Oh Bethesda…
Oblivion is the go-to example of how not to do level scaling. It’s impressive how badly they fucked it up. Like, they managed to make exploring pointless and unexciting.
You find a tomb, but you know that whatever’s inside will be “level appropriate”. If you’re low level it’ll be steel weapons, and if you’re high level it’ll be daedric. There’s not really any point in going in at low level. Might as well level up some other way and come back when the loot will be good.
On top of that, the gameplay is so bland and unresponsive that you can’t really punch above your weight class. The game is very much a levels game. It’s not like Dark Souls where someone can get really good and beat the whole thing while naked (and in the game, too). There’s a lot of “well, this guard is level 30 and you’re 10, so no matter how many times you hit him with your hammer he’s not going to flinch.” Knowing you’re always going to get kind of bland treasure wouldn’t be so bad if the act of getting it was fun. Like, sometimes a tomb or whatever in Elden Ring will have crap loot, but it’s still a solid core gameplay.
Morrowind had a lot of these problems, but it was also kind of wacky and heartfelt.
I don’t know why people expected anything different, this is not a bug to be fixed is a awful decision they made for the original and had a huge chance of staying in the game, it’s a remaster after all.
Unfucking the leveled lists and automatic leveling or everything in general was one of the first things modders did back when the original Oblivion released as well. Appropriately nostalgic perhaps that it still needs to be done in the remaster too.
Unfucking a Bethesda game with day-one mods is a time-honored tradition. Toddition.
Oh look, a common cutpurse in full Daedric armor!
That Daedra shouldn’t have been walking alone at night.
Talked shit to some dunmer, didn’t know he was from Maar Gan.
Was anyone expecting Bethesda to do any more than upscaling some textures?
This is a cash grab, plain and simple. Zero effort
Bethesda didn’t work on the remaster.
They literally did more than just upscale some textures.
Well they didn’t but virtuos did, but I’ve been meaning to learn about the whole unreal engine thing. Did they have to remake the whole game in unreal or is there like a translator that uses the original engine but in unreal or what
My understanding is unreal is translating the original game engine.
Nothing worse in an RPG than building yourself up into an unstoppable beast only for every stick brandishing bandit and feral dog to be juiced up to the eyeballs when you fight them, taking your god strength blows to the face with not even a flinch.
Morrowind already had a great design for this; many enemy spawns scale with your level, but they do it by adjusting which area-appropriate enemies have a chance of spawning, and it only makes a difference to a point. Like if you go to daedric ruins in the early game they’re going to be populated with scamps which are the weakest daedra, but those are still strong enough to steamroll you. If you run into a cliffracer in the lategame it will probably be the plague-enhanced stronger variant, but you will still be able to oneshot it. This system increases the number of circumstances where you’re going to run into challenging fights you have a chance of winning, in a way that doesn’t do much to nullify your power progression or break immersion.
They should have just done the same thing in Oblivion but they had some procedural obsessed design philosophy and wanted to avoid manual level design work I guess.
When you have a leveling system and everything in the world levels up along side you there may as well not be a leveling system at all. Devs do it when they want to say they have a leveling system but are too lazy to make it work correctly.
It makes sense for things to level in an open world game where someone could encounter an area at level 1 or 10. In order to provide a reasonable challenge for the player coming to that area. What oblivion did wrong is it was far too global and there weren’t sensible caps and floors on areas.
Or you just let players get their face smashed in by a high level enemy when they trespass somewhere they shouldn’t so they learn that they’re not ready to face that challenge yet. You also craft a world that gently guides them in a viable direction to level up to meet that challenge, ideally with multiple options to pursue.
Wasn’t morrowind like that? There’s nothing wrong with going somewhere and going “oh I shouldn’t be here. I’ll come back later.”
New Vegas as well. Try and take a shortcut to New Vegas instead of going the long way? Here, have some cazadors and deathclaws lmao
Terraria technically has scaling (actually just three tiers) but it works fine. Your gear generally upgrades much faster than the scaling enemies. The new enemies are the real obstacle which feels better. I’ve never noticed old enemies becoming a problem and by the end game your ability to clear whatever random enemies stands in your way is trivial
I’m not sure I understand what you’re referring to. If by “three tiers”, you’re talking about pre-Hard-Mode, Hard-Mode, and post-Plantera, I don’t think that falls under what is typically meant by “level scaling” (I realise you didn’t use that term specifically, but people up-thread did). Level-scaling would be if a green slime, which dies in 2-3 hits at the beginning of the game, grew stronger alongside the player such that later in the game, it would still take 2-3 hits.
I’m not saying this just to be a persnickety asshole, but instead to make the point that Terraria is so great because it doesn’t have the kind of scaling that Oblivion and many other open-world RPGs have. I love how Terraria has no qualms in repeatedly bitch-slapping you back to spawn if you insist on heading into areas you’re ill-equipped for (and the tiered progression ensures that there’s nearly always some such difficult place, even as the player levels up). I also find it interesting how the tinkerer’s bench acts as a key driver of progression by allowing you to pack more accessory function into fewer equipment slots.
That is to say that unless I’m misunderstanding you, I completely agree with your points, except that I would consider this to be an example of good progression without level-scaling
Didn’t realize they didn’t fix this. I knew there was a catch to this remaster…
They didn’t fix shit that the unofficial patch fixed years ago. Like actual broken things just stayed broken… I did the main story mission in Kvatch and the NPC you followed into battle after you clear the oblivion gate got stuck in a courtyard. I looked up the issue and apparently it is a bug from the original game that the unofficial patch fixed… They know fixes exist, they just spent literally 0 time implementing them knowing “we” will do it for free…
I was told jank was left in specifically because that’s a huge part of Oblivion in the first place.
Part of me appreciates it. Also it’s just using the same code from the original game, so I guess they wouldn’t want to fuck with it too much. Duct tape and voodoo, after all.
Haha that happened to me. Maybe we’ll get a patch for some of the stuff that actually breaks the game. I love some of the quirks they left in though, like the voice acting screwups.
Yeah, I’m glad I requested the urge to buy it when it came out.
I figured, like you said, there’d be a catch and then I saw the story of files being the exact same as the original and thought I bet a ton of stuff I hated about the original was still there, better wait for a sale.
I"m the opposite. I bought it immediately and I’ve been loving it! Wouldn’t have even noticed the leveled loot if someone hadn’t pointed it out lol. It just sucks that they left that in after fixing the character leveling system.
I am largely happy with how faithful the remaster is, warts and all, but this is something they should’ve included as an optional checkbox in the settings.
So Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul 2.0 essentially?
Throw in some MMM and Deadly Reflex and we’re cooking with gas!
Wait what? They even said they fixed the leveling, in the announcement video! This was the one thing everyone agreed was broken, and it barely mattered which mod you chose to fix it, because all of them were an improvement. How’d they fuck this up twice?
They did fix the leveling. Instead of getting bonuses based on which skills you leveled up, you simply get a flat 12 points to spend every time you level up. It makes for a much more consistent leveling experience. You don’t need to worry about stupid things like missing a +5 because you accidentally gained a level of Acrobatics, or missing out on bonuses entirely because you leveled twice in a dungeon and didn’t have a chance to sleep.
This mod fixes leveled quest rewards. By default, when you finish a quest, the rewards are scaled to your level. So if you go do the Mehrune’s Razor questline at level 1, you now have a level 1 dagger that is super underwhelming. The mod fixes it, so quests give a set reward, instead of scaling to your level. So now if you rush to get Mehrune’s Razor, you actually get a kickass dagger a level 1, which will carry you through combat for a long time.
you simply get a flat 12 points to spend every time you level up.
… that’s the wrong problem entirely! Complicated leveling was just another minigame to optimize.
If they wanted it to be painless, they could’ve leveled the world according to your total stats. Attack the player based on how much their numbers went up, instead of how often they went up.
The deeper problem in Oblivion was that you could blast goblins with a single fireball at level one, and then when you got stronger and put all your points in kill-stuff-harder attributes, the same fireball against the same goblins just tickled.
Fixing the level system so you aren’t punished for using major skills regularly is a really good change to the system. Managing a spreadsheet to level efficiently was always a huge negative.
I’d argue your solution is even worse, because that would actively punish players who had received large bonuses. It would also require more optimized builds, leaving little wiggle-room for mistakes. That was already an issue in the original game, because it assumed you were optimizing your characters well; It was very easy to accidentally wreck your character early on because you didn’t optimize your build, and end up getting one-shotted by mud crabs who were 10x stronger than you.
It would also require more optimized builds, leaving little wiggle-room for mistakes.
How?
For any set of stats, it wouldn’t matter if you got there at level 2 or level 20. Mudcrabs built for an optimized level 10 wouldn’t spawn just because you are level 10. They’d spawn when you’ve spent as many points as you would have, had you optimized to level 10.
The real issue would be “the Draugr are training” kinds of builds. If you put half your points into personality… the bandits did not.
They fixed the attributes (No more powerleveling unrelated skills to keep up with the enemies) when leveling up but the leveled loot and creature system is still in place.
