This is an absurd statement. Would you mind backing it up with something so I can better understand what you are saying?
Sure
You are level 1. You only have a iron mace and iron armor set. You encounter some bandits. They are equiped with leather armor, one of them with iron bow, captain with a two handed iron warhammer and others with iron maces/daggers.
You are level 35. You have a daedric armor set and an enchanted daedric claymore. You are going to the exactly same place where you were going when you were level 1. You encounter some bandits. They are equiped with glass armor, one of them with a glass bow, captain with a two handed glass warhammer and others with glass longswords/maces
You are level 1. You complete a quest and recieve a dagger which inflicts 10 damage with 3 fire damage as a reward
In another game you are level 35. You complete the same quest and recieve a dagger which inflicts 15 damage with 7 fire damage as a reward.
See what I mean? There won't be anyone stronger or weaker than you. You rewards and loot will always be "good enough" for you. After some quests you don't really care much about the reward. Even in the Fallout:New Vegas kind of scaling, "adjusting things for the player" is a bad idea.
This is a good example of somebody not understanding what level scaling actually is. Did you ever play Oblivion with any of the popular overhaul mods? I can only think of one (out of the four/five around) that attempted to entirely remove scaling from the game, and of those that didn't they generally did a good job of it.
First I ask that you understand the objective of level scaling: The theory isn't to allow the player to go anywhere and do anything at any time. The theory is to give the player some choice over how they go about "creating" their "own story". You'll agree that doing such is the basis of open-world WRPGs such as the TES series. Thusly, level scaling is an extremely powerful tool as it gives the player a limited amount of control over how things progress (what if I think stopping the Oblivion crisis should be more difficult than becoming the arch-mage? I do the latter first and the former'll be harder when I get to it. What if I think things should be the other way around? Vice versa, etc.).
The problems Bethesda have faced and the mistakes they've made can be, in my opinion, boiled down to two points:
- Bethesda attempted to implemented level scaling in a half-arsed fashion. They wanted to keep some of the traditional elements of RPG design (static skill trees in the form of milestone perks, set equipment tiers, a set Big Bad etc.) without considering the actual potential of level scaling. An excellent example of
level scaling done right a conceptual approach similar to level scaling is DF (and what DF will later become): You don't need to have set game progression. If I want to be a random peasant and eventually kill a crundle or something to "win", then that's fine. If I want to be an army-destroying demigod and progress to battling the gods themselves, then that's fine too.
- Bethesda didn't understand that total level scaling in a mostly static environment doesn't work, full stop. This is what leads to the entire daedric invasion being made out of scamps and random bandits having glass armour. If they wanted to keep the static elements of design that they actually did, they should've hard-limited the level scaling to some extent. The TESCS has this capability (and has since Morrowind iirc)
built into the GUI and yet Bethsoft were still too incompetent to figure out how to use it correctly. It's ridiculous and it's been gone over dozens of times before (not least by me), so I won't carry on further.
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Topic: Elder scrolls V: Skyrim (Read 266026 times)