OLD SUBJECT! EVERY GAME HAS LEVEL SCALING! ITS NOT A MATTER OR THE THING ITSELF, BUT HOW IT IS USED. BETHESDA WONT READ YOUR IDEA, THEY ALREADY WORKED THE PROBLEM. USE SEARCH!

Oblivion's particular interpretation of level scaling was a problem. Not level scaling in general.

Fallout 3's worked much better. And FO:NV's lack of scaling made it much more linear, which bugged me since I was expecting an "open world" game (silly of me, just because it was made using FO3's engine, it wasn't made by Beth).



For non-linear games, some form of scaling is pretty needed - it just has to be balanced well. Oblivion's version was a textbook example of how NOT to do it.

main quest should be static so that you can only complete it with a high level character. for the rest of the game it should be unlevelled completely. you never know what your going to get whenever you enter a cave or ruin and its a hell of alot spookier going in knowing that you could encounter level 40 enemies even at the beginning of the game if you explored enough. impossible to replicate that feeling when you know whats going to be their ahead of time. i like bethesdas approach which will allow for high level enemies to appear even at low levels but locks the area in place so it will always be like that. im glad they did it that way cause i dont want everthing to be near my level all the time.

I used to think i disliked level scaling, until the time in new vegas when those super strong deathclaws blocked me off from exploring where i wanted to go at a low level, the world became less interesting as a result later on, some creatures in some areas were too easy to kill, and in other areas so tough it was as if level scaling was back again anyway.

Also kiralyn makes a point i agree with, it wasn't level scaling idea that was the problem in Oblivion, rather it was how it was implemented.

Awww crud Kiralyn post just made me realise i not going to like level scaling being gone in Skyrim, as she says will make the world more linear for me as happened in NV.

They said they're using a system similar to Fallout 3, not FO:NV. No worries.

Ah ok cheers

Yeah, New Vegas has no scaling at all. It has it's strengths, and it works until around 40 hours in, when you can stomp down everything with one sneak attack critical 2ft away from the thing you're shooting. But New Vegas is designed to be experienced a very specific way, contrary to what a lot of people might want to believe.

The game has an obvious progression, that you may not be locked to, but straying outside of the design results in it becoming just how apparent it is. For example, if you go North out of Goodsprings, and get swarmed by Cazadors, virtually unwinnable fights without using a terrain and pathfinding exploit to circumvent, and then there's also the deathclaws. They did Okay by sprinkling some high-end encounters in the west, like the Giant Radscorpions a couple of Super Mutants, and some Goul Reavers, and the world is generally small enough that you can get away with it. But the progression is obvious. Goodsprings -> Primm -> Nipton -> Novac -> Boulder -> Vegas.

Compare to an Elder Scrolls game, that has you bouncing between the world constantly, and much more developed faction quests. Some form of scaling, At least (Or at most) on the overworld, is really needed. Fallout 3 is a good middle-ground. I often say, the big issue with Fallout 3's "Scaling" wasn't so much it's scale, as it was combat in general. Towards the end-scale, enemies were basically HP sinks, but combat was designed pretty poorly, compared to New Vegas. My favorite muse on the subject is "I'd like New Vegas to take place in the Capital Wasteland".

what is the difference exactly in the levelscaling system of Obilivion and Fallout 3?

Oblivion had really apparent in your face scaling, where at higher levels, everyone was wearing deadric armor and had a million HP. F3 was far more subtle, and it was zoned more.

Ob scaling totally made me never want to reply the vanilla game. I very much disliked it after a point.
F3 scaling was less noticeable, and imo superior in every way.

As bad as it gets----------Great-------------------------Who knows?
Oblivion <------------------Fallout 3------------------------------------->

level scaling is totally necessary in an open game otherwise you get a linear game, not an open world RPG, and every ES game has had level scaling, Oblivion was that bad becuase bethesda was reacting to the lack of level scaling that was in Morrowind, but they found a good balance with fallout and that is what will be in Skyrim

Cleverly used levelscaling (one which retains both challenge and sense of progression) shouldn't hold a problem. That said, the Fallout 3 way didn't (imo) work too well, although some of the scaling problems could've, and probably did, resulted because of how off balance the game was -- maybe it works better in Skyrim, who knows.

I disagree. I never noticed the linearity in NV. How can you say it was meant to be played in a certain order if you have the freedom to go anywhere you want? I went to Novac pretty fast and right after that I headed over to Vegas. Sometimes there were places in between too tough for me so I avoided them, but that's how it should be. It's far from impossible to reach Vegas with a low level character. Of course it's easier if you stay around Goodsprings and level up before you go any further. But this is the only way to make the world believable and not make it feel like you are the center of the universe.

And where is the fun in exploring if I can go anywhere I want anytime I want without any fear? In Oblivion you could explore the whole world within the first few hours of the game. No place where you couldn't go, it was boring. Not only the landscape was exchangeable, the enemies were exchangeable as well.

Quests can be adjusted to the level they should be played at accordingly. Why would the fighter's guild send someone to a region inhabited by frost giants during their first quest? Make use of the high level regions in high level quests, simple as that. Of course you could say quests were meant to be played in a certain order in NV. But if you don't want that then you'll end up like in Oblivion, where every quest was suited for every character level. Some tasks are harder than other tasks. That's not linearity, that's the way things work. If you make sure the player never gets hurt to much while exploring the world only to make sure he can do every quest he likes to do at the level he just happens to be at then that's hand-holding to me. It's like you go to school and instead of having to learn new things for graduation the things you need to learn get adjusted constantly so they become easy enough to reach graduation without any effort.

Of course you should be able to reach towns and villages without getting killed constantly, but that's what roads and more populated regions are for. If you want to play safe stay on the roads and keep close to civilized areas. If you're looking for a deadly adventure explore the most remote mountain regions or the deepest forests of Skyrim. As long as the enemies that appear make sense (no uber enemy standing on a road connecting the two biggest cities of the game for example) I don't see any problem, even in an open world game.

I really hope I will not be able to explore Skyrim as easily as I could explore Cyrodiil.

Any point you tried to make in your original post was lost on me, because of the grammatical and spelling errors. It just made it hard for me to take this seriously.

Level scaling was something added in Oblivion. Some people mistakenly use it for leveled lists too which is something entirely different. Morrowind didn't have level scaling. Every creature, NPC and item were unique in Morrowind.

In Oblivion, certain creatures and some NPCs and even items were set to level with player, they either scaled down or scaled up to player. Also Oblivion didn't utilize the randomness feature(which then only spawn the highest level content from a leveled list) of leveled lists and made content disappear from the world.

In Fallout 3, I will http://fallout3.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/lead-designer-jumps-into-the-forum/:

Well, MQ is out of progression chamber. I can live with that.

Really one of the only things wrong with oblivion

Well, let's not talk about Oblivion. I'd rather have NV's static world than Oblivion's level-match scale any day, believe me.

You probably didn't notice the linearity of NV because you don't think like a game designer. They do a pretty good job of masking it, but the game does have a designed progression, which is really obvious just off of how the difficulty curve of enemies progresses around certain points, as well as the loot you're likely to encounter along that same route. The problem with you arguing about "Risk of exploration", is, it works once in New Vegas. Afterwards, you know exactly what you're going to encounter at every spot in the game. It plays much like the old Final Fantasy Games, where the world map is open to explore, but there is no real incentive to go backwards.

The design hurdles of getting the best out of both a static, and slightly scaled world are pretty daunting. But I think BGS needs to really work at that just because of the nature of their games. And I wish people would just go back and read some earlier posts, I made it clear that I like scaling to work up and not down. In Oblivion, everything scaled up and down against the player, which was totally the wrong thing to do. If Morrowind was a 1-15 game, It would have been perfect in terms of scaling, but it's not, it's a 1-70 game, scaled around a 1-20 experience. Fallout 3 is much more like Morrowind that some people think, the main difference is the Level Cap, so with Skyrim being scaled around a 1-50 with a mathematical cap of 70ish, there's some hope yet.

how about time scaling? Like certain places will have fixed scales like in NV but then after a certain amount of time, certain creautres will kinda start taking over or leveling, its like saying well while you were busy waiting alot to make use of traders re-spawning gold, that group of wolves that were in a cave near the town have been killed, and now have ravage demon wolves, bandits or even orges. it teaches you that its not just you who's leveling but the world around you, and being foolish causes monsters too "level" while you were busy doing quests in town and sleeping alot. Or take the others idea but put it to npc's in that a place might start with 5 bandits, but not being there for a while might cause there too be 10 instead. i really didn't like bandits have leveled armour and wepons too, it was basically farming in OB

I actually like level scaling(to a degree). I agree that OB overdid it, but to remove it completly would weaken Skyrim quite a lot IMO. Without scaling the game will be forcing you to do the same things at that lvl(like most MMORPGs. Those who have played one know what I'm talking about, and no I don't play WOW :shakehead: ), and basicly ruin the fact that ES games allows you too go anywhere ay any lvl if you know how to get there.
The scaling in OB was quite bad, most notably with quest specific creature(like the swamp trolls) and the lack of randoemly placed unique loot. In these aspects MW uses a better scaling system(Yes, Morrowind have lvl scaling: Todd Howard said it himself in one of the interviews).
I think they should have different areas that are ranged from easy to hard(and maybe have those areas randomized so an easy area might be quite a bit harder on your next playthrough), but even the hard areas should be accesable at any lvl.
Feel free to disagree, but don't start a flame war over it.

This is a little bit confusing. I agree with you, but my experience with FO:NV is totaly different.
The Deathclaws you could avoid, but the cazadors (spelling?) was basicly invisible walls until you hit a certain level, and I hate invisible walls.

I think they struck a good balance in FO3. You could go anywhere at any time, but there were always a chance of stumbling on certain death.

Well, show me one NPC or item or creature that leveled with player, then I will be proved wrong.

I like that. Much better than my suggestion.
vtastek: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tribunal:Gedna_Relvel, but lvl scaling does not nessesary means that each individual lvl with you. Most dungeons inhabitants were chosen after your lvl, and if you entered a daedric shrine at lvl 10 you would meet dremoras. 10 lvls later you could go into the same shrine and encounter dremora lord, daedroths and golden saints. That is also lvl scaling.
When people say lvl scaling in ES they tend to refer to the system used in OB, unaware that there is more than one type of lvl scaling.

The world scales off the "Leveled Lists", but the creatures themselves don't scale. Fallout 3 uses the same system, but it's a little more aggressive in weighing the high-level probabilities.


Oblivion did both, but weighed out weaker creatures almost entirely. So by level 50, you had all Minotaur Lords and Ogres with their Base HP of around 250 or so, plus their level correction modifier which could skyrocket that well into 500+.

i cant argue against FO3 scaling, wasn't suicidal hard and wasn't BS easy, was just FO3.

I actually think the ogre could have about 1200 hp around lvl 50 since they had a min hp at 406 + 26 times your lvl-3. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Ogre#Ogres. This is of course in vanilla.
On topic: Good summary about the lvl scaling used in MW.