» Fri Mar 25, 2016 2:28 pm
Well in both of those cases though, your character has to be tough enough to be able to defeat a fairly tough unleveled NPC -- Nuvusa Veleth for the temple quest and Burab gra-Bramog for fighters. Any character who can defeat those NPCs should be able to either deal with whatever daedra happen to spawn outside the ruin (even if it means dipping into their scroll or potion supply) or have a method of retreating if things get out of hand. I don't see why every character should expect to complete every quest every time without having to retreat and come back when they are stronger. With the guild quests in Morrowind you can still advance in the guild by just going to another quest giver and getting tasks from them instead if the quest line from one quest giver proves too difficult. With an unleveled world (at least as I envision it), there would be a decent chance that you would get daedra spawning outside a daedra shrine that a mid level character could handle, perhaps with some potions or scrolls, but there would also be a chance of encountering some more challenging daedra and having to retreat.
That's what makes an unleveled world exciting. Not always knowing what you are going to encounter or if your character can survive and sometimes having to retreat and come back later. That rarely happens in vanilla if you follow the questlines, since the game holds your hand a bit and really doesn't throw you in over your head much if at all.
Although it might make for an interesting overhaul to overhaul ruins, alter quests, etc., I don't think my idea to unlevel the would necessarily require any additional overhauling, since Jordan has already done what I wanted without overhauling anything else.
I might just use his mod. On the other hand, there are only a handful of leveled lists in Morrowind (maybe about a hundred and twenty or so creature lists and another couple hundred item lists), so it might not be all that much work for me to go in the CS and edit the lists myself, since I might want slightly different odds of various enemies and loot spawning than Jordan. That way I could tweak it to suit my personal tastes.
I agree it would take a lot of tweaking and testing to get the balance right. If I get the balance the way I want it, the world will be harder at low level but the world won't get harder as you level like it does in vanilla, thus providing a real advantage to leveling up. At high level, the world will be a bit easier than vanilla since there will be fewer high level enemies, but at the same time the world will be more diverse since you won't always get the same four high level enemies to fight because low level enemies won't disappear (or be significantly reduced in number) from the lists the way they do in vanilla. So when you get a quest for grand souls, you might have to hunt around for a while to find them, instead of having none until you hit the right level and then finding them at every single shrine. One of the things I like about an unleveled world is the diversity that you don't get as much in a leveled world where low level enemies become much more infrequent.
At the same time, the number of cliff racers can be reduced. I like cliff racers, actually, just not every thirty seconds. Changing some those cliff racer lists to 95% chance none and removing cliff racers from some other lists (or reducing their odds) could go a long way towards solving that problem.