This is apparently the thread announcing a new Bethesda game in which the controversial level-scaling is obligatory and people try to decide whether Todd Howard will keep his job. I own Oblivion, have played Fallout 3 and have read enough to be able to speculate about Skyrim. They both seem to want people to post on their blogs/in forums:
Enemy 1 EMG EPIC BATTLE!!!
Enemy 2 EPIC BATTLE!
Enemy 3. epic. battle.
Enemies 4-1,000,000*. all epic battles.
*not sure about that number because I'm bored around enemy 6.
I have thought about it quite a bit and my opinion of why these games are broken is in the
contrast between battles.
Just have the starting areas less dangerous and the further away you move from stuff like cities, the tougher challenges you face. Remeber good old Gothic? The orcs were a bitch, but it felt so good to finally kick their asses. And it was equally fun going back to the starting area and mopping the floor with the weak enemies that bullied you at level 1.
That is the way I play an RPG: go out and explore. There is stuff I can kill without trouble. I keep going until I find a real challenge (something that unfairly pounds me into the pavement). This is the puzzle that is driving my slogging through all the less exciting battles. Should I get better at melee attacks, ranged attacks, healing, or something else? Each one of those theories drives me many lesser battles until I finally unlock the secret of that challenging battle but when I finally win it is something to get really excited about. Morrowind might have had real issues with balance but it allowed me to pick the contrast that I wanted.
Oblivion/FO3/Skyrim (from what I have read) all have the same problem: you can't find a beast until they are everywhere and they are everywhere until they are nowhere. Need scamp skin for a potion? You should have thought about that before you caused the extinction of an entire non-biological race by sleeping too much.
My biggest problem with the lack of contrast is the fact that my enemies will never flee in terror from me.
In Oblivion, the battle starts out with a bear finding itself paralyzed by an invisible foe and then a fireball catches the bear on fire and the explosion blows it off a cliff and leaves it with 1/3 of its HP. You might think that a bear who lives through that and can finally move again would run away and try and stay alive but this isn't a real bear; this is bear was determined by the game makers to be a good challenge for my character.
Even more than having foes recognize that a battle is hopeless, I'd like to be able to walk through parts of the world and see my foes flee from the very sight of me. That would certainly be rewarding but I'll eventually want to take a break from fighting and just walk around and play with the landscape.