Official: Beyond Skyrim TES VI #47

Post » Mon Dec 15, 2014 5:33 am

This thread is for ideas and suggestions for future Elder Scrolls games, and to keep all the discussion in one series of threads.

We also have an official thread specifically for http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1502486-tes-vi-location-and-setting-speculation-7/ suggestions for future games.
Now that Skyrim has been released the number of suggestions and ideas for the next ES game are starting to show up. We have a long way to go before we get another ES game and all topics like this will be closed and either transferred or referred to this one.

Please keep any discussion of Skyrim in the correct forums.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1510781-official-beyond-skyrim-tes-vi-46/

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Danel
 
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Post » Sun Dec 14, 2014 4:55 pm

Continuing from the thread of level scaling:

Skyrim's scaling was a bit more nuanced than people give credit. For the most part, enemies have set levels, but differently ranked variants (Restless Draugr are always level 6, Draugr Scourges are always level 21). Which variants spawns from a leveled list depends on a lot of things: the player's level, of course, but also the encounter zone (sets minimum/maximum levels of a location - enemy levels will always be within this range regardless of player level), and then the actual actor difficulty (easy, medium, hard, or very hard) which can be set for each actor.

And there are plenty of non-leveled encounters, like named Dragon Priests and Giants.

I think when people ask for a non-leveled world, they mainly just don't want to feel like there's level scaling, or maybe Oblivion just left a bad taste in their mouths. I'm not sure how TES can get away without level scaling at all; fight a Draugr Deathlord at level 1, or an ordinary Bandit at level 50, and you'll see why it might be a problem. Morrowind might have been able to get away with it; but then on the flipside, maybe Morrowind could have gained from some level scaling. The player could get pretty godly, and the game could get pretty easy; the expansions attempted to address this by adding more challenging content for endgame players, but that ended up making the expansions stupid hard for anyone at a somewhat low to midgame level.

I just don't see how an open-world RPG where the player can become so powerful could benefit from completely dropping level scaling. The main point of level scaling isn't just to make sure the player doesn't face something out of their their league - an important part is making sure the player can become as powerful as they can without making the "easy" content so ridiculously easy it's unrealistic and un-fun. Which is especially true for loot scaling.

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WYatt REed
 
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