Wow, I'm glad I read that. This is reassuring.

Hmmm. I hope it's closer to New Vegas than Fallout 3. I can understand the need for an extent of Level Scaling, but having every quest done is just daft. I prefer area-centric levelling personally. It makes more sense. However the quote from the article (which is all I have to go on being in the UK) does inspire some hope with the word "suitable". I'm hoping this not only means your skills but also the general danger of the quest being undertaken (saving a kid from a local cave should be nowhere near as hard as assaulting a castle for example). I'm sure they know what they're doing.

Absolutely true, you level up to get a payoff, e.g. being able to beat your enemies more easily or to be more powerful, if it′s again that the game gets harder and levelling is punished like that, this will be a big disappointment for me. And I don′t see a problem in it that there may be quests that I′m not up to yet. It′s the whole point of levelling that you can beat things later in the game that you weren′t able to beat in the beginning. I think Bethesda are doing the same mistake as in Oblivion, they want everyone to beat everything right from the start. Why should I level at all then? If it will again be possible to beat the game with a lvl 1 or 2 character, this will be the last TES game for me... (probably not as I like the series too much, but I just wouldn′t understand why Bethesda thinks that this is the right way to design their games).

It's not every quest thats getting scaled it's just the randomly generated ones.

As long as there is enough stuff to do at lower levels, I'm fine with FNV's system. I sometimes felt stymied for xp in the lower-mid range in FNV because of difficult areas and quests.

FML

The leveled scaling in MW was not quite enough, it needed tweaked just a tad, they listened to us but tweaked it too much then they reined it back for Fallout:3....way back. I am of the belief they now have it pretty right on the dot. I'm not worried therefore. And one of the FO:NV devs stated that it to was leveled a bit and despite that there are people believing it had none at all. But anyway, I am confident Bethesda will have gotten that part right now.

"The leveled scaling in MW was not quite enough"

I don't think this is the case. The player did feel rather godlike at level 25, but this is due to not enough variation in the levels of the enemies. I am sure Beth could have solved this e. g. by making the bandits in the Grazelands some 20 levels higher (on average!) than in the Ascadian Isles (less imperial presence and more attacks by Telvanni rogues would certainly be a reason for the really badass marauders to concentrate on the right half of the map). This has even been done to some extent, but not enough. It needs no levelscaling to solve this issue; just make some areas easier and some harder. It's called area-based difficulty. WOW does this, Nehrim does this. Morrowind tries this but isn't too good at it, and tries to compensate this by levelscaling.

I think the only real reason for hardcoe Oblivion-style levelscaling in RPGs is the presence of some idiot reviewers who think they should be able to see the whole game in 1 hour of playing, and write bad reviews if they get their ass kicked in Mordor. Well, optimizing games for reviewers is not the best design decision...

Honestly I didn't like the level scaling in Fallout 3 either. It tricked a lot of people, but I noticed it. "Huh, everything I encounter can reasonably be beaten." What really ruined it for me was talking to other people. They believed that Super Mutants were really tough. But I encountered them at level 3, and so they were fairly easy.

http://fallout3.wordpress.com/2007/07/14/desslock-explains-level-scaling-on-fallout-3/ This explains what fallout 3 scaling is in a nutshell, it's not our dream version of ultimate lack of level scaling but I prefer it over Oblivion and I think I'll appreciate it in Skyrim...hopefully.

statics levels doesn't belong to a open world rpg they belong to linear ones

Care to give a reason why?

^^^^ like he said, don't worry, it won't be like OB, hehe I mean do you really thing they are that stupid!! to put one of the most unwanted things BACK into the game, it will be more like fallout, as in better wayyyy better

Yes. Yes I do. They've made innumerable poor design decisions in the past, I have no reason to believe they won't stick to the status quo and just continue churning out idiotic game mechanics in the future. I'd rather voice my complaints as early as possible than keep my mouth shut and trust in the infallible wisdom of a committee that may only end up releasing a flawed, poorly designed product in the end.

That's a bit harsh - welcome to the forums by the way.

It's hard to make the perfect game - however Bethesda have a habit of listening to the fans and making the changes - they've publicly stated that levelling didn't work for Oblivion and have been working on it - will it please everyone - probably not - however so far it's sounding pretty good to me and its honestly hard to complain if you haven't seen the end product - with Gstaff weighing in earlier obviously levelling is still on the minds of the developers

Read http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1156831-skyrim-compilation-and-explanation/ This will let your level-scaling worries go to rest.



Please elaborate. They have tested with some mechanics in the past and not everyone like them but they have always tweaked them after testing them in their games, thus the point of testing them. But I really want you to list this innumerable poor design decisions.

The worst products of level scaling in Oblivion were:

1. By the time the player was level 25 or so, every single Bandit and Marauder was equipped with glass/daedric armor. In addition to making no sense, this also made these items seem cheap and commonplace and not worth seeking out. The armor had a "tiered" feel to it, such that when you turned level 10 it was time to upgrade to elven armor (which everyone suddenly had) then later you had to upgrade to mithril and glass (and again, everyone else in Cyrodil suddenly had it as well). This totally removed the value these armor types had in Morrowind in addition to taking away from realism. It simply doesn't make sense for daedric armor to be common — ever.

2. Because the weapons and armor upgraded universally on this level scaled system, there were very few unique weapons and armor. The content of the dungeons always felt randomly generated, thereby removing much of the motivation for exploring them. In Morrowind you would sometimes find rare (daedric, orcish, dwemer) or even unique items in dungeons which you simply could not get anywhere else, and you thereby had a reason to loot dungeons. Looting in Oblivion lost most of its attraction, because the player simply never found anything other than politely level scaled quantities of gold and weapons/armor (again, the same ones everyone else in Cyrodil had at your level anyway).

3. You never walked into an Oblivion dungeon, realized you would be overwhelmed, and decided to come back when you were a higher level. If a dungeon was hard in Oblivion, it was equally hard at any level. The motivation for leveling largely disappeared because of this. Leveling up did not allow you to go anywhere that you couldn't go at lower levels, nor did it make you feel that much more powerful. If the entire world courteously adjusts itself to your level, not only do you not feel you are getting better when you level up, you sometimes feel like you are getting worse. If you're not careful to train up enough non-major skills and acquire the new universal tier of armor/weapons, you can quickly fall behind the rest of the world. Leveling should always make you more powerful relative to the rest of the world. It's okay to have some level scaling (e.g. in random quests), but it should not be so blatantly obvious to the player as it was in Oblivion. Clearly, random quests need to match their difficulty to the level of the player, but at no point should the player get the sense that the level/armor/loot of the entire world is contingent upon his or her level.

As long as these three issues are addressed, I have no problem with level scaling in Skyrim. Bethesda seems to be aware of the flaws with Oblivion's level scaling system, so I'd like to think I can trust them to really implement it well in Skyrim.

If levelscaling is restricted to random quests that are made in order to occupy high-level players with something interesting, then I don't think anybody would mind. At least I wouldn't. But "Fallout 3"-like levelscaling is much more than this. Fallout 3's levelscaling, at least with Broken Steel, displayed all of the flaws of Oblivion's levelscaling, only (sometimes) at a lower quantity.

Well with my time with Fallout 3, at level 18 through 30 I seemed swamped by Hellfire troopers and Albino Radscorpions. I am just glad they realized that there was a problem and hope they allow a proper adjustment from what they did in Fallout. No one knows all the details yet so I won't give up hope. I wish they could have like a hardcoe mode though which would be able to have no scaling as well as a scaling mode. If someone made a mod for Oblivion like that it is not out of there power to do so. :dreams:
I just have one request.. have only one of each Daedric armor and weapon pieces, and bring back Tamerilic Lore weapons.

on the contrary I think Static leveling belongs in an openworld rpg and Level scaling in linear.


Linear you are going in a predetermined line yeah? and all your enemies would simply be fodder by the time your at the end, but as most would know in linear games, bosses and enemies only get stronger. because more or less the game is about -you-.


TES from daggerfall has been about the world, there will be some weak enemies, and some (Cenc)ing hard ones to contend with, it shouldnt cater to the player, the player should be adapting if things are too tough or not working, and if anything else go away, get stronger and come back to curbstomp the opposition. everything shouldnt be magically tailored to the protagonist really.

Although I am someone who immediately downloaded anti-leveling mods the moment Oblivion was installed (never played vanilla), I do think leveling can improve the game if it is utilized carefully. I do like the idea of only randomly-generated quests being leveled, and the rest of the game being mostly static. My reasons are thus:
A) In both Morrowind and in Oblivion, when my character was high level, there was zero challenge in the world. (Actually, because of how easily the monster-AI could be exploited, there was no challenge at moderately low levels, but that's another issue.) I don't know if vanilla Oblivion had this problem or not. This is one of the factors which contributed to the games eventually feeling rather boring to me, although not the only factor.
But, if there were still quests presented to the player at high levels which were adequately leveled, that could help address this particular issue. In order to address the issue properly, however, such leveling should not have a cap (a level-500 character should still have some entertainment when playing, for example.) It would be nice to also have some variance in the leveling so it doesn't always feel like exactly the same difficulty.
B) For random quests, it actually feels more realistic. That is, if an NPC has a very difficult problem, they're not likely to ask for help from an adventurer who comes across as inexperienced.

But again, that's just for random quests. There's good reason why I downloaded the anti-leveling mods - it's feels rewarding to be able to try one's hand at a dungeon which is way over the character's skill level, for example.

What this man says.

People complain about level scaling which is in for most games of this type anyhow, well I find the opposite more frustrating! How many times have you been playing a game without scaling and you constantly die over and over and over again when you run into some Uber creature at a low level? I find this MUCH more annoying than having creatures appear at about the same level as yourself, infact I consider this a bigger immersion killer! How would you like them to remove it, you wander down the road at level 1 and run into a big nasty dragon and you realise that you haven't saved the game before hand? Insta-death over and over again isn't my idea of fun, I have been known to take games like this and turf them out the window !

Its the same with weapons and items, you shouldn't be able to run into a dungeon and get a Uber powerful weapon or Armor either, this would throw out the balance of the game, and then you would have 100 posts right here with people complaining the game is far too easy! Its the only way to keep things balanced and interesting right through the game, and I am sure that they will have a difficulty bar to make battles tougher just like the previous games!

Fast travel is essentially a cheat code built into the game. Leave that [censored] out please, if I want to cheat, there are trainers and console commands.

Please don't scale the enemies. Whatever happened to having to level up so you can continue the main quest? That was fun and it lets you choose how difficult you want the game to be by manipulating your level. The reward of having the game be more difficult(by continuing as a lower level) is that you get to see what happens next immediately. As well as getting powerful loot relative to your level, which is always fun. Otherwise if it is too hard or you want it to be a bit easier, you can go do some sidequests and level up a bit.

And having a dragon one shot you when you just started if you're just walking along a road is a design flaw, don' t try to blame something like that on a traditional leveling system.