Level scaling and other annoyances

[Daishiok]

I personally play with OOO, so I don't have to deal with level scaling, or randomly generated loot, I'm just curious on how we're going to do this.

[Dave_91]

As far as I know, very little in the mod will be levelled, armours, enemies and wepons etc. will all be availible from level 1, but it'd be very difficult for a low level player to get past high level creatures to get to the good stuff, but it'll be possible. There will be some instances of levelled creatures and loot I imagine, like there was in TES3, but not to the same extent as that of Oblivion.

It'd be great if the mod was quite difficult at first, like Morrowind, where you actually had to be very careful when wandering into a random cave incase you ran into something high levelled. That's when you come back later on in the game.

[Mormacil]

I agree and don't forget it's good that some low lvl creatures, like rats, do level a bit to keep them from beeing to weak, just let it take 4 hits instead of 1 I think we get the MWsystem in all BC mods

[Dave_91]

Yeah exactly, and skeletons need to do a lot of damage unlike in Oblivion, in Ob, I found that they (the higher level ones) took ages to kill, but did little damage with their attacks, whereas in Morrowind they had really powerful attacks with a balanced amount of health. Something I really didn't like in Oblivion was when you could go into almost any dungeon and basically know you won't get killed because of scaling, in Morrowind you never really knew what to expect, you could be up against a few rats, or a level 30 Ascended Sleeper.

[Lightwave]

I totally absolutely agree.

No, joke, at level 1 I took a character straight out of the Imperial Prison, ran west and straight through the Kvatch gate and took it straight down (mainly by avoiding everything trying to hit me of course). There's no excitement or challenges when you can tackle any challenge at any time, which makes for no game, especially when there's no imagination to the storyline (oh look, megalomaniac wants to take over/destroy the whole world, kill the boss, finish the game, how original ... )

In Morrowind you dare not venture much out from the villages and towns in the early to middle stages, it's a really dangerous world out and one that you have to train and equip yourself up to deal with it. You can't outrun a Kagouti and even if you jump in to a lake to save yourself from it (avoiding the lethal mudcrabs on the way) the slaughterfish will get you. You want to be able to admire those walking around in really cool looking armour and wondering just what it is and how or where you're going to get something like that. And if you do irritate them enough to pick a fight with them, know that you'll be smacked down in no time.

Level scaling should definitely left out as much as possible; I think Beth put it in for the 2 minute attention span console players to increase early reviews, sales and revenue; I wish they'd given an option for the rest of us to disable it in Oblivion. It took just 5 casual evenings for me to complete the main game, including over 80% of the side quests (which also involved having to find and fix some in the CS because they were released with so many bugs). With Morrowind this took nearly 4 weeks (and I found no quest bugs) and I'd still find amazing new ruins laying apparently undiscovered in the landscape.

Anyway, enough ranting.

Lightwave

[Dave_91]

Yeah for a lot of the fans who played the previous games the scaling system wasn't really a good choice for gameplay IMO, it ruined a lot of the fun, and made all those quality dungeons seem really generic, full of really pathetic enemies that took no thought or time to get past. In Morrowind, if you remember Ibar-dad, a small-ish Daedric ruin cave with arguably the best loot in the game, it was guarded by an almost impossible trapped lock, and two Dremora lords, which were like level 40 or something. They'd be really difficult to kill for a lower level player (even higher ones too), but that doesn't say it'd be impossible, and it's better than knowing you could kill them easily like Oblivion. So I agree and I think others will too, level scaling should be used carefully and sparsely.

[Mormacil]

Hmm you also had this Dremora under Vivec I think Foreign Canton. Besides him was a chest with great loot as well ^^

[blackbird]

And the shrines under the other cantons. Those keepers were pretty strong.

[Dave_91]

Ah yeah I remember those... those cantons usually had something interesting down there.

[Tibixe]

Well, there is no feeling like when you accidentally find Chrysamere at level 8 (after dodging some nasty spells )
:crown: