In Mw the game started in a dream. The player as prisoner was asleep and dreaming as he was told that he was chosen, and he was told to wake up.
In Ob the game started in a dream. The emperor dreamed about the hordes of destruction as they were about to invade the lands under his command and destroy it.
In TES5, the game can start in a dream. You can dream about the hordes of destruction as they are invading the land of TES5, and destroying the towns, and building their own towers of oblivion in the scorched land, and then dream about the regrouping of the native people to attack the invading forces, and forcing them to retreat to out of reach lands, and the resulting anarchy and unrest in that continent.
You see yourself in a dark, nightmarish world, fighting a huge beast, something like a combined monstrosity of human, crocodile, goat and wolf. You are defeated and it grabs at your body and takes you away as the world fades into darkness.
Finally you will be informed, (in an un-earthly voice), that you are chosen, and you are freed to unite the nation and bring back the peace, you are told that you have lost everything and must start from the beginning and try to recover any skill and strength that you have lost, and you are told to seek a specific person, or a specific place, (with a specific name), and then you are told to wake up.
After that, inside of a sick room gradually appears before your eyes, and you are a floating entity approaching a bed. A covered body is over the bed and you enter that body, after that you push the cover away, and try to open your eyes and look around to see an old nun/nurse knitting beside a desk in a room filled with old beds and a few other unconscious patients.
You try to sit, but the nurse notices your movement and shrieks that you are awake at last, and then forces you to lie down on the bed again, and exits the room to fetch the priest of the cathedral, (as the sick room is part of a cathedral).
You try to sit again, and when the priest hurries into the room and looks at you with noticeable awe, you are already sitting on the bed. The priest hurries to your side, dragging the chair which the nurse had occupied before, then he places it in front of you, and sits down to survey you more closely.
Then he says: "Look at you; nobody would ever guess that you have been asleep for about two centuries! I know that you are weak, but your face does not show it at all. Can you remember your name?"
In this moment you are presented with a character generation dialogue to select a race, body, face and a name.
After that the priest informs you that about two hundred years ago the gates to oblivion started to open on all the surface of the Tamriel and the hordes of oblivion invaded their lands and destroyed a lot of places, and made a mayhem that still rages after so many years.
In the first days after the start of the invasion, you were brought here to the cathedral, unconscious, and were bedded in this very bed and then the priest that managed the cathedral at the time was informed that you were a special patient that might remain asleep for centuries, and he and the next priests were to keep an eye on you, until you awoke.
After that you must be trained a bit of the basic weaponry and spell casting to decide what would be your class of actions, and you were to be watched by a seer mage to decide how the stars have affected your fortune, and then we have to supply you a bit for your voyage ahead.
At that point we should let you wander around the island and get some experience to gain back some of your skills and strengths. Then we would put you to a final test which will remain a secret until you are ready.
After the test, depending on the result, you will be sent to a place in the main land to fulfill your mission as no doubt you already know a bit about your mission.
The priest waits for a bit, looking keenly at your face, but as he gets no response, he starts to rise and says: "All right keep it to yourself. Can you follow me to the next room?”
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All right, let’s assume that the newbie area is in fact an island, like M&M7. In this island you can see the main land from the coastline but if you try to swim all the way to the mainland you would become a good meal for the sea creatures, unless you reach level 20, for instance, which would be impossible in the relatively small newbie island with its limited amount of available quality equipment and assets.
You could pass the main newbie island challenge and get the rights to use the official available transport facility, which probably is a part of the main quest, or you could look for an alternative way, like a smuggling ferry available at specific times of the night to a specific group of people, so you would have to find your way into those groups.
Or you can find and befriend a secluded monk or mage in the hidden and dangerous depths of a cave or dungeon in the Newbie Island, i.e. this island can have some very dangerous places from the very beginning, so let’s develop this theme.
In a newbie dungeon cave there can be a sign that warns the characters not to enter the inner depths of some branches of the cave, but if anyone enters those depths and could outrun or evade the resident dangers on those areas, and find the correct route, they could reach a relatively peaceful place to find some good loot and for instance a lonely mage that could teleport them to the main land.
This way the game gives the players a standard route that would develop their characters, and gives them a taste of what is in store before they could have access to the rest of the world, but it also gives them other back-door opportunities to find a faster way out, but they have to use their mind and character skills to find those opportunities.
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Anyways, when the players exit the newbie area, by any possible route, they would start in a relatively easier place and would gradually have access to more dangerous places.
The game can be dynamic in this aspect, i.e. like my next Oblivion project, the surface area can be divided into different zones, and the relative danger level of each cell is governed by the combined effects of the nearby danger zones, so if we give a higher level of danger to a zone (compared to the neighborhood), the cells near the center of the zone are more dangerous than the border areas of that zone.
The danger levels of these zones can be defined/altered on the fly, so their next (monster/loot) spawns would be leveled to the current danger level of that area.
From the start of the game there can be more dangerous places like outlandish moors, and hostile towns, and less dangerous places like near the newbie towns, but those danger zones can be adjusted in the real time, so when the player exits the newbie area and enters the rest of the world, the place in which he has entered the world is marked as newbie area and it's danger level is scaled to the newbie level, and the way to the nearest newbie town is marked as low level danger as well.
But the rest of the world remains at its default danger level, except for the fact that the danger level of faraway places are raised a bit depending on their distance from the player's starting area, even the areas around the newbie towns of those faraway places would become a bit more dangerous.
The danger level defined for each zone is the approximate level of a player that would be moderately challenged in that area, so if a place is marked as a magnitude 20 danger level, then a level 20 player would be moderately challenged in that area, with regard to the probable arsenal that a level 20 player would possess.
The dungeons are defined as dangerous as the cell that their entrance is located at, plus a defined amount of danger level, depending on how deep they go, so the place near the entrance is just a little more challenging than the outside area, but the deeper levels would become increasingly more dangerous.
Each internal cell can point to an external cell for the danger level reference, which can also be useful for the target of spell effects like "jump outside", and for the environment effects like "natural interiors", and each cell can have a relative danger index that is added to the calculated danger level for that external cell, so for a first level dungeons this can be 5 and for the next level this can be 8 and so on...
This way the developers can still use this leveled list idea but instead of scaling it to the player level, scale it to the danger level calculated for the area. And also the developers can change the danger level of different areas on the fly, depending in the events that have happened in those places, as in the main quest line or other big happenings.
For instance a war between two opposing clans or the opening of an oblivion gate in an area could increase the danger level of that area as much as we like, without the need to spawn a specific amount of monsters, and just by changing of a value, and setting the zone to respawn at the next visit.
The designers should also be able to place individual high level random monsters and loot, wherever they like, and select their danger level by hand, because this way we can have a scenario like the single dragon in the specific cave of the newbie island in the M&M7 game.
The random monster template should have the option to select a minimum and maximum for the size of the calculated resultant monster so that only monsters within that size range are selected.
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By developing the dynamic danger zones idea, the game can still have leveled lists and randomized encounters and rewards, but those encounters and rewards are leveled depending on the place, and not the player, and we can have extremely dangerous places from the beginning of the game which could possibly be scaled as level 100, so a level 100 player would be challenged there and thus we can have places that in an unmoded game would always remain as too dangerous to enter.
So if a player had a perfect chance and those leveled list were in his favor and he could somehow evade those dangers, he could find the loot that are scaled at level 100, but this requires that the game could supply danger level and loot that is scaled to level 100.
Diablo II has done that by giving the same monster meshes different textures, scales, attributes and names to scale them for more different danger levels, also it does it for the loot as well, so Diablo II can have a relatively more scaled danger level with relatively fewer resources.
This way the game can scale the danger levels of different areas and the dungeons in those areas so that the deepest level of the dungeon at the most dangerous surface area would be scaled to the danger level that a level 100 player would be moderately challenged there.
And there could be a GMST definition as 1.0 that could be multiplied to these calculated danger levels, so that later on it could be changed easily by mods that could supply danger level and loot beyond the default level limit of 100 for the leveled lists.
Remember that this level 100 is just an example and it can be any other number.
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The Bottom Line is that for the free form type of games like TES, the perfect setting is a world that always has some areas that are too easy for the player, other areas that are too hard for him, and some areas that are just right, no matter what level he is.
This way the players can set the pace themselves, casual gamers can take it slow and attend the easier parts until they are ready for the harder parts, but hard-core players can try to get ahead of themselves and find the harder places before they are the right level, to get better loot earlier.
Another benefit of this scaled world is that there are areas that are always too hard in a normal game-play, so in the forums, we might read comments like this:
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"Yeeeeeaaaaayz, palz, *F*i*n*a*l*l*y*, I got past those nasty guardians of the "Netherwatch Citadel", without any cheat, honest!!! OK, I did not reach the throne room, but who has?..."
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"WOW, that’s incredible! How did you manage that? What level is your character? What is your race and primary class?..."
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"Well, I had quite a bit of luck, because..."
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This can turn into contests and survival races and so on...
But remember, the higher level nasties should not chase the players to the end of the world, and passing some gateways or passages into more civilized areas should warn the nasties to back away and return to their territory.
» Wed Dec 01, 2010 9:09 am 
bliviongate:" You wouldn't just walk off and do your own thing. Morrowind was better in this respect - you were not compelled to visit Caius, except by those who had recently been your captors, and who you are probably not best friends with. 
