratulations you just ADVANCED and you are now level 2! You continue playing...
You meet another bandit level... 2 ( all bandits lvl 1 suddenly died ).
You are stronger now but a bandit has now 150HP so you still kill him in 10 seconds.
And so on... Situation will stay that way forever.

With system like this what is the point leveling at all? Why not remove leveling completly?
Because as it is now it is just a number on the screen. You dont feel your character becoming stronger.
What is wrong with easy killing a group of casual bandits on a road when you are high level.
Isn't it what you have leveled for, to become more powerful? High level character should look for a challenge
in most dangerous places and common sh.t that threatened at level 1 should be dying just by looking at lvl 100 tank!

No no, I understand that people play it differently and don't roleplay their characters (i.e. not having their expert mage start wearing heavy armor on a whim after he's trained in magic his entire life in robes.) What you fail to understand is there *is* a way to play this game "wrong" and that is attempting to level up skills that your character, the kind of person (s)he is, cannot use as effectively as another skill will cause issues for you. Like I've said, Bethesda has made a game that the vast majority enjoy extremely and have turned it over to the modders on the PC to make it the game *you* want it to be.

I for one will be getting some sort of realism mod that makes you need to eat, perhaps expands marriage, darkens caves so there's no ambient light all over and torches matter and does a whole host of other things. But I don't really see level scaling as a problem, because the way I see it, the Dovahkiin is *not* a god, only a mere man-like-creature destined to defeat dragons and that an experienced bandit leader should still be a respectable match for me even at lvl 50.

I personally think they did a good job on the scaling in Skyrim. There were always places I could do easy and always places I would get my ass handed to me if I had the audacity to enter. Being able to enter those areas now definitely grants a sense of progression and I would never want scaling removed, whats the point of playing a game if everything becomes face roll easy later on.

Except in your example, when you go from say, 10 to 11, the bandit stays at 10 and stops leveling. Because certain enemies only go so high. Instead you might start meeting a different, more experience brand of bandit. /i think it's wrong to expect to start wielding a sword and train with it for a couple months and expect that after that you'll be able to beat an experienced bandit who's been surviving for a decade or more in the wild.

Because people who have issues with their ego need to feel like a god instead of a normal man that's good at killing dragons, i.e. dovahkiin. <_<

Actually, your level makes combat harder - if you level skills like alchemy, enchanting, speech, etc. Your level will increase, but not your combat capability. Hence, when you go back into the wilderness/game world, all the NPCs will have scaled above you by increasing their levels AND combat capability.

This already has been proven numerous times by players that are a lot smarter than I am. And that's also been the subject of a lot of discussions.

I fail to see what your elitist attitude concerning other people and their gaming experiences has to do with the conversation at hand.

Except that this doesn't happen this way. Bandits have level limits. Once you explore an area with bandits they will be locked on those limits if you ever go back there. At level 20 you should be slaying standard bandits like they are flies. If you go to a bandit area you have never been to there will be some of a stronger variety (and still some weak ones) and they will stay that way forever if you ever pass by that way again. I believe even the strongest bandit stops at level 20 or so so after level 30 you really should have no problem with any bandits of any variety. I know I don't at level 36.

I read your essay on this as well as your recent posts, and I think you are making arguments to reach a predestined conclusion. You downplay the negatives of level scaling while playing up the negatives of static mobs. For example, you assume that I want loot to match the challenge given by the enemy, or for the enemy to be a challenge at all. On the contrary, by the time I'm level 50 I would expect to faceroll a large % of the game and only be truly challenged by the biggest, baddest mobs out there or areas with higher density of medium challenging mobs. In your essay, you said that doing respawn mobs by hand is unrealistic: why? If they're doing a static world in the first place, they'll already have to pay attention to the level of that spawn so increasing the power of the respawn a reasonable amount (or none at all... wouldn't have a problem with this either) wouldn't be that hard.

Personally, for intelligent mobs I think it makes sense to have the first few respawns get progressively smarter. i.e. you kill the weakling bandits and their superiors find out about it and head out to retake the fort. For something like mudcrabs though... go ahead and keep them the level they are. There's nothing unrealistic about respawning at all in that case. Last I checked, animals make whoopie and have babies, and it stands to reason we don't have access to every animal den or breeding ground so that's not an immersion breaker.

Lastly, the worst intellectual crime you commit is the completely ridiculous assertion that "without level scaling, the game is linear and the same every time you play it." Surely you're smart enough to know that's a bit of BS. With an intelligently designed static world, players would have a wide variety of places to go at every level and would actually be unable to go to all of them without outleveling them. In my opinion, this increases replay value since on your second run you check out the areas you leveled past before and avoid the ones you've done already (unless you like repetition). Why were you unwilling to consider these alternatives in your essay?

Sigh... another case where you only consider two extremes for the sake of your argument (which is, at its core, Beth is smarter than us and did the best they possibly could). Why not have leveling lockpicking still raise the power of enemies, but just not to the same degree as leveling a pure combat skill? You could be very conservative with it and it would still make a significant difference. Give every skill a value between .75 and 1, where 1 are the most effective combat skills and .75 something like speechcraft. When you level, it takes a weighted average of the skills you used to level and uses that # to decide the power increase of mobs. Seems fair, and the most you could exploit it is creating a world where mobs are 3/4 of the power as someone who leveled combat skills... where you don't have great combat skills. The #s I chose are arbitrary but you get the idea, it doesn't have to be one extreme or the other.

I mean, did you honestly not realize as you were making your argument that it was more than a simple binary choice? Unlike many posters, you seem more than able to grasp the staggering complexity and difficulty of what Bethesda has to accomplish but seem unwilling to fully explore possible alternatives.

I'm level 16 and bandits are a pushover. So much so that I increase the difficulty slider but then reduce it again when I meet some bandit leaders, etc.

Level-scaling is awesome. y u so jelly?

I find that without scaling at some parts you'll get stuck. For example, lets say the middle of Skyrim had low to mid level enemies but you have to go to some dungeon where the enemies are super high leveled, whereas you are level 4. The scaling allows the game to be balanced without making it way too easy or hard but at the same time letting the difficulty to be changed. This lets people have a challenging experience while not having to face an Ancient Dragon at level 1.

I've found that scaling in the game is fine. The problem I've found the tools available to you to deal with new challengers which include but is not exclusively leveled enemy types. Right now characters that reply mainly on weapons have a lot at their disposal to increase damage output to keep any particular challenge from being overwhelming. I'm not a big fan of playing mages in games but after playing through with a couple different types of PC's. Mages(pure cloth wearing style ones particularly) don't scale particularly well.

Games without scaling are failures.

sigh, another self-entitled, ungrateful whiner making a thread. How many do we need? Same answer as always: the game is not perfect, and it has flaws. It is not tailored specifically to any one person. Modding helps this a lot. But what Bethesda has created is a fantastic game with very creative designing; again not perfect, but still a masterpiece in its own right. Why not enjoy it instead of nit-picking it? :shakehead:

Have you considered that by putting higher level enemies in areas it gives more of a reward to the player when they are able to come back and clear the area later in the game? Care to back up either of your points or would you rather just blurt out generalizations? People like you should be banned from the forum.

@OP - I think most people agree with you, and even the simpletons who mindlessly think that "leveled enemies would destroy the exploration aspect of the game" would probably agree too if the system were implemented well into the game.

Umm...why not criticize it instead of just writing sycophantic devoted fan-boy posts about it?

I think the obvious reason to be critical of aspects of the game on the developer's board would be to provoke a change in the developers' further undertakings in game design.