Well i have been following this mans work for a while and he is a very inspirational man. he is responsible for a big chunk of The Elder Scrolls lore and the world we have all fell in love with while journeying through Tamriel.
I was keeping track of GDC and it looks like we finally have word of Kens latest work in the game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which seems to be based around the general theme of gameplay that skyrim is working with. abandoning classes to develop your character as you play, making the open world a little more believable, rehashing the dungeon design etc. anyway, it looks like these 2 games KoA and Skyrim may be more or less complementary...which leads me to my question, IS KEN HELPING OUT WITH SKYRIM???? Do you think he would, or did he leave it all up to Todd?

No, he isn't. Ken Rolston doesn't work for Bethesda Softworks any longer, he left the company years ago.

Isn't Ken the one who had the "brilliant" idea of level scaling as we've seen it in oblivion?

Exactly

Hahahahaha....................No wonder he doesn't work for Bethesda anymore, that was the biggest mistake of the Elderscrolls series, sodding level scaling

Ken retired after Oblivion and is now leading his own project. I don't think he is involved with Skyrim in any way. Mercury Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has also been in development for quite some time, so I don't think its "based" on Skyrim.

It's possilble that Bethesda may use him as an independent contractor for new in-game books. They did that with two other writers (who I believe left after Morrowind, but were involved with Oblivion.)

He's probably too busy with Kingdom of Amalur, which is also getting released this year.

i never said that it was, i said they were complementary and based off of the same ideas.


kindof what i was thinking, he is responsible for alot of lore. Dunmer and Nords mostly, morrowind and its expansions were his baby.


nope.
2012.

Why does everybody say that? The leveling system wasnt nearly as bad as people make it out to be. So what! Your character takes 5-10 swipes with the sword to kill literally anything in the game at high levels. So what the enemies always provide a challenge at any level (which I debate). Its better than a FO system where everything in the world is a puny weakling next to the vault dweller. Id rather the game always provide somewhat of a challenge (again, OB didnt really do this. I have no problem destroying enemies with ease at level 40), than a game that everything is catered to my needs and handed to me on a silver platter.

Sorry for the off topic post, but Im sick of people whining about the level scaling. It had its flaws, just as FO3's system had its flaws. Neither is perfect, yet I have yet to see another game come up with a better idea. Overall I thought the system in OB worked as expected. Im glad that when I maxxed out my character, I didnt go around pummeling my enemies like ants. Thats even dumber than having them be a little bit stronger than you.

Actually, It probably wasn't the always-a-challenge issue (though it gets kinda wonky when your level 1 fighter single-handedly saves Cyrodiil from Mehrunes Dagon's legion of Stunted Scamps,) though that certainly helped, since it basically never gave you a reason to level up. The issue was how the game handled leveling itself; unless you made a completely counter-intuitive skill choice for your class, chances were that you'd become weaker as you increased in levels, and the game never realized that. Not too bad now, since we know about efficient levelling, but when it first came out... well, it surprized a lot of people when their warriors kept getting eaten by timber wolves and bears. After all, how many people would make the logical leap of "If I wanna go melee, I'll choose non-combat skills for my class!"

I doubt it. They won't release that near Skyrim and I don't see it released earlier than this fall. 2012 title.

Good for you that you were able to enjoy it as it was :goodjob: me and other millions have downloaded the mods that fixed the level scaling and were able to enjoy it too... in my opinion that kind of level scaling prevents the player from feeling the progression, which is one of the incentives to play games in the first place. Start weak, get your ass kicked, improve your skills, become strong, feel your power pummeling your enemies like ants. That's how rpgs usually work, except Oblivion.

Needlessly spiteful. One person's idea, good or bad, doesn't make it into a multi-million dollar project without a bunch of other people agreeing with it. And an idea, good or bad, is only an idea. A game feature is an idea, a lot of design work, a lot of testing, rebalancing... and during all the designing, testing and rebalancing it was always possible for the people at Bethesda to say 'nice idea, but we're going to have to either fix what we've done with it or go with a different idea'.

Ken Rolston didn't break Oblivion, and you can bet level scaling had nothing to do with why he's working on other projects.

I highly doubt Ken has any influence on the series anymore. I'm sure he's still good friends with Todd though: the two basically built Morrowind in its entirety from the ground up, and much of the spirit of that game comes directly from his experience working with DnD and ye olden tabletop boardgames.

Also, I never heard anything about Ken being linked to the level scaling feature. It doesn't sound like something he would do, honestly. The game world should still remain challenging in places - so that the player is always rethinking their strategy and never reaches a point where they can safely say, "I've done it all, I have a Macguffin sword for every NPC class archetype and enchantments to protect me from every possible spell; by using this exact same blocking pattern, an enemy will never land a hit on me". There should always be some sliver of insecurity when playing, that a cookie-cutter playstyle won't get you out of all situations. Daggerfall was closest to achieving this, although it too tapered off eventually (though at a much later point in the game unless you picked some cheap advantages). But I definitely won't say anything to defend Oblivion's implementation, after seeing how FO3 and NV improved upon it in so many ways.

Anyway, I do think some directly level scaled enemies still could have a place in Skyrim, although they should be few and far between and done with reasoning: human rivals and doppelgangers who have been watching your every move, for example. But not the Mudcrabs, please. Leave them out of this contrived scaling system. Leave them in the game, so that at level 30 I can get the satisfaction of kicking them off of mountaintops as I could never do at level 1.


That fool!

You know Todd, my name is Ken, if you need somebody to fill his shoes... :nod:

I fail to see how any of this would effect leveling. For one everybody knows there is a difficulty bar, set it all the way down to one hit stuff and all the way up to be one hit. And two I would prefer it the way it was myself to any mod that changed it. I mean I dont want to fight scamps at 50 and I sure as hell dont want to fight Goblin Champions or Minotaur Lords at level 5. I like how I would roam around at a certain level, encounter a mountain lion or a boar and a few levels later it would be a Troll or a Minotaur. For the first few times its unexpected and like, "oh [censored] that thing looks beast." It seems to make the game more progressive to me.

IGN posted a little preview of his game today and it has been pushed back to 2012.

If Ken was still involved I think Morrowind would still exist.

Actually he is working on a new game, which doesn't seem half-bad. Obviously not close to Skyrim, but still seems like a decent open-world fantasy game. (compared to trash like 2worlds and gothic4)


http://pc.ign.com/articles/115/1153882p1.html

Levelling system was very like Daggerfall system and it worked pretty well in Daggerfall, main difference was that you had a higher variation of enemy level in enemies in Daggerfall, you had a small chance of running into a daedra lord or similar before level 10, yes you had to exit the dungeon and try again.
Oblivion had enemies at your level all the time, only way to get into a hard fight was then you faced multiple enemies at once.
In Daggerfall the daedra lord was the strongest enemy, with a daeric weapon, backstab and sneak you could kill them in a single hit, here Oblivion was better, main issue with Oblivion is that enemies get loads of health at high levels. I would prefer less health but more damage.
The bandits in daeric armor is also a problem but don't show up until you are close to level 30, yes it should definitely be scaled back.

Morrowind does still exist, what are you talking about. I still have my disc on the shelf right next to me :whistling:

Why is everyone talking about Ken? Wasn't he a completely dike?

What makes you say that?

Why would you say that?

I like Big Huge Games. I enjoyed Catan on XBLA a lot. Probably my favorite arcade game. I know it's just a board game but I played that svcker for hours every night for a good portion of 2007 and 2008. Still play it from time to time now. I think it might be the best board game ever created actually and the xbla version by B.H.G is a nice version of it especially for people like me who live in the U.S. where not many people have heard of it and definitely don't play it.

I'm glad to see them going on to bigger games though. Ken Rolston sounds like he is taking that company to bigger and better heights. I'll probably rent Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. It won't be as good as Skyrim but it'll probably be better then half the other RPG's out there such as Fable III and Two Worlds II.