» Thu Aug 20, 2015 11:14 am
I think that leveling serves a useful purpose by making some content too difficult to deal with at the start, with more viable options opening up to the player as the character "grows". It allows the developer to place more content tailored to the abilities of the character, rather than having only 10% of the content be challenging yet beatable. It allows the developer to "pace" the game, without placing artificial restrictions by openly saying "you can't go here yet".
On the other hand, most games tend to have far too large of a change from starting weakling to godlike wrecking machine, with 10x to 50x the fighting ability as compared to what the character had at the start. A lot of games spawn too much content (or nearly ALL or it, as happened in OB) specifically at the PC's level, which gives very little sense of advancement of the character because the character never gets any "better" compared to what he or she is fighting. Extremes of leveling and scaling result in no longer finding basic low level creatures and items in the world, because they've all been replaced by high level equivalents. (Example in OB: You can't buy a Journeyman mortar and pestle set because only Novice versions exist in the world at your level, but in a few more levels there well be LOTS of Journeyman sets and not a single Novice set to be found anywhere unless you already own it.)
The trick is to have enough character progress so you FEEL like the character is getting better, and a mix of content both above, below, and AT the character's level to show that progress compared to the rest of the game world, with a fairly large portion AT the character's level to provide an appropriate challenge in enough cases to be interesting. Too little variety and range of opponents and loot and it feels artificial (Oblivion suffered from having too much "leveled" and "scaled" content that adjusted to match you, and very little static content), but too much variety and range (as in a completely unleveled game) and there's not enough content that's a suitable challenge at any given time, particularly if the character makes huge advances in skill and ability over the course of the game. Note that Morrowind DID use leveled content, but interspersed that with static content to provide both easy, difficult, and "suitable" challenges at just about any level, until the character eventually out-leveled the content in the game (the developers never thought that players would take it that far), and then everything got far too easy.
I can hope for a more modest amount of character advancement in future games (easier to balance, and less restrictive for RP), and a mix of static and leveled content (Morrowind, for example, used leveled lists to place leveled creatures and Daedra, as well as static placed NPCs that didn't level with you), but if the developers want to turn it into a basic hack & slash action game, there's likely to be an even greater disparity and even more "appropriate" content, but not much else.