Damn it, I was going to make that point in the comment section of your last review but I found that I just could not be arsed. Damn my sloth like nature. Yes this is true and it's a killer among RPG's sort of the reason why FFVIII is one of my least favourite Final Fantasies. When you don't progress then there's no point in bothering. The whole fun in RPG's (well at least it is for me) is the levelling up, starting off as a little pussy who get's his arse handed to him by rodents, to becoming a demi-god that eat's lightning and craps thunder. Sort of like real-life where your a little child who depends on his mother to get him the cookie jar until you get older, then you are capable of picking up the cookie jar and eating as much the smug bastards as you want. I think boxing (or any other combat sport) is a good example in real life. You come in on your first day of training and get your arse kicked because your a tiny little weakling who hasn't yet learned how to punch, you've not exercised or built muscle so your just fodder for the big boys. Then come a few years later and your the one doing the crushing because of your experience. Now if real life was like oblivion and that every day I trained, the rest of the world got equally as good, then why bother. Why not just sit on my arse eating cheerios and watching porn for all the good it's going to do for me.
Back to FFVIII and Oblivion, with these games it almost seems to be encouraging you not to progress or level, the higher the level you become, the higher the level the mobs become and they even start to out do you. This makes little sense in a world as big as these. Oblivions world is big and is obviously that big for exploration (although most of it looks like the same forest with a few cliffs here and there), however because your best chance of completing this game is to be weak and not fight, what is the point of bothering to explore?. Exploration is going to end with you fighting, which equals levels, which equals a harder difficulty. What would had made sense would had been to have certain areas that were more dangerous to others. Like have one area of the map with dragons and evil tentacle monsters that would be a challenge to even the highest of levelled characters.
I understand that the opposite of this is just as much a killer too, when your levelling up and becoming hard as hell only to realise that your just going to be facing the same levelled enemies over and over again. That means there's no challenge, there's no giant man eating dragon on the other end of that cliff that I need to level up to stand a chance, no there's just a little lizard that I'll just trample under my feet without even bothering to care. We do need a challenge to over come, we do need an actual point to levelling your self to the point where you can punch out God. Otherwise your just bored as hell, chopping away at mindless weaklings, you so powerful that you don't even have to look at the screen to play, You can just hold the joy stick in one, pressing random buttons, while watching T.V, polishing your trophies or doing any other mindless thing that doesn't involve this game. Then at this point your asking your self "Why am I playing this game?" when I could be doing millions of other activities that would be a lot more fun... like watching paint dry... or porn.