It's definitely a necessity. I'm level 25 and I've only killed that first dragon and haven't even went to the greybeards yet. If the game didn't scale I'd probably have out-leveled most of the story by now.

Please do not think Daggerfall and Morrowind are anything alike... Daggerfall had even more aggressive level-scaling than Oblivion.

Because such a difference in level in a local area is extremely jarring and would break the game experience. And all this does is add Backtracking; you can't semi-permanently move on from where you were.

Herp derp, you'd still be taking dungeons in a pre-scripted order. That's what linearity is.

What Skyrim does is offering you the freedom of playing a Conan type who does nothing but fight bandits and loot tombs for 30 hours. Or you can play a rogue character that does urban adventuring for 50 hours, without ever touching the wilderness. Or you could be an explorer. Really, you're not making sense.

Sure and games like savage worlds are great but even they don't have level scaling. Yeah and some stats don't scale, but others do and a person with 16 advances is a lot more powerful than someone with 0. Since they went with a non-hp system anyone can handle any monster at any time, it just might be unlikely. Like I think dragons have 20 armor in savage worlds, good luck breaking that damage threshold if you aren't advanced enough and with good gear. Thing is virtually ever PNP game out there is level scaling free, the DM is making things "linear" by picking level or challenge appropriate adventures for you. If you go off the rails and try to assassinate the Archmage who runs the mageocracy 3 kingdoms over you will likely get curb stomped 1 second in on the other hand if you decide to handle some petty bandits you heard about the challenge will be small. In PNP games the challenge is usually appropriate to the challenge and the DM just makes sure the adventures that come up for you are challenge level appropriate. Usually the dragon wont magically have only a 10 toughness is a savage worlds game just because you decided to jump it at a low "level", it has 20 and your measly 2d6 attacks wont get through that unless you get really lucky with exploding damage.

In the real world, is everything that you do easier or harder based on your location? Is there one city you need to start in as a baby, because it's the only one that's easy enough for you to live in? Then, as you reach childhood, adolescence, and advlthood, do you get better, thus allowing you to move to different places without becoming a total failure? Are there places populated entirely by old people, because they're the only ones with trhe experience and skill needed to live there?

There are mobs that will melt your face if you stray away from roads or go further north, bears, sabres and giants are all capable of one shotting a squishy character with low health.

You could kill anything in Morrowind once you reached level 16. And you could reach that level while still doing the main quest.
And artifacts were all over the place, making it much easier to make money.

This. But people keep wanting to ignore that simple truth.

Linear because you must always go the same path. Every single one of my 15+ FoNV chars have gone south and east :/

And once again, what makes you capable of tackling a dragon in Savage Worlds? You don't have more HP, meaning the dragon takes you down equally fast (as in TES games, with scaling damage). Your sword deals the same damage at all levels (like in TES games, with scaling monster HP).

The difference is skills/perks/spells = edges, powers, relics. Numerical scaling is minimal, but options open up that allow you to win. People is making it sound like scaling in Skyrim (or any TES game) literally makes every confrontation a matter of trading blows. It's not like that.

Take stealth for example. Sure, monsters may scale with you, but they don't scale with your perks. You don't have the same odds of clearing a bandit forth through stealth at level 30 with 50 stealth and 5 stealth perks as you had at level 5 with 15 stealth. Even with scaling.
And that's what leveling is all about.

I dunno, I thought Morrowind was pretty neat.

But I DO KNOW who I'm facing. I'm up against an identikit bandit who is no different to look at and is wearing exactly as every other bandit I've killed in one hit. So how am I supposed to know who's got more health and who hasn't? I'm not psychic

But Riften is part of the high level area, so I cannot join the guild, or do any quests for them because I'm too level. I guess I have to join the companions until then.

NONLINEARITY.

Because you don't have to be on the lookout for strong enemies already?

And again, if the world is static, so are the quest, so I cannot do any quests for the guild until I achieved a certain level, which completely ruins the freedom.

A. That argument is total [censored].

B. Yes.

How bout you just trot off to the jungle and see how you get on with the lions and tigers without any training.

Or maybe you'd like to cross the ocean in nothing but a rowboat and take on those easy as [censored] whales and sharks

Edit:

Maybe if this game was 'Average Joe simulator' you'd have a point. But it's an adventure RPG set in a dangerous world filled with killer creatures

Actually that would then be LINEARITY. But never mind.

And if you engaged your brain you might be able to work out that if the game was changed the design would to. If Riften is a place for advanced thieves then you'd have a town that has lesser thieves that will take you in and train you up until you are ale to join the guild in Riften

You have absolutely no argument

Yes, in some sense.
Amateur wrestling gyms have all the the rookies and wrestling championships are filled with pros.
School systems work like that too. From elementary schools to universities.

I guess you are arguing against some hypothetical game world that greatly limits your freedom to move around from location to another?
It's not like that automatically follows if you remove level scaling.

I wasn't implying that, it's just that those two games are the most popular, and the ones all other TES games get compared to.

Level-scaling is awful and should be removed from the series almost entirely.

• It completely destroys the illusion of being in a real gameworld when everything from shop inventories to enemies scales to your level.
  
• It significantly decreases the incentive I have to go out and explore dungeons, because I know that whatever I find will be scaled to my level.
  
• It removes the sense of danger from the gameworld. Sure, you might say that the game stays challenging, but I never feel like I have to be cautious entering a certain region because I know whatever I come across will be beatable at any level.
  
• It removes the sense of progression.

What Bethesda should do is:

• Make the quality of items being sold in shops static. So one shop might permanently sell iron/steel weapons regardless of how much my level increases, while another shop in classier area might sell high-tier, expensive items right from the moment I start out in the gameworld. You might say "what's stopping someone from typing in a money cheat so they can afford the expensive items right away?" THAT'S THEIR CHOICE. The gameworld's uniqueness and believability shouldn't be undermined just because some idiots choose to find quick ways to become all-powerful early on. Just make the good items expensive, stick a master lock on the door at night, and if players still decide to try and get the items early, that's their loss.
  
  
• Give every creature / NPC in the game a fixed level right from the start. Yes, this means you aren't going to be able to beat every enemy you bump into - and early on in the game it'll probably mean being very cautious and using evasive tactics a lot of the time... but this will make the gameworld so much more exciting, and progression so much more rewarding.
  
  
• Don't scale loot to the player's level at all. Just stick high level loot in a dungeon with high level enemies, and if a fairly low-level player somehow manages to fight their way through without having to turn back, then they deserve the reward.
  
  
• Don't scale quest rewards either. The rewards should simply be relative to the difficulty of the quest. If someone tries to rush through a questline at level 8, they should fall flat on their [censored] once they attempt the harder quests.

...

And the argument that such changes would make the game too linear is [censored]. There has to be some linearity, otherwise the game completely fails as an RPG. Just because you can't beat everything at every level doesn't stop you from going where you want in the gameworld. It just means you have to think more and be a lot more careful.

I don't if they need to be instanced or specifically tailored so that the player doesn't accidentally bump into them. All they need to do is be tailored for a character/s at a specific level or range of levels. You'll notice that you are not ready for the specific area when you see that you cannot manage yourself with the enemies/tasks there are.


But you mustn't, noone's forcing you. It's just the most convenient way. You can't really blame the game for linearity if you decidedly choose to play it that way even though you could do otherwise.

Sure with a couple skills things don't scale like that, but in most cases skyrim is more like D&D than savage worlds. You do have hit points, your damage does go up etc. So the problem becomes with level scaling you frequently remove a lot of reason behind a lot of those advances, health, if it is 3 hits or 3 hits all you did by putting points in it is keep up with the level scaling. Skyrim is a level based sytem so things that diminish the impact of it are a bit counter intuitive. Don't get me wrong, I kind of expect at least some level scaling, there isn't a DM to pick level appropriate adventure for you so it is a valid method of handling it. But it is far from required for a non-linear game and the skyrim method does have a lot of flaws.

The only problem that I have with level scaling is that it makes your character look so weak. I mean there's a huge dragon threat, yet I know for a fact that the bandit marauder, a frost troll, or a bear are individually as capable of killing a dragon as my character is. Why the hell even have your character at all when the native wildlife will cleanse the land of all dragons eventually anyways. I've seen a freaking drauger scourge kill a dragon 1 v 1.

Yes, it was rather poor planing to have your character in Morrowind be a god by level 16 (though you could still be easily killed, you simply just had the means to deal it as good as you got it). And that you could get some serious end game equipment within 20 minutes of leaving the ship was a bit shifty. But for all that, at least you had a sense that your character progressed when raising his skills, rather than raise the "wrong" skills and suddenly find yourself overwhelmed by the newly scaled enemies. And thats right, wrong skills. Pickpocket, speachcraft, and lockpicking. These in NO WAY contribute to your combat prowess, but they count just as much toward leveling as your weapon skills.

Scaling content and difficult with player skill/level is generally a good thing, but that does not mean it cannot be implemented poorly. I think one of Skyrim's primary failings is that you can end up at level 10 or 20 or 30 and have had little improvement in combat-related skills. I can sneak around picking pockets and locks and stealing and selling loot and level up pretty steadily. Then, when something level-scaled shows up to hurt me, it sure does hurt me. I just had a group of three thugs show up to teach my character a lesson for some imaginary slight (the claim was theft, but I haven't stolen anything from Hilde, yet.) These thugs pretty much wiped the floor with me initially, until I pulled together a complex plan consisting of mostly running punctuated by some flying arrows.

Level scaling can be good, but it can also be bad. I think Skyrim needs a better leveling system in place to ensure the content that is scaled in difficulty for your level is actually scaled to an appropriate level. I would go so far as to say that levels in Skyrim are pretty much meaningless. Being level 10 does not really give me any idea of anything about the character. Skyrim really should have content scaled to skill.

We have people becoming arch mage at level 5 w/o even using magic in this game. I'm sorry, but being able to do that isn't freedom. Do you really not see this? You have to improve and become more skilled to complete certain quests, it's the same thing in life. It is realistic and immersive for some quests to demand that your character is strong or skilled in certain ways. The lack of this is my biggest problem with the game really. This is what firmly anchors this Bethesda title as a dumbed down game that hand holds you through everything you want to do.

Sure you can. Equip a bow, do sneak attacks. Might take forever but it will work


Anyways, I've grown sick of the "blanket" level scaling that Beth has used time and time again. They need to switch to a system that only scales CERTAIN things. There is no point scaling a mudfish or a wolf or a butterfly. Scale only the IMPORTANT creatures or "leader" type humanoids.

I'm starting to think the meaning of linearity in videogames eludes you. All your scenarios lack the kind of choice we're referring to. You're suggesting making the game heavily more scripted.