I found after my mid-20s I started to gain on the power curve – I don’t know if there is a level cap on the highest mobs but it seems like there is, and I continued to get more powerful. However, I don’t know how Kvatch plays out if you are, say, level 30. I’ve never tried it. Also, even before my chameleon suit made the game trivial, I was relying heavily on conjuration; so I don’t know how it plays out for a pure melee type.
No, it scales up, and if you dont ‘level right’, it gets harder. It’s fine with mods thoguh as mentioned here. I dont really play my 360 copy anymore though.
I don’t think Kvatch ever spawns anything above Clannfears or Daedroth, which are pretty weak once you get into the 20’s.
I don’t know what you mean by “level right”, but I’ve got a warrior type and a mage type both in their 20’s and they’ve steadily been getting stronger than anything they face.
Not at all, Jazar–because the game levels with you.
I did Kvatch at about Level 5, and honestly (after maybe 2 bad starts) had not much trouble. I did have a b*tch of a time a bit later, though, at the Dagon Shrine. Trying to not kill the dude I was supposed to sacrifice and get out of that freakin’ room nearly caused me to quit the game.
I’m still way early though. I’ve actually mostly just done the main quest. I’m still trying to figure out a simpler way to manage my potions/weapons/spells. I’m finding the hot keys not enough, and going into the Tab screen to be annoying as hell. Still…I’m still in the love phase with this game…
That was an unmitigated slaughter for both characters I went through it with, for the fighter in particular who was a little higher level than the mage. Bodies were flying everywhere and I’ve never seen so many enemies flee from me at any other time playing the game.
Yes I know all about the auto-levelling but from reports that I’ve heard the enemies lose their “Umph” when you start collecting the uber-l33t items. Wasn’t there someone here who said that the game gets rediculously easy after level 30 or so?
I found the game generally pretty easy after level 25. I had already done Kvatch however, and I played a battlemage/summoner.
Yeah. The whiners originally thought they were faggots for touching the difficulty level in an RPG. I moved mine a little bit and then moved it back up. I never killed the Emerald Weapon either, don’t waste your own time. It’s really similar to going into Civ IV on Noble and complaining.
The only program I currently have with leveled stuff is that it creates a really goofy feeling world. All the ogres in a ogre dungeon are cave bosses, soon they’ll all be chiefs, and you don’t see a scamp ever again after some point.
Bandits running around with glass weapons and dwarven armor just breaks immersion for me. Those aren’t bandits anymore.
For me, it breaks the feeling of a real live living breathing world around me. No matter which direction I head, I can’t find a quest or monster that I can’t defeat. I can go anywhere or do anything and my foes are just right. The world only exists to serve me in most games, but here I feel like it’s shoved in my face. I’m in a fantasy version of the Truman Show. Of course it really is all a scam, but I like to pretend, dammit.
And really, it would only take a few dungeons that didn’t scale down to your level, an occasional wilderness encounter, and a few quests (like the Arena) to keep the feeling of a world, independent of the player, out there.
That’s a really great way of describing Oblivion. It’s entertaining, it’s enjoyable, but it starts feeling overly contrived and transparent after a while.
The really breaking moment for me was when I was helping out a shop keeper – he’d been getting broken in to and robbed. So I wait in his place until the middle of the night, and he’s being robbed by – three NPCs in full mithril/glass.
Nothing in the store was worth even remotely close to a single item the NPCs were wearing.
I did that quest too. The 3 baddies were wearing full glass armor and wielding Daedric weapons.
Yep, I’d like to see a real stab at “in the world” rather than “around the player” game design. Oblivion is kind of best of both worlds, but the game is imbalanced, so it can sometimes look quite odd. The “in the world” bit has these thieves out there robbing stores and a shopkeeper needing help. But the “around the player” hands them levelled wealth that makes their profession a digital sore thumb.
Problem is that “in the world” games have an intrinsic suckiness to them. I made up this really cool culture simulator which had a civilization represented as cellular automata growing out and evolving, with new cells colored slightly differently to show changing mores and values and what have you. It was cool to watch a game with a “pure blue” culture and a “pure yellow” culture grow toward each other and then go all France-Germany on the border. Then I tried to turn it into an actual game where you could turn cells into controllable units and it sucked. So I understand why the professionals always take the counterintuitive approach of making the game and building the toy arond it.
I cleared Kvatch by beating the monsters to death with the difficulty slider. I feel dirty.
Just think of it as your +5 slider of power.
I did Kvatch while in the mid-teens, and couldn’t defeat the clanfears. So I ran like hell into the castle followed by the last surviving archer henchman. There, the daedroths equally kicked my ass. So I left the archer to his doom and ran back outside. There I found the guard captain (forgot his name), who had roused himself from unconsciousness and was fighting a sole flame atronach. When he ran back into the castle with me, the daedroths were also gone.
I don’t know why the harder spawns vanished after I re-entered an area, but I’ll attribute it to the efforts of the guardsmen and keep quiet.
It’s like two separate game designs.
It’s as if the world itself was created by one team and the main quest by an entirely different team. The levelling thing definitely is the choice of the world team and probably a bad one. There are so many better and more subtle ways to make the difficulty scale. I really don’t see why the overworld should level in such a way as to become completely unrealistic. If you go way off the beaten roads, then ok, you should find pockets of ultra-mean monsters. But if you’re just rolling from town to town, then the stuff should be wimpy. How would the roads have been built if the bandits and monsters had high-level armor/weaponry?
Also, bandits? They should simply disappear after awhile or at the very least, run from you when they see you in armor of the gods. I mean, they can’t ALL be that stupid to attack you and shouldn’t be wearing stuff that’s uber-tough. Heck, when the run away, they could be yelling “I want no part of that!”
I think the thing that’s most rotten is that the answers to the problems they’ve created seem so obvious, and yet without any insight, you have no idea if they ever considered anything different and somehow better.
Maybe it’s just a time thing? The game was already late. I’m guessing there are a lot of things that gamers have griped about that they would have liked to change, but to do so would’ve meant another six months to a year of work and then the reception could’ve been entirely different by then, especially on Xbox 360. The game is obviously a huge success in spite of all the grumbling.
I disagree. Kvatch was an exception, not the rule. While the glass-armored bandits are kind of dumb, I prefer having a challenge on the road rather than killing five billion one-hit-wonder Cliff Racers every time I want to move between towns. I just went through a fort full of marauders wearing more powerful shit than I’ve seen yet in the game. Does it make much sense that the chests they were guarding had like 50 gold and a torch in them? No, but who cares? The fights were great and I scored some phat lewt off their bodies.
I think the problem I have is not that the enemies scale, but that the treasures and other such things in the dungeons don’t. Like when I went into the one tomb to get the Seer’s Stone, and the pre-placed dead guys in the “boss room” all had iron armor and weapons, while the guys I’d been fighting on the way in had Elven and Dwarven stuff. No wonder you got your ass kicked, guys, you didn’t bring the people with the good shit.
I hate rubberband AI no matter what the game.
This is the biggest disappointment about Oblivion to me. Some scaling is necessary, but why not have parts of the world that make you realize “whoah, I’d better buff up before heading there,” and other parts that might be milk runs if you postpone them too long? It’d make for a much more interesting world.
Those Cliff Racers should simply stay away from you. Roads are definitely going to be safer from the wilderness at large. You should rarely see anything on them except bandits. Animals don’t know to prey on those on roads… only the other people know that. It’s just not logical or consistent with what you expect from this largely “realistic” fantasy world.
When you start mixing game with reality the way they have in Oblivion, the gamey things are like these huge festering sores on an otherwise healthy guy. It rips you out of the immersion they’re trying to create, especially since they put in all the physics stuff now.
I see no reason why parts of the map shouldn’t be off limits until I can survive them at higher levels. If you want to be an explorer, you have to be smart enough to know when to run away. Making it so I can just go any old place with this constant level of difficulty just makes all the believability fly right out the window.
I guess I’m basically saying you’re being way too easy on the developers when you give them the benefit of the doubt in this case. They’re the ones raising expectations and then not delivering on them. It’s our job to call them on it, even if the overall experience is still a positive one.
They wanted to deliver a sand box, and that’s what they did. Some people were expecting something different and they didn’t get it. I mean, really, what’s done is done and they aren’t changing it in a patch. Let’s move on.