Oblivion's leveling system: Was it really so terrible?

[ChupathingyX]

Yeah I always thought Oblivion had a terrible leveling system.

It felt more like you were being punished for leveling up than rewarded. Plus once you gained a high enough level certain enemies, armours and weapons just disappeared from the game and you were pretty much forced to use whatever was the most powerful.

I don't understand the logic behind your point. You WANT to use low leveled weapons, fight low leveled enemies??

No it just doesn't make sens ehow those things disapear in the game. Somehow every marauder and bandit now have access to the most powerful armour and weapons in the land and wolves, rats and minor goblins are now extinct. Once you reach a certain level what was once the rarest armour in the game is now just the next ruin or bandit encampenet away.

Plus the whole sleeping was stupid also. You could grind your ststas up and enever sleep and eventually become a powerful character with nothign to fear...and you were still level 1.

I think it's better to have more preset enemy levels and character weaponry than scaling stats. If I meet a monster that's tougher than me, I want to become stronger than it, come back and kill it. Not enouncter it, train, come back only to find it has just become stronger than before.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

The leveling system worked perfectly fine. The scaling system worked perfectly fine. The problem was that the two, when combined were utterly broken. The problem basically is this: the leveling system rewards players for using abilities. Thus a player can decide at some arbitrary point that they'd like to use a mace rather than a sword (for example) and simply pick one up and go to work. This however introduces a problem: since enemies scale, suddenly you're all but incapable of harming the most basic foes and combat becomes incredibly tedious.

This special case isn't even the end of it all. If one plays the game as it desperately wants you to play (as a sword wielding heavy armor wearing dude who uses magic for little more than healing) you will naturally level up 6 distinct skills: blades, heavy armor, block, athleticism, armorer and acrobatics. This unfortunately means that, at certain points, you are suddenly ill prepared to face common foes (generally at intervals of five as this is when enemy types dramatically improve. Wolves become timber wolves for example). This leads to absurd spikes in difficulty when suddenly enemies take dozens of your most powerful swings to take down while you can only sustain a few yourself.

There are certainly ways around this problem of course but this demonstrates the real flaw of the systems. Players simply become less concerned with playing the way they want to play (the premise of the leveling system in the first place) and instead seek options that more or less break the game. A stealthy marksman with decent alchemy and chamelion armor can literally beat the entire game without once taking a hit and can kill almost any foe in a single shot (either from the fact that you deliver hundreds of pure damage with the arrow or because of the significant health drain over time from a strong poison). Someone can manipulate the magic system to the point that single spells that can be cast as often as they want are capable of delivering thousands of points of damage.

Worse still, the game continues to level enemies long past the point at which the player stops improving in their abilities. At best armor will absorb 85% of damage delivered and the most powerful sword in the game delivers a mere 45 points of damage in a swing. If one keeps playing the game long term, they are eventually forced to exploit the various systems in order to compensate

Between the two systems we see a fundamental failure in both. Scaled enemies do not offer enhanced difficulty: they simply force exploitation. The leveling system does not offer freedom of choice, it simply lets the player freely exploit. The player is thus left with two choices: play the game honestly and be annoyed by tedious (even if you don't find it difficult, that it might take more than a minute to defeat a common enemy is rather dull) nature of combat or exploit the game and be rewarded with a world devoid of any danger.

 

[b1zarr0]

leveling system? no it wasn't terrible

it was the fact that the enemies scaled with you thus negating any leveling is what made it annoying

 

[Gaiseric]

I didn't care for it.

edit: also what the guy said above me.

 

[meece]

It was good. Got me to sleep in some random places (and not so random in the case of The Bloated Float) and discovered that was the trigger for some interesting quests. The fact I needed to find a bed to sleep in didn't really faze me, it was just the way it was. Since there were beds everywhere it was hardly a challenge to find one.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

I can honestly appreciate the frustrations that inevitably arise with set levels for mobs/gear/dungeons/etc.

I also think these frustrations postively pale in comparison to the intense boredom I experience with level scaled games. I'd much rather stumble upon the occasional stupid-easy quest or impossibly tough monster than spend dozens of hours slogging through a gameworld with no sense of place or progression.

Edit: I played Oblivion as a pure mage. It was a royal ***** until I gained access to the arcane university, at which point I created a suite of incredibly efficient and, well, broken spells. Tri-element, damage over time, touch nukes, with summons to distract all my enemies = all combat trivialized.

 

[PixelKing]

From the way I played I was lv 25 without any top-set armours so I had to glitch the game to be able to do most quests.

 

[distended]

The leveling system worked perfectly fine. The scaling system worked perfectly fine. The problem was that the two, when combined were utterly broken. The problem basically is this: the leveling system rewards players for using abilities. Thus a player can decide at some arbitrary point that they'd like to use a mace rather than a sword (for example) and simply pick one up and go to work. This however introduces a problem: since enemies scale, suddenly you're all but incapable of harming the most basic foes and combat becomes incredibly tedious.

This special case isn't even the end of it all. If one plays the game as it desperately wants you to play (as a sword wielding heavy armor wearing dude who uses magic for little more than healing) you will naturally level up 6 distinct skills: blades, heavy armor, block, athleticism, armorer and acrobatics. This unfortunately means that, at certain points, you are suddenly ill prepared to face common foes (generally at intervals of five as this is when enemy types dramatically improve. Wolves become timber wolves for example). This leads to absurd spikes in difficulty when suddenly enemies take dozens of your most powerful swings to take down while you can only sustain a few yourself.

There are certainly ways around this problem of course but this demonstrates the real flaw of the systems. Players simply become less concerned with playing the way they want to play (the premise of the leveling system in the first place) and instead seek options that more or less break the game. A stealthy marksman with decent alchemy and chamelion armor can literally beat the entire game without once taking a hit and can kill almost any foe in a single shot (either from the fact that you deliver hundreds of pure damage with the arrow or because of the significant health drain over time from a strong poison). Someone can manipulate the magic system to the point that single spells that can be cast as often as they want are capable of delivering thousands of points of damage.

Worse still, the game continues to level enemies long past the point at which the player stops improving in their abilities. At best armor will absorb 85% of damage delivered and the most powerful sword in the game delivers a mere 45 points of damage in a swing. If one keeps playing the game long term, they are eventually forced to exploit the various systems in order to compensate

Between the two systems we see a fundamental failure in both. Scaled enemies do not offer enhanced difficulty: they simply force exploitation. The leveling system does not offer freedom of choice, it simply lets the player freely exploit. The player is thus left with two choices: play the game honestly and be annoyed by tedious (even if you don't find it difficult, that it might take more than a minute to defeat a common enemy is rather dull) nature of combat or exploit the game and be rewarded with a world devoid of any danger.

Agreed.

I'm currently a level 7 on my first Oblivion play through, and taking down an enemy quite often consists of simply standing behind it and backstabbing until it's dead. Apparently my sneak is so high relative to my level that even after shoving a longsword into someone's back, he still has no idea where I am. This is just one example of the many ways the gameplay can break.

The biggest challenge Oblivion offers is trying to make the gameplay balanced, which is simply an unpleasurable metagame that certainly doesn't help immersion.

 

[Byere]

I personally liked it.

I know people are bitching about it being too realistic for a fantasy game, but all I can think of with skill point systems is "Hey hey, you leveled up by killing enemies with your sword. This some how makes you much better at running and picking locks!"
Skill points, while good in some games, just don't feel right all of the time.
As for myself, I ended up using the Dark Brotherhood leather for the whole game from the moment I got it and using a bow and my backstabbing power to snipe out every enemy before they even spotted me. Kinda takes the fun out of it all, but it gave a true feeling of power to be able to stealth kill any enemy (bar bosses) in a single hit.