...or am I doing something wrong?
We all know that in the mainstream RPG environment TES have a bit of a unique leveling system. Not that the "learning by doing" concept is particularly new but the vigor with which they hold on to it and embrace it with every new game is special.
Let's have a look on the main features of this system:
1. Learning by doing for every skill
2. Enemies will level with you or will replaced by stronger enemies
3. Every skill increase counts towards your level
Now, I've played Oblivion and Skyrim for quite a few hundred hours and I found that the combination of those three makes for a horrific outcome for players like me. I will talk about how these individual features are flawed and what kind of horrific outcomes they had for me in combination.
1. Learning by doing
In and of itself not a bad thing of doing things. It seems logical at first. It works just fine for combat skills but as soon as it comes to the more passive skills like smithing, enchanting or alchemy it hits a barrier. These are essential skills for more advanced players who want to squeeze the last bit of power out of their builds. However attaining a high enough skill level in these is tedious and even works against the game mechanics. Gaining XP in these skills means crafting and crafting and even more crafting. Fair enough, but what then? You have to get rid of all the stuff you crafted that you don't need. Seeing how all merchants are generally low on cash makes this arduous. Traveling to all merchants who still have money doesn't really sound like a thing a warrior or a mage might do in their studies. It feels weird and forced. Also all that selling will raise your speech skill if you want it or not. If you don't want it you're fucked. So just dump all the things you made somewhere in a ditch. Yeah, that totally sounds like something a real craftsman would do.
Overall a nice idea but horribly executed and neither fitting with the rest of the skills nor with any reasonable roleplaying.
2. Enemies will level with you
Now I've been an opponent of this kind of system since I first heard of it. I love to play RPGs and I love to grind and get stronger and stronger until I can dispose of anything with a flick of my hand. It gives you a sense of achievement and makes your long journey and hard work to a success.
Leveling enemies will rob you of that success. You will have as much trouble fighting a lowly bandit on level 1 as you will have on level 30. Sure your skills will advance but the overall ratio against practically the same foes will not have risen in the same linear fashion you leveled up. Which robs everything you've done the sense of achievement. It makes leveling up meaningless because everything stays essentially on the same level. Or if you combine this system with the other 2 it will take a reverse path and it will punish you for ever leveling up. But more about that later.
I always found this system to be very very lazy of the developers because it makes it so easy for them to pace the game. No need to think about where to put the strongest creatures. No chance that the player will stumble onto something that he is not yet ready for. I realize that actual pacing in an open world game is nearly impossible but other games have done it and completely without employing such systems.
I will always prefer games that will from the start confront me with impossible to defeat enemies. It gives me something to strive for and makes it easy to create an atmosphere of actual danger around you. JRPGs and a certain other open world WRPG do this very very well.
3. Every skill counts towards your level
This is what pretty much drives the last nail into the coffin of this flawed assembly of systems. This not only destroys a lot of role playing builds but it also easily shows why the systems are so flawed.
If a skill increase in an RPG will make you feel punished, something went completely wrong in the conception of the gameplay mechanics.
TES games are the only RPGs that will make me feel bad about my exploration and curiosity. It will without asking raise stats that I didn't want. It will raise my level even though my combat skills haven't advanced. I've come to a point where I'm dreaded to even touch books because they could raise certain stats that I don't want. Sometimes even certain quests will give you skill increases that you coulcn't have known beforehand(as it is with most books).
Leveling up through skills that you don't want or use is not a level up for you. It's a level up for everyone in the game but you. Which means that exploration and doing quests will make things harder for you even though it should be the other way around.
Now here are 2 scenarios that show the perfect harmony of flawed systems at work that actually made me stop playing the game before I wanted to.
Build 1: Archer/Ranger/Rogue
That one is always my main build I will play first in any RPG. It starts off fair enough when I'm gaining all the important stealth and archer perks I need to have an edge on the field. Lockpicking, Stealth and Archery will go up really quickly until they are maxed out. At that point my combat ability will not advance any more. My dps will stay the same even though the enemies will continue to grow. And I'm not even half through the game. Good thing I'malso great at alchemy so that I can use strong poisons against my enemies. Sadly this also means level increases. That's 9 levels alone from mastering alchemy and several other levels for speech from selling all the useless potions. The poisons won't make up for that level gap. So I'm continuing with the game and will gain more and more skill and level increases that do nothing for my combat ability but great for my enemies' HP and strength.
In Oblivion this was even worse when you had more skills and among that athletics and acrobatics that would level up as you go. In the end in Oblivion I needed more than 20 arrows for simple bandids and up to 50 and more for stronger enemies. Just think about that. A master of stealth, poisons and archery having to go for minutes at a single enemy even though he is employing all skills he has at his disposal. It wasn't as crass in Skyrim but I didn't play this as long as I did Oblivion.
Build 2: Destruction Mage
This one I tried very recently and it made me stop the game even faster.
I went in with all stretegies and trying to focus my XP on very few skills so that I wouldn't have to deal with unnecessary skill increases. Guess what. I mastered destruction magic at level 20, not even a 3rd through the game. The best complementary skill to this was enchanting since it would lower the cost of my spells. But seeing how tedious it would be now to just roam the world and try to find stuff that I could enchant or disenchant didn't really sound like much fun. Even more I lost all desire to even use my magic since it wouldn't increase my level. Killing anyone would gain me 0 xp so why even bother. Combine that with the extremely limited set of destruction spells and there is no positive outlook on the future. I would have to raise my levels even further to gain more magicka to effectively cast the biggest spells but the returns would be minimal and nothing against the level increases my foes would get. At least in Oblivion you could craft your own spells which would've gotten me a lot farther in Skyrim but I had to stop because the outlook on things to come was just not fun.
So in the end we have a game that will punish you for level ups, will make you master any skill long before the game ends and rob you of any sense of achievement while leveling up.
This all wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't a completely feasible alternative to Skyrim. So let's look at a game which is essentially the same but with a proper system.
Gothic (1/2/3)
There we have a vast open world, completely explorable from the start. No self leveling enemies. All enemies from the start have the strength, HP and XP they need to have. A vast range of strength for enemies so you will have formidable foes at any level, even if you mastered your main skill. You will gain XP from EVERY enemy always as you will from quests and even for simple things like discovering new areas on the map. XP are always useful and will allow you to further your skills at select teachers spread out through the world. This even makes away with the illogical "I can learn everything by myself" mechanic. There is no level cap, at least none that would be achievable in less than a few hundred hours. You can increase your attributes indefinitely though there will be deminishing returns. But every XP you gain counts and you will never do anything without reward. Grinding is fun, doing all the quests is fun. You won't get punished for leveling, but you will get kicked in the ass numerous tikmes for not leveling enough.
Basically they found the perfect balance. Why is a 3rd rate developer like Piranha Bytes able to do this but not a hundreds of men strong TES team that has been making games for decades? It's just pitiful. I really wanted to finish Skyrim this time but I don't really see the point anymore.
tl;dr Skyrim nay, Gothic yay!
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