Alright. I know what we're getting in Skyrim is set now, and I'm sure Bethesda have learned their lesson from Oblivion. But why on earth did they feel the need to change it anyway? Morrowind was a great game with room for improvement, however it's World Pevelling and Level Scaling were nigh perfect. I've yet to meet someone who thinks otherwise.

By all means I do not want any type of Morrowind 2, I want each game to be individual. But surely building on previous successes and fixing things that didn't work so well, then adding new ideas is the way forward? Luckily for Bethesda they nailed Level Scaling with Morrowind (that's not to say Skyrim's will be bad, I'm sure it'll work well), so why the need to change it?

It made sense lore wise, it was subtle so you never really noticed it, it was used in areas and missions that made sense, but also allowed a feeling of progression and gaining strength. It didn't hem you in tightly, but taught you caution. Really, what was wrong with it?

Absolutely nothing.

Not only did they take a step back with Oblivion, they stumbled down a pit, were impaled on a spike, and slowly bled to death.

All I know is that scaled uniques are a bad idea in my opinion. Enemy scaling seems to be working like the newer Fallouts.

Probably because new people thought they knew better and tempered with a winning formula.

At the low end it was fine.It was at the high end that it fell apart.Once you hit lvl 20,or sooner if you knew where certain items were, you owned everything on the island.Your choices at that point were to restart or Role Play a bully.The expansions improved on this and took a step in the right direction.

Most notable with Morrowind's level scaling as I remember it was that at higher levels there would sometimes be chests with daedric weapons (also ebony). These were moderately rare though.
Also, another notable thing was how dremora got better items.

Nothing of this was really bad though.
We know Skyrim will be like Fallout 3 in terms of level scaling. I don't really remember anything notable about the level scaling in FO 3, which means that it wasn't as horrible as Oblivion's. But it could also mean that it were even less notable than Morrowind's. Whether this would be a good or a bad thing, I don't know.

In any case, FO 3 definitely showed that they learned their lesson. I don't think we should worry.

As a general comment, I'll have to say that if they had tried to build on successes and fix things that work so well, you wouldn't have Morrowind.

From there on, about level scaling in Morrowind, personally I don't think there was anything wrong with it. I prefer it from Oblivions. I kind of understand how they thought of Oblivion. They thought.. it's not as freeroam as we want if we determine where the player goes and what quest he does at which level through difficulty of enemies, and it's not challenging enough in higher levels, so lets make them able to go everywhere and tackle any quest and make the enemies grow with the player up until the end. That didn't work so well IMO and the sense of growth was subpar. Fallout's system seems like a hybrid. The idea is it will allow you to go places and give you sense of growth without making everything pointless.

There's that key word " If ".

What made Morrowind superior in this instance? I actually felt like I gained strength, and was worthy of said powerful artifacts.

Then you weren't here on the forums back in 2002 and 2003. The game gets very easy when the player become 25+ or so, and there were huge amounts of complaints about how the game was too easy. Things got a bit harder with the expansions, but only slightly.

So with Oblivion the goal was to make the game challenging no matter what level the player are, but that approach had some flaws too.

I think the problem wasn't the actual game, but the players. Many Morrowind players were very snug that by the end of the game they were uber-gods that could take on anything with one hand tied behind their back, and complained there was no challenge in the late game. Bethesda simply overracted to this :facepalm: .
C'mon people, first you abuse the leveling system to reach a degree of power way higher than what the devs anticipated, then you complain there isn't something that can pwn you?

Almost Nothing.

The down side was the lack of challenge at higher levels, a bit of a spoiler for those who liked to play on and on. Still, this was very easy to fix via mods.

Many positives not least of which was the way it allowed the player to play entirely in their own time. Want speech at 100? Barter at 100? Want to learn a whole new weapon from scratch? None of this was a problem, the world happily waited and if you ended up fighting mobs at -10 you level, well, your game your way.

Well, I had this problem too in my first play through actually, not even with any knowledge of the point underlined above. And my character's build was haphazard at best. Don't know if I can speak for others, but Morrowind's level scaling was nowhere near nigh perfect.

If there is a soft cap on character level at 50, then there should be challenges, and rewards, which are appropriate for that level, or very near it to provide a constant challenge. If the scaling is capped at say 40 or 45, then you can become 'god-like', but will be challenged all the way along the hard road to that level of power.

Basically it can be too hard at the beginning if you're careless, and it WILL be too easy when you get higher in level. I think that's part of Morrowind's charm, but it probably wont do for this generation of gaming.

I do not think it is a valid argument to blame the players who the play the game as intended.Reaching lvl 20 with a fairly standard char build (No power gaming) with the monty haul of enchantments available makes you fairly unstoppable.I agree that Oblivions level scaling went to far in the other direction but IMO it was a move in the right direction.

I believe some of the problem is there are two types of players group A likes to replay a game and see it from every possible angle using different skill sets to solve problems group B likes to play the game with a favorite Char exclusively.

Group A never saw the flaws that group B saw.

Correctly, Morrowind level scaling had some basic flaws, first the lack of high level content. Few enemies was past level 20. You had pretty easy access to high level content; far easier if you followed guids or this forum, this made the game easy from around level 15.

Npc was not levelled, your typically bandits in caves was level 5-10 and had iron daggers at level 25, you had to feel sorry for them as they run into your daeric longsword, however they also had crappy loot so it was no reason to hunt bandits.

The Morrowind advanced mod gave you high level enemies for random encounters but not high level npc. It also rebalanced the loot, no more daeric weapons from all golden saint but daedra lords had a very small chance of dropping daeric armor who was extremely very rare but you run over with daeric and ebony weapons at high levels.

Oblivion tried to fix this but overreacted, enemies are to close to your level, would prefer more variation both individual enemies and locations, another overreaction is to many enemies with good equipment at high level.

Personally, it made the game too easy at later levels.

The problem wasn't a simple one to pin down to one particular cause, but it's partly because insanely powerful high-level equipment was too easy to get at low level, compounded by the fact that almost all of the enemies guarding them were static. Perhaps a smaller stat spread between the worst and best equipment (with other differences such as durability, enchantability, and repairability to distinguish them), a mix of static and levelled opponents guarding those static items, some randomization of the "guardians" that prevents you from focusing your preparations on them even before your character knows they're there, and some other limiting mechanisms on things like alchemy and enchantment stacking were needed to prevent the player character from picking up all of the "goodies" at low to mid levels, and then running rampant over the relatively weak opposition by the time they hit Level 15-20 (I had a character beat Gaenor in a stand-up swordfight by that point, without excessively powerful gear or exotic potions). That's a lot better than the immersion-breaking idea of not having items exist in the game world until the character is "ready" for them.

The idea behind MW's system was right, but the execution needed some tweaking. Instead, someone decided to throw out the baby with the bath water, and scrapped the whole system. We ended up in OB with scaled rewards, bandits with Glass and Daedric armor, goblins with 600 hitpoints, and all of the other absurdities that replaced MW's balance problems.

At high level, the game was a joke. Of course, the extreme Level Scaling in Oblivion had flaws as well. For me, the ideal would be something like the new Fallouts (well, a little bit more difficult, at least Fallout 3 was extremely easy). And it seems it is going to be similar.

I really don't like level scaling in Morrowind, those stupid cliff racers just keep leveling with me :sadvaultboy:

I'm with Daiyus on this. I say if the game gets too easy at higher levels, adjust the difficulty slider. It's what it's there for. It's what I did when the game started getting too easy.
Haven't played Fallout 3 but I'm glad to here the leveling system is better there, it seems to bode well for Skyrim.

Agreed. But I don't think Skyrim should have any kind leveling, which makes it hard to set the difficulty right.

I'm probably gonna get a lot of hate for this, but here we go: MW was to easy. There, I said it. At lower lvls it was way more challenging than OB, but even though I like to feel as I get stronger, it got way to easy in MW. At lvl 30 you are superman, at lvl 50 you are god and at lvl 70 you are chuck norris. OB was probably a little extreme with the armor and weapons, but FO3 had the right deal so I'm glad that's coming back.

The only problem with Morrowind's level scaling was if you got to high levels you were a god. The same could be true in Oblivion but some of the enemies still leveled scaled with you although it was overdone to a degree. Level Scaling (Not Quest Rewards :flame: :flame: :flame: :flame: :flame: ) isn't bad by any means but you can't have something like the Goblin Warlord happen again in Skyrim that's a big no no.

I had a little epiphany about this whole level scaling malarky -
If the world 'levels' with you, then whats the point in levelling up yourself? There seems to be none. The only point of levelling up in an rpg, is to become better than npcs and enemies around you, if, as you level up everything else does too, then why level up atall? Why even have levels as a function in the game, if another function is implemented alongside it, which completely negates its purpose?
Levelling in oblivion, then, simply became an exercise in pretending you were improving, when in fact you were not, you were actually probably becoming worse (unless you partook in the immersion breaking metagame of getting x5 multipliers).

As soon as you bring in a system whereby levelling up is not just a method for your character to improve relative to the world around him, you might as well scrap the idea of levelling up altogether.