Tigranes

Then what's wrong with him? it's kind of hard to NOT get what he is supposed to get on drops. I wonder if the game controls, within its scaled boundary, the enemies' levels. E.g. If you are level 10, you will usually encounter 8-10s in one palce but 10-12s on another? I've seen no evidence of such yet, though.

Only place in Kvatch plaza (the parts after and before that were alright) where you can avoid 5 clannfear chewing your ass off is a spot in a corner where if you do jump in, you're stuck and can't get out (saw Salvius do that). Everywhere else you are slightly less vulnerable, but at the same time your mobility is restricted, making things possibly worse.

10K: Again, one must be conscious of the system's failings and make up for it by juggling around skill uses and whatnot. That is like powergaming to achieve balance, and who wants to do that? I want to be immersed and play. It is a solution for the situation we have, but it is by no means a valid excuse or defence. Nope. Quest rewards also scale to your level half the time, and half of them are gold. Try going into with a level 14 character, 50-60marksman/sneak but 20 blade and 12 blunt, 35 endurance, 45 strength. Or are you going to tell me that I made the wrong decision to make such a character? Cause I thought the point of TES was to let you make any character you want.

Other RPGs rewarded you greatly for doing minor sidequests? I don't think so. (BG1, Exterminate the Rats!) In fact, it's all about the way you play. BG2 was by anyone's standards a large game, and FFVII/VIII had big worlds with lots of pointless sidequests and hidden things (collect 50 of random thing for random reward!!!) and I still did them all, just because I hate missing things. And it's still what I do in Oblivion, I cringe when i see +10 active quests in my journal. Others will play differently. The quest mechanic in Oblivion is not any different. Otherwise, SS, I can understand why Beth valued the ability to go anywhere adn do any quest at any time, and so I understand the reasons for their decisions - and no, it's not terrible or absolutely gamebreaking, but I would definitely suggest that it is the greatest flaw in Oblivion, especially since everybody knows its plot / characterisation / dialogue was never going to be the focus or be any good. The gameplay and exploration / questing is what mattered, and it is severely disenchanting to realise that everything scales to you, because as I said before, Oblivion lets you go anywhere you want - but everywhere you go, is the same.

There is such a system, yes, but it is much tighter than the one you have suggested, as various levelling mod attempts have shown. I can also echo SP's sentiment about the main quest: Whereas in Morrowind people did not like leaving the main quest too late or doing it too early because it was too hard / too easy, Oblivion did not solve that problem. As a sneaky character with some Destruction and Alteration in the mix, I was level 13, having levelled every time it wanted me to - which is indeed the NATURAL thing to do when you are first trying a game. Anyway, about the equipment deal: you have to be X level to get X equipment. So you turn level 10, go to a dungeon to get level 10 equipment, you come out level 12 with level 10 equipment. Then you gotta do it AGAIN. Somebody (SS?)'s suggestion of purposefully levelling slower may work better, but as I said in the Scaling thread, that is an acknowledgement of Oblivion's failings: the system is not natural, and you have to pull from immersion to calculate when and where you want to level up, like when to move to the next level of Mario.

Alternatively, you would be shooting little pixelated aliens crawling on ultra-magnified gazongas.

Right-click on monster: drop-down menu shows Attack, Cast Spell, Some Random Special Ability. Hover Cast Spell to open a dropdownmenu right next to it, showing the available spells targetable at enemy. Right-click on empty tile: drop-down menu shows Move, Cast Spell (for AOE spells), and some random crap. Right-click on neutral or friendly critters: Talk, Pickpocket, etc. Or the Cast Spell one could be divided even further at the first menu. Who knows.

Well, it probably beats somebody else's (successful) attempt at recreating a lesbian position with Havoc... this one is more morbid and more sloppy (thus saving the author a miniscule amount of grace. Wait, no.)

I thought Elder Scrolls was going for the same thing, at least judging by their Level Up messages. "Suddenly everything is crystal clear" and all that. I mean, Oblivion has a mixture of Levelling and By-Use increase, sure, but that's taking away from the actual discussion - scaling. Wouldn't matter what it scaled by, but the fact that it scaled. Everything.

Noes, he stolez it off dar Codex!!11oneoneonelolz.

I thought it was a given that it's much better than Morrowind. :/ Then there are the locked chests - if they are too hard for you you know you'l never remember to come back and spend 10 mins in an empty dungeon looking for it, and they are never to hard anyway because the minigame lets you open anything at Security 1, except it's not worth it anyway because at low levels you break 2 picks to find 1 pick inside.

Having to NOT level up on purpose when the game wnats you to, just so that you don't break it, is not "playing properly". It's breaking immersion to purposefully manipulate the external character system in order to keep the playing field at a reasonable (not good) level. It might be the best we've got for now, but it's certainly not satisfactory.

And the game is still a hell of a lot better than Morrowind. And you can still rob shops blind at night witha little skill.

I'd say the mind operates faster skimming a vertical/horizontal menu than a circular one. Of course, I always played with pause like I do with IE games.

The problem with Oblivion's scaling, specifically, was that: -> At any given level, you will rarely (if ever) be handed challenges much below your level, or much above your level. This has the effect of making all enemies pretty much the same Pack of Challenge wrapped in a different texture, and it really feels like the world is levelling up Platform-style. -> Your progression, level/stat/skill wise and equipment wise is always the same. You are robbed of the delight of discovering powerful weapons at an early level, and later on they just become all too common - problems which persist even in RPGs without scaling, but become worse here. I guess this was to fix MW's unbalanced nature (too powerful too early), but this is by no means a perfect solution. I would have been satisfied if Oblivion still had pockets of areas where monsters *were* much more powerful than you so that you had to run the hell out of there, in general a greater standard deviation rate in levels for both monsters and loot. It is also unkind on Oblivion's limited varieties of monsters to put forth only a few at a time: it's kind of silly when the 10th dungeon you go into has the same exact monsters, just a bit stronger. And no, there is no "slider". Mods are attempting to solve the issues by tweaking with variables, but some of the level scaling fixes seem to screw up quests.

I have been at 70%, only lowered it for the said Clannfear mob which you canNOT run from. There is no way to dodge about 4-5 power lunges at once. The problem is that raising difficulty raises HP, and I really don't like that. Unless I am able to hit multiple sneak attacks, fricking skeletons/zombies take +20 arrows in the face before falling over. The main plot is a little further on for me now, but it's still fairly unbelievable, removed from the game and with bad dialogue. I mean, why is there absolutely NO chaos in the imperial city or ANYWHERE ELSE? There is no reaction to Septim's death and the alleged destruction of the Imperial dynasty except for stupid RAI conversations. You'd think you could participate in some nobles attempting to coup into power or something. Nope. Maybe Oblivion gates wreaking hell everywhere later on would do something. Nothing so far.

The dialogue could easily have been written by half the regulars on this board. If you gave me the plot, etc, basically what i have to write about, voila. It doesn't take much to write "Your etiquette is refreshing". Wait, you're right, it DOES. I could never write that and live with myself. Not using horses at the moment, it chugs my system bad and the animation looks weird to me. Rescuing Kvatch at level 14, and I finally had to scale down difficulty from 60-70: there is no way I can kill a mage, a fire atronach and 4 clannfears in a small space with no place to hide, after the imperial guards die in 2 seconds. (Thief-mage char)

Never even found one for sale. The helmet that is. Most enemies don't seem to helmets, only cuirass/greaves/gauntlets set and some random boots. I'm still wearing clothes because my armour skills are crap (wonder why) and I like hitting things with sneak attack 5 times until they die. (In some places). Found a dungeon in the Skingrad-Kvatch region, its' absolutely fricking huge (my feather items/spells give me about 200 free space, and i had to make 5 runs to get all the most valuable stuff). There's also a nice boss battle vs a mage.

Level 158 Rats!

1st SS: I must point out that the house in the foreground is... well.. crap. Especially the lit window. 2nd SS: The grass also appears 2D and of even lower pixel quality than Oblivion. At least we're not in first person to have it shoved in the face. 3rd SS: The tree branches are low quality and clip into the air. Either Obisidian is a lot more honest, or this isn't looking as impressive as previous screenies. Oh well, its just grafikz. The interface comments sound a lot like what I've always thought was ideal for RPGs. (Except horizontal not vertical drop down menu. ) Good stuff.

Why do you avoid levelling? You don't want high level opponents? (Apparently at 25+ lions are super-powerful and all the bandits wear elven/daedric/glass armour. Jumping from 12 to 13 I suddenly see dwarven axes everywhere.) At least I have a loot scaling mod. Oh, the plane of Oblivion is a piece of crap. It looks crap, it's not scary, and all you do is fight. Like a half-assed dungeon.

So once you reach master in your primary skills, your level is capped right? Also, stealing is still easy. I'm level 13 and 52 sneak, managed to rob half the shops in Imperial City blind, but I still can't get good weapons, and am forced to skip dungeons with the stupid will-o-wisps until I can find somewhere to spend my 3000 gold on. :/

Each city has somebody that sells a house. In Imperial City, go to the marketplace district and the Imperial Commercial Office or something. In most of the outlying cities it is the Count in the Castle that sells the house. There is also a mod out that places Dimension Pockets (bag of holding) or Chests in Guilds that are NOT "looted" by NPCs. Use Search function in elderscrolls.com/forums.

Yeah. I'm level 12 or something, done ~20 quests and cleared ~10 dungeons, no fast travel except for a couple of fedex quests (Go to Chorrol. Talk to A. Go to Cheydinhal. Talk to B. Come back to Chorrol. Talk to A. Quest Ding.) and a couple of loot trips... I got about 2-3 magic weapons worth using, and that's just +5 frost damage or something. How the crap am I supposed to kill Will-o-wisps when it takes at least 30 hits of my Dwarven Arrows or Firebolt? And no, I don't want to readjust difficulty level back to normal. EDIT: By the way, is there any way to get Alchemy Recipes off people or whatever? So far the only way I know of making potions is clicking one ingredient, then clicking the next slot to see if I have anything that combines together. And a stolen recipe for... Cure Disease.

Yes, I understand that. Such as when people say "I can only speak to friends concerning this matter". I can understand that for some particular quests you would need 80+ disposition, but you seem to imply that this is commonplace: and seeing as I've visited every major city and have completed over 25 quests, you'd think that I would have noticed if that was the case. I haven't seen a single quest where, for ANY part of the quest - starting, wringing information, persuading them, whatever - that you needed such a high disposition. Certainly not so high that you need to bribe. Hell, in one quest I was given a Charm scroll to use to persuade a person, but I just speechcraft'd to max disposition and it worked fine. I can't remember if it was 80+ in Morrowind, but my point is you usually don't need to bribe. EDIT: Some can be persuaded up to nearly 90, it seems. I never had to go over 75 though. It might be that you have been focusing your enquiries in, say, the Imperial City. And you might have a lower Personality. It also hurts disposition if your weapon is drawn. 8 quests probably aren't a very good sample, but it's a pity you have to bribe so early in the game when gold *is* scarce.