See, that's what I mean. Your choice in what to do (ally with Germany, or fight them?) determines how hard it is for you to succeed.

In an idealistic RPG (though TESV doesn't have to be one of those), I'd envision doing "the right thing", having a positive karma level in FO3's terms, to be coupled with the more difficult and mechanically less rewarding choices.

Personally, I wouldn't want any scaling. Half of enjoyment of Morrowind was entering a cave or ruin and not knowing of you'd have to equip the Boots of Blinding Speed and high tail it out of there. It gives you a sense of fear/satisfaction that the leveled system of Oblivion could never achieve in its vanilla state. It might be frustrating to be killed by a couple of cliff racers at level 1, but it makes up in the satisfaction you get when you slay a cult lord after chopping you way through in dozens of minions at level 20.
I never felt challenged in Oblivion. Why feel weary of entering a ruin? You know you can kill any amounts of spider deadra that they can throw at you.

Nice. Come to that section of the world you've not been to before and you're like.. hmm.. this could be interesting.

I vote for it, too. Big time.

Of course, without scaling, the game will be exceedingly dull beyond level 20. When has Bethesda ever made content for "those high levels"?

Someone have any reason to give me any confidence that they'll manage this time?

They did it in Morrowind. Granted you had to have the expansions for it.

In Vvardenfell, got more than a few chars up to level 70+. Characters that could jump off mountains, smack down ascended sleepers with one or two hits. Etc, etc.

Take it to the Bloodmoon expansion and promptly got whomped by a gang of blue people riding on boars. Won the battle, but it was like ouch. That 700+ health was down to like one-third. Realized I couldn't just waltz in here. Went back to Vvardenfell, made potions that healed, restored fatigue and gave me a lightning shield. Came back to the island prepared. Good stuff. Not much of a level scaling script there. At least, not as hardcoe as moden Bethesda games, surely. Good enough to keep a dude playing and going "hmm".

This. I don't see why Bethesda shouldn't use all of the tools they have at their disposal. IMO, a mixed system would give them much more flexibility to design NPCs, creatures and regions that keep the game interesting/challenging, while still being able to offer a rewarding experience through character progression and hand-placed items. Using a single system and applying it throughout the entire game is basically what led to Oblivion's level-scaling. Also, as someone else had mentioned before, make the character progression from level to level less dramatic. If done right, it could help to keep the game challenging through levels 30-40, while still giving the feeling that you are slowly becoming more and more powerful.

I think you've just proven my point: Bloodmoon is a reaction. I find it hard to believe that they planned it as "content for people past level 50", although I do think Bethesda may have had the story in mind before Morrowind's release. Likewise, Broken Steel. Look where Fallout 3 is capped. Look where Morrowind transitions to virtually static. Look where Oblivion runs out of quests.

Bethesda never plans past level 20 to 25.

Whether you like Oblivion's method or not, it delivered challenge in the form of 1000 HP Goblin Warlords, as opposed to needing an add-on to get... Feral Goblin Reaver Warlords in Broken Steel. Wait.. that's not what they were called.

Anyway, static worlds should stay back in the old console days, where you traveled to new areas and somehow weakling farmers have The Equipment of the Gods, but cannot defend themselves from the local wildlife, which ignores them anyway.
TES needs something entirely different. Something uniquely TES and something that isn't "gain 5 levels and go from unbeatable to one-shot". If I want that experience, it's called "Borderlands". I own it, I enjoy it, and I want TES to not be it...
TES needs something that makes enemies that are a dire threat at level 5 still a tough enemy at level 7. and something you'd prefer to face in ones and twos at level 10. and still have an amount of threat way out at level 15 if the numbers are large enough. What it doesn't need is to remind people of the old console RPGs where every plot event opens a new area that requires more levels, new equipment, and highly tiered gameplay.

I think it is safe to focus this debate to fundamentals:

Leveling

This is a cheap method used by RPG developers. It is flexible and easy to manage so they use it. There is only one thing I like about leveling, the ability to determine the path of your character. You can decide to go in strength or intelligence... This is strategic, one can choose intelligence even strength has 5 multipliers opposed to 1 of intelligence. But other than this, there is not one good thing about it.

As long as you have leveling as a +1 feature, you can limit or halve the scale(I'm repeating myself), you will end up with god PC or you scale the enemies and they will be a drag. Your stat system must be dynamic, goes up and goes down based on training frequency.(and ingame dynamics:doing too much fighting can hurt your brain cells too. )

I would like to start at level 30 with random stats based on character class in a second gameplay if I want to skip the character development part. I want the game to be designed for developing characters(1-30) and matured characters.(30+). If my character leveling is dynamic, I can play the whole game with one character. I can still want to play the game with different characters because their 1-30 will be unique. I can also add as many quests as possible as mods too.

Random encounters/loot and scheduling.

The single most powerful feature that TES can have is expanding scheduling and replacing leveled lists completely. Why have static zones? You can do that so wild life can migrate place to place in time. Seasons can play a role. Food chain can be linked directly. Player can't be everywhere at the same time. You can use that and can have a constantly changing world. You can give a meaning to random cave loots.

"This cave was used by some local bandits but then one adventurer cleared it. Now it is occupied with xxx pirates. They are powerful(and rich )."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:_Shadow_of_Chernobyl

You can link estates to NPCs and make NPCs migrate/travel. So if an essential died, no problem. Assign freed quests/houses to spare NPCs. Random NPC creations must not be a problem(incarnate dead ones with random changes. Note I am talking about personalities and class. When you have them separately, you can mix it with random faces and create a unique NPC personality and position/class without creating mindless zombies.). Player can't count whole Nirn population. People can die from going old too!

You can use a simple leveled list for all these. Or you can develop the Radiant AI to its potential.

You've just echoed something I said in another post. Can't remember where it is. When making Morrowind, I belive that they thought their customers were a bunch of kids who wouldn't have the patience to get past levels 25-30 or so. I think it caught them by surprise when people did so en masse. I also once saw them refer to their customers as "kids" in an interview.



Heh. After Bloodmoon, they must've thought it was all their customers wanted. It would go along with their "our customers are just kids" thinking. However, look at the heat the resulting Oblivion product generated. Got so bad that if you bring up the MW vs. OB debate, it gets locked by moderators. Obviously, this "heat" is still there, years after the product's release. I'd wager that's not the reaction they were hoping for. It's not exactly a sign of success, you know?

Personally, all I'm saying is that if I'm going to "level up" a character, then I want the game to reflect those such improvements in more ways than just numbers on a screen. I think you may have been saying the same thing.

However, if you just want every Tom, dike and Harry that you meet to always be just as great a swordfighter as you are.. well, why even bother working on it? After all, it'll always be a challenge with that method.. no matter what. To me.. that's what gets dull. Not trying to shove my preferences in your face, friend. Just saying they're my preferences. Who knows, maybe we're agreeing and I just don't know it.

All in all, the only real thing I'm not keen on is how the TES series seems to be turning into a reflex oriented action-fest. Action titles are common. I also have to say that the TES series should be it's own thing.. not just another face in the crowd.

I chose no leveling though in very isolated cases I wouldn't mind some leveling. Anyways if enemies re-spawn then a lv 25+ character will meet lowly level 1-5 enemies so lets let enemies have some more options like avoiding, surrendering, if they are bandits perhaps try to high-tail it to some high level bandits.

I would really like to see weak enemies, including the mundane versions of creatures to continue to appear throughout the game - just for variety. I don't like that once you see one mountain lion you 100. It would cooler to keep the creatures encountered more varied. I'm also not opposed to having big creatures appear as obstacles to to characters in low levels. It presents a challenge and something you know you'll have to overcome later.

Ideal for me: Some level scaled creatures, some non-level scaled creatures, a huge variety of level scaled dungeon bosses, occassional contact with high level creatures from the beginning of the game - things you couldn't normally beat at your level.

OR.... Maybe the Red bar could start to go down when you don't use the skill in a while, and when it gets to the bottom, it stays there until you use it again...
but the skills themselves don't go down

just a suggestion


EDIT: Also, keep leveling, as it keeps the game fun!!

Before anyone reads further, some of what I say may not sit well with people. I am critical of the forum atmosphere and some attitudes within it.

If you are not absolutely certain you can maintain a civil tone in a very candid discussion, it may be best to skip this post



I'm sure that perception has changed, but I just heard an interview where Todd Howard said they expected "final Fallout 3 levels to be about 14"... with Broken Steel installed and not meeting too many of the new enemies, I still would routinely hit 25 before the last part of the main quest. I think they simply underestimate our wanderlust and actual desire to "practice" skills that can be practiced.



There are good reasons the moderators lock those threads. I don't think it has anything to do with the scaling, though. Just like my Indycar example (possibly another thread, basically, two large groups pining for different pasts = killing the sport), you have some people who will never be satisfied with anything other than Morrowind 2 (or 1995 CART 2, to follow the anology), and you have some fans that react to them with a fair degree of nastiness. It won't go away as long as people refuse to admit that the marketplace has changed and full voice acting is a de facto requirement, etc. 2002 is dead and gone, and people need to accept that. Likewise, 2006 and 2008 are gone. Oblivion 2 and "Fallout 3 with magic instead of guns" aren't going to cut it either. The heat ultimately can't be traced to anything other than "fans being willfully blind to reality" and "fans getting touchy in defense of their favorite". Oblivion isn't to blame for the forum environment. WE are.



And I'm saying I don't want the game world to be carved up into ye olde Final Fantasy zones where entering the wrong area is death. Ruins the open world aspect, and that's a large part of Bethesda's sales pitch. That's why "no scaling" is a terrible option. People CLAIM it's Morrowind-style. Morrowind.esm disagrees. I happen to believe the game data. What I'd like is "one level" to be a small improvement, and five levels to be the minimum to go from "all but impossible" to "certain victory". Current games, 1-2 levels, sometimes even a new cuirass, are "game-changing". Either we tone down the actual advancement, or we add some complex scaling to make a Troll a challenge longer. Either one works. Just depends on whether you want each level to make you closer to a demigod, or merely "tougher"



Actually, I'd rather bandits DID gain weapon skill as their level increases, more than HP. But Oblivion had no "accessible" metric for controlling that. What I want is "more ways to control the scaling". Everything from static placements to level-Dependant static spawns (static creature from a leveled list, as in Morrowind AND Oblivion), scaled creatures (but only if we get more options than Oblivion), story-Dependant lists (where things like quest state and number of days you've had a quest can affect whether your Frostwargs are running rampant in Skyrim, or whether they're on the decline), fifteen different rats with levels other than just 1 (although I'd cap it at ~5, with the exception of my now-required daedrat that lives in the 10-15 range). I want SCORES of creature types, with dozens of variants. I don't have a problem with level 25 enemies spawning from the get go, but I need to have an option besides death. What I want is diversity, and a feeling that there's still more out there after level 25. If everything exists in the world right from the start and never changes... once I can beat it all, why level? To kill it all .2 seconds faster? That's it??



Well, giving the player more control and more efficient control is a bell that can't be unrung. Any ideas on how to give the player more control than Oblivion while restraining the reflex demands are more than welcome, but taking player control away from people, at this point, is never going to fly. My opinion, of course, but rather than ask for a reversion to dice roll mechanics, I'd be interested in seeing a rethink of combat that is relatively real-time, gives the player as much control as Oblivion, and still mitigates the need for reflexes. That's forward-looking and creative. Bringing back dice rolls is, well, pining for the past, I guess. Got a suggestion? I don't, because I really didn't have a problem with Oblivion's combat. Didn't hear the dice rolling, so to speak. Be my hero. Come up with a proposal, even if I hate it, that is "relatively real-time", "player controlled", "is not heavily dice-roll", and "not reflex-driven". I have faith in you (plural. It's fair game to all).

Whoaaaa Nelly. Whoa there. Easy.

If you're getting bothered by what I said, then let's just sit back a little. I can say for certain that I'm not upset or trying to get anyone upset. The opinions I expressed mainly just dealt with player advancement and gameplay style.



A lot of your "response" was rather defensive. Because of that, I'm not going to touch most of what you said. Sorry if I made you feel that way. However, I'm not going to stop expressing what I'd like to see in a TES game.



Well.. right here you are both right and wrong. If someone said that Morrowind was a static world (or something like it), then they may be just as right and wrong.

Run around the game world at level 1, you find rats and kwama foragers. Run around the game world at a higher level and you find tougher things like kagouti and nix hounds. So, in that respect, Morrowind did level scale. Oblivion does a lot of this, too. This is the part where you are right.

However, go into a bandit cave in Morrowind. There you will find bandits that all have individual names (not just "bandit") and they all have pre-set levels. Play a different game and go into that same cave at a very high level, you'll find the same bandits who are at the same pre-set character levels. That is the static part of Morrowind. This is where you were wrong.

For people like me who really like to mess around and exparament with all the different things one can do, well these static parts are a great thing. You could use charm and persuade to make those formerly hostile bandits your perminant friends and then start living with them. Really. You can. They'll always be there. Or, you can just wipe them out and claim their cave as your own. Every container there is safe. Then, there's the slaves. Do you want to free the slaves? Want to be a bad boy and own a slave yourself? Use dominate to make a slave follow you to your house and leave them there? This is all just to name a precious few of the different things one can do. This is why it's a good thing to have something static in a game world. Even if you only do a certain something once or twice, it's still something that's always there to mess with.

When a game has nothing but respawning and randomizing becuase we just have to level scale everything.. well, I guess we have the monster mash experience.

This is why I say it's ironic. Bethesda tried so hard to acheive a balance in Oblivion, yet wound up imbalancing their customer base so much. Don't hate people with different opinions than you. Just look at the larger picture for what it is.



Erm.. hmm.

How do I say this without making you more upset? I am honestly not trying to upset you here. Really, I'm not. Since saying the game's name seems to be like saying the N-Word.. I'll just call this particular game the "M-Word".

But, it sounds like you'd be a great fan of the M-Word game. One level gain in M-Word is not that much of an improvement. A particular bandit that rocked your boat at level 1 is still just as likely to rock your boat at level 3. However, at level 5 and with proper preparation it might be a different story. At level 10 it would certainly be a different story.

I am truly sorry if that's not what you wanted to hear. But, what else can I honestly say? It sounds like what you're asking for.

You see, for me, it's not about wanting "Morrowind 2". Morrowind was great fun, sure. But, I'd like something new. What I want, however, is the sensibility that Morrowind displayed and the flexibility to mess around with it's static parts.. kinda like what you'd expect to do in a sandbox game huh?

That and the personalization. Oblivion took a step backward to Daggerfall's days and did a lot of re-hashing. I go into a ruin in one part of Cyrodiil and some of that ruin looks exactly like parts of another ruin I visited previously. The Oblivion gate zones particularly looked like cookie-cutter layouts.

Morrowind actually did have a little of this, too. After all, a game designed around a construction set can only have so many parts. But, they always made up for it by adding that personal touch to every area. Nothing in Morrowind looked just "exactly alike" or felt like a cookie-cutter layout.

It's not a huge complaint with me or anything, but I'd like them to bring back the personal touch.



Do you mean for us players to have control options over the level scaling that a game does? Or even simply just how it does it? If so, then you'll get no arguement from me. It just might be the best idea I've heard so far since coming to this forum.

Hmm...You know, I really think I saw this exact same post somewhere else...Maybe not.

Regardless, loot leveling and scaling needs an overhaul. Enemy leveling and scaling could do with a tweak so as to make better sense. Most animals are territorial, and are usually found in specific regions. Enemies, like bandits, should be located where they make sense. Anyway, will think more on this.

First off, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGGG!"
I'd almost replied when I hit the wrong button on the Windows Update screen to ignore it another 4 hours. IE closed before I could prevent the reboot. :brokencomputer:



That's just a disclaimer for not-you people. If I was worried about YOU being offended, I wouldn't have made the reply I did. There are "certain elements" on all sides of the spectrum here that I lack confidence in once I start claiming "fans are responsible for the hostile environment." Oblivion is a bunch of binary data. Humans are a bundle of emotions occasionally swayed by cold logic. Which one would you fault? Which one is more likely to lead to a locked topic if you blame it?



Wasn't supposed to be. Might have a lot of my frustration with some fans leaking into it. There's only so many times I can be told that I need to "play Morrowind" or I've "obviously barely played Morrowind" or "must have started with Oblivion" before I get a little permanently hostile. If you consider that I've beaten both Bloodmoon quests the "good guy" way, most of the major factions in the base game, and the main quest, I think you could understand why these comments have had that effect.

By all means, take my reply as "opinions related to you but not directed at you" and comment. As I said, I have a fair amount of confidence I can be blunt with you without a firestorm. The forums still aren't split because of Oblivion or Bethesda. They're split because fans choose to act divisively. It's that simple. I've never gotten crap from an Oblivion fan, even when I don't like some Oblivion choices, but I know Morrowind fans who have. I didn't see it personally, but it's happened. Both sides are to blame, and in a way, everyone is to blame because we don't restrain the people we agree with and call them out. The moderators have to, and killing Morrowind vs. Oblivion threads is pretty time efficient on their part.



I think the "monster mash" experience is related to the Goblin Warlords gaining 30 HP/level and Ogres 26. That's a full swing with a 125% Goldbrand. Problem? Yeah.

Other than that, to say "Morrowind caves are static" is right and wrong as well. Some are static, some are mildly leveled. Crypts are very leveled, and usually "worse than Oblivion" because some options that could have made them more random aren't checked (and it's only a few lists in the whole game that do this). Pretty much I only see Bonelords now because of this. Lesser undead NEVER appear. I could fix it in under 10 minutes while drinking a pop, but the main use is (admittedly) throwing it in the face of people who make incorrect claims about Morrowind. (Yes, bandit caves are nearly 100% static. Morrowind didn't have any mechanic for scaling an individual creature or NPC at all.)

Personally, I don't understand why anyone would particularly be attracted to living in a bandit cave when there's a mansion with "body of infinite storage" in Balmora, but that's me. I mean, sure, it's not terrible that you can do it, but you'll never convince me it's an actual positive, either. It's sort of a "SLAP! Video Game!!" moment for me. I'd perosnally rather have NPCs sleeping under blankets than see Bethesda work really hard to get "move in with bandits" back. (as for why that's so important? SLAP! Video Game!! moment. As soon as it happens, it puts me 100% at my keyboard playing a game)

You want some caves that are completely static? I can't argue. But if you want every cave and the whole overworld static and caves never respawn, we'll have issues. If you want some caves that never respawn and are dynamic, and static respawning caves, and variable respawn lengths, we'll get along nicely. I may not want the same mix, but I want those options. Because modders will make awesome from them. Heck, the developers probably will, too. But first we need to have the options. HMA likes options.



The fans either control themselves and act civil or they do not. The moderators have pretty much decided the latter. What does Oblivion have to do with it? Nothing. Bethesda is not the first company that has made design decisions that aren't 100% popular. They will not be the last. Meltdowns are 100% on the fans, though. The company doesn't exactly force them to play, post, or act like complete barbarians. That's fan choice.



go back and resurrect my original reply attempt that I accidentally nuked? I'm not upset and have not been upset at you. Upset at the condescension I've gotten from other people? yes. You? No.



Morrowind isn't on my top 5 list for "games I really want to play", which is why it isn't in the drive. Assassin's Creed 1 and 2, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Borderlands, and Betrayal at Krondor all come in ahead. Without including New Vegas. Trust me, I've played it. Beat most of the questlines. Really can't get into Tribunal, which is mostly what's left. And the levels went by too quickly for them to matter. By the time I got to most static caves, I was already overpowered because skills went up far too quickly to make it meaningful. The first bandit cave I came to was tough the first three times I tried it. Then I learned Morrowind's dark secret: use only weapons with skill levels > 35 and you stand a chance of hitting :banghead:

Silly me, I guess, expecting a 2002 video game in 3D with real-time combat to have divorced itself from tabletop mechanics...



I don't particularly pine for static parts. It doesn't matter one way or the other to me whether they exist or not. I just don't want to go all the way back to NES RPGs where areas were strictly "level 4+" and "level 10+" and so forth. That's not a sandbox, that's a "sure, you can go there... and die" box. It's so 1987. I expect to be able to go "off the rails" and still be able to have a reasonable chance of getting somewhere. If it turns out to be over my head, I should have a window of opportunity to get away. (Here I'll reference Todd Howard's Irrational Interview). Basically, if I wander into a high-level cave, that's not exactly a decision I can immediately know to unmake. When I meet the minotaur or frostwarg around the corner, my first instinct is going to be to test my mettle. It's not like TES has (or that we want it to have) the skulls and caution signs from Borderlands. So I should get a bit of a chance to figure out where I stand and act accordingly.

Just... no fixed creatures and levels everywhere I roam. I played those games when we first got them in the US in 1987. Something different, please.



Funny. My complaint about Morrowind is that none of the caves/ruins seemed interesting. Especially since every cave had the exact same stone spiral in it. Oblivion's version was the hairpin staircase in the Ayleid ruins. Whereas I find places in Oblivion like Smoky Hole Cavern. That place had to have had a story in the designer's head that never got written. Of course, I find exploring caves in Oblivion much easier than Morrowind, for reasons that will probably incite a riot (*coughNeedFastTravelcough*). Played most of the way through Oblivion something like 4 times before ever visiting that cave. There are caves in Morrowind I'd never bother going back to that I've located just because I'd need UESP's map to relocate them, etc. Hand touches don't mean much if no one ever visits the cave, I guess. Which cuts both ways. Obviously, Smoky Hole Cavern didn't sound too appealing, either. (I'd rank it second to Sideways Cave in places to visit).

I think the solution is multifold. Forget quantity. Morrowind had a huge number of carefully crafted caves, ruins, etc... but you can't find them casually and would probably bypass most of them if you did. Oblivion has fewer locations, and you can get back to them easily, but by the time the good ones are on your map, you've probably decided "why bother" because so many were just treasure holes. Well, handcraft all the dungeons, but cut the number back a bit, and direct the "saved effort" into books, rumors, notes, and what have you leading us to these places. Some people will inevitably howl about less content, but if you had 120 dungeons with 20 of them being "interesting", and now you have 100 with 60 being "interesting", I'd count that a gain.



Player control? I could see it possible on the PC, but on a console? So probably not. There's no "good way" I can think of to manage any real control there. (PCs can use the ini). I was thinking "Construction Set control", so that when scaling is used, the array of options is massive compared to Oblivion. Basically, Oblivion allows you to control level with offset (level = PClevel+ x), and HP by linear scale (HP = n * level). The latter deserves to be recognized as the reason Goblins svck. Fallout 3 is PCLevel*x, where x is a float*. I want both level control metrics available, along with Fallout 3's max/min bounds. However, both auto-calculate attributes and skills. I want to have metrics to control that, or even "OnSpawn" scripts that one can attach to critters/NPCs. What if I wanted a bandit that raises his restoration ability as he levels and has the AI packages to dispense healing to his allies? Auto-calc won't do him justice inside the core Bandit class. Opportunity lost. (and the OnSpawn scripts can be used to do nifty equipment tricks that leveled lists can't easily replicate, like using level-dependent credits to assign armor). Basically, I want Bethesda and modders to be able to make creatures that scale in radically different ways, so this level 16 Khajiit bandit isn't much like THAT level 16 Khajiit bandit.

*technical info for readers: floating point means "a.bbbbbbbbbb" style numbers, so 0.5 is valid, as is 3.333333333, etc.

I want Spawn scripts so one bandit might wear no armor and have a high-end weapon, while another might have a mere rusty iron dagger and a Glass cuirass. Why? because the spawn script elected to spend the minimum on weapons, and dump every other "credit" on a cuirass. Stuff we can't do without Fallout 3-level list indirection.

Hopefully, you can accept this as "HMA trying to discuss issues with candor" kind of way. I'm an uncivilized dockrat by day, and so I've got a rougher "normal" tone than regular society...

@ HeavyMetalArchmage your posts have a lot of fat on them. Can you try and trim it back to be exclusively about level scaling.

Also less of the passive aggressive posting please. Lets try and keep this thread civil.

Another thing that needs considering besides their frequency is the quality of weapons, armour and magic items.

In both TES III and TES IV a high quality material like ebony is dramatically better than a common material like iron.

Since PCs inevitably collect higher quality items this contributed to the PCs getting overpowered in MW. Even if of similar skill to the PC a NPC bandit wearing steel has little chance against a PC in ebony. Oblivion made better quality items much more common on opponents to compensate for this but the solution was worse than the problem for many of us.

I'd suggest than in TES V there should be a much less marked difference in quality between low and high-end items so that high-end items can return to being rare but NPC bandits etc will still retain at least some challange at higher levels.

Artifacts should remain markedly better than good quality items as a reward for making them suitably rare and hard to obtain, but not so good that even bosses are easy to defeat as was often the case in MW.

I would prefer none at all but if they did than I'd be cool with FO3's style.

FO3's system was practically MW's, which was a great system.

That is actually something I've been wanting to know. Hope others forgive if this is a little off topic, but maybe it'll help shed light on the current topic.

Can you give a short run-down on how it's level scaling system works?

You've seen my posts. I do not like the wild n' crazy zippy action game that Oblivion eventually becomes. It's not to say I hate action elements. But, I go with "roleplaying" games because I want something that revolves a little more around character building and planning. The stuff that eventually happens in Oblivion goes way beyond the scope. Bandit, spellcaster or anything; I just blink and they're already behind me and have gotten 3 shots off on me.

It's like... geez.. stand still so I can hit you. :ahhh:

Pretty much like MW's.

At first it's scrub creatures with some static areas (indoors and a few outdoor areas, especially that one area with deathclaws..). As you get stronger, stronger enemies appear, but there are still scrubs walking around and most indoor areas are a bit static. Also, some enemies scale with you, but only to a point, for example super mutants only go to level 10 at the highest, even when you are level 20.

The main difference is, the "baseline level" of an area gets set when you first visit it in FO3, and never changes. This leads to the game being way easier if you just visit as many such areas as possible at an early level, just running through and not doing anything in them, then level up and come back later to kill the still low-level enemies.

It doesn't work in the outdoors, of course.

I am not sure why some people believe that having some areas be of a certain difficulty or level breaks the "open world" gametype. If I had all the money in the world, I still could not wander into a jungle without appropriate supplies and little experience in navigating jungles and expect to survive. I think of the high level areas similarly, as I need to increase my combat (or magic or sneak) skills and upgrade my equipment in order to expect survival. The high level spawns should make sense, as a ragtag team of bandits holed up in some random ruin should not be uber strong, but crazy daedra cults and such could be possible reasons for very strong enemies.

I'm not saying that every area should have a prescribed level. But not having such areas makes player progression completely unnoticeable, as being able to kill spawns that just look more dangerous does not really make me feel like my character is any better than before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UpSlpvb1is can survive. I love real life examples. In real life, there are indeed areas hard to survive. But the reasons vary a lot. Cold, heat, animals... Skills are important and one can develop them in real life too. But also there is no level scaling in real world. Even for a skilled person, things can get pretty challenging. If you have a human character, a troll can squash you with one blow. It will be always challenging. To kill that troll, your human character should develop a lot of skills. As a stealth character should aim for throat. You can use a spear with a warrior character. Or with a mage cast some destruction spell. To kill that troll you will need some high skills.

The real word has adaptation. Creatures can adapt to your hunting tricks. You adapt to your environment too. I recommend for untrained skills to decrease in time. But maybe we can have a system so they can go into cold mode. I can have 70 in marksman and blunt but marksman is not used for a while so it is in cold mode while blunt is in hot mode because it is my active weapon. You decide the cold mode penalty. I say let's have hot-cold-normal mods and have -%50,+%50 bonuses for hot and cold. It can happen gradually too.

Hmm, I just come up with this idea, I think it is pretty good.