» Tue May 15, 2012 10:45 pm
The areas around the starting location definitely seemed to be completely leveled, but I actually did encounter some harder stuff as I wandered farther. I made my first real goal to get to Winterhold, and on the way I took a shortcut through the mountains (probably not an intended path... I had to do some fancy jumping to make it happen). On the other side of the mountains I encountered one of those power word "shrine" things protected by an undead boss that basically exploded me in 2-3 hits. I tried the fight again but couldn't really do any damage to it. Of course, this isn't really part of the game's normal leveling curve, as I imagine this is an intentionally level-gated boss to keep the player from just getting all the shout abilities from the start. I feel the same way about the giants -- sure they're higher level, but they're not really primary encounters; they're relatively rare avoidable enemies you expect to be dangerous. That's still better than Oblivion, which simply never had higher-level enemies.
I also encountered some higher level wolves on the trip (Ice Wolves I think?) which probably would have killed me if there hadn't been an Imperial patrol on the road at the time. I can't be sure if this is just a result of my level (I was 5 at the time) throwing some "tier 2" wolves into the random spawn mix, or if it's because an area that far from spawn and so high up in the mountains is considered a higher level area. I haven't gone into any dungeons up there yet but I'll give one a try today... I expect it to be leveled though.
As many have pointed out, there are a few big problems with excessive leveling... the first is that Oblivion and Skyrim's leveling systems don't really make the "level" value a great indicator of the player's combat ability. You could easily get to level 20 just by leveling non-combat skills, and this would magically make every enemy you encountered godly. I really think the scaling -- if it's going to exist at all -- should be based on some kind of "combat level" which is calculated using a slightly different forumula... IE, non-combat skills are only worth half when calculating the level for scaling purposes. Of course, maybe that makes the whole system feel even more artificial, but it still seems more fair for crafting characters.
The second is that for most characters (combat-focused characters) it makes the whole game feel extremely static. If the scaling is used too heavily, then the game might as well not have levels to begin with (see: Dead Island). When the designers feel the game needs a completely even difficulty curve the only real way to make this happen is to have the characters starting stats/skills stick with them through the whole game. Even then, the equipment you pick up will alter the game dynamics significantly -- it's basically the wrong goal to have when making a non-linear game.
And to contradict myself, on top of making the gameplay too static it also introduces really unnatural changes to the world. Every 10 levels or so, all the animals that attack you get replaced with larger animals, as if they'd been keeping all the mountain lions/bears/whatever locked up in the zoo until you were ready for them. Every now and then, all the bandits in the world get a fresh shipment of weapons they'd never be able to afford. This kind of stuff is really disconcerting in an open world game, because you'll see these changes when wandering through areas you've already been. In a linear game you'd just assume, "oh, I must have made it to where all the bears live."
The main problem is that it's unfortunately incredibly difficult to build a non-scaled open world unless you start funneling the player into a specific path. F:NV did a lot of this at early levels, basically only giving you a single path to follow that wouldn't get you killed (though it had options along the way). Once you leveled up a bit, things opened up and you could generally wander wherever you wanted. This is a pretty traditional RPG mechanic, really: Create a more linear early game and then open up the world when the player levels up to the point they can deal with it. NV managed to do it with placement of difficult monster spawns instead of just forcing the player to follow a specific path, but they also had to resort to placing some invisible walls to keep players from just hopping over the mountains and avoiding the barrier mobs. Now if you wanted to simplify this a bit, you could have the player start in (for example) the lower left corner of the map and generally scale the difficulty by how far they travel from the starting point. It would be very intuitive to the player, though it probably would feel extremely unrealistic (it's sort of an old-school world building strategy; farther you travel, harder it gets).
The real alternative, doing something like OOO (completely open world where the player has to carefully decide what is safe to engage), probably won't ever be done by Bethesda simply because it alienates a large percentage of the more casual players... that's always going to be the territory of modders and indie studios.
*Edit: Oh wow, that is a massive text wall, sorry. TL;DR version: Scaling seems less severe than Oblivion, but encounters still mostly scaled. Unfortunately it's super-hard to make an open-world game that plays well without scaling unless you're willing to regulate the player somewhat at early levels.
