What was wrong with Morrowind's Level Scaling?

Post » Sun Jan 09, 2011 3:05 am

Exactly! All that is needed to fix this is to have quite a few super amazingly high levelled enemies about the place. This way, when you are a high level, instead of being challenged by a simple cave crawl, you have to actively SEEK OUT the greater chellenges, as a mighty warrior/mage would.
The renownd hero would surely go out of his way to take on greater foes, as opposed to becoming pissed off that all the places he used to find a challenge are now a walk in the park. If not, then he is simply a bit of an idiot (perhaps a not to inept anology of certain breeds of gamers? : P)


I can agree with that. There needs to be alot for the end game though. Many lvl 50+ caves and dungeons to find and battle through to gain some super rare items.( since the game has a soft cap at 50 they could make dungeons set at higher levels so you have to work to get strong enough even then to even keep up with those dungeons) A secret cave thats room after room where you have to take what you have and try and survive each room untill the end much like that one cave in the legend of zelda twilight princess which felt damn near unending and was hard as hell at that. There should be some special end game quests that can only be started once you get to lvl 50 or higher that bring you on more epic adventures. In all honesty Shivering Isles would have been an amazing end game expansion if the game were set up correctly.
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Irmacuba
 
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Post » Sat Jan 08, 2011 10:31 pm

What MW did RIGHT was to allow the earlier entries in the lists to still spawn on occasion, rather than having them be replaced by stronger "variants".

Funny, this was the one thing I'd say Morrowind's leveling system got wrong :)
I can't remember meeting any Nix Hounds in the Ascadian Isles Region at later levels anymore. They suddenly all turned into Alits or Kagoutis. Just like the Shalks from the Grazelands turned into Winged Twilights and Golden Saints. Whereas in Oblivion, I always had a nice mix of bears, wolves and deer in the forests, which seemed very natural.

In general I think that Morrowind's leveling wasn't very good at all. However, you didn't notice it, because so many areas actually weren't leveled and had static enemies, which were often even NPCs with unique names and such. You could even get through the whole game without encountering a leveled enemy, I guess.
So, what saved Morrowind was having a good mix of static and leveled enemies, which made the game feel varied. I think Morrowind would have been much, much better with Fallout 3's leveling system, though. Fallout 3's system is more versatile, you can recreate Morrowind's system with it without any problems, but it also allows you to spice everything up a bit. And I'm glad they decided to keep improving that system for Skyrim.

Damn, writing down all the names of those awesome Morrowind enemies made me wanna go there now. *installing*

edit: By the way, I'm completely with Bethesda when they say they were surprised at the angry reactions because the game got too easy once a character reached level 25 or so. I never even got a character further than level 15-20. Why do you always have to max out everything?
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Laura Shipley
 
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Post » Sat Jan 08, 2011 10:53 pm

Morrowind levelling was very far from perfect. As a few people have pointed out, the levelling (or lack thereof) made the game too hard for the first few levels, then way too easy once you reached around level 20-25. This is NOT a good system, although I do like that unique items were static.

We can all agree that Oblivion took it too far in the other direction. Fallout 3's system was much better than the other two games and managed to find a good compromise in my opinion. The fact that Skyrim's levelling will be similar to Fallout 3 is very reassuring for me.

Please stop holding Morrowind on an unrealistically high pedestal :)
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Mélida Brunet
 
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Post » Sun Jan 09, 2011 7:49 am

LOOK AT OBLIVION, oblivion was a little challanging, when you get level 50, you already have powerfull items and enchanted items that pretty much can kill alot of npcs in a hit, its easy to kill lots of guards, and you can make lots of powerfull spells, meaning that the system of oblivion wasn't the worst possible ever to imagine! yes i hated it, but the thing i hated the most definitly was the lack of npc interaction, the higher your level gets, the most powerfull looking your armor is, the npcs should fear you or respect you as a all mighty warrior you become, not like if you're still level 1, the only things that changes betwen the time is that they talk about your level 70 + skill, wich is no big deal, if the leveling will be fixed or not is of no big concern to me, since i like both morrowind and oblivion, but how the npc's will interact with you , that should be fixed!
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Cesar Gomez
 
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Post » Sun Jan 09, 2011 3:54 am

Funny, this was the one thing I'd say Morrowind's leveling system got wrong :)
I can't remember meeting any Nix Hounds in the Ascadian Isles Region at later levels anymore. They suddenly all turned into Alits or Kagoutis. Just like the Shalks from the Grazelands turned into Winged Twilights and Golden Saints. Whereas in Oblivion, I always had a nice mix of bears, wolves and deer in the forests, which seemed very natural.

In general I think that Morrowind's leveling wasn't very good at all. However, you didn't notice it, because so many areas actually weren't leveled and had static enemies, which were often even NPCs with unique names and such. You could even get through the whole game without encountering a leveled enemy, I guess.
So, what saved Morrowind was having a good mix of static and leveled enemies, which made the game feel varied. I think Morrowind would have been much, much better with Fallout 3's leveling system, though. Fallout 3's system is more versatile, you can recreate Morrowind's system with it without any problems, but it also allows you to spice everything up a bit. And I'm glad they decided to keep improving that system for Skyrim.

Damn, writing down all the names of those awesome Morrowind enemies made me wanna go there now. *installing*

edit: By the way, I'm completely with Bethesda when they say they were surprised at the angry reactions because the game got too easy once a character reached level 25 or so. I never even got a character further than level 15-20. Why do you always have to max out everything?

for those who tried to forget about the existance of fast travel in oblivion... I HATE WOLVES AND BEAR! ALMOST AS ANNOYING AS CLIFF RACERS! lol as TES are fantastical environment i think oblivion has a really big lag of fantasy, even though todd howard was into lord of the rings in that time(as he said by himself) i think he didn't understand exactly how to populate those forests... unfortunately only wolves and bears, with really rare stupid looking ogres, annoying trolls and goblins and ... weirld minotaurs... the game still don't give me any reason to go out there and explore by my self, without having to do any quest..even though... every PLACE LOOKS THE SAME.. but i know this is not the topic for this kind of post... well.. the annoying wolves and bears level up with you... making THEM EVEN ANNOYINGER IF THATS POSSIBLE!
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Juan Suarez
 
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Post » Sun Jan 09, 2011 7:32 am

There was nothing wrong with Morrowind's System.
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Amy Cooper
 
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Post » Sat Jan 08, 2011 9:17 pm

morrowind was much better than oblivions but once you played the game a few times you knew were everything was. i think new vegas had it just right. certain areas at the start of the game meant instant death. the best levelling system is having the game completely unlevelled everywhere except main roads and around cities and towns. everywhere else anything at any level, high or low, can show up at any time. this is how TIE and WAC were designed and it improved oblivion considerably.
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Gill Mackin
 
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Post » Sat Jan 08, 2011 5:31 pm

Absolutely nothing.

Not only did they take a step back with Oblivion, they stumbled down a pit, were impaled on a spike, and slowly bled to death.



I bet sales would say diffrently.


Morrowind was Tradition
Oblivion was Revolution
and
Skyrim will be Evolution
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Motionsharp
 
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Post » Sun Jan 09, 2011 8:13 am

Morrowind levelling was very far from perfect. As a few people have pointed out, the levelling (or lack thereof) made the game too hard for the first few levels, then way too easy once you reached around level 20-25. This is NOT a good system, although I do like that unique items were static.

We can all agree that Oblivion took it too far in the other direction. Fallout 3's system was much better than the other two games and managed to find a good compromise in my opinion. The fact that Skyrim's levelling will be similar to Fallout 3 is very reassuring for me.

Please stop holding Morrowind on an unrealistically high pedestal :)


I half-agree. But Morrowind was not too difficult in the first few levels, it was just interestingly difficult. Starting out with a character who just got out of prison, you had to scrabble your way around the world, taking chances and often avoiding difficult enemies. You really felt weak, it was a struggle to survive.

It feels like many RPGs these days are afraid of making you feel weak, as if players would stop playing if they didn't feel macho. That's a pity.

Sure, Morrowind had a severe lack of high-level content. But that's a balance issue, not a reason to scrap the system. In FO3 there was still too much obvious scaling going on for my taste, although it was lightyears better than Oblivion.
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dean Cutler
 
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Post » Sat Jan 08, 2011 7:00 pm

the fact that you could destroy almost anybody at lvl 3
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CHARLODDE
 
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Post » Sat Jan 08, 2011 11:11 pm

I was able to mod Oblivion into a game I was quite happy with. I suspect that my ultimate opinion of Skyrim will also depend on how moddable the nuts and bolts of the game are. I have faith in the modding community, so long as they have the tools and the game design is flexible enough to actually flex.
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Danny Blight
 
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