I miss finding unique items accidentally. Dungeon crawling in Oblivion wasn't terribly good. To this day, I haven't seen half of them.




I'm not spending time killing things and making my way to the bottom of a bandit-infested cave only to discover that the "treasure" they're guarding so fanatically is a chest containing a bolt of cloth, a pair of tongs, two flawed gems and a scroll of Summon Skeleton. Ugh.

In fact,it was terrible...

The game has not come out yet be patient we will find out more as I am sure bethesda has heard this many times They have already stated it will be more like fallout with how the leveling works so it should be fine.

At least there was a dungeon. Remember Morrowind.

Fallout wasn't really great leveling, it was just better than terrible, which isn't that good of an improvement.

Playing Oblivion with no leveling at all but with better placed loot and enemies is such an awesome experience and really shows the flaws in both Oblivion and Fallout leveling.

This.

*edit* and even better they could get rid of the "walk 100 paces, fight something, walk another 100 paces, fight another something in exactly the same way, rinse, repeat" mentality and make only very specific places in an area actually dangerous. It would add some much needed light and shade to exploration and would permit a player of any level to explore a large proportion of the game world without feeling restricted by parts of the map that under normal circumstances would get you chomped on by a randomly wandering level one million Kagouti. *edit*

Leveling world is just terrible.
I want to go to a dungeon whistling, and suddently find myself in front of a g%$#@&% vampire ready to tear my face off, and run for my life crying and hoping he slips in a banana skin or something so I can escape.

This can be solved easily.

Still use level scaling and leveled lists, but instead of scaling the random lists to the player character's level, scale them to the defined difficulty level of the area, with a bit of defined randomness for that area.

You still have random monsters and loot, but they are scaled to the area, but do not forget to add manually placed monsters and items as well, to have the best of both worlds.

If nearby areas are gradually scaled to different difficulty levels, from newbie areas to high level areas, following the geometrical zones, the players can go to different places and retreat whenever the decide the area is too much for their health, and try other places and generally adjust the difficulty of their environment by deciding where to go.

This theme goes well with random respawns.

And also matches well with the system that the difficulty of a task decides the resulting experience gained by that task.

This is a problem but where do you strike the balance between variation and credibility: a gecko is gecko and this is where they live, or overnight replace all the geckos with fire geckos?

Morrowind was clever, in so many ways , to the point where many people didn't even realise there was levelling of general road side creatures. Morrowind hid the level scaling right in front of the player, yes, in front of, not a typo. They made it part of the plot but didn't explicitly state the consequences...



Lowest level creatures were 'normal', a 'rat' for example, and there was always a good chance of them appearing (iirc). Highest level creatures were infected with the blight, 'blighted rat', the background story said it could happen so we all believed it. Then they mixed in the mid-level 'diseased rats' just for variation, disease happens, I'll believe that. Genius. Also, at least some areas had the possibility of two different, but equal in level, creatures and not necessarily hostile ones. More variation, it felt totally natural.

How do you think NV would feel if it had another type of creature mixed with the geckos?

Edit:
Forgot. Levelling is great if done correctly, sadly Beth. has forgotten the tricks to success of late.
Levelled loot is passable, levelled unique items is a farce.

Thanks for all responses so far. I have gone through a lot of the forum threads, and also had some interest looking at the Bethesda video and game informer info.

My position, is that given the quality of games from Bethesda, I will buy this whatever. I just need to have faith that they do tone down what was done in Oblivion around level scaling, as I really can't emphasise enough how I thought this was the one key area they really went backwards on.

To drilldown a further level, I just hope that levelled loot and levelled unique items is done away with, as I want to go back to the endless hours of treasure hunting that Morrowind gave me. Probably the most rewarding aspect of any game I have ever played.

This is the biggest thing, there is nothing worse than getting an item from some quest, or finding it in some place at level 5, only to look at the wiki and find out that you just made one of the strongest weapons in the game barely comparable to a non-enchanted dagger.

So true, it was just ridiculous and a disgrace gameplay wise. On top of that it was absolutely no reason to level up (and thus develop your character) because you got absolutely nothing out of it. In fact, you had to administer the level-up system to perfect to make sure you didn't get progressively weaker. Morrowind was sooo much better that I can't even bear to think about the regression in Oblivion.

But fair enough, lets hope that it is all water under the bridge. I for one can't wait to begin my adventures in Skyrim! Cheers to that! :intergalactic: