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[poca]

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.

[G-Flex]

Actually I wouldn't be surprised either, and I don't think you're wrong. They're promising MOAR of everything, better graphics, more detailed models, higher res textures.... but the thing still has to run on a six years old sucksbox, so they must've cut something to free up the space and processing power for that.

Eh, amount of content doesn't have much to do with processing power. It does, however, have everything to do with budget and a little bit to do with user accessibility.

But yeah, the XBox 360 isn't all it's cracked up to be. I pretty much laugh out loud when I realize that some of the games on that are internally rendered at, what, 570 lines of resolution? I had better than that on my computer monitor in 1996.

[Soadreqm]

EPIC BATTLE!

Yeah, you're right. Epic battles are cool, but you need some juxtaposition or the epic battle becomes yet another epic battle. I guess that's generally harder to do in a huge, open world than in a more linear game with more scripting, but they could at least try.

My biggest problem with the lack of contrast is the fact that my enemies will never flee in terror from me.   

That would definitely be cool. In a lot of games, the protagonist ends up being universally hailed as the knight protector of humanity by his allies, while his enemies still treat him like dirt. I don't mean that they should like him, but being taken seriously would be a plus. "Hello. I am the Nerevarine, the Hortator, the Master of the Fighters guild, the Arch-Mage of the Mages Guild, and the Archmagister of the most noble house Telvanni. This is my sword, enchanted with the soul of Almalexia of the Tribunal." "Oh yeah? Well, I'm a smuggler! Prepare to die!" I guess that's pretty hard to do properly, though. You're probably expecting to kill enemies in the game, and that gets kind of awkward if they're trying to run away instead of fighting back.

[Glowcat]

You're probably expecting to kill enemies in the game, and that gets kind of awkward if they're trying to run away instead of fighting back.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing if you're trying to create an experience that doesn't focus almost entirely on combat.

[LoSboccacc]

You're probably expecting to kill enemies in the game, and that gets kind of awkward if they're trying to run away instead of fighting back.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing if you're trying to create an experience that doesn't focus almost entirely on combat.

quest enemies will be appropriate to your level (unlikely to see daedra princes running, even from the master of whatever) so they won't run away, also constructs and brainless stuff or feral animals will keep harassing you.

smugglers and robbers running would add that little bit of touch to allow you to feel the power you've reached, without leaving you without targets to fight.

[Shadowlord]

Personally, I replicated the effects of the scrolls (at about 75% of the travel range per jump) in an amulet using enchanting, and made a short-distance version with slowfall built in for short safer hops.

[Sergius]

I practiced my Acrobatics to 100 by climbing to the top of those Vivec building things and jumping down to ground level. The crunch of your legs is also most satisfying.

[Sordid]

Eh, amount of content doesn't have much to do with processing power. It does, however, have everything to do with budget and a little bit to do with user accessibility.

I beg to differ. More polygons and higher res textures = more processing power needed. That's kinda why newer games made for newer computers generally look better than older games made for older computers.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Fallout 3 had... what was it? Twice the polygon count on average, yet ran at a higher FPS on the same machine than oblivion (according to someone at Bethesda in an interview)? Conversely, while I could run Fallout 3 on fairly high settings, so it looked beautiful, I couldn't run Dead Space at a playable frame rate even when its (already comprably terrible) graphics were turned down to "blobby blobs of shit" levels. Similarly, a while back I got hit with the nostalgia stick while browsing Tvtropes, and got a hold of a DS emulator and roms of the latest Pokemon games (since I'd played the older ones to death as a kid). The first ones for the DS looked like ass, and stuttered horribly. The latest ones had much more detail to the graphics, and ran at about twice the FPS (still looked worse than things from the PS1 era, but still). So yeah, there's a whole lot of room for optimization in games, especially those destined for the outdated pieces of shit known as consoles.

Total amount of content also has exactly jack shit to do with processing power. Processing power relates to what is currently in front of you, it doesn't care about how many different types of monsters there are hidden away elsewhere, or how many lines of dialogue can be spoken over the span of dozens of hours, or how many different spells you can know.

[Ampersand]

The SNES Final Fantasy games had more real content than Fallout/Oblivion. By Real Content, I mean things that aren't just there for the sake of graphics.

[Sordid]

So yeah, there's a whole lot of room for optimization in games, especially those destined for the outdated pieces of shit known as consoles.

Enough to make a six years old sucksbox competitive with a modern computer? I don't think so. Plus even things on modern computers can benefit from optimization, so even if you could somehow make a sucksbox game look as good as today's PC games, you could also spend that effort making today's games look even better. Fact of the matter is, the sucksbox is going to hold Skyrim back. Like I said in my original post, a more efficient engine can make some improvement, but it can't work wonders.

Total amount of content also has exactly jack shit to do with processing power.

While that is true, I fail to see why you point it out. Nobody said that it did.

[Duke 2.0]

I practiced my Acrobatics to 100 by climbing to the top of those Vivec building things and jumping down to ground level. The crunch of your legs is also most satisfying.

If you jump while walking up the stairs in Vivec you land immediately, meaning you immediately have a chance for a new jump. I found jumping up stairs was a huge boost to training that skill up. So that became my powerleveling strategy, jump up the stairs and leap off the canton back to the base of the stairs.

[Africa]

Did you seriously type out "sucksbox" all three times?

[LoSboccacc]

The SNES Final Fantasy games had more real content than Fallout/Oblivion. By Real Content, I mean things that aren't just there for the sake of graphics.

[citation needed]

seriously, if you call content the same sprites over and over again in different colors then each smuggler differently armed via the random levelled item list should count as a different creature and tracked separately as 'content'

[Sordid]

Did you seriously type out "sucksbox" all three times?

You're right, it should be suxbox. Thanks for the tip, I'll use that from now on.