It's alright, but it's broken as hell. The game has far more problems than its leveling though.

Skyrim is open world. Please tell me how you make a world that allows you to go into some random dungeon and expect it to be a challenge and not have a leveling system like it does. Skyrim is not some linear game like other RPGs where areas you conquered in the past are dead and useless because you've already beaten it.

Skyrim's world is ALIVE. Previously conquered areas are filled again with stronger and stronger enemies because survival of the fittest is a real thing. As you reign destruction upon the world, the world evolves with you because you are killing off all the weaklings!

Yes you can have varying degrees to this and mods have done this better than the vanilla where some places are hard leveled way above where you could possibly be at the beginning or mid part of the game. Still in the end you end up with a world that generally has all areas in the game still on part with you.

As for some of the other skills being tedious to level up. Welcome to RPGs in general. Seriously any game that has skill leveling tradeskills is tedious or so easy/useless its dumb. I choose harder over the easier.

It's far from perfect too. I had to abandon my first playthrough of Dark souls as I had made it too difficult for myself. Not knowing he importance of upgrading gear I spend all my souls on levelling, levelling the wrong stats as well. Since the amount of souls you need to level further follows an exponential curve I had basically gotten myself stuck, not being able to use the weapons or spells I needed to advance further. They fixed that with DS2 with an option to reset you character.

Matchmaking in Dark souls was simply broken. I got invaded by people with end game or ng+ gear and abilities while I wasn't even a third of the way on my first playthrough. Same with summoning a co-op partner. I usually ended up with someone already on ng+ or beyond destroying the boss I had been working on for half an hour in 10 seconds.

When you use it right it works great however. Much better than grinding skills in Oblivion or Skyrim and getting put at a disadvantage for it. Plus the loot scaling devalues finding something special or making anything new yourself as well.

Where did I credit Bethesda? I even said, vanilla Bethesda games are overrated. It's the mods that make them amazing.

You didn't its just fyi.

I really dislike the level scaling... It might be part to why i found skyrim to be extremely underwhelming.. I am much more of a fan of fallouts sytem where you just have to stay clear of certain areas untill you are strong enough.. I disliked dead island for that very same reason

You sure you played Oblivion? Because if you remembered it, you probably wouldn't complain as much about how bad Skyrim's levelling system is. I mean, at least Skyrim doesn't encourage you to auto run into a corner any time you go AFK.

elder scrolls are garbage when it comes to rpg mechanics, combat. The loot system is also terrible, most overrated rpg's ever.

as others have said, it's completely open world.
They want you to go any place on the map at any time with any level.

With scaling, enemies are somewhat posing a challenge throughout the game. You frequently visit some of the areas/cities (Whiterun for example) to advance in the main quest or doing all the side quests and other dungeons.
What's the point if they don't scale and you already went to other regions and then come back to do the remaining side quests only to see that the enemies are 10 levels below yours?

I *could* agree with irstupid's idea that enemies should have a level range, but that already makes the game more linear.

I though it was alright but it takes a while to get used to. Brilliant game, even on PS3 although the framerate could of been better.