Well ... that's quest design. On the whole, I'm in favour of not every quest being completable with every character level (and neither with every character type), but the quest lines as such should be, although some types and levels of characters should have significantly harder times with them. Basically, offer alternatives during the quest lines; a sneaky character should have at least a slight difference in the course of events than a diplomatic character, and both should offer different events to live through and challenges to face from the combat or magic oriented ones.

Sorry, I explained myself poorly. I do want different quests to have different difficulties, without a doubt. But they shouldn't be offered to the character until they can (or are at least close to being able to) complete it. Walking into a quest dungeon and getting smacked around isn't fun, but neither is fighting enemies that are generic, don't gain new abilities, and will run in circles around a rock if you climb on it. Quests should be relevant to player level and skills, and thus a thief would have a harder time with a quest meant more for a warrior and vice versa. But quests that are meant for, say, a level 10 mage with about a 75 destruction skill shouldn't be offered to a level 3 warrior with a 2 destruction skill. I think that NPC's judging who does quests for them adds to the feel of "the world doesn't revolve completely around me, but I have the ability to change it." Recognition for your level and skills should be a key factor in whether a quest is offered to the player or not. Factions and race could (and should in my opinion) play a part in what quests you can get as well, adding to that same feel and the replay value of the game.

In essence, I agree with you. What I was trying to say was the idea of being able to do a quest at one moment and then suddenly becoming too inept to do so kind of svcks. Now I have to either 1) find more quests to level up or 2) grind in the wild until I get high enough level again. But quests should not be so generic that any class can do them at any level at any time. I also agree that it would be great if different more important quest lines played out differently for different classes, especially the MQ. Then there's a lot of replay value for the game.

It should combine elements of Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3, taking the best aspects of each. We'd have something where possibly more enemies appeared at higher levels, but the really good loot is rare and only on certain named boss characters.


I also hate that the guards' stealth ability leveled with you in Oblivion. It made it really hard to be stealthy without Illusion.

Speaking strictly on a technical level:

There's not really much to share between them, you know. Morrowind had lists that act exactly like Oblivion's lists. Oblivion had an additional metric that allowed endgame and other select creatures/NPCs to hang with the player better. Fallout 3 had a different metric to do the same, and a much more complex usage of the Morrowind lists than Oblivion had.

Essentially, Morrowind goes "choose one of the following: list", unless the spawn is a daedra, in which case it uses your level as an input and favors stuff closer to your level. Although not all spawns use lists.
The big problem people ACTUALLY have with Oblivion is almost certainly rooted in the fact that nearly every spawn was routed through a set of lists that tended to be nearly identical. Sure, you'll never see a Land Dreugh in the Colovian Highlands, and I don't recall seeing a Mountain Lion in the swamps, but those might be the only ways that the two lists differ. Since I'm currently at level 15, let's look at a few lists and see what annoys people (results are random and per 1000):

On a Road in a Mountain/Forest region, I will encounter 709 does, 195 Brown Bears, 185 Black Bears, 145 Bucks, and 36,34,32,26,18,17,17,11 minotaurs of various configurations.
If I go off-road in a swamp? 348 mudcrabs, 233 doe, 184 Spriggans, 162 Boars, 156 Will o the Wisps, and 55 Buck.

The part that absolutely seems to annoy people MOST justly is Goblins. A Goblin Warlord is PC level and has 30 HP per level (min lvl =18), meaning that this creature takes an extra hit from a fully repaired (125%, actually) Goldbrand to die each time the player levels, and then an additional 1 damage beyond that. Meanwhile, a player who isn't using a levelling mod or minmaxing probably has maxed their damage, and so gaining levels has a net negative impact. Ogres are almost as bad (26 HP/lvl), but they start at 16 and trail the player by 3 levels, which is thankfully less than 1 hit with an over-repaired Goldbrand. (Complaints about bandits are harder to take seriously, since they should never be able to gain more than 10 HP/level)

Fallout 3, on the other hand, allows Billy Creel to level twice as fast as the player, but within limits. Brotherhood of Steel initiates? 50% as fast, and also limited. (Oblivion has limits, but I can't recall seeing that non-zero off-hand). Everything else is a list to a list to a list that usually chose between different looks for the same basic enemy (Oblivion has similar lists, such as the 8 minotaurs being 4 looks and with/without weapon above).

Combining the Fallout 3 ratio with Oblivion's offset metric, you'd have a fair amount of power to scale individual creatures or not, and the usage of lists... no substitute for looking it over yourself. You'll see what I mean, if you are willing to try.

The problem I ACTUALLY have with Oblivion is that EVERYTHING is leveled to me, making it pointless and even punishing to level. In Morrowind there were a lot of enemies who did not level. I would frequently get my ass kicked by venturing somewhere I shouldn't and I would also sometimes cut thru enemies like water by going into an easy cave at an advanced level. There was a reason and even a need to level up. In Oblivion there wasn't.. and if they're going to pull that crap, they should have just taken leveling out altogether. I could have respected that choice.

This.

It wasn't the lists or the way leveling worked that bothered me, per se, but rather the fact that there was no tangible reward for leveling, such as becoming more powerful that some enemies or getting loot that doesn't level with me. Loot should be (for the most part) unique, especially at higher levels, and I should see a difference in how my character performs in a fight when I level by being able to kill weaker things faster, and gaining the abililty to kill stronger enemies.

Personally, I don't even think there should be lists, but rather all enemies should be present in the game at all times, and some enemies could be more prevalent in some areas. Having enemies suddenly appear out of nowhere made the game feel somewhat fake, as did having weapons just start to appear for no tangible reason (every bandit suddenly sporting full glass armor). I'm not saying that the world needs to be static, but there needs to be some reason behind new enemies starting to spawn besides the fact that I gained a level, and all armor should exist at the beginning of the game, but the stronger enemies have the better gear. That just makes sense.

Bad news for you: Morrowind is anything but a garden of static or even unleveled spawns. Red Mountain? 4 spawn lists, the base list looking like this:
corprus_stalker - 1, ash_slave - 1, rat_blighted - 1, corprus_lame - 8, ash_zombie - 8, cliff racer_blighted - 8, hunger - 11, daedroth - 12, ash_ghoul - 15, ogrim_titan - 15, ascended_sleeper - 25

Let's compare that to a "dangerous area" list from the sequel, just for grins:
Stunted Scamp - 1, Dremora Churl - 5, Clannfear Runt - 6, Scamp - 7, Dremora Caitiff - 8, Flame Atronach - 9, Dremora Kynval - 11, Clannfear - 13, Dremora Kynreeve - 14, Frost Atronach - 15, Daedroth - 16, Dremora Kynmarcher - 17, Spider Daedra - 18, Storm Atronach - 19, Dremora Markynaz - 21, Xivilai - 22, Dremora Valkynaz - 24

Yep. Morrowind is soooo different. Not.

Well, maybe something a bit less drastic than Red Mountain/Plane of Oblivion?

So, maybe you'd suggest that Ilunibi is "not leveled"? Nope. Spawns are taken from the "+2" lists for the 6th House (ash and all list), the daedric list (+2) and the tomb list (+2), which may scale later by 2 levels, but it still means "gain level, potentially see new spawns". Dagoth Gares, however, is a static spawn.

Well, surely the cell between Sedya Neen (-2, -9/-10) and Pelagiad (0, -7/-8) is not scaled to Player level? Well... no. one cell along the way DOES contain a static guar spawn. I'll give you that. But most creatures are ex_bittercoast_lev+2 or ex_ascadian_isles_lev+0 or +2. you also get ex_shore_mudcrab... which makes diseased mudcrabs show up (at or above level 3)
For reference, these lists both tend to scale from rats, scribs, and kwama foragers (Nix-hounds don't appear until level 4) to Betty Netches (12).

In short, you hate how spawns scale with you in Oblivion and wish it was more like the constantly scaled spawns in Morrowind...
Check the game data. It's in there.

HMA's rebuttal is valid. Morrowind had levelled lists as well.

The difference is that Morrowind managed to pull it off, with variance and some sense of storytelling.

However, HMA fails to mention the biggest difference between those: In Morrowind (and Fallout 3), generally any of the monsters at or below your level could appear. In Oblivion, only those most close to your level did.

That's what I was getting at. Named bandits and other NPCs in Morrowidn did NOT level, only monsters.

Hence the second line of my post: "The difference is that Morrowind managed to pull it off."

I think Bethesda has caught the mess that was levelscaling in TES4, and that they'll do better next time. Lord knows thy can't do any worse :glare:

Thanks. You've ruined Morrowind forever for me ><

I feel that the problem arises from the massive difference in power between a 1st level character and a 20th+ level character in the system as it stands; it all but forces enemies/areas to use an equally-aggressive scaling system so that the player character remains challenged regardless of its level. Unfortunately, it also ensures that the player will have the nagging feeling that his character isn't getting ahead despite being higher level.

In my experience, games that successfully avoid level-based scaling with a wide-open world concept (it's obviously not a problem in a linear game) do use static encounters/difficulties, but also keep the power level of the player character(s) within a fairly small range, so a fully-developed character is only moderately stronger than a beginning one. This would be a major shift from the approach taken in Oblivion (or Morrowind), and may therefore be seen as too big a change just for the sake of avoiding scaling.

I'm also in the camp that wonders whether there's really a reason to maintain "level" as a game statistic; it seems like a bit of a design artifact. Your character's abilities could just as easily increase directly based on the increases it gains in the relevant skills; as a side benefit, if health and mana are derived directly from endurance and intelligence (or weighted averages of stats) without levels coming into the equation then the annoying "endurance race" issue would be put to rest.

A way to effectively lower the "power scale" without actually clamping down on stat increases is to implement the "half-scaling" I talked about before. That is, enemies scale up half a level for every level I gain.. so I'm really only gaining half the power over the world that I appear to be with each level.

This would satisfy people who want a wide open world with doable challenges and who don't care about how fast they increase in power, but want to be rewarded when they do.
And it would also satisfy the kiddies who don't care about level scaling and just want to see their stats zoom up.

As NeBy and I said earlier...have enemies scale at a lower rate than the player, have some enemies start with the player at level 1, some at level 3, some at level 5,....you get the idea. This way, the character will really have to be very powerful in order to be the most powerful character in the world.

I have loved the series since i bought daggerfall at release (and subsequently upgraded lol), i have however always preferred xp and levels system, perhaps being an old school pen&paper guy, but I like the idea of collecting xp....
TES will always be a skill based system however... I would like a hand crafted world mainly.

Pardon any places where it seems I lost my train of thought and kept typing anyway. It's hard to finish a thought while checking three sets of game data, only to realize that the preview feature in two of them is no longer working locally, and will probably not do so again until I reboot.



Here's the deal: show me the cells and spawns that demonstrate this behavior. Something verifiable.

Or, I can sling the unprovable as well: at higher levels, I claim all manner of lower creatures drop off most of Morrowind's lists as well on the basis of "half of these lists contain creatures I forgot were in the game" and "last time I saw (random low-level creature), I think I had a single digit level". Like Ancestor ghosts. Ain't seen one of them in the last 10 tombs I've entered.

Since the Morrowind CS lacks any list-related debugging features, I propose a test: Omelan Ancestral Tomb. No idea where that is, but it uses exactly one spawn list for the 12 undead enemies. It will also spawn a rat that we don't care about. What we need is a survey of these undead enemies, character level, and a generic check to make sure mods haven't altered the tomb or in_tomb_all_lev+0. Hopefully, the largest sample size is "people at levels higher than 9". I expect to see something missing from this sample set.

Morrowind contains 49 lists with 3 or fewer entries, which pretty much keeps everything "close" to your level. Most of these contain lower level spawns and are placed in specific regions. Your rat probably isn't coming off the grand lists of the region, it's coming off a list that is called ex_wild_rat_lev+2 (or +0 or -2, depending). If it was up to Morrowind to pick him off a real list instead of a rat-only list, are you so sure he'd still show up? I wouldn't be so sure, because if you're right, why did bonelords displace ancestor ghosts in my pass through Morrowind?

Fallout 3 uses very short lists (the longest without Broken Steel is a whopping 6 entries), which makes it "much harder" for enemies to drop off at all.

All of which goes back to what I've said before: Oblivion's main problem is that the lists that are used for most spawns are "very much the same". Oh, Oblivion HAS a rat-only list. I think it's even used in a few places. But pretty much "every external spawn" comes from about 14 lists that tend to be "all non-daedra" with individual items subtracted. (Do we want Will o the Wisps in the Jeralls? No? OK! I'll delete it from this copy!)

In no way has anyone done the kind of anolysis that supports your contention that Morrowind and Fallout 3 have appreciably different drop-off properties than Oblivion. What can be proven is "they use a lot of really short lists that are used" and "Oblivion uses a lot of larger lists that overlap heavily".




Nothing actually levels in Morrowind. There's absolutely no mechanic for it. What spawns is leveled, but the spawn itself is the same no matter where it is (except for disease effects). There is only one rat. Even when he attacks you from four directions at once, it's the same freaking rat. The ultimate question is whether "a living, dynamic world" is more or less important to you than "I want to become godly against the characters that beat me up when I was level 1". If you say the former, then you're probably discussing the "half-level scaling" idea or something. (BTW, bad idea, since it's a regression from FO3, where the scaling possibilities amount to "set a minimum, set a maximum or 0 for no max, and set a scaling factor that need not be an integer", offering half scaling with a 0.5 factor, or pi scaling, with a factor of 3.141592, if you have the insane urge to use it.). Then again, I'm also sure the half-scaling proponents will accept the FO3 leveling on the "default to .5" caveat. Because flexibility is good. (Speaking of which, the best NPC scaling solution is to combine TESIV and FO3: allow us to add a constant to the mix, besides simply multiplying the PC level by a constant. Because it's one more option at very little complexity)

So... do bandits do things, or do they just sit around waiting for random adventurers to slaughter them.
If they do things, why should they be fixed level? They can fight and practice and train. As AI and other systems evolve, we should even allow them to switch into peasant cloths and visit a city without going psycho on the guards.
If they are simply window dressing... can we make them creatures and be done with any pretense that they are actually Bosmer and Argonians and Orcs? Let's make them "things to be slaughtered without mercy" and stop pretending they have family.



The truth will set you free.

There are aspects you can appreciate now that would've been mundane before. A dev had to specially select THAT spawn to be a rat list instead of it being a Winged Twilight. A dev made an Alit list so that you felt threatened at low levels, but at high levels, the Blighted Alits had a chance of still holding a degree of menace. All for you, they created lists that filled in gaps that appeared. Before, you might have assumed it was purely regional what appeared. Now you know someone spent time and effort to make that balance you liked. It shouldn't "ruin" anything for you, except the ability to slam Oblivion for using lists. It definitely still gives you cause to bash the lists ultimately used. I have no problem with people bashing them because "they're too similar" or "so big nothing ever hits the bottom". Those are both true. Demonstrably so. And so you can appreciate Morrowind's attention to detail in adding MORE lists to do what people assumed they did with no/fewer lists.

I can show you that behaviour verifiable in Fallout 3; I don't feel like dusting off my Morrowind disks, really. Not even for the chance to air-walk from Vivec up to Dagon Fel and drag all the cliff racers behind me at level 30-ish or so again. That was fun. The UESP wiki has the following to say about http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Leveled_Lists:



While it only lists random items, all but two lists there has either all items being able to appear at level 1 (my favourite solution), or the "=Lvl" flag set (meaning it behaves as I wrote: At higher levels, the lower-level random items still appear, though not as often).

And this was actually a problem; I started feeling very sorry for the poor smugglers after some time. Rusty dagger against glass armor doesn’t work very well.
Lack of high level enemies was a major problem in Morrowind, the expansions gave us harder areas and the Morrowind advanced mod gave us harder monsters, but large part of the game was boring at high levels.

Oblivions main problems were that everybody felt to closely levelled to you. You also had the issue with bandits with high level equipment.
Much of the problem could be solved simply by having larger variance, you had a small possibility to run into something really dangerous, also give far of areas higher minimum level and keep monster where at a higher level than you.

Sorry, but you're confusing "levelled" with "scaled" in some of your aguments.

Morrowind used levelled lists, and that's mostly a good thing. At low level, you might encounter a Rat or a Kwama Forager; at slightly higher level, a Nix Hound might appear, OR that same Rat or Kwama Forager. The differences were that in Morrowind, the Rats and Kwama Foragers never vanished from the game world; those that appeared (aside from a chance for Diseased or Blighted versions) were JUST Rats and Kwama Foragers, they didn't SCALE to become stronger as you advanced in level. There were no "Level 15 Rats" as apposed to the basic "Level 1" version, a Rat was a Rat, unless you happened to meet one of the tougher Cave Rats, and those were hand-placed in specific areas, not levelled OR scaled.

There was a mix of levelled and hand-placed items and creatures in MW. In a few cases, there were possibilities of finding rarer items in an otherwise "routine" container, because one of the entries in the levelled list was a link to another list with "better items. Even at low level, there were (rare) instances where I found a "mid level" item in a levelled container, that weren't hand-placed. The same could be done with spawn lists to provide RARE occasions where something about one or two steps higher than normal appear, but 99% of the time, you'll still see the "routine" wildlife. In some areas of the game, those higher-level spawns should occur "frequently", regardless of character level, which is why those areas are considered "dangerous".

Edit - In the example given above, as a comparison between the dangerous and blighted Red Mountain region inside the Ghost Fence, versus the demonic plane of Oblivion (BOTH of those being places you really don't want to go for a pleasant vacation), the Corprus Stalker and Ash Slave in the MW example are mid-level opponents, and the Ash Slave in particular is NOT to be taken lightly even at a medium character level. The OB entry is a Stunted Scamp, Ho Hum. Granted, they're both levelled lists, but the whole balance is entirely different: MW has a definite "danger" factor in that region, where OB has the same weak opponents (or comparable equivalents) everywhere you go for that character level. MW's lists are regional, OB's are universally "balanced" and boring.

I think that having some lists that scale and others that do not may be a good compromise. For example, it makes no sense for a rat, deer, or other wildlife to level, or their skills to become appreciably different, as they dont train, they just do the same thing every day: eat and sleep. So have a few lists with wildlife which are non-scaled, and typical to certain regions.
Scaled lists include humanoids (that are not bosses or named NPC's), and maybe some elemental creatures. It makes sense for them to become more powerful with time. Then make the lists the way that NeBy and I have said before, with a list starting at level 1, next starting at level 4, and so on, and make them scale at a slower rate than the player. That way, the player will eventually become more powerful than most enemies, but at a gradual rate. I would like to, if possible, avoid regions a la WoW, as the game is open world, and much of the fun comes from exploring. But having some caves, dungeons, ruins, and maybe a couple very small regions where the enemies are much higher leveled, and where end game, non-leveled loot can be found. These areas would also have to be tied in with player skills, as in some of these regions should only be traversable by powerful magic characters, some by thieves, etc. This could successfully make some areas more dangerous than others without hampering the player's ability to explore a vast majority of the game world.

I also have an issue with creatures completely falling off the radar, but I also don't like certain enemies just appearing out of thin air. Evolution takes more than a couple months, so I wouldn't expect to see scamps get much more powerful as I levelled. Therefore, I would prefer that all types of enemies be present at the beginning of the game, with the appearance of certain enemies limited by the difficulty of the region. There should be some more difficult enemies in the wild sometimes, but for the most part it should be man vs. wild.

Finally, I hope they have more named NPC's linked to quests and just present in the game who have mid and high level loot (which is non-levelled) for the character to obtain. Levelled loot kind of ruined OB for me, as it seemed to me that the characteristics of a sword shouldn't change with time. My ability to use it and the damage that I can do with it, yes, but it should be separate from the object. Make my skills and attributes actually mean SOMETHING.

Fallout 3's lists are short enough that at most one creature could drop off permanently under oblivion's tendencies. Mind you, Oblivion does generate some pretty screwed up randomizations: I've seen a list jump between spawning 5 layers (PC lvl = blah) and 1 layer with 2 items just by increasing the preview level. (Which makes for amusing behavior later: you go up in level and lower grades of armor begin to appear again...?)
That's why exact cells/spawns are needed in Morrowind: very few creatures spawn from single lists, and they are not "fixed" in where they appear in a list. So when you see a scamp in Morrowind at level 47, is he spawned from the bottom of the daedric list, or several levels up the "random creature list"? Is the rat spawning from the random critters pool, or the rat list used in the same cell? I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but the issue has become a bit too contentious to accept player's word.

The same flag exists in Oblivion, but to my knowledge, no one has done a comprehensive listing on enemy or item list flags. Interesting side-note, that flag is NOT set for the tomb lists (you know, where I claim Ancestor Ghosts stop appearing), leading one to believe that tombs would be nearly completely scaled, assuming flags operate as described (I'll concede it sounds like it should work as you describe. My faith in Bethesda's QA missing major bugs does not allow me to concede it works as intended). Intentional, or a bug?

Tell you what: why don't we get a few people willing to run actual statistical tests on pre-chosen environments in both Oblivion and Morrowind (multiple people to eliminate false conclusions on the basis of hardware defects, OS quirks, and "strange mod side-effects".) with the list flags in both positions. We can see what spawns, item and creature-wise. I'm convinced the GECK is broken as far as the list preview goes, and I'm starting to have doubts that the Oblivion CS works that well, either. (Simply put, the CS says a bandit spawned with Fur boots that statistically don't spawn according to the CS, given my level 14/15 character. It was just that fact that made the find stand out.) See why I'm starting to have doubts about the CS preview?

A level 5 critter? Mid-level? That's... just... well... not much of a standard...
60 HP, 5-15 damage... OK, the ash slave might be tougher than a Stunted Scamp one-on-one, but it's hardly "night and day", and that stalker probably gets fireballed to death by the scamp in the three hours it takes to walk over to try to hit it. A speed of 7? SERIOUSLY? That's mid-level?

Bottom line: We're actually comparing a level 2 critter to a pair of level 5s. And I still don't think the Stalker gets more than one swing on the scamp before dying. So... I think you exaggerate the danger. At least, if the player has a weapon they can actually hit with.

I sort-of agree that the Corprus Stalker isn't that big a deal. The Ash Slave, on the other hand, would make short work of a cheezy half-grown Scamp from a distance. My point is that those Level 5 critters can and do spawn in Morrowind when you're Level 1, if you're in the Red Mountain vicinity. Like most (but not all) of the levelled adversaries, they exist somewhere in the game regardless of your character's level. If you're at Level 1 in OB, the only thing you're going to face is more of those Stunted Scamps.

MW has a "voluntary" level of difficulty, because the harder areas often spawn slightly higher level creatures than normal, and the "safe zones" generally never spawn anything above a certain degree of difficulty. I found OB's difficulty far too "flat", no matter what you did or where you went. I had to add MMM or OOO just to turn it into something playable.

Walking into the blighted regions around Red Mountain isn't something you do by accident; it's walled off by the "Ghostfence", a magical barrier created to contain the problem, and the only ways to get there are either a fairly powerful Levitation spell or to go through the front gate. You don't just "wander in", and you know very well that you're jumping into the "deep end" when you see it. Other areas are also harder or easier than "normal", but that's about the most obvious example.

im all for completely elimintating arbitrary levels alltogether. im using a bunch of mods one of which is TIE. it essentially removes all restrictions allowing anything at any level to spawn at any location althoughi think TIE has safer roads included for beginners. just make sure you stay on the roads. its a much better game experience, if you want to take your level 10 warrior into a ruin then either be prepared for sissy level 5 bandits...........or a level 40 lich king, or something in between and any combination. it makes dungeon diving alot more dangerous and upredictiable and since everything respawns afterwhile you can alway go back to see if something is easier the next time around.