I got interested in that question based on the Elder Scrolls series. Morrowind had a basically static world, Oblivion was basically entirely scaled to the player, and Skyrim is scaled to the player but within a min/max range.

To me, Morrowind was great because it could put appropriately powerful rewards in difficult (or just plain obscure) areas. Oblivion in particular was bad at making leveling feel like a treadmill because every time you leveled up as the player, pretty much every enemy would be that much more powerful also. Skyrim was better about that since an area would generally set its difficulty scale based on the first time you visited it, so you could leave and come back later if it was too tough, but it still felt a little off.

Another associated problem is how loot gets influenced by those leveled lists. In Skyrim, loot in containers and in the inventory of leveled enemies generally scales, but loot sitting out in the open in the game world generally doesn't. Which is really annoying, because all generic loot pretty much everywhere ends up being crappy low-level iron. God forbid there's some steel, elven, or dwarven gear in places where it would totally make sense to be (say, dwarven gear in dwarven ruins) that you might venture into before that gear becomes "level appropriate".


In a related issue, one beef that I have with general RPG mechanics is how they all feel the need to make you drastically more powerful at level 5 compared to level 1, and again at level 10 compared to level 5, and so on. By the time you're near the level cap, you're probably 100-1000 times as powerful as you were at level 1, which gives a good sense of accomplishment but just doesn't seem realistic, and leads to this problem with fixed difficulty or level scaling. Western RPGs (boiling back to pen and paper DnD rules) certainly aren't great about this, but JRPGs are completely ridiculous about it, which is pretty much why Final Fantasy 3(6) was the last one that I enjoyed. In my adulthood, I just can't handle them -- even going back and trying to play FF3 that I *loved* way back when.

I'd like to see more games where you get more skills, polish, and versatility as you progress, but overall you aren't more than 3-5 times as powerful at max level as you were at the beginning. Mount and Blade is one of the few games I can think of that comes close to that.

I love Elder Scrolls (back to Morrowind), and thought Fallout 3 was very good but not great, but I just cannot get into Fallout 4 at all.

Some of my reasons coincide with Yahtzee here, but a lot are different. It's clunky, the dog does a great job of heroically jumping in my line of fire to take bullets / melee blows for enemies that I am trying to fight, pathfinding is significantly worse than Skyrim (and it was rather poor there), the crafting seems WAY too obsessed with needing 1 or 2 "rare" bits like the screws mentioned in the video that should be in *everything*, etc. etc.

The city building as an upgrade to Hearthfires in Skyrim is pretty cool, but should be a back-burner *optional* thing that encourages you to check it out because it gives cool rewards rather than because the very first set of hobos that you run into want you to do everything for them.

...Take all of that with a grain or three of salt, because I only played for a few days before I got thoroughly annoyed with it and haven't been back since. Skyrim gets new mods that add fun content or make it look *way* better than Fallout 4 does all the time. And I like the setting and lore better, but that is a personal preference. But basically, even after playing through the main story and all of the factions many multiple times each, I still periodically find myself getting interested in another run through Skyrim with a new set of mods. Fallout 4 might get good once the community gets hold of the creation kit for it, but for now I have zero interest in even giving it a more thorough shot to catch my attention.

Skyrim family, *and* an Ordinator from Morrowind... Sweet!

Perhaps, but not necessarily. Different studios -- Bethesda (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim) and ZeniMax Online (parent corp., so they can borrow art assets and TES IP, but whole different set of developers and from what I've read I don't think they'll be transferring any of the dev staff between studios).

Take heart, all is not lost for single-player TES.

Probably wasn't as funny as it could've been, but then again, I still haven't played Skyrim or Oblivion because I'm still trying to get my shit organized in Morrowind. I used to joke about how I spent more time cleaning my room in the game than I did cleaning my actual bedroom, but really, it's not a joke, it's a very serious problem.

EDIT: I take it back, that last line was classic.

oh man,
how awesome to find out im not the only one sucked into this game.
my arena team on wow are sooo pissed at me right now due to skyrim.
i have been addicted to TES series since morrowind.
yahtzee called it correct.
its a great game with a ton of bugs and glitches but who cares?not one of them is a deal breaker.
lvl 48 in full daedric armor with a few daedric artifacts (spellbreaker is $$$) but even on the hardest setting im kicking the crap out of pretty much everything (unless i run into a few arch casters..bastards).
time to make a new toon.

Shit, I'm still playing Morrowind nine years later. I haven't even made it to Oblivion.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'All Your History, computers, consoles, games, Bethesda, part, third, III, three, S3E28' to 'All Your History, Bethesda, elder scrolls, morrowind, todd howard, xbox' - edited by xxovercastxx

Ah, good to know. Thanks!

In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
You gots to use the old style embed to embed in comments.
In reply to this comment by Shepppard:
@gwiz665

I agree with you that Morrowind was better then Oblivion.. but I think Skyrim trumps them all.

All three keep the same "Theme" (the notes played for the rising crescendo) but differently.
Morrowind has it peacefully played by flutes as it climbs, Oblivion has it played with a quicker tempo and by trumpets, and skyrim put lyrics to it, and gave it a more grand feel.)

clicky

That video is a really good way of hearing how the theme evolved throughout the three games.


(Edit: I can't embed videos anymore for some reason, so it was replaced with a link instead.)

You gots to use the old style embed to embed in comments.
In reply to this comment by Shepppard:
@gwiz665

I agree with you that Morrowind was better then Oblivion.. but I think Skyrim trumps them all.

All three keep the same "Theme" (the notes played for the rising crescendo) but differently.
Morrowind has it peacefully played by flutes as it climbs, Oblivion has it played with a quicker tempo and by trumpets, and skyrim put lyrics to it, and gave it a more grand feel.)

clicky

That video is a really good way of hearing how the theme evolved throughout the three games.


(Edit: I can't embed videos anymore for some reason, so it was replaced with a link instead.)

@gwiz665

I agree with you that Morrowind was better then Oblivion.. but I think Skyrim trumps them all.

All three keep the same "Theme" (the notes played for the rising crescendo) but differently.
Morrowind has it peacefully played by flutes as it climbs, Oblivion has it played with a quicker tempo and by trumpets, and skyrim put lyrics to it, and gave it a more grand feel.


(Thanks Gwiz)

That video is a really good way of hearing how the theme evolved throughout the three games.

Morrowind was the best one, I think. Sounds just beautiful.

Oblivion is good when it's really going though.. "dam-dam-DAM dam-damDAM dam-dam-DAM-DAM-DAM-DAM"

And Skyrim seems to be a further development on the Oblivion theme.

>> ^RFlagg:

The version shown was on a 360, so I would think any reasonably modern computer should be able to match what was in this video. Hopefully a more recent better built higher end computer would have more detail.


Even if it doesn't, there will be half a dozen mods within a month that dramatically improve the graphics. Morrowind was awesome with mods (mods that are still hitting and making the game better). Oblivion was broke without good mods, so I'm sure mods will be an important part of Skyrim.

Looks nice, but good graphics are commonplace today (I'll assume the every-few-second stutter is a result of the video, not the game itself). More importantly: the elder scrolls are unfortunately plagued by shortcuts in design (no doubt a result of trying to create such large worlds) which they just cannot seem to shake. Leveled lists and tile-constructed dungeons are not fun. The latter are insultingly tedious after the 4th one, and if you don't know what the former are, you haven't played much in the ES series. The same worthless loot over and over again is not fun. Always being at or near the same level as your enemy is not fun. Being able to exploit the system to become so powerful (in everything) that you can beat the end boss before you reach level twelve, is not fun. These things do not make for good gameplay. I don't know how much Skyrim makes use of these old poor designs, but Morrowind and Oblivion were completely based on them, and it ruined what could have been gaming excellence. The same experience again and again and again and again and again is not fun. Here's hoping Bethesda have learned by now, or will learn, someday.

Something else: I'm not sure why they're discussing Radiant AI as if it's new; it's mocked all over youtube with Oblivion.

Anyway, seeing mountains in the distance and plants up close is yesterday's news (I wonder if the shadows are real or faked; the original video demos for Oblivion had realtime light and shadow, but they were removed for performance reasons in the final release). Ditch the LL and tile construction and add a level of environmental diversity and interactivity like that of Thief (which is over a decade old), and I might be convinced to try another ES game.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE let the auto-leveling of opponents and their gear be history. I would like it back to the Morrowind days of some opponents just simply being WAY more powerful than you, while later in the game the feeble ones are much less. Don't get me wrong, I loved Oblivion, but it's kinda a downer when you've played for 10 hours and suddenly all the random bandits are wearing the most powerful armor in the game.

I hope it isn't that similar to FO3 either; that got much too easy much too fast as well. I'd argue that in some aspects it was much easier than Oblivion.

That said; LKFDJL:SKFJ SDLKF /me want.
>> ^saber2x:

This is the only info available about the leveling system in Skyrim, it was posted by a Bethesda rep:
“Since people are asking, wanted to briefly touch on level scaling. All our games have had some amount of randomness/leveling based on player level. Skyrim‘s is similar to Fallout 3‘s, not Oblivion‘s.”