The power of nostalgia grips us all somewhere along the line. I mean, who hasn't at least dozed off a little bit in their seat to that sweet series of serenades from Soule his self. Gah I've been feeling a play through coming on for some time now
Wow, this is beautiful. As a teen playing this game, I didn't realize there was a difficulty slider, so I gave up and just watched my dad beat it to know where the story went. My dad, meanwhile, had a handwritten spreadsheet that he took notes on in order to level with maximum efficiency. And you know what? He beat it multiple times, with different builds. The man was a machine. Now I'm considering trying to play it again, vanilla, and do the efficient leveling trick just to see if I can pull it off.
There's something subtly wholesome about this, as the torch passes from father to son. Good luck if you try it. I just started replaying the game for the first time in about 12 years, am at level 8, and already helplessly underpowered.
there's a nice mod that lets you pick up a book called "Skill Diary" right at the exit from imperial Sewers. It keeps track of your skill gains. Very usefull.
efficient leveling is super easy, you can skip the spreadsheet part by using the ''skill diary redone'' mod that tells you how many skill-ups you did for the current level to help you keep track of it. Also max out endurance over anything else ASAP when making a new char, enjoy
You don't need mods. You don't need spreadsheets. You don't need "efficient" leveling. Each time you level up, train a skill that levels your primary damage stat that is not a primary skill. Like if you're using sword, use a blunt trainer. That's it. You're now keeping pace with damage, +3 is perfectly viable, and you can do whatever you want on regular difficulty.
@@shadowmystery5613 Except Morrowind doesnt have level scaling, and as a result any character can recover and will become powerful. In Oblivion, basically any character not efficient leveling will get shat on
@@donutismz6760 Exactly. It amazes me that people like the idea of everything levelling up with the player. Take an rpg like mm6. When you've put a few hours in you go back to the starting area and just rip through everything, it really makes you feel your progress.
@@donutismz6760 level scaling is not fundamentally the problem... the problem is maximizing those +5 while minimizing the leveling of other skill not contributing those +5.
You know what really bugged me in Oblivion? The character classes all have these amazing drawings, I wanted to BE that Wizard with the long gray beard. Guess what? No beards.
I will always remember that the official strategy guide for Oblivion began the section on leveling by saying: “Are you sitting comfortably? Not hungry or thirsty? Good. Now, this is going to be really difficult to get through, and we don’t like it anymore than you will, but take some notes, try and keep up, and you’ll almost get this in no time.”
My end-game Oblivion character was nearly unkillable and by sheer miracle I managed to mostly stay on top of the damage curve, but every now and then I'd run into a goblin with like 10 billion health.
I fuckin' backpedeled across half of Cyrodiil trying to kill a goblin that was attacking a farm or some shit, because MY dumb ass leveled up too much by spamming Restoration magic and as a result the rest of the game had gotten disproportionately stronger as I gained no combat ability at all. >_>;;
currently on my first ever playthrough of oblivion and i accidently made my character into a wobbuffet, can just stand there and get slapped around as the enemies kill themselves because i was like... "ima stack all the spell reflect and damage reflect items i can get" and honestly... i don't regret it, it's absolutely hilarious.
I used to summon skeleton and kill it with preffered weapon or magic near the exit from sewer, wait an hour if mp is out and repeat. Takes some time, but when I lvl up enough, I then go to Proxy Inn which is nearby (up the road) and kill everyone in it and take their equipment, usually it is an elven armour set or even glass, one guy has chameleon enchanted parts, and third one was mage or something like that
A good way around this was to have conjuration in minor skills with one of those birth signs that give you decent magicka Or just have quest bound characters run around with you on separate quests Ally units levelled up just as much as the enemies and took the edge away from the broken stat differences
"It probably seemed like a good idea at the time." To my knowledge all TES games used this exact same system until Skyrim. The only difference between Oblivion and previous TES games was that the world leveled up with you, and THAT (IMO) is what broke TES's level system. In Morrowind, for instance, not leveling up efficiently just meant you may need to earn a couple more levels before entering that dungeon than if you were being efficient.
It is possible in Morrowind to max all class skills without maxing your attributes, but there were ways to lose skills and keep leveling if you needed to.
I agree. In Skyrim, for example, if you prioritize leveling up your _crafting_ skills first then you will level up and so will enemies and potentially you will be at a disadvantage in combat ... BUT they don't scale in real time, so you can still catch up with whatever you ARE able to do, even if it means returning to previous areas which you discovered at lower levels in the meantime.
@@Turd_Rocket It is a very simplified leveling system, but still a leveling system. You increase your health magic or stamina when ever you level up and certain quests aren't available until you reach a certain level. You don't possess stats, which is a problem, but you do have skills that can be different each play through.
Enemy scaling in Oblivion is an absolute nightmare. I get that they did it so the challenge doesn't disappear but you barely feel like you're more powerful unless you use cheats or exploits, in which case you are the one god above all. I am walking around and this highwayman in part glass part daedra armor is trying to shake me down for a bunch of gold. Bruh, your equipment is expensive enough to buy a house wym you want 100 gold?
That reminds me of when I reached a certain level (25 or 30 I think) and suddenly almost every bandit was clad in daedric armor or glass. It was ridiculous
Yeah, my first character got to level 50ish but was super weak because I didn't really understand the leveling system all that well which made the game annoyingly hard the first time around. Second time around was a lot better. I built a spreadsheet for the task and kept track of all my minor skill leveling so I always got the +5 attributes for the stats I wanted as well as selecting major skills that were easy to control (not things like acrobatics or Athletics that would passively level all the time). Also found some really good items on the second run which allowed me to stack reflect damage to 100% so I only had to worry about spell damage from that point, being atronach birth sign helped there.
@@TheotherTempestfox I remember playing it on the PS3 when I was a kid and struggling even though I was doing everything I thought the game wanted to me do with the leveling up. Wonder why it was so hard haha.
@@Glassandcandy They tried to teach us a few times in different classes, but I failed miserably because I couldn't even give half-effort into trying to understand it.
7:20 Wow, I actually remember playing this game back in the day with a spreadsheet where I kept track of every skill and planned on what skills to level up and in what sequence. Every time I leveled I would go back to the spreadsheet and compare and plan on the next level and repeat over and over and over and over.
Did the same. It was bonkers how much thought you could put into planing. Even such things as your potential max level. Luckily I am that type of gamer that likes planing, so it didn't take the fun out of the game for me.
It sounds really tedious, but knowing how good RPGs can be, especially those from the 2000s, the golden age of games, I assume the experience and the memories are worth it. As a kid, I had the luck of playing both KotOR games and the Gothic series, which are much easier in regard of leveling and character building.
High level in WoW: back to retail, noob! High level in KoA Reckoning: Why won't you die, damage sponge? High level in Gothic: pull a bully Maguaire moves. High level in VTMB: still stuntlocking every enemy.
Another fun fact about the leveling in this game is that skills like armor and blunt don't scale with difficulty. That is, the amount of hits needed to level up is the same no matter what difficulty you're on. This means that on low difficulties your armor stat levels up faster than your other combat stats becuase you can take more hits. Turn up the difficulty and you'll have to hit more to kill things, which will cause that stat to level up faster. It's a truly bonkers system.
Had an aneurysm reading that. I may be slightly tipsy but it was still extremely hard to get the gist of it. May I ask for a tl;dr for square brain lads such as yours truly?
Attack/defense skills give flat exp per hit, damage doesn't matter. Since you attack more/less on different difficulties, the skill levels get imbalanced easily.
So that's why they changed it in Skyrim so it's based of how much damage you do. Example: an enemy has 100 hp, in novice mode you oneshot it, on legendary you require 10 hits. In both difficulties you get the same exp because you did 100 damage in both cases.
loved how Endurance isnt retroactive so if you didnt max it out early you missed out on a big chunk of hp depending how long you waited to max it, none of the other attributes act like this either
At least in Arena, you could do the Oghma Infinium quest very early and max out your END at like level 4. I isn't really necessary, though, since each class's hit dice is pretty reasonable. (Maybe assassin and rogue, because they're melee thief subclasses with a hit die of only 8. That, however, is an oversight caused by the thief classes all having swapped around hit die from what the manual and common sense say. I have uploaded a fix for this to the Nexus, though, so it's a non-issue as far as I'm concerned.)
You forgot to mention the fact that monster health pools become absolutely rediculous at higher levels too (although your clips showcased this issue quite well). Even as a properly leveled character, all enemies are extremely tedious to kill unless you use other exploits like enchanting
poisons and spellcrafting, make a poison that does damage AND gives weakness to poison. same with spells, the least encountered magic resistance is shock, so make a spell that does shock damage and weakness to shock 100% for the same duration.
@@creativename6126 It does get a lot worse as you level up though. End game monsters take lie 100 regular attacks where as early monsters take maybe 5-10
@@MaMastoast The only way to really combat this issue is to efficiently level or install a leveling mod as well as one that removes leveled gear from bandits and in-turn buffs them +10 plvl balancing everything out.
"How the game plays is central to the experience and everything else is just icing." Too many people seem to forget this. I see soo many praises for the graphics or the shiny new systems at play in new games meanwhile it's all so boring to interact with. Go ahead make a game. Make a bad game even. Make a fucking terrible one. Just don't make it boring. Don't get me wrong. Innovation is not bad. It should continue. It must continue. Just don't forget it needs to be fun.
And not only is Oblivion itself a fun game, it’s brokenness actually makes it better in my opinion. I always have a good laugh when some random npc gets stuck walking in a wall.
@@rmbwemanplays5567 that's what the console is for (and if you play on anything but PC your game will die at 100 hours/200 hours/400 hours anyway thanks to the a-bomb bug bethesda never fixed, just delayed, so PC or not getting attached to your saves it is)
I recently discovered the Oblivion XP mod and I'd totally recommend it. Though it does *COMPLETELY* change how leveling works so it may not be everyone's cup of tea. Basically, it makes the leveling system more like that of Fallout 3. You gain xp through discovering locations, completing quests, killing enemies, etc. Once you have enough xp to level up, you're given a set amount of points that you then add to your attributes and skills. It's super customizable and it has made leveling actually something I look forward to.
Yeah, Oblivion XP and Realistic Leveling are both pretty good overhauls for the leveling system. +5 mods are a little closer to vanilla but not quite as streamlined. I tend to recommend the overhauls for anyone who's played the game previously though.
If I ever play Oblivion, i'll have to use it. Because my god does this look like a headache. There's making level ups need more thought... and then there's pulling a Shadowrun. Also, do you have the name of the mod you use?
Ive played both skyrim, fo3. fonv, and morrowind, and enjoyed the games. Started playing oblivion to fill in the hole, and oh boy it is fucked. I will be using the XP mod for sure, fighting daedric goblins and bandits just doesnt make sense... I understand they want to keep some challenge, but that should've been done in a balanced manner, their idea and way of execution is just ridiculous
I hate how every single bandit shows up with glass armor and daedric weapons when you're high level, like wtf? Isn't that supposed to be extremely expensive? Why are you even a bandit? I made a small mod that removes anything better than steel and leather armors and silver weapons from bandits and marauder's leveled lists.
The saddest part about Oblivion's leveling system is that even though I know it's awful and unbalanced, my brain still tricks me into thinking if I jump back into Oblivion and make a new character with the correct (class-wise) major skills, somehow I can outpace the NPCs and still be an effective force in combat, and it works...until like, level 8 or 9, and then reality sets in and I realize Oblivion is best played with a calculator and not a dreamcatcher.
@@heloxiii8894reading these comments blows my mind, I beat this game back in 2006 without fully understanding the systems on my first play through. Now as an adult I can 2-3 shot everything (100% weakness to magic/shock, then a shock attack or enchanted weapon)
@@paperboy8708 you guys clearly haven't played with crazy spells and enchantments, you could make spells that make an enemy weak to magic and at the same time deal crazy amounts of magic damage, pair it with another weakness to magic spell and everything would crumble... including yourself if they had spell reflection
Whenever I play Oblivion these days I install a mod called "Damage Rebalance". It's very simple - all it does is multiplies the damage the player takes by 20. Then you can crank down the difficulty slider, until you can 1-shot enemies from sneak or 3-hit enemies regularly. You'll also die in 2-3 hits, sometimes in 1 hit. Solves the issue of having to choose between "enemies deal normal damage but I need to slash them 66 times to get them to half HP" and "Ok nice now I can 2 hit enemies but THEY need to hit me 66 times to get me down to half HP".
As I came from Morrowind, I had extensive knowledge of the leveling system. still prefer the +5 mod in both games, less of a headache than keeping meticulous track of level gains. However, Oblivion is not only horribly balanced around the leveling system, even if you powergame your character, you do not gain any relative strength, you simply manage to keep up. While I needed 5-10 swings with a sword in Morrowind at the start to kill a skeleton, when my stats and skills are maxed, that same skeleton will fall in a single strike. In Oblivion, no matter where on the curve I am, I have to hack way at enemies just like it was on level 1, still under the assumption I powergamed perfectly and my relevant skills & stats are maxed. THAT is what makes Oblivion feel so bad to play, not to mention the punishments you receive if you started certain quests early and thus get a useless reward at the end, unless you waited till level 45(?) or so.
Yeah I don't use a 5 atr mod in Morrowind because the enemies don't level with you and therefore perfectly efficient leveling is not necessary. You can be a very inefficiently and casually created character in Morrowind and still body everyone in late game. Oblivions level scaling is what ruins the system
+5 isnt really needed in Morrowind. Scaling is VERY limited (a few enemies in the overworld are replaced by slightly stronger versions, and weak enemies like cliff racers spawn more often), so efficient leveling doesnt matter that much. The reason it's so important in Oblivion is because Oblivion had almost exclusively leveled enemies.
I had played Morrowind before so when I first played Oblivion I did treadmill leveling stuff like running up to the top of the wall at the Blades HQ and jumping off and healing and repeating it over and over while watching tv and such. So then when I started traveling around eventually, oblivion gates were spawning all over the place but even worse were the constant bear attacks and eventually I saw a gate spawn and a bear started fighting the demons and won. You don't need to defend Cyrodil from the daedric invasion, bears will handle it.
The bears had one cheat attack that they would use in a rapid span. It was that lounge attack where it would also daze you at the same time. I died many times from that because they could keep doing it till you died. You had to either attack them from a distance or try to stay behind them. Trolls were another issue because they were like the fastest enemy in the game. You couldn't really outrun them.
Oblivion did indeed have a huge influence on all the singleplayer-rpgs to come. What i find interresting is that the lord of the rings movies had a huge influence on the looks of oblivion: Elven architecture on the ayleid ruins, mordor on the planes of oblivion etc.
My experience with Oblivion goes hand-in-hand with the Leveling Problem. - Play mage - Specialize in conjuring - Slowly climb skills - Finally become master conjurer - Learn Summon Dremora Lord - Sic dremora lord on bandits - Dremora lord gets wrecked by 2 basic bandits - Uninstalled game then and there and have not played since
My dad got screwed. He followed the efficient leveling guide and once he had 96-100 in all but 2 skills, he couldn't level up at all. Punished for playing the intentional way
Oblivion is actually not a good game. Between Morrowind and Skyrim it fails at both things, in which both games had been better, by watering down the complexity and details of Morrowind and not reaching decent grafic or animations like in Skyrim.
There's also the Oblivion XP mod, wich instead of increasing skills levels based on usage, will give XP to monsters, quests and others things, and you just gain XP, fill the bar, then on level Up you choose get Attribute points and skill points to distribute. You can then simply put the points where you want. No more doing weird actions and repetitive stuff to lvl up a certain skill or act out of character if you're into Role playing to get certain skills and stats to a certain lvl to stay efficient.
Yeah, I've heard good things about it. I suggested the +5 stats mod because it's the closest to the "true" experience, but definitely not the most elegant solution.
Oblivion XP is sort of a good solution, but not optimal. It's outdated and hasn't been updated for a looong time. I played with that mod and there were some problems where I got too much experience for easy tasks like picking a lock or way too much for finishing a simple quest, which would result in me getting lots of levels without really having seen anything of the game yet. That is why I'd personally recommend Ultimate Leveling, a mod made by Maskar. It also has an experience leveling mode which is in my opinion far better than that of Oblivion XP. His mod has many tweaks that can be made for personal preference and different modes to choose from. Lots of variety. Or just go with the default, it's already very good.
@@EphiTV morrowind's madd leveler strikes a better balance (it's on nexus.) I'd love that in oblivion. The monsters thing is less fun to me since you can't just infinitely level in town which is one of the funniest and coolest things about tes to me when you set it up right.
@@zeratultemplar6604 I found a glitch with oblivion xp: everytime you equip the grey fox's mask ( I don't remember its name) and unequip it you gain 10.000 xp
You dont need any mods, imo the best strategy is to just level up at your own pace. Not every time that level-up icon pops up, but every time you want more challenge. It just means you cant sleep often which doesnt impact the game much. I stopped at level 20-25 when i played it, never had to lower the difficulty slider, i even maxed it out at the end of the game. Had fun doing daedric quests and main quest line and generally fucking around, it was a good experience. Before that i played it as a kid not knowing how its broken and that sucked though lol.
So funny thing is the previous game in the series Morrowind has the exact same leveling system and guess what you don't have to min max in order to actually play the game. But unlike Oblivion, Morrowind had little to no enemies that scaled with you. If you went into an end game area you will be killed by an end game enemy and vice versa. That means that you can find an area in Morrowind that's too hard for you, leave, level up and then return stronger without being punished for it.
Oblivion having a broken leveling system is one of the things it’s most famous for, and understanding exactly how that works is really interesting! I always tried to make custom classes to suit my play style more and then ended up making the game basically unplayable. Great video!
That's not true. The WORST class would be the one that minimizes your character's power in relation to enemies at any given level. A custom class that maximizes your power makes it the BEST class. The whole "major skills need to be the ones you use most" concept is where players go wrong. People see the word "major" and think those should be the most important skills to their game play. They're only important for leveling. Every skill except Athletics and Mercantile is easy to increase through natural gameplay or spamming, so make your Major Skills the ones that are easiest to control, and then play the game normally. Once you've hit the 5/5/5 or 5/5/1 mark (an Excel sheet makes it really easy) then spam up your major skills and level up. And definitely purchase 5 training sessions on EVERY level because those are invaluable. And save the skill books and Oghma Infinium for the 90+ skill increases.
@@JakeKoenig Stop assuming players are 'wrong', the game literally asks you "What is it that your character does and is good at" and then proceeds to NEVER explain the levelling system. It's just a shit system.
@@UnsuitableBachelor a lot of people beat the game without this level manipulation so you just got filtered and want to complain at people who beat the game? lol
The real evil of it was that this problem only becomes evident after about 50-80 hours of play, and most journalists played it for about 8 hours to review it.
You're implying that journalists even bother to play it for more than a 5 minutes which is entirely unrealistic Everyone knows journalists will give up after 5 minutes due to their own incompetence at the most basic of aspects before giving the game a negative review & saying it's "too hard" or "It's the Dark Souls of (Insert game genre here)"
The way I play now is to build whatever character I feel like, and turn the difficulty slider down a fair whack. After each combat, I decide if it should go up one click or down one click on the slider based on how hard I found the fight. It's a minor chore, but serves as a reasonable balancing system.
after quitting the game twice from it being too hard or too easy based on whether i tracked my stat increases i came back to the game doing this exactly and finally really enjoyed it
@@leonrowe5445 You don't even understand. My dad efficiently leveled until he was maxed (96-100) in all attributes except 2. The game just stopped letting him level up LOL
On my very first playthrough, I left the difficulty as default straight in the middle, and I mostly levelled due to jumping around, sneaking and healing, so I quickly fell victim to the rising difficulty! And I never adjusted the slider so just had to cheese combat by backpedaling with a bow and jumping on top of high rocks (as my jump was so ridiculously high!)
I remember going to the oblivion wiki when I first played the game to see why I’m so weak and ended up with a notebook of leveling bullshit I still have somewhere
Ditto. I drew out a little spreadsheet and kept tallies. It was the most soulless and boring gaming experience I've ever had. When I revisit Oblivion I'm gonna just fix it with a mod.
@boiledelephant man, i'm honestly confused as to why people critize the leveling system, i personally think its very realistic and i like it alot, i think the people who don't like the leveling system are just plain lazy and don't wanna do any work, people almost exaggerate the leveling system saying its hard and insane but to me it doesn't really seem that hard, oblivion was one of the first rpg games i played and enjoyed and the leveling systems of other games seem too easy and almost like a cheat to me since you don't need to put any effort really, from my point of view the people who claim the leveling system is 'insane' they themselves are the ones that are insane yet they do not realize, in oblivion you have to put effort into every skill but as for other games with 'normal' leveling systems you don't have to do half of the work, think about it, if you put a lot of effort in one skill but don't do the same for another but you still magically level up as if you put the same amount of effort into the other skill (which you did not) then isn't that almost similar to cheating? in real life if you work out only your upper body and skip leg day, would your legs be as ripped as your chest/back/arms? no it wouldn't, therefore the oblivion leveling system is realistic unlike other games and *is* superior, just my opinion though.
@@eatabrick personally I don’t play oblivion for the leveling, I play oblivion for the world, the quests and the lore but if you want to keep track of your skills literally all the time with almost no room for error go ahead play the game how you want to play it but I and many other people don’t enjoy that way of playing tip: keeping track of everything with almost no room for error is what strategy games are for, if you like that check them out they are pretty fun, I recommend plague inc. evolved, halo wars, the kingdom rush games and games like them
I played this for the first time around the start of the pandemic and fell into the leveling trap badly. I assumed you could handle enemies non violently and wanted to play as a wily lady thief who could talk her way out of anything so I spent like 5 hours in the imperial city bartering with and stealing from everybody and leveling up mainly my personality and speed. Needless to say when I finally ventured out of town I did not have a good time at all.
Yeah, there's quite a lot of forced combat even with high Personality. Fallout did a bit better job of making Charisma builds possible, but still not ideal.
@@EphiTV Personality is completely worthless as an attribute. It affects nothing. In the rare cases disposition matters the minigame is trivial or you can just bribe your way to the disposition you want.
It does have a couple uses (see en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Personality), but was never fleshed out to be nearly as impactful as the other stats. Unfortunately common for most RPGs, personality/charisma often becomes the worst-choice. Unless you're role-playing something specific for fun, which is totally up to the player.
@@EphiTV Charisma is just that leftover that made it's way into Videogames from it's Roots in Tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. In these games Charisma can be a super powerful choice as long as you have a DM who lets you argue or reason with everyone and everything. So the first RPGs trying to adept DnD obviously tried to adept Charisma as well, which is how Charisma kind of cheated it's way into modern RPGs, even the Combat Focused ones like the Elder Scrolls series, where it's uses were rather liimited. I remember that Morrowind had it's uses for it, because certain Spell Schools were associated to Personality, but in Oblivion it became basically a dumpstat because most combat wasn't avoidable anyway and it made you level up, raising the difficulty without making your charakter stronger, therefore digging a leveling trap for you to fall in.
Yep, it's a dilemma given most RPGs are centered around combat where charisma has little effect. I'm sure some game will get it right eventually, but for now it does end up feeling like a waste in most video games.
As an aside: Morrowind has literally the exact same system of levelling, but since Morrowind is way more sparing with using scaled monsters the potential of falling behind scaled enemies is way less debilitating
@@seawind930 but it's funny in terms of Morrowind because it works for a lore sense. Becoming the Neravarine and challenging the 4 people who scrwed you over by 3rd eye'ing nirn itself
@person person There are a few enemies that don't spawn in the wilderness until you are a certain level eg. Golden saints, but most locations and dungeons are static.
I think one of my "favorite" issues with Oblivion leveling is alchemy. There's this weird sweet spot where you have access to almost (but not all) of the effects for each ingredient so that you can have max freedom to make useful and/or complex potions in many different ways... but... once you have access to all four, it breaks several of the most useful recipes from earlier in the curve. Suddenly, it starts to feel like the best potions now either have to be made with exactly one very specific recipe or they come with negative effects, and it becomes almost impossible to make complex poisons from most ingredients.
Also alchemy completely breaks the economy, you can basically grab ingredients from everywhere, make potions, and sell them for a bunch of cash. Rinse and repeat.
I love alchemy in all TES games. I usually just grind out potions to become rich super early on. It’s the closest you can come to having a real job in TES. like level 60 alc in morrowind rn with a lvl 4 character
I used to prioritize skilling up the passive combat oriented attributes first so that I could have more control over stat ups when levelling other things. This meant wedging myself under the well overhangs to shorten the jump cycle, autorunning into walls, and rebinding block to the space bar so I could huddle in a corner, put a book on the keyboard, and read a novel while a rat attacked me. God damn, what a bizarre way to spend time.
I actually did the efficient level-up method to try to get all attributes up to 100 some time ago... what a miserable experience it was. Literally just grinding and meticulous planning, it's *far* from how the game was intended to be played. I would never, ever recommend anyone ever do it unless they just want something mindless to do for several hours. And somehow I still love this game. Probably going to download the level-up mods linked in the description for the next time I play through the game, lmao
There's no way around having to plan your levels in advance, but there's still some fun to be had there. With a good custom class you can essentially just jump between stealth, magic and physical combat from level to level to keep your stats in check while more or less questing normally. That, and every few levels sell stuff, do alchemy etc. to make money without wasting the mercantile increases. It's basically an excuse to diversify, though obviously you still need to get some enjoyment out of the planning phase.
What I love about Oblivion is that for every broken system that stacks the difficulty against the player, there's another broken system that works in the player's favour. When I was a kid playing for the first time, I remember getting pretty frustrated with how hard the combat started to get in the later parts of the game. Then I figured out that you can enchant 5 pieces of apparel with 20% chameleon each. Enemies can never detect you, plus you get the sneak attack multiplier on every hit. I never ended up adjusting the difficulty, I just went invisible and cheesed everything whenever things got too hard.
I got super lucky and got the mundane ring on a Breton character, and and several pieces of equipment with reflect damage. So my character is essentially unkillable
Morrowind is literaly this dialed up too 11. Everything is broken and is meant to be. You can literaly jump from one side of the map to the other in one jump if you want.
@Synth Oriole yeah. Just maxing to 100 won’t do this. The broken thing in morrowind comes from the fact you can use potions to fortify your alchemy, then make more potions to increase it further on loop to relatively unlimited before crashing the game. At this point you can create a potion to fortify enchanting and then make a completely ludicrous enchantment to speed, strength, etc. so you get ridiculous permanent enchants or temporary fortifications via potions.
The way I combat this, is to make sure I get to lvl 100 Endurance as soon as possible. Because it governs how much HP you get per level, hence your maximum potential health. +5 endurance every level. For other stats, I don't end up caring as much, and I end up picking any that are +3 or more.
My biggest problem with Oblivion was I never felt like I was getting stronger. Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind and Skyrim got that right. It's remarkable how goblins become damage sponges, worse than ogres.
ngl I have only played morrowind,skyrim and oblivion. I can safely say that the only game I felt that I was getting stronger in was morrowind, that I leveled up got better gear and the same enemies didnt just somehow become millionaires and kick my ass. in oblivion I felt like I was getting smarter about it, I was pretty young and didnt really have internet so I played thought it was a bit too easy and raised the difficulity and went on to continue the game and when i inevitably started to have some issues with the enemies becoming to strong because I probably had a slightly less than optimal leveling strat I started to find other ways around how to fight and utilized sneak attacks, poison timing the blocks better conserving potions for more optimal amount of health regain n stuff like that. didnt really have any issue with the game. skyrim however that I had issues with and still do. I never felt like I was getting stronger at all mainly because while the gear enemies used got better and they were of slightly better variants it was still too easy. played it through on legendary a few times and the difficulity of quests never felt higher than the starting tutorial, there was next to no reason to play it again because with one character you could do everything in the game (minor exceptions like the dark brotherhood alternative). slight tangent but yeah I had some issue with how I never felt like i was getting stronger in skyrim because you start out pretty damn strong already, the most useful shouts you were pretty much handed on a silver plater right at the start of the game,you werent really gonna meet some enemy that was too high level for you at any point because they are scaled towards you so if you were weaker they were weaker and depending on playstyle you could pretty much craft the best gear in the game way too early
@@goranpersson7726 The soultion for Skyrim is stay at adept. But you have to take other choices with it. The game was meant to be played at adept, higher difficulties make the game a chore instead of more difficult also it breaks the pacing of npc battles because the reduced damage gets across the entire world instead of just you. Well the solution: - Adept. - No grindstone improvement of weapon-armor, enemies never get improved gear so you shouldnt have access to that. - Bare minimum perks on onehaded, twohanded, marksman to access some special abilities (behead, bow zoom, etc), only one point for example on armsman to access the perk tree, going over 1/5 character does too much damage for that difficulty. - Armor same logic, bare minimum and i would recommend skipping custom fit so you dont get armor rating that high. 200-250 AR is more than enough for endgame armor types. For lore and inmersion i would also skip the perk who make you weight zero and remove the movement penalty. - limit your healthpool depending of the class you plan to build: if you plan to be a barbarian you go 500hp, knight 450hp, paladin 400hp, assasin-hunter 250hp, mage 200hp, necromancer 100hp. - equipment health boost enchants are banned, the only exception are unique items like Amulet of Arkay, etc. - destruction tree have some limits, you are allowed to only boost ocnce the element if you plan to get the turn to ash perk, etc. - chaos enchanted weapon from the regular pool are forbidden. If you wanna use chaos enchant you have to make one with a max magnitude of 15 so instead of doing 30/30/30=90, you roll instead for a max of 45 damage if 3 activate. - for regular elements if you wanna use dual enchant the magnitude gets halved so insead of only one fire doing 30 damage now it becomes 15 and the other 15 can be anything minus chaos of course. - shield charge is ridiculous and is banned, fun at first but breaks the game. - if you go nercromage perk route, never get the dual wielding boosting perks. It gets ridiculous. I would save that necromage perk for actual necromages, so you can go in sunlight to even lower health than 100. - Take the roles somewhat serious, if you go necro you go alone and your only company are most the time strong summons, if you make a death knight you are physically strong so you dont need endgame summons, some mid level or low level are more than enough. If you are assasin you go alone, if you are barbarian you can go with some follower, recommender archer. same as knight. If you are a mage is recommended to have a tanky follower or rely on strong atronachs. This paragraph is more personal but keeping it balanced avoid spoiling the experience. - with these limits imposed before now food, potions become very useful and is nice to run aroud with a decent stock of them for difficult times. If you are paladin you dont need pots.
@@Bourikii2992 You don't even understand. My dad efficiently leveled until he was maxed (96-100) in all attributes except 2. The game just stopped letting him level up LOL. Don't even try to defend this shitter game, sure it's better than Skyrim but you literally can't level up after leveling efficiently
@@wade2112 That's a lie. You don't stop leveling till all attributes are at 100. Efficiently leveling only gives you the max bonus to attributes when leveling.
@@wade2112 yes there is level cap but it's all about (again) how we built our character. It is originally not possible to level up if your all majors 100 level. The only thing you can do is go jail and decrease your major skills. It is another thing breaks gameplay.
The reason I kept decreasing my difficulty, especially in oblivion gates, is because of staggering. It's so broken in this game and you can't do anything other than punch once and step back, which takes ages for enemies that have a lot of health.
@@TheRealZuia Eh... Agility SUPPOSEDLY decreases the chances of getting staggered. However, it will still happen... a lot, especially from those fucking Clannfears the Xivilai summon.
If you're trying to do efficient leveling the "tdt" console command is a lifesaver, shows you how many skillups you had for a certain attribute so that you don't have to keep track of it in your head
I only ever noticed it after my 3rd play through I noticed by waiting to go to kvatch late in the game it makes the spider deadra common when saving kvatch. And all my friendly kvatch guards couldn’t survive lol. It really isn’t a big deal. I noticed it as a 8th grader and never touched the difficulty slider just buy more potions if you made a shiter character
@Charles Pendragon Morrowind is at least tolerable since areas are designated by level instead of scaling and also you can intentionally go to prison to lower stats in order to squeeze in more levels to compensate for inefficient leveling.
Excellent video, I never understood why it was so damn difficult playing on normal all those years ago, but now I do, and I will definitely download that mod for a more enjoyable experience! Thank you!
@@Bourikii2992 You mean, constant melee combat with increasing strength and endurance? Not an option, if someone prefer to play stealthy. Enchanting items is always useful, though, i agree.
@@Maxxon89 My very first oblivion character was a stealthy character. I don't recall turning the game down from normal difficulty once. I was 12 at the time. Stealth is probably the best ways to play in the game. Even with only 15 damage your stealth hits with a dagger so 6x I'm pretty sure.
Duuuuude, now all makes sense. This is exactly why I stopped playing Oblivion. I was tired of getting killed all the time because of overpower enemies and I felt like leveling up wasn't helping at all. Saddly I never could end this game. Thanks for explaining this huge problem.
I barely beat the game, but I chose the strategy of just running past everything in the portals because it got so boring and grindy to fight them, especially since there were so many gates. I liked skyrims dragons more
You could have just swallowed your pride and lowered the difficulty lol. Bethesda games are not played for their difficulty anyways, they’re all horribly balanced and Oblivion is the worst at it.
@@smtandearthboundsuck8400 Call me blind, but I didn't even knew that difficulty bar existed and played a big roll Also, Oblivion is often called one of the best RPGs ever, so how could I guess it had a broken leveling system like this?
I remember way back being too caught up on efficient leveling - and back then I also couldn't do mods as well because I was on console. I basically came to the result of ''The only thing i'm going to perfect level in endurance to 100 first to make the most out of health gains in the early levels, i'll get 100 in the other skills I want later'' Saved me many headaches
The fact he didn't even mention the glacial pace at which skills like restoration, destruction, and mercantile level tho. I remember back in the day trying to play tanky heavy armor restoration build and I literally couldn't get restoration past level 30 without cheesing the game.
@@glowcloudwheatproducts495 yeah, i just connected my Xbox controller to pc and watched some movie. Worst things with oblivion was that it didn't count how much damage you death with weapon, just repetition lol
@DekkyTheAwesome i think you only need like 2 -3 hours to level up a magic skill. Its prob best to just leave it on while you eat or something. I also like only doing it in chunks (maybe like 20 levels at a time) to make my progression seem a bit more natural.
3:00 Okay so... They have a whole system built around increasing difficulty when you get stronger, but instead of using that with the difficulty slider, they... Modify damage only
I remember two things about Oblivion levelling; the skills you use should not be the ones for your chosen class, and at about lvl 5 there's a huge jump in encounter difficulty. You'd go from fighting rats and wolves to trolls and you'd still have rat/wolf scaled gear and spells.
There is another way to slightly mitigate leveling pain: lean extremely hard into major skills at character creation. It actually reduces max level to a point where things can still be managed while still reaching 100 in your most relevant stats. But Oblivion had other interesting design choices. For example, the fact that boosting stamina directly increased damage, and was the only way to increase weapon damage after you reach 100 in the relevant attribute and skill.
@@Izthefaithful Assuming no other boosts from character creation (and ignoring certain gameplay events), maximum character is 53, well beyond where gear is maxed out and far past the point where boosts from stats and skills matter. However, class specialization and race choice both give skill bonuses at character creation, which can drop this into the forties. For examples, a Nord warrior maxes at 46, Altmer mages max at 45, and Bosmer theives can max as low as 43 (assuming the Skeleton key is obtained). Since gear maxes out at 35, and most characters have a major skill or two they don't really use (I know I always have at least one), it brings the finishing character level well within reasonable range for endgame scaling. Combine with the right mixture of signs and favored attributes, and your important attributes may only need 35-40 points to max out (easily obtained over 35 levels). It doesn't completely remove the problem, but it does mitigate the worst part of it. I ran a Nord warrior to about level 18 before I began feeling the level drag, and I wasn't taking full advantage of the magic stones.
Thank you! I’ve never been able to enjoy Oblivion because of the anxiety this leveling system caused me, and you’ve perfectly captured the madness of it.
The problem isnt the leveling system itself but the enemies leveling up as you do and out right changing into more powerful creatures. If Bethesda changed how enemies scaled with you it would not be a problem. Skyrim handles this better as enemies do scale but its at a much more manageable level. Or enemies have a fixed level that does not change. Bandits and others will change but not like what Oblivion did.
check out oscuro's oblivion overhaul if you wanna do away with the level scaling. it basically makes it so that locations are leveled differently. so while you may have trouble in one location, you can just go to a lower leveled area to grind.
I still remember my first time playing Oblivion. I went to the capital city and took a quest to investigate a haunted pirate ship. Assuming this would be an easy enough quest given that I could pick it up at such a low level I went inside the ship to look around. Then I encountered the pirate ghosts. Which could only be killed with magic or an enchanted weapon. Safe to say I spent the next several hours hiding in corners and shooting very weak firebolts at ghosts. Great game.
A solution I can't believe they never used was to allow excess attribute points to carry over levels. That means you could level minor skills guilt free as you would have those attributes in the bank waiting for your next level up. Another problem I had was that artifacts would stay under levelled if you got them too early. So if you got the Escutcheon of Chorrol at level 10 you were stuck with an above average Dwarven shield that would have been the best shield in the game if you just waited till level 25. The artifact system actively discouraged players from doing quests untill level 25.
Sure... unless you value artifacts when you get them instead of some theoretical final form? How is that an issue except for extremely rare max playthroughs?
My solution to the level scaling system problem when I first played as a mage: Level your alteration skills , spellcraft the most broken paralyze spell and speedrun most of the dungeons (if the quest doesn't envolve killing anyone of course). Unrelated but I'm rlly curious if you can do a max difficult run in Oblivion
I remember the dodgy leveling from Oblivion, jumping everywhere like a fool, can't remember having any problems with difficulty though. I remember the annoying scaling ruining immersion more than anything, as soon as you find your First piece of say.. cool glass armor, the game scales the lowest level bandits to then have full glass.
Something even more ridiculous was that the system was much simpler in Daggerfall. Every time you leveled up, you just get 4-6 points to distributes across your attributes. And that's it.
This was my method from when I played as a kid: Before you level up, save the game. Then if you level up and you don’t have 3 skills that you can get 5 points in, just load the game and don’t go to sleep until you level up some more.
Sort of a take on efficient leveling. Problem is the game locks your stat gains in to that level on the 10th major skill-up, even if you wait to take a level up. So you'd have to reload before that 10th skill-up and focus on minor skills only.
My other issue is that adventuring was too expensive: repairing my equipment and buying hammers were more expensive than what I got from selling dungeon loots. I had a similar money problem in other games
Making money should be easy in oblivion. I'd make a fortune going into oblivion gates and looting corpses, tons of daedra equipment. Just carry what you can before your over encumbered, leave the gates, go to a vendor with Max never ending money, usually 1200 was the max. Then go back into the gates and keep doing that until the gates is closed. It's tedious but you shouldn't have any problems with money
@@EphiTV I think I recall even in Oblivion cause in Morrowind it was even less explained cause back then we weren't all morons, it was slightly explained that every skill is governed by an attribute and to level up you need to level those skills you chose. It doesn't take 1+1 = 2 to realize that it does in fact affect your number of points for each level. But hey if most of us realized how to do this in Morrowind back when I had to download from school, pages from the wiki so I can search for legendary and unique items, I'm sure all you brainy skilled players could figure it out now that the whole game is explained online.
its been years since i have played skyrim with console commands and i still remember "player.advancepcskill" "player.placeatme" "player.additem" lol giveing myself items in skyrim taught me how to count in hexadecimal
I level up normally with my chosen major skills, and use spell making and enchantment to gain an edge. No matter how high I level I can still dispatch enemies fairly quickly this way, and it allows me to experience all that oblivion has to offer. When enemies start getting tougher, or I suddenly start to die often, I just up the enchantments and power of the spells.
When I first started playing oblivion, I had no idea the difficulty slider was there and left the game on the middle normal difficulty all the way through. I learned over my first 10 levels how leveling seemed to work and started a new character while somewhat tracking my stat ups.
My experience was exactly as you described: Somewhere around level 6 I touched the difficulty slider just a liiiiitle bit and suddendly it was totally managable. I didn't realise that the game was too hard because I was underleveled, I thought i was just too bad. But around level 20 the oblivion gate loot got ridiculous and I started one-shotting everything, so I put the slider just back to the middle. But the acually important part: I really really enjoyed the game!
Yeah it's like the first 5-10 levels while you're struggling to not get too many levels in athletics, then you get a decent amount of gold to blow on skill trainers.
@@EpicPrawn Exactly. But then I efficient levelled to max stats and 100% completion of the game - and friggin' enjoyed most of the process! As you said, once you've got past the initial levels it becomes much, much easier to control your levelling, assuming you've made the correct choices for major skills. (Memories of not running or jumping at level 2 to avoid getting levels in acrobatics or athletics ;-) ) My worst memory of completing was finishing off the final oblivion gates - 60 of them in total, but at level 45 or so I was at 100% chameleon so it just became a bit of a chore sneaking up dozens of very similar towers and being invincible. Anyway, I've done it now and I've just got the good memories left.
Playing a pure wizard is a trap in normal oblivion. You figure, "Hey, I want all the magic, so I will pick all the magic skills + Alchemy as my class skills" Obviously when you level you want +5 INT and +5 WIS because those are your spellcasting stats. However, because you picked ALL of the INT skills and ALL of the WIS skills as class skills, there is no way to get a +5/+5 to INT and WIS when levelling up, because there are no minor skills for those stats.
@@HallyVee It means that you will only get +2 or +3 in your primary stats on leveling, but the enemy progression is based on the assumption that you will be getting +5 gains in your primary stats. Or to put it another way, the game assumes you will have maxed at least one of your primary stats by level 20, when in fact you wont be ale to max them until at least level 30-40
@@nispelsm could be, could be, but I will point out that I closed multiple gates without running into any of the issues mentioned here, and I only ever rarely got + 5. And I don't use any of the crazy weird tricks. Just normal stuff like hitting for optimal damage type and whatnot.
Super helpful video. I was breezing through early game, but after a while every encounter was a death sentence for my character. This is literally the exact video I needed.
Yeah, it's weird. I first heard about this when I came about a playthrough where someone tried to basically get a perfect character at max difficulty (fun note: You kind of have to play as a conjurer at that difficulty because your own damage is ridiculously penalized whereas everything else deals a lot more damage, so summoned creatures are actually stronger than normal whilst you yourself are much weaker) and the whole efficient leveling thing was simply weird to watch.
i never even knew a problem with the leveling system like this even existed until now because i always thought i would eventually hit a level cap where i would max out all my major skills and be left unable to level up without maxing out all my attributes, so on every serious playthrough i would use the trainer in battlehorn castle to level up minor skills whos attributes overlapped with those of my major skills as well as those that didnt so i could level up as efficiently as possible each level so i unknowingly circumvented the level scaling problem while worried about a completely different issue
I remember playing Oblivion as a teenager way back when the game first came out, and it was the game singularly responsible for introducing me to the modding community. All of Bethesda's games can be significantly improved with the use of mods, but Oblivion was the only game ever in the series I considered "unplayable" without modding, and its horrific leveling system was the sole reason.
In theory, the way you level up in Oblivion makes a ton of sense. It is the in practice part that sorta, kinda sucks. It seems counterintuitive to pick a class (or create one) and then basically ignore the major skills. And, as mentioned, if your character is higher level and you did not efficiently level then you are in for epic battles almost all the time. For most of the game I have it close to the middle for difficulty, but if I am doing the main quest I usually move the slider to the left quite a bit (10-12 moves to the left). That is primarily because the enemies are numerous and generally tougher than an average enemy encountered in Cyrodiil. I have tried leveling efficiently, but it is one huge pain in the rear. I appreciate your mod suggestions and I am leaning toward "Attribute Modifiers on Levelup to 5" if I decide to download one. Thanks for the video.
@@evancrow2191 In a party based game or MMO class limiting system makes sense. In a single player game, if your not a DPS machine or tanky boi, your gonna have a bad time.
The biggest problem is Endurance determines your health increase every level, anyone playing a non-warrior build or one of the physically weaker races is at a massive disadvantage.
@@larrydavinci2844 It wouldn't be so bad if most enemies didn't stun lock your character, especially if you're fighting multiple. Mages, thiefs, and the like will consistently get 3 shot by a troll or a clanfear anything past level 20 unless you're using health enchantments on gear. God forbid that you run into bandits with Daedric gear and enchanted weapons. The game almost requires you to efficiently level or basically abuse game mechanics.
This is one of the things I don't like about Skyrim. In every other main title, your character always increases in health, but in Skyrim, it's a choice. Of course, in Arena and Daggerfall, the effects of endurance are relatively minor.
I jumped back into Oblivion a few years ago on my pc after having not played it since it released. I legit completely forgot I had to sleep to level up, never saw a reason to sleep, and got through the entire game without getting to level 2.
My friend lent Oblivion to me. I had no knowledge of Elder Scrolls and almost no familiarity with free-form character development. I made a custom class with Speech as a core skill, because I talk to NPCs often, and the idea of interacting with people as a primary talent that empowers me seemed really interesting. I spent a couple of hours in the first town talking to people, discovering that picking up items in a store means I STEAL them, and gaining a few levels from the chatting minigame. I leave town and everything is murdering me. After I tell my friend this, he explains the leveling problem to me, and I never gave the game, or series, a second chance. I insist on playing games blind, so my friend did nothing wrong.
I'm sure that this system looked really neat and interesting on paper. Just like most other needlessly convoluted RPG systems that end up doing more harm than good.
1:20 You know, this reminds me of The Last Remnant's leveling problem in a similar way. On the original Xbox release it was horrible, you had to fight and choose "certain kinds of fights" so that you increase your stats *efficiently* while raising your Battle Rank only slightly, if you fight weak mobs you don't get any stat increase but it still raises your Battle Rank. Battle Rank going up increases the enemy and boss difficulty a lot, so if you mindlessly grinded without grinding your actual stats efficiently you'd actually get unwinnable boss fights, and worse is if you do all side quests in the game you get a super-powered final boss, making the game unbeatable if you didn't make extra saves. Yes you read that right, so doing a "only mandatory encounters" run would actually be easier than grinding and playing normally. 😂Thankfully the issue was mostly fixed in later releases of the game.
Never played it but that does sound pretty annoying. Cool that they fixed it though. Bethesda definitely isn't gonna patch Oblivion now, but I could see them changing things if they make a remaster down the line.
Thank you! It was mad immersion breaking that a wolf pup gave me the same difficulty as a dremora, scamp and/or a flame atronach. The illusion of challenge was broken when I had to decide if my opponent will be the paperbag, I would or both of us!
I think this is a great pre-watch video to "Why did Skyrim remove all the stats?" If you never saw this leveling system, it's hard to appreciate how this complex monstrosity impacted Skyrim. Now, whether they over-corrected or not is a different topic altogether... BTW Efficient Levelor for lyfe. I still have notebooks filled with tallies keeping track of my level ups in this game.
The problem wasn't the stats or even really the leveling system, but the fact that enemy scaling was so broken and unfair. They got it right with Morrowind, where enemies aren't scaled and have fixed levels.
So, recently, I got an original launch copy of Oblivion, because why not have a physical copy of the game with it's original "T" rating (despite having had the GOTY edition from Steam for a while bow). Anyway, getting the original copy made me finally decide to try and play through the game seriously. Before even getting out of the beginning / tutorial area, I decided to increase my sneak skill a bunch just by auto-walking into a corner with an enemy nearby with it's back turned to me. My sneak went up a lot, and I still didn't know why I wasn't even gaining any levels (and no, I didn't think to check the manual that came with the game...) Anyway, once I was out of the beginning / tutorial area, I randomly decided to use a nearby bed roll to sleep, and realized THAT'S how you level up in the game, and just from all the sneak skill ups, I could sleep repeatedly and gain a bunch of levels. After getting my character to about level 13-17, I eventually came to some inn where the innkeeper randomly wanted me to go into a nearby cave to kill a necromancer or what ever who was raising a bunch of undead. I get into that cave, and I swear, everything in there was annihilating me, and I'm doing such little amount of damage to anything, basically I had the choice of die left and right, OR use the console to give myself a few hundred potions just to keep myself alive to 1v1 or 1v2 fights. After doing that through that entire cave, I quit playing the game and I went back to Skyrim... I'm really glad I found your video here, I had no idea any of this was what was going on, or any idea that a mod could fix it. Thank you so much, I will probably give the game another go sometime soon.
The only time i lowered the difficulty is when enemies in shivering isles were quite literally too tanky for me to enjoyably fight. Grummites were taking 8 consecutive sneak attacks with max blade and stealth let alone the healing they did every now and then.
As someone who likes keeping as many NPCs alive as possible, Kvatch was an absolute nightmare because of the leveling system. Literally had to delevel my character at that point.
For me it was the battle of Bruma. Considering how many times my character nearly died in the Great Gate because I was more busy trying to rush through it because I only had 15 minutes to get to the Sigil Stone, I was like "fuck it, I'll only fight what I have to."
Oblivion is by far my favorite game. I just put the difficulty slider right in the middle and never change it. How I prefer to play is; pick major skills according to the play style of that character, Force the minor skills for the attributes I want for the next level, enjoy the game till I level up, then back to step two. It allows for efficient leveling without any stress or tracking and I don't have to force my level ups. Thanks for the video. It was quite entertaining!
@@HallyVee Absolutely agree. Oblivion was my first entry in the Elder Scrolls series. Played it on Xbox 360, just to give you an idea of how scuffed my playthrough was. I chose my main attributes according to the style I wanted to play and sank literally hundreds of hours in the game without hitting any gamebreaking walls. Never cared about min/maxing or anything, just enjoyed the game.
@@smaller_cathedrals same, I closed several gates without noticing any difficulty issue. Same with Morrowind on Xbox. Wonder if the slider is the biggest factor.
Also. There is one very easy fix the developers could have done. Just make it so the skills contribute to attributes up to when you sleep, not when u hit the 10 major skill cap. How it works now, when you are ready to level, all just skill increases will start controbuting to the next level, not your current one, even if you havent slept and leveled up yet. So this simple fix (which is basically how it worked in Morrowind) would make the leveling process 100 times better.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Morrowind is like this. I remember playing OpenMW and it was tracking how much each attribute was being increased, and that included skills up until resting/sleeping. Why did they change this so sneakily I wonder. For older ES fans, it would confuse them, and for the newer ones, well...
Because in skyrim they all drink nasty shit. In cyrodill, they drink milk and such for cow's are more plentiful and mill is accepted. Thus, strong bones.
I was an under leveled sneaky archer. Somehow, on that playthrough I managed to get a daedric bow, and I went through most of the game fairly smoothly.
I love Oblivion but that leveling system was a nightmare. I always care about trying to maximise my attributes on the first few levels, then just get frustrated with it and play the game normally
I can deal with overpowered enemies, I usually like making stealth builds so in open combat I’m usually at a strong disadvantage until at least mid game. What really annoys me is the insane health pools these damn things have. Like one shot me idc I’ll just keep jumping around and dodging but don’t make me hit something with like 40 arrows just to end a random encounter lol. Oblivion basically needs mods to be fun imo, or else it runs out once you reach the bottom of the difficulty slider, which is usually somewhere around lvl 20 I think, if you drop it a tick every couple levels especially after 10
Oblivion is the reason I still jump everywhere in modern open world games
The power of nostalgia grips us all somewhere along the line. I mean, who hasn't at least dozed off a little bit in their seat to that sweet series of serenades from Soule his self. Gah I've been feeling a play through coming on for some time now
Valheim has brought back my jumping habits
Same but Skyrim
hahahahaha
@Focken Kiwi same for both
level 50 dragonborn: [kills alduin in 2 hits]
level 50 hero of kvatch: [gets their ass beat by a skeleton]
Skeletons are no joke bro
ever heard of them daggerfall skeletons? annoying and hardhitting
@@supergenius6256 I still have nightmares of those fuckers
@@PotatoeGamerLP lol
@@supergenius6256 daggerfall skeletons arent that bad, the worst things were those fucking imps
Wow, this is beautiful. As a teen playing this game, I didn't realize there was a difficulty slider, so I gave up and just watched my dad beat it to know where the story went. My dad, meanwhile, had a handwritten spreadsheet that he took notes on in order to level with maximum efficiency. And you know what? He beat it multiple times, with different builds. The man was a machine. Now I'm considering trying to play it again, vanilla, and do the efficient leveling trick just to see if I can pull it off.
There's something subtly wholesome about this, as the torch passes from father to son. Good luck if you try it.
I just started replaying the game for the first time in about 12 years, am at level 8, and already helplessly underpowered.
there's a nice mod that lets you pick up a book called "Skill Diary" right at the exit from imperial Sewers. It keeps track of your skill gains. Very usefull.
efficient leveling is super easy, you can skip the spreadsheet part by using the ''skill diary redone'' mod that tells you how many skill-ups you did for the current level to help you keep track of it. Also max out endurance over anything else ASAP when making a new char, enjoy
You don't need mods. You don't need spreadsheets. You don't need "efficient" leveling.
Each time you level up, train a skill that levels your primary damage stat that is not a primary skill. Like if you're using sword, use a blunt trainer.
That's it. You're now keeping pace with damage, +3 is perfectly viable, and you can do whatever you want on regular difficulty.
Wonderful! Time for a celebration! *CHEESE for everyone!*
Oblivion's leveling isn't broken by modern standards. It's broken by any standard.
Yeah, the oblivion leveling system was greatly criticized and mocked back in the day as well. It's not some modern recognition of it's flaws,
@@СтепанХудяков-у1д Plot Twist: It's just a recycle of Morrowind Leveling hahaha
@@shadowmystery5613 Except Morrowind doesnt have level scaling, and as a result any character can recover and will become powerful. In Oblivion, basically any character not efficient leveling will get shat on
@@donutismz6760 Exactly. It amazes me that people like the idea of everything levelling up with the player. Take an rpg like mm6. When you've put a few hours in you go back to the starting area and just rip through everything, it really makes you feel your progress.
@@donutismz6760
level scaling is not fundamentally the problem... the problem is maximizing those +5 while minimizing the leveling of other skill not contributing those +5.
You know what really bugged me in Oblivion? The character classes all have these amazing drawings, I wanted to BE that Wizard with the long gray beard. Guess what? No beards.
Exaaaactly. It's almost as if Bethesda was creating their game with Todd Howards' parents 15 dollar allowance.
Bro I feel that. I feel that.
YEEEEP Glad I wasn't the only one that thought this as well.
@Alex Glimmer fun fact in the code sheogorath is literally a different race to give him his beard
@@prophetofwatersheep8100 Is there a way to play the game as Thrognor the Ascended Beard?
I will always remember that the official strategy guide for Oblivion began the section on leveling by saying: “Are you sitting comfortably? Not hungry or thirsty? Good. Now, this is going to be really difficult to get through, and we don’t like it anymore than you will, but take some notes, try and keep up, and you’ll almost get this in no time.”
My end-game Oblivion character was nearly unkillable and by sheer miracle I managed to mostly stay on top of the damage curve, but every now and then I'd run into a goblin with like 10 billion health.
I fuckin' backpedeled across half of Cyrodiil trying to kill a goblin that was attacking a farm or some shit, because MY dumb ass leveled up too much by spamming Restoration magic and as a result the rest of the game had gotten disproportionately stronger as I gained no combat ability at all. >_>;;
currently on my first ever playthrough of oblivion and i accidently made my character into a wobbuffet, can just stand there and get slapped around as the enemies kill themselves because i was like... "ima stack all the spell reflect and damage reflect items i can get" and honestly... i don't regret it, it's absolutely hilarious.
I didnt to Kvatch until i was lvl 30+ it was such a drag to clear the city everything had su much health....
Goblin Warlords are the bane of my existence.
I used to summon skeleton and kill it with preffered weapon or magic near the exit from sewer, wait an hour if mp is out and repeat. Takes some time, but when I lvl up enough, I then go to Proxy Inn which is nearby (up the road) and kill everyone in it and take their equipment, usually it is an elven armour set or even glass, one guy has chameleon enchanted parts, and third one was mage or something like that
I remember grinding dungeons before starting the main quest. The first oblivion gate looked like Doom Eternal.
As maybe it should. Instead of happy fun land with imps and bipedal dinosaurs.
That ocassion when you look for the count of kvatch and you find a fucking draedroth or a thunder attronacht in his bedroom 😩
A good way around this was to have conjuration in minor skills with one of those birth signs that give you decent magicka
Or just have quest bound characters run around with you on separate quests
Ally units levelled up just as much as the enemies and took the edge away from the broken stat differences
I knew a really good dungeon for healing and magicka potions in my playthrough
Brah I was in that shit on lol 1 sitting my pants like wtf why is this so hard
"It probably seemed like a good idea at the time."
To my knowledge all TES games used this exact same system until Skyrim. The only difference between Oblivion and previous TES games was that the world leveled up with you, and THAT (IMO) is what broke TES's level system. In Morrowind, for instance, not leveling up efficiently just meant you may need to earn a couple more levels before entering that dungeon than if you were being efficient.
It is possible in Morrowind to max all class skills without maxing your attributes, but there were ways to lose skills and keep leveling if you needed to.
I agree. In Skyrim, for example, if you prioritize leveling up your _crafting_ skills first then you will level up and so will enemies and potentially you will be at a disadvantage in combat ... BUT they don't scale in real time, so you can still catch up with whatever you ARE able to do, even if it means returning to previous areas which you discovered at lower levels in the meantime.
Skyrim doesn't have leveling. It has a perk system. It's not even an RPG in my opinion.
@@Turd_Rocket so what's this
@@Turd_Rocket It is a very simplified leveling system, but still a leveling system. You increase your health magic or stamina when ever you level up and certain quests aren't available until you reach a certain level. You don't possess stats, which is a problem, but you do have skills that can be different each play through.
Enemy scaling in Oblivion is an absolute nightmare. I get that they did it so the challenge doesn't disappear but you barely feel like you're more powerful unless you use cheats or exploits, in which case you are the one god above all.
I am walking around and this highwayman in part glass part daedra armor is trying to shake me down for a bunch of gold. Bruh, your equipment is expensive enough to buy a house wym you want 100 gold?
Lol
That reminds me of when I reached a certain level (25 or 30 I think) and suddenly almost every bandit was clad in daedric armor or glass. It was ridiculous
Boots alone worth more than that 😂
Sounds like someone is jealous that those bandits have that Sheogorath drip.
download my mod 'goons without glass'
Oblivion was the reason I learned excell spreadsheets!
Yeah, my first character got to level 50ish but was super weak because I didn't really understand the leveling system all that well which made the game annoyingly hard the first time around. Second time around was a lot better. I built a spreadsheet for the task and kept track of all my minor skill leveling so I always got the +5 attributes for the stats I wanted as well as selecting major skills that were easy to control (not things like acrobatics or Athletics that would passively level all the time). Also found some really good items on the second run which allowed me to stack reflect damage to 100% so I only had to worry about spell damage from that point, being atronach birth sign helped there.
Wait, you didn’t learn it in school? I thought everyone was forced to learn excel that way. Most boring class I’ve ever taken
@@TheotherTempestfox I remember playing it on the PS3 when I was a kid and struggling even though I was doing everything I thought the game wanted to me do with the leveling up. Wonder why it was so hard haha.
@@Glassandcandy They tried to teach us a few times in different classes, but I failed miserably because I couldn't even give half-effort into trying to understand it.
XD
7:20 Wow, I actually remember playing this game back in the day with a spreadsheet where I kept track of every skill and planned on what skills to level up and in what sequence. Every time I leveled I would go back to the spreadsheet and compare and plan on the next level and repeat over and over and over and over.
Did the same. It was bonkers how much thought you could put into planing. Even such things as your potential max level. Luckily I am that type of gamer that likes planing, so it didn't take the fun out of the game for me.
Are you an engineer now?
@@Bronzescorpion yeah you should see how long it takes me to play a game of civilization.
hahahaha i do the same
It sounds really tedious, but knowing how good RPGs can be, especially those from the 2000s, the golden age of games, I assume the experience and the memories are worth it.
As a kid, I had the luck of playing both KotOR games and the Gothic series, which are much easier in regard of leveling and character building.
Being a high level in Skyrim: I am a god, nobody can touch me.
Being a high level in Oblivion: Mom come pick me up I'm scared.
Just be a battle mage or paladin 😎 Drain Health is the ultimate cheese
Oh no a game that was actually challenging....
High level in WoW: back to retail, noob!
High level in KoA Reckoning: Why won't you die, damage sponge?
High level in Gothic: pull a bully Maguaire moves.
High level in VTMB: still stuntlocking every enemy.
@@BlackRabbit223 oblivion challenging??? Lmao are we playing the same game
@@BlackRabbit223 There's a difference between challenging and bullshit. Dark Souls is challenging. Oblivion is bullshit.
Another fun fact about the leveling in this game is that skills like armor and blunt don't scale with difficulty. That is, the amount of hits needed to level up is the same no matter what difficulty you're on. This means that on low difficulties your armor stat levels up faster than your other combat stats becuase you can take more hits. Turn up the difficulty and you'll have to hit more to kill things, which will cause that stat to level up faster. It's a truly bonkers system.
Had an aneurysm reading that. I may be slightly tipsy but it was still extremely hard to get the gist of it. May I ask for a tl;dr for square brain lads such as yours truly?
Oh nevermind I think I got it.
@Cyberkot basically the system levels up the skill based on number of hits, so doing/taking more damage actually means you level up slower.
Attack/defense skills give flat exp per hit, damage doesn't matter. Since you attack more/less on different difficulties, the skill levels get imbalanced easily.
So that's why they changed it in Skyrim so it's based of how much damage you do. Example: an enemy has 100 hp, in novice mode you oneshot it, on legendary you require 10 hits. In both difficulties you get the same exp because you did 100 damage in both cases.
loved how Endurance isnt retroactive so if you didnt max it out early you missed out on a big chunk of hp depending how long you waited to max it, none of the other attributes act like this either
It's interesting cause this is based on old D&D rules, but even much older D&D games (like Planescape) retroactively give you the missing hp.
At least in Arena, you could do the Oghma Infinium quest very early and max out your END at like level 4. I isn't really necessary, though, since each class's hit dice is pretty reasonable.
(Maybe assassin and rogue, because they're melee thief subclasses with a hit die of only 8. That, however, is an oversight caused by the thief classes all having swapped around hit die from what the manual and common sense say. I have uploaded a fix for this to the Nexus, though, so it's a non-issue as far as I'm concerned.)
You forgot to mention the fact that monster health pools become absolutely rediculous at higher levels too (although your clips showcased this issue quite well). Even as a properly leveled character, all enemies are extremely tedious to kill unless you use other exploits like enchanting
poisons and spellcrafting, make a poison that does damage AND gives weakness to poison. same with spells, the least encountered magic resistance is shock, so make a spell that does shock damage and weakness to shock 100% for the same duration.
Everything has a million health from the beginning of the game
@@creativename6126 It does get a lot worse as you level up though. End game monsters take lie 100 regular attacks where as early monsters take maybe 5-10
@@MaMastoast The only way to really combat this issue is to efficiently level or install a leveling mod as well as one that removes leveled gear from bandits and in-turn buffs them +10 plvl balancing everything out.
@@Travybear1989 Absolutely. I'd never play Oblivion without a leveling overhaul mod.
"How the game plays is central to the experience and everything else is just icing." Too many people seem to forget this. I see soo many praises for the graphics or the shiny new systems at play in new games meanwhile it's all so boring to interact with. Go ahead make a game. Make a bad game even. Make a fucking terrible one. Just don't make it boring. Don't get me wrong. Innovation is not bad. It should continue. It must continue. Just don't forget it needs to be fun.
Considering I can still play GBA graphic level titles and utterly love them. IMO.. Graphics are generally the least important aspect XD
@@NightwinSeraph tbf it's an art style that aged really well. I'll take GBA era sprite work over early 3D models any day of the week.
And not only is Oblivion itself a fun game, it’s brokenness actually makes it better in my opinion. I always have a good laugh when some random npc gets stuck walking in a wall.
@@mrlightningbolt887 yeah until you need them for a quest and can’t talk to them lol
@@rmbwemanplays5567 that's what the console is for (and if you play on anything but PC your game will die at 100 hours/200 hours/400 hours anyway thanks to the a-bomb bug bethesda never fixed, just delayed, so PC or not getting attached to your saves it is)
I recently discovered the Oblivion XP mod and I'd totally recommend it. Though it does *COMPLETELY* change how leveling works so it may not be everyone's cup of tea. Basically, it makes the leveling system more like that of Fallout 3. You gain xp through discovering locations, completing quests, killing enemies, etc. Once you have enough xp to level up, you're given a set amount of points that you then add to your attributes and skills. It's super customizable and it has made leveling actually something I look forward to.
Yeah, Oblivion XP and Realistic Leveling are both pretty good overhauls for the leveling system. +5 mods are a little closer to vanilla but not quite as streamlined. I tend to recommend the overhauls for anyone who's played the game previously though.
If I ever play Oblivion, i'll have to use it. Because my god does this look like a headache. There's making level ups need more thought... and then there's pulling a Shadowrun. Also, do you have the name of the mod you use?
Ive played both skyrim, fo3. fonv, and morrowind, and enjoyed the games. Started playing oblivion to fill in the hole, and oh boy it is fucked. I will be using the XP mod for sure, fighting daedric goblins and bandits just doesnt make sense... I understand they want to keep some challenge, but that should've been done in a balanced manner, their idea and way of execution is just ridiculous
Instructions unclear. Turned my PS3 into a toaster oven
I hate how every single bandit shows up with glass armor and daedric weapons when you're high level, like wtf? Isn't that supposed to be extremely expensive? Why are you even a bandit?
I made a small mod that removes anything better than steel and leather armors and silver weapons from bandits and marauder's leveled lists.
If you're gonna do that, you might as well just download Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul to delevel this shite.
@@arnox4554 I tried it and I didn't like it, that's why I just made a few changes myself.
@@darkeninjx5619 Why didn't you like it?
@@darkeninjx5619 try maskar's oblivion overhaul + dinamic combat
@@nikolasferreira3247 I'll keep it in mind for when I start a new playthrough, just really burned out on Elder Scrolls right now.
I didn't even know that +5 was a thing...
Same
I knew about powerleveling basically since I first played. Don't even know what I learned it from.
Probably my brother
I thought the max was +3 for years
how? I level my bladed skill enough in the right order then strength is +5 at level 2.
You never tied a rubberband to your thumbstick and sneaked into a wall in town for 3 hours?
The saddest part about Oblivion's leveling system is that even though I know it's awful and unbalanced, my brain still tricks me into thinking if I jump back into Oblivion and make a new character with the correct (class-wise) major skills, somehow I can outpace the NPCs and still be an effective force in combat, and it works...until like, level 8 or 9, and then reality sets in and I realize Oblivion is best played with a calculator and not a dreamcatcher.
pen and paper, not a calculator.
Play a summoner.
Come on oblivion is not that hard
@@heloxiii8894reading these comments blows my mind, I beat this game back in 2006 without fully understanding the systems on my first play through. Now as an adult I can 2-3 shot everything (100% weakness to magic/shock, then a shock attack or enchanted weapon)
You know you love a game when you can identify holes in its quality and still enjoy it for years and years
_"You sleep rather soundly for a murderer"_ - Lucian Lachance in literally every single playthrough.
@@thatsneakyneenja2595
Me: Makes a warrior
Water’s Edge: *Sweats nervously*
well i mean with elder scrolls sometimes the holes make the quality
@@Queue3612 they at least add a certain charm for sure
If modded*
Well this and the fact that at high levels all fights took a thousand years
your daedric longsword would just feel like a floppy hot dog that you're slapping enemies with
@@paperboy8708 you guys clearly haven't played with crazy spells and enchantments, you could make spells that make an enemy weak to magic and at the same time deal crazy amounts of magic damage, pair it with another weakness to magic spell and everything would crumble... including yourself if they had spell reflection
nice
Shit even at level 17 I counted 25 fire balls just to kill a bandit bowman.
@@brohvakiindova4452 you could put all that on a weapon too. I had a dedric dagger that would 3 shot the giant boss in the sheogorath dlc
Whenever I play Oblivion these days I install a mod called "Damage Rebalance". It's very simple - all it does is multiplies the damage the player takes by 20. Then you can crank down the difficulty slider, until you can 1-shot enemies from sneak or 3-hit enemies regularly. You'll also die in 2-3 hits, sometimes in 1 hit. Solves the issue of having to choose between "enemies deal normal damage but I need to slash them 66 times to get them to half HP" and "Ok nice now I can 2 hit enemies but THEY need to hit me 66 times to get me down to half HP".
Sounds like the difficulty settings in the STALKER games. They ramp up the damage on both sides so it makes the fights a lot faster paced.
That doesnt sound rebalanced lmao 😂
As I came from Morrowind, I had extensive knowledge of the leveling system. still prefer the +5 mod in both games, less of a headache than keeping meticulous track of level gains.
However, Oblivion is not only horribly balanced around the leveling system, even if you powergame your character, you do not gain any relative strength, you simply manage to keep up. While I needed 5-10 swings with a sword in Morrowind at the start to kill a skeleton, when my stats and skills are maxed, that same skeleton will fall in a single strike. In Oblivion, no matter where on the curve I am, I have to hack way at enemies just like it was on level 1, still under the assumption I powergamed perfectly and my relevant skills & stats are maxed. THAT is what makes Oblivion feel so bad to play, not to mention the punishments you receive if you started certain quests early and thus get a useless reward at the end, unless you waited till level 45(?) or so.
I forgot all about the nerfed quest rewards. The quest award leveller mod was essential.
Yeah leveled quest rewards are absolutely dumb.
Yeah I don't use a 5 atr mod in Morrowind because the enemies don't level with you and therefore perfectly efficient leveling is not necessary. You can be a very inefficiently and casually created character in Morrowind and still body everyone in late game. Oblivions level scaling is what ruins the system
it helps that in oblivion you wouldn't have a random 30% chance to miss strikes just for picking a minor combat skill instead of a major one
+5 isnt really needed in Morrowind. Scaling is VERY limited (a few enemies in the overworld are replaced by slightly stronger versions, and weak enemies like cliff racers spawn more often), so efficient leveling doesnt matter that much. The reason it's so important in Oblivion is because Oblivion had almost exclusively leveled enemies.
I had played Morrowind before so when I first played Oblivion I did treadmill leveling stuff like running up to the top of the wall at the Blades HQ and jumping off and healing and repeating it over and over while watching tv and such. So then when I started traveling around eventually, oblivion gates were spawning all over the place but even worse were the constant bear attacks and eventually I saw a gate spawn and a bear started fighting the demons and won. You don't need to defend Cyrodil from the daedric invasion, bears will handle it.
The bears had one cheat attack that they would use in a rapid span.
It was that lounge attack where it would also daze you at the same time.
I died many times from that because they could keep doing it till you died.
You had to either attack them from a distance or try to stay behind them.
Trolls were another issue because they were like the fastest enemy in the game.
You couldn't really outrun them.
Oblivion did indeed have a huge influence on all the singleplayer-rpgs to come. What i find interresting is that the lord of the rings movies had a huge influence on the looks of oblivion: Elven architecture on the ayleid ruins, mordor on the planes of oblivion etc.
Pretty sure it was the opposite oblivion was inspired by The LOTR movies aesthetically since the movies came before and oblivion came out in 2006
@@JGCO115 That's what he said.
My experience with Oblivion goes hand-in-hand with the Leveling Problem.
- Play mage
- Specialize in conjuring
- Slowly climb skills
- Finally become master conjurer
- Learn Summon Dremora Lord
- Sic dremora lord on bandits
- Dremora lord gets wrecked by 2 basic bandits
- Uninstalled game then and there and have not played since
My dad got screwed. He followed the efficient leveling guide and once he had 96-100 in all but 2 skills, he couldn't level up at all. Punished for playing the intentional way
@@wade2112 If you go to jail, your skills decrease and let you keep leveling
@@JesusCheeseburger yes but you can't level up if you don't have 3 attributes to increase
Oblivion is actually not a good game. Between Morrowind and Skyrim it fails at both things, in which both games had been better, by watering down the complexity and details of Morrowind and not reaching decent grafic or animations like in Skyrim.
@@Chareidos idk, I prefer oblivion to skyrim in some ways. Mostly cuz spells in skyrim are dogshit compared to oblivion
There's also the Oblivion XP mod, wich instead of increasing skills levels based on usage, will give XP to monsters, quests and others things, and you just gain XP, fill the bar, then on level Up you choose get Attribute points and skill points to distribute.
You can then simply put the points where you want.
No more doing weird actions and repetitive stuff to lvl up a certain skill or act out of character if you're into Role playing to get certain skills and stats to a certain lvl to stay efficient.
Yeah, I've heard good things about it. I suggested the +5 stats mod because it's the closest to the "true" experience, but definitely not the most elegant solution.
Oblivion XP is sort of a good solution, but not optimal. It's outdated and hasn't been updated for a looong time. I played with that mod and there were some problems where I got too much experience for easy tasks like picking a lock or way too much for finishing a simple quest, which would result in me getting lots of levels without really having seen anything of the game yet.
That is why I'd personally recommend Ultimate Leveling, a mod made by Maskar. It also has an experience leveling mode which is in my opinion far better than that of Oblivion XP. His mod has many tweaks that can be made for personal preference and different modes to choose from. Lots of variety. Or just go with the default, it's already very good.
@@EphiTV morrowind's madd leveler strikes a better balance (it's on nexus.) I'd love that in oblivion. The monsters thing is less fun to me since you can't just infinitely level in town which is one of the funniest and coolest things about tes to me when you set it up right.
@@zeratultemplar6604 I found a glitch with oblivion xp: everytime you equip the grey fox's mask ( I don't remember its name) and unequip it you gain 10.000 xp
You dont need any mods, imo the best strategy is to just level up at your own pace. Not every time that level-up icon pops up, but every time you want more challenge. It just means you cant sleep often which doesnt impact the game much. I stopped at level 20-25 when i played it, never had to lower the difficulty slider, i even maxed it out at the end of the game. Had fun doing daedric quests and main quest line and generally fucking around, it was a good experience.
Before that i played it as a kid not knowing how its broken and that sucked though lol.
So funny thing is the previous game in the series Morrowind has the exact same leveling system and guess what you don't have to min max in order to actually play the game. But unlike Oblivion, Morrowind had little to no enemies that scaled with you. If you went into an end game area you will be killed by an end game enemy and vice versa. That means that you can find an area in Morrowind that's too hard for you, leave, level up and then return stronger without being punished for it.
Oblivion having a broken leveling system is one of the things it’s most famous for, and understanding exactly how that works is really interesting! I always tried to make custom classes to suit my play style more and then ended up making the game basically unplayable. Great video!
It's actually crazy that, to optimize your character, you need to pick the "worst" class, attribute, and skill combination that you possibly can.
Jep, this is why i stopped playing it..
That's not true. The WORST class would be the one that minimizes your character's power in relation to enemies at any given level. A custom class that maximizes your power makes it the BEST class.
The whole "major skills need to be the ones you use most" concept is where players go wrong. People see the word "major" and think those should be the most important skills to their game play. They're only important for leveling.
Every skill except Athletics and Mercantile is easy to increase through natural gameplay or spamming, so make your Major Skills the ones that are easiest to control, and then play the game normally. Once you've hit the 5/5/5 or 5/5/1 mark (an Excel sheet makes it really easy) then spam up your major skills and level up. And definitely purchase 5 training sessions on EVERY level because those are invaluable. And save the skill books and Oghma Infinium for the 90+ skill increases.
@JakeKoenig "These are the things your character is good at. Do not use these." Just face it man this game has the worst leveling system ever made
@@JakeKoenig Stop assuming players are 'wrong', the game literally asks you "What is it that your character does and is good at" and then proceeds to NEVER explain the levelling system. It's just a shit system.
@@UnsuitableBachelor a lot of people beat the game without this level manipulation so you just got filtered and want to complain at people who beat the game? lol
Staying level one is a hilarious idea for a play through
The real evil of it was that this problem only becomes evident after about 50-80 hours of play, and most journalists played it for about 8 hours to review it.
For me it becomes evident after like 10-20 hours
@@jimbo8581 Same. I got to level 18, and it took me 20 of the best fireball spell I could throw to kill a bandit archer. Haven't played since.
You're implying that journalists even bother to play it for more than a 5 minutes which is entirely unrealistic
Everyone knows journalists will give up after 5 minutes due to their own incompetence at the most basic of aspects before giving the game a negative review & saying it's "too hard" or "It's the Dark Souls of (Insert game genre here)"
@@firehedgehog1446 difference is this is back in 2006 when they were still game journalists, not just journalists
@@firehedgehog1446 Do you have an example of that happening?
The way I play now is to build whatever character I feel like, and turn the difficulty slider down a fair whack. After each combat, I decide if it should go up one click or down one click on the slider based on how hard I found the fight. It's a minor chore, but serves as a reasonable balancing system.
after quitting the game twice from it being too hard or too easy based on whether i tracked my stat increases i came back to the game doing this exactly and finally really enjoyed it
I keep seeing difficulty slider as an easy way out and that it makes me bad at the game... but I just realised all it does is fix the levelling system
@@leonrowe5445 You don't even understand. My dad efficiently leveled until he was maxed (96-100) in all attributes except 2. The game just stopped letting him level up LOL
@@leonrowe5445 The combat is pretty shit anyways, I wouldn't say being bad at Oblivion is all that bad.
@@wade2112 that cant even be the least bit enjoyable though, can it?
On my very first playthrough, I left the difficulty as default straight in the middle, and I mostly levelled due to jumping around, sneaking and healing, so I quickly fell victim to the rising difficulty! And I never adjusted the slider so just had to cheese combat by backpedaling with a bow and jumping on top of high rocks (as my jump was so ridiculously high!)
Same. Also kept restarting the game around 30-40% because the hp sponge enemies was a joke and impossible.
I remember going to the oblivion wiki when I first played the game to see why I’m so weak and ended up with a notebook of leveling bullshit I still have somewhere
Ditto. I drew out a little spreadsheet and kept tallies. It was the most soulless and boring gaming experience I've ever had. When I revisit Oblivion I'm gonna just fix it with a mod.
@boiledelephant man, i'm honestly confused as to why people critize the leveling system, i personally think its very realistic and i like it alot, i think the people who don't like the leveling system are just plain lazy and don't wanna do any work, people almost exaggerate the leveling system saying its hard and insane but to me it doesn't really seem that hard, oblivion was one of the first rpg games i played and enjoyed and the leveling systems of other games seem too easy and almost like a cheat to me since you don't need to put any effort really, from my point of view the people who claim the leveling system is 'insane' they themselves are the ones that are insane yet they do not realize, in oblivion you have to put effort into every skill but as for other games with 'normal' leveling systems you don't have to do half of the work, think about it, if you put a lot of effort in one skill but don't do the same for another but you still magically level up as if you put the same amount of effort into the other skill (which you did not) then isn't that almost similar to cheating? in real life if you work out only your upper body and skip leg day, would your legs be as ripped as your chest/back/arms? no it wouldn't, therefore the oblivion leveling system is realistic unlike other games and *is* superior, just my opinion though.
@@eatabrick personally I don’t play oblivion for the leveling, I play oblivion for the world, the quests and the lore but if you want to keep track of your skills literally all the time with almost no room for error go ahead play the game how you want to play it but I and many other people don’t enjoy that way of playing
tip: keeping track of everything with almost no room for error is what strategy games are for, if you like that check them out they are pretty fun, I recommend plague inc. evolved, halo wars, the kingdom rush games and games like them
@@Zer0Main43 ah, i understand, for me the leveling was one of the things that got me hooked on oblivion. thanks for the game recommendations btw.
I played this for the first time around the start of the pandemic and fell into the leveling trap badly. I assumed you could handle enemies non violently and wanted to play as a wily lady thief who could talk her way out of anything so I spent like 5 hours in the imperial city bartering with and stealing from everybody and leveling up mainly my personality and speed. Needless to say when I finally ventured out of town I did not have a good time at all.
Yeah, there's quite a lot of forced combat even with high Personality. Fallout did a bit better job of making Charisma builds possible, but still not ideal.
@@EphiTV Personality is completely worthless as an attribute. It affects nothing. In the rare cases disposition matters the minigame is trivial or you can just bribe your way to the disposition you want.
It does have a couple uses (see en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Personality), but was never fleshed out to be nearly as impactful as the other stats. Unfortunately common for most RPGs, personality/charisma often becomes the worst-choice. Unless you're role-playing something specific for fun, which is totally up to the player.
@@EphiTV Charisma is just that leftover that made it's way into Videogames from it's Roots in Tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. In these games Charisma can be a super powerful choice as long as you have a DM who lets you argue or reason with everyone and everything. So the first RPGs trying to adept DnD obviously tried to adept Charisma as well, which is how Charisma kind of cheated it's way into modern RPGs, even the Combat Focused ones like the Elder Scrolls series, where it's uses were rather liimited. I remember that Morrowind had it's uses for it, because certain Spell Schools were associated to Personality, but in Oblivion it became basically a dumpstat because most combat wasn't avoidable anyway and it made you level up, raising the difficulty without making your charakter stronger, therefore digging a leveling trap for you to fall in.
Yep, it's a dilemma given most RPGs are centered around combat where charisma has little effect. I'm sure some game will get it right eventually, but for now it does end up feeling like a waste in most video games.
To efficiently level I would first have to understand the leveling system. This video is the closest I have ever come to that.
Mortismal Gaming also covered it up in his review.
As an aside: Morrowind has literally the exact same system of levelling, but since Morrowind is way more sparing with using scaled monsters the potential of falling behind scaled enemies is way less debilitating
Plus you can exploit things to the point you can go god mode. Stacking effects and enchanting becomes ridiculous.
@@seawind930 but it's funny in terms of Morrowind because it works for a lore sense.
Becoming the Neravarine and challenging the 4 people who scrwed you over by 3rd eye'ing nirn itself
@person person There are a few enemies that don't spawn in the wilderness until you are a certain level eg. Golden saints, but most locations and dungeons are static.
Also more skills made it harder to lock yourself out of +5 stat gains
@@rustyjones7908
And also the fact that your bonuses aren't locked in the moment you get your 10th major skill gain.
I think one of my "favorite" issues with Oblivion leveling is alchemy. There's this weird sweet spot where you have access to almost (but not all) of the effects for each ingredient so that you can have max freedom to make useful and/or complex potions in many different ways... but... once you have access to all four, it breaks several of the most useful recipes from earlier in the curve. Suddenly, it starts to feel like the best potions now either have to be made with exactly one very specific recipe or they come with negative effects, and it becomes almost impossible to make complex poisons from most ingredients.
Also alchemy completely breaks the economy, you can basically grab ingredients from everywhere, make potions, and sell them for a bunch of cash. Rinse and repeat.
I love alchemy in all TES games. I usually just grind out potions to become rich super early on. It’s the closest you can come to having a real job in TES. like level 60 alc in morrowind rn with a lvl 4 character
I used to prioritize skilling up the passive combat oriented attributes first so that I could have more control over stat ups when levelling other things. This meant wedging myself under the well overhangs to shorten the jump cycle, autorunning into walls, and rebinding block to the space bar so I could huddle in a corner, put a book on the keyboard, and read a novel while a rat attacked me. God damn, what a bizarre way to spend time.
I actually did the efficient level-up method to try to get all attributes up to 100 some time ago... what a miserable experience it was. Literally just grinding and meticulous planning, it's *far* from how the game was intended to be played. I would never, ever recommend anyone ever do it unless they just want something mindless to do for several hours. And somehow I still love this game. Probably going to download the level-up mods linked in the description for the next time I play through the game, lmao
Also grab "Real Retroactive Health" while you're at it.
There's no way around having to plan your levels in advance, but there's still some fun to be had there. With a good custom class you can essentially just jump between stealth, magic and physical combat from level to level to keep your stats in check while more or less questing normally. That, and every few levels sell stuff, do alchemy etc. to make money without wasting the mercantile increases. It's basically an excuse to diversify, though obviously you still need to get some enjoyment out of the planning phase.
What I love about Oblivion is that for every broken system that stacks the difficulty against the player, there's another broken system that works in the player's favour.
When I was a kid playing for the first time, I remember getting pretty frustrated with how hard the combat started to get in the later parts of the game. Then I figured out that you can enchant 5 pieces of apparel with 20% chameleon each. Enemies can never detect you, plus you get the sneak attack multiplier on every hit. I never ended up adjusting the difficulty, I just went invisible and cheesed everything whenever things got too hard.
I got super lucky and got the mundane ring on a Breton character, and and several pieces of equipment with reflect damage. So my character is essentially unkillable
I did the exact same thing. xD
Morrowind is literaly this dialed up too 11. Everything is broken and is meant to be. You can literaly jump from one side of the map to the other in one jump if you want.
@Synth Oriole yeah. Just maxing to 100 won’t do this. The broken thing in morrowind comes from the fact you can use potions to fortify your alchemy, then make more potions to increase it further on loop to relatively unlimited before crashing the game. At this point you can create a potion to fortify enchanting and then make a completely ludicrous enchantment to speed, strength, etc. so you get ridiculous permanent enchants or temporary fortifications via potions.
@@robertharris6092 that just sounds like an average oblivion playthrough after unlocking spellcrafting alter
The way I combat this, is to make sure I get to lvl 100 Endurance as soon as possible. Because it governs how much HP you get per level, hence your maximum potential health. +5 endurance every level. For other stats, I don't end up caring as much, and I end up picking any that are +3 or more.
My biggest problem with Oblivion was I never felt like I was getting stronger. Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind and Skyrim got that right. It's remarkable how goblins become damage sponges, worse than ogres.
ngl I have only played morrowind,skyrim and oblivion. I can safely say that the only game I felt that I was getting stronger in was morrowind, that I leveled up got better gear and the same enemies didnt just somehow become millionaires and kick my ass. in oblivion I felt like I was getting smarter about it, I was pretty young and didnt really have internet so I played thought it was a bit too easy and raised the difficulity and went on to continue the game and when i inevitably started to have some issues with the enemies becoming to strong because I probably had a slightly less than optimal leveling strat I started to find other ways around how to fight and utilized sneak attacks, poison timing the blocks better conserving potions for more optimal amount of health regain n stuff like that. didnt really have any issue with the game. skyrim however that I had issues with and still do. I never felt like I was getting stronger at all mainly because while the gear enemies used got better and they were of slightly better variants it was still too easy. played it through on legendary a few times and the difficulity of quests never felt higher than the starting tutorial, there was next to no reason to play it again because with one character you could do everything in the game (minor exceptions like the dark brotherhood alternative). slight tangent but yeah I had some issue with how I never felt like i was getting stronger in skyrim because you start out pretty damn strong already, the most useful shouts you were pretty much handed on a silver plater right at the start of the game,you werent really gonna meet some enemy that was too high level for you at any point because they are scaled towards you so if you were weaker they were weaker and depending on playstyle you could pretty much craft the best gear in the game way too early
@@goranpersson7726 The soultion for Skyrim is stay at adept. But you have to take other choices with it.
The game was meant to be played at adept, higher difficulties make the game a chore instead of more difficult also it breaks the pacing of npc battles because the reduced damage gets across the entire world instead of just you.
Well the solution:
- Adept.
- No grindstone improvement of weapon-armor, enemies never get improved gear so you shouldnt have access to that.
- Bare minimum perks on onehaded, twohanded, marksman to access some special abilities (behead, bow zoom, etc),
only one point for example on armsman to access the perk tree, going over 1/5 character does too much damage for that difficulty.
- Armor same logic, bare minimum and i would recommend skipping custom fit so you dont get armor rating that high. 200-250 AR is more than enough for endgame armor types. For lore and inmersion i would also skip the perk who make you weight zero and remove the movement penalty.
- limit your healthpool depending of the class you plan to build: if you plan to be a barbarian you go 500hp, knight 450hp, paladin 400hp, assasin-hunter 250hp, mage 200hp, necromancer 100hp.
- equipment health boost enchants are banned, the only exception are unique items like Amulet of Arkay, etc.
- destruction tree have some limits, you are allowed to only boost ocnce the element if you plan to get the turn to ash perk, etc.
- chaos enchanted weapon from the regular pool are forbidden. If you wanna use chaos enchant you have to make one with a max magnitude of 15 so instead of doing 30/30/30=90, you roll instead for a max of 45 damage if 3 activate.
- for regular elements if you wanna use dual enchant the magnitude gets halved so insead of only one fire doing 30 damage now it becomes 15 and the other 15 can be anything minus chaos of course.
- shield charge is ridiculous and is banned, fun at first but breaks the game.
- if you go nercromage perk route, never get the dual wielding boosting perks. It gets ridiculous. I would save that necromage perk for actual necromages, so you can go in sunlight to even lower health than 100.
- Take the roles somewhat serious, if you go necro you go alone and your only company are most the time strong summons, if you make a death knight you are physically strong so you dont need endgame summons, some mid level or low level are more than enough. If you are assasin you go alone, if you are barbarian you can go with some follower, recommender archer. same as knight. If you are a mage is recommended to have a tanky follower or rely on strong atronachs. This paragraph is more personal but keeping it balanced avoid spoiling the experience.
- with these limits imposed before now food, potions become very useful and is nice to run aroud with a decent stock of them for difficult times. If you are paladin you dont need pots.
the way that skill leveling affects the stat leveling is the one thing that really puts me off returning to this game
That's literally the best part.
Stop trying to be an everybody God in a RPG.
@@Bourikii2992 You don't even understand. My dad efficiently leveled until he was maxed (96-100) in all attributes except 2. The game just stopped letting him level up LOL. Don't even try to defend this shitter game, sure it's better than Skyrim but you literally can't level up after leveling efficiently
@@wade2112 That's a lie. You don't stop leveling till all attributes are at 100.
Efficiently leveling only gives you the max bonus to attributes when leveling.
@@Bourikii2992 well I might have been wrong about 96-100 but you still hit a wall with leveling
@@wade2112 yes there is level cap but it's all about (again) how we built our character. It is originally not possible to level up if your all majors 100 level. The only thing you can do is go jail and decrease your major skills. It is another thing breaks gameplay.
The reason I kept decreasing my difficulty, especially in oblivion gates, is because of staggering. It's so broken in this game and you can't do anything other than punch once and step back, which takes ages for enemies that have a lot of health.
Agility decreases staggering chance, the higher your Agility the lower chance you'll stagger.
Same man I broke when I took 5 hits without being able to move
My main issue with oblivion gates is that it can get quite boring, since most of it are all just the same.
@@TheRealZuia Eh... Agility SUPPOSEDLY decreases the chances of getting staggered. However, it will still happen... a lot, especially from those fucking Clannfears the Xivilai summon.
If you're trying to do efficient leveling the "tdt" console command is a lifesaver, shows you how many skillups you had for a certain attribute so that you don't have to keep track of it in your head
I did the efficient leveling all the way through once and it was tedious as hell.
I made it to level 10 and had to stop playing for a year because I was so annoyed with the process.
You legend!
I only ever noticed it after my 3rd play through I noticed by waiting to go to kvatch late in the game it makes the spider deadra common when saving kvatch. And all my friendly kvatch guards couldn’t survive lol. It really isn’t a big deal. I noticed it as a 8th grader and never touched the difficulty slider just buy more potions if you made a shiter character
Doing the same now, took a break ofc.
@Charles Pendragon Morrowind is at least tolerable since areas are designated by level instead of scaling and also you can intentionally go to prison to lower stats in order to squeeze in more levels to compensate for inefficient leveling.
Excellent video, I never understood why it was so damn difficult playing on normal all those years ago, but now I do, and I will definitely download that mod for a more enjoyable experience! Thank you!
I recommended my friend notch the difficulty down 1 tick every time he leveled. Seemed like a simple solution.
Or just decrease it by 10-15 times when you encounter some tough slaughterfishes.
Or level your character properly and take advantage of enchants/tower orbs.
@@Bourikii2992 You mean, constant melee combat with increasing strength and endurance? Not an option, if someone prefer to play stealthy.
Enchanting items is always useful, though, i agree.
@@Maxxon89 My very first oblivion character was a stealthy character. I don't recall turning the game down from normal difficulty once. I was 12 at the time. Stealth is probably the best ways to play in the game.
Even with only 15 damage your stealth hits with a dagger so 6x I'm pretty sure.
@@Bourikii2992 dude "normal" is not highest difficulty, you know?
Duuuuude, now all makes sense. This is exactly why I stopped playing Oblivion. I was tired of getting killed all the time because of overpower enemies and I felt like leveling up wasn't helping at all. Saddly I never could end this game. Thanks for explaining this huge problem.
I barely beat the game, but I chose the strategy of just running past everything in the portals because it got so boring and grindy to fight them, especially since there were so many gates. I liked skyrims dragons more
Only proper way to play oblviion is by removing the level scaling entirely with a mod ^^..
Tbh I had it on the lowest difficulty that's how I beat the Main Quest.
You could have just swallowed your pride and lowered the difficulty lol. Bethesda games are not played for their difficulty anyways, they’re all horribly balanced and Oblivion is the worst at it.
@@smtandearthboundsuck8400 Call me blind, but I didn't even knew that difficulty bar existed and played a big roll
Also, Oblivion is often called one of the best RPGs ever, so how could I guess it had a broken leveling system like this?
I remember way back being too caught up on efficient leveling - and back then I also couldn't do mods as well because I was on console. I basically came to the result of ''The only thing i'm going to perfect level in endurance to 100 first to make the most out of health gains in the early levels, i'll get 100 in the other skills I want later''
Saved me many headaches
I wanna play Oblivion... But I never went to college.
Have you at least been in the chess club?
@@radicalcentrist4990 ;)
Lol, that's how I feel about Grand Strategy games.
The fact he didn't even mention the glacial pace at which skills like restoration, destruction, and mercantile level tho. I remember back in the day trying to play tanky heavy armor restoration build and I literally couldn't get restoration past level 30 without cheesing the game.
For me marksmanship was the worst, by far. It took me something like 20k arrow into shadowmare's butt to get it to level 100
@@houjouin8819 lol I've never done a marksman build. I guess you can't even tape down the button for that, which is worse in its own way
@@glowcloudwheatproducts495 yeah, i just connected my Xbox controller to pc and watched some movie. Worst things with oblivion was that it didn't count how much damage you death with weapon, just repetition lol
@DekkyTheAwesome holy fuck, that is rough xD
@DekkyTheAwesome i think you only need like 2 -3 hours to level up a magic skill. Its prob best to just leave it on while you eat or something. I also like only doing it in chunks (maybe like 20 levels at a time) to make my progression seem a bit more natural.
3:00
Okay so... They have a whole system built around increasing difficulty when you get stronger, but instead of using that with the difficulty slider, they... Modify damage only
I remember two things about Oblivion levelling; the skills you use should not be the ones for your chosen class, and at about lvl 5 there's a huge jump in encounter difficulty. You'd go from fighting rats and wolves to trolls and you'd still have rat/wolf scaled gear and spells.
Had zero issues using my skills normally but yeah the difficulty jump was always notable. I like that it got serious :)
laughs in skyrim:
Telekinesis spell,> grabs something,> opens map> fast travel anywhere> instatnt LVL up
There is another way to slightly mitigate leveling pain: lean extremely hard into major skills at character creation. It actually reduces max level to a point where things can still be managed while still reaching 100 in your most relevant stats.
But Oblivion had other interesting design choices. For example, the fact that boosting stamina directly increased damage, and was the only way to increase weapon damage after you reach 100 in the relevant attribute and skill.
And vampirism. Never forget vampirism. IIRC in vanilla, it was the only way to raise stats above 100.
Could you elaborate a lil more I’m interested about power leveling the major skills ?
@@Izthefaithful Assuming no other boosts from character creation (and ignoring certain gameplay events), maximum character is 53, well beyond where gear is maxed out and far past the point where boosts from stats and skills matter. However, class specialization and race choice both give skill bonuses at character creation, which can drop this into the forties. For examples, a Nord warrior maxes at 46, Altmer mages max at 45, and Bosmer theives can max as low as 43 (assuming the Skeleton key is obtained). Since gear maxes out at 35, and most characters have a major skill or two they don't really use (I know I always have at least one), it brings the finishing character level well within reasonable range for endgame scaling. Combine with the right mixture of signs and favored attributes, and your important attributes may only need 35-40 points to max out (easily obtained over 35 levels).
It doesn't completely remove the problem, but it does mitigate the worst part of it. I ran a Nord warrior to about level 18 before I began feeling the level drag, and I wasn't taking full advantage of the magic stones.
@@Auron3991 thanks for the reply!
You never know if anyone will get back to you or not!
Have a great weekend 😀
Thank you! I’ve never been able to enjoy Oblivion because of the anxiety this leveling system caused me, and you’ve perfectly captured the madness of it.
Anxiety lol damn what a puss 😂
The problem isnt the leveling system itself but the enemies leveling up as you do and out right changing into more powerful creatures. If Bethesda changed how enemies scaled with you it would not be a problem. Skyrim handles this better as enemies do scale but its at a much more manageable level. Or enemies have a fixed level that does not change. Bandits and others will change but not like what Oblivion did.
check out oscuro's oblivion overhaul if you wanna do away with the level scaling. it basically makes it so that locations are leveled differently. so while you may have trouble in one location, you can just go to a lower leveled area to grind.
You still have the problem of efficiency leveling
Ah yes I do love bandits in Daedric plate
@DekkyTheAwesome That's what they did in Morrowind, so they are definitely capable of it
But... what was the problem? It all worked a intended for me...
I still remember my first time playing Oblivion. I went to the capital city and took a quest to investigate a haunted pirate ship. Assuming this would be an easy enough quest given that I could pick it up at such a low level I went inside the ship to look around. Then I encountered the pirate ghosts. Which could only be killed with magic or an enchanted weapon. Safe to say I spent the next several hours hiding in corners and shooting very weak firebolts at ghosts. Great game.
A solution I can't believe they never used was to allow excess attribute points to carry over levels. That means you could level minor skills guilt free as you would have those attributes in the bank waiting for your next level up.
Another problem I had was that artifacts would stay under levelled if you got them too early. So if you got the Escutcheon of Chorrol at level 10 you were stuck with an above average Dwarven shield that would have been the best shield in the game if you just waited till level 25. The artifact system actively discouraged players from doing quests untill level 25.
There's a mod to fix that too lol
@@HeroSword_P I found those two mods essential for any replay!
Sure... unless you value artifacts when you get them instead of some theoretical final form? How is that an issue except for extremely rare max playthroughs?
@@HallyVee Because you very quickly replace this item given to you by a god.
@@tadferd4340 oh boy. If that bothers you don't investigate the rest of the game!
My solution to the level scaling system problem when I first played as a mage:
Level your alteration skills , spellcraft the most broken paralyze spell and speedrun most of the dungeons (if the quest doesn't envolve killing anyone of course). Unrelated but I'm rlly curious if you can do a max difficult run in Oblivion
consider fatigue spells.
I remember the dodgy leveling from Oblivion, jumping everywhere like a fool, can't remember having any problems with difficulty though. I remember the annoying scaling ruining immersion more than anything, as soon as you find your First piece of say.. cool glass armor, the game scales the lowest level bandits to then have full glass.
Something even more ridiculous was that the system was much simpler in Daggerfall. Every time you leveled up, you just get 4-6 points to distributes across your attributes. And that's it.
This was my method from when I played as a kid: Before you level up, save the game. Then if you level up and you don’t have 3 skills that you can get 5 points in, just load the game and don’t go to sleep until you level up some more.
Sort of a take on efficient leveling. Problem is the game locks your stat gains in to that level on the 10th major skill-up, even if you wait to take a level up. So you'd have to reload before that 10th skill-up and focus on minor skills only.
@@EphiTV So that’s why that happens! I try efficient leveling and STILL only get +2 and +3!
Why did they do this???
No idea. Probably to discourage efficient leveling, but it still exists as the optimal way to play. Lots of small things overlooked in the design.
My other issue is that adventuring was too expensive: repairing my equipment and buying hammers were more expensive than what I got from selling dungeon loots. I had a similar money problem in other games
Making money should be easy in oblivion. I'd make a fortune going into oblivion gates and looting corpses, tons of daedra equipment. Just carry what you can before your over encumbered, leave the gates, go to a vendor with Max never ending money, usually 1200 was the max. Then go back into the gates and keep doing that until the gates is closed. It's tedious but you shouldn't have any problems with money
... Knowing about the whole 15 points thing at level up sure would've helped me enjoy the game way more back in the day.
It is pretty odd that it affects so much of the game but is never explained to the player.
@@EphiTV That's Bethesda game design for you.
@@EphiTV I think I recall even in Oblivion cause in Morrowind it was even less explained cause back then we weren't all morons, it was slightly explained that every skill is governed by an attribute and to level up you need to level those skills you chose. It doesn't take 1+1 = 2 to realize that it does in fact affect your number of points for each level. But hey if most of us realized how to do this in Morrowind back when I had to download from school, pages from the wiki so I can search for legendary and unique items, I'm sure all you brainy skilled players could figure it out now that the whole game is explained online.
@@KpK1Cioby you couldve just wrote one sentence saying you were a dick
My lazy ass solution to the leveling problem: console commands.
Ah, I see you too are a master of CHIM.
its been years since i have played skyrim with console commands and i still remember "player.advancepcskill" "player.placeatme" "player.additem" lol
giveing myself items in skyrim taught me how to count in hexadecimal
/kill
Could you tell me some console commands?
@@Queue3612 What is hexadecimal?
I level up normally with my chosen major skills, and use spell making and enchantment to gain an edge. No matter how high I level I can still dispatch enemies fairly quickly this way, and it allows me to experience all that oblivion has to offer. When enemies start getting tougher, or I suddenly start to die often, I just up the enchantments and power of the spells.
When I first started playing oblivion, I had no idea the difficulty slider was there and left the game on the middle normal difficulty all the way through. I learned over my first 10 levels how leveling seemed to work and started a new character while somewhat tracking my stat ups.
My experience was exactly as you described: Somewhere around level 6 I touched the difficulty slider just a liiiiitle bit and suddendly it was totally managable. I didn't realise that the game was too hard because I was underleveled, I thought i was just too bad. But around level 20 the oblivion gate loot got ridiculous and I started one-shotting everything, so I put the slider just back to the middle. But the acually important part: I really really enjoyed the game!
I'd go to play Oblivion much more often over the years, but then I remember the leveling planning.
Efficiently levelling isn't too bad once you have enough money to start aggressively seeking the help of trainers.
Yeah it's like the first 5-10 levels while you're struggling to not get too many levels in athletics, then you get a decent amount of gold to blow on skill trainers.
Glitches man, otherwise it's garbage.
@@EpicPrawn Exactly. But then I efficient levelled to max stats and 100% completion of the game - and friggin' enjoyed most of the process! As you said, once you've got past the initial levels it becomes much, much easier to control your levelling, assuming you've made the correct choices for major skills. (Memories of not running or jumping at level 2 to avoid getting levels in acrobatics or athletics ;-) ) My worst memory of completing was finishing off the final oblivion gates - 60 of them in total, but at level 45 or so I was at 100% chameleon so it just became a bit of a chore sneaking up dozens of very similar towers and being invincible. Anyway, I've done it now and I've just got the good memories left.
Playing a pure wizard is a trap in normal oblivion. You figure, "Hey, I want all the magic, so I will pick all the magic skills + Alchemy as my class skills"
Obviously when you level you want +5 INT and +5 WIS because those are your spellcasting stats.
However, because you picked ALL of the INT skills and ALL of the WIS skills as class skills, there is no way to get a +5/+5 to INT and WIS when levelling up, because there are no minor skills for those stats.
And that matters because?
@@HallyVee It means that you will only get +2 or +3 in your primary stats on leveling, but the enemy progression is based on the assumption that you will be getting +5 gains in your primary stats. Or to put it another way, the game assumes you will have maxed at least one of your primary stats by level 20, when in fact you wont be ale to max them until at least level 30-40
@@nispelsm could be, could be, but I will point out that I closed multiple gates without running into any of the issues mentioned here, and I only ever rarely got + 5. And I don't use any of the crazy weird tricks. Just normal stuff like hitting for optimal damage type and whatnot.
Super helpful video. I was breezing through early game, but after a while every encounter was a death sentence for my character. This is literally the exact video I needed.
Yeah, it's weird. I first heard about this when I came about a playthrough where someone tried to basically get a perfect character at max difficulty (fun note: You kind of have to play as a conjurer at that difficulty because your own damage is ridiculously penalized whereas everything else deals a lot more damage, so summoned creatures are actually stronger than normal whilst you yourself are much weaker) and the whole efficient leveling thing was simply weird to watch.
i never even knew a problem with the leveling system like this even existed until now because i always thought i would eventually hit a level cap where i would max out all my major skills and be left unable to level up without maxing out all my attributes, so on every serious playthrough i would use the trainer in battlehorn castle to level up minor skills whos attributes overlapped with those of my major skills as well as those that didnt so i could level up as efficiently as possible each level so i unknowingly circumvented the level scaling problem while worried about a completely different issue
In other words you used obvious in your face game mechanics to play normally and everything worked? Almost as if that was intentional...
I remember playing Oblivion as a teenager way back when the game first came out, and it was the game singularly responsible for introducing me to the modding community. All of Bethesda's games can be significantly improved with the use of mods, but Oblivion was the only game ever in the series I considered "unplayable" without modding, and its horrific leveling system was the sole reason.
In theory, the way you level up in Oblivion makes a ton of sense. It is the in practice part that sorta, kinda sucks. It seems counterintuitive to pick a class (or create one) and then basically ignore the major skills. And, as mentioned, if your character is higher level and you did not efficiently level then you are in for epic battles almost all the time. For most of the game I have it close to the middle for difficulty, but if I am doing the main quest I usually move the slider to the left quite a bit (10-12 moves to the left). That is primarily because the enemies are numerous and generally tougher than an average enemy encountered in Cyrodiil. I have tried leveling efficiently, but it is one huge pain in the rear. I appreciate your mod suggestions and I am leaning toward "Attribute Modifiers on Levelup to 5" if I decide to download one. Thanks for the video.
This leveling system is realistic good and creative. But for general players.
It's a piece of SH-
@@evancrow2191 In a party based game or MMO class limiting system makes sense. In a single player game, if your not a DPS machine or tanky boi, your gonna have a bad time.
Your major skills should mirror the stats your class needs. It's not counterintuitive, people just suck at making classes. That includes Bethesda.
The biggest problem is Endurance determines your health increase every level, anyone playing a non-warrior build or one of the physically weaker races is at a massive disadvantage.
And it not retrospective so you must max Endurance as soon as you can.
I mean, it makes sense that a mage or a thief would be more squishy than a warrior
@@larrydavinci2844 It wouldn't be so bad if most enemies didn't stun lock your character, especially if you're fighting multiple. Mages, thiefs, and the like will consistently get 3 shot by a troll or a clanfear anything past level 20 unless you're using health enchantments on gear. God forbid that you run into bandits with Daedric gear and enchanted weapons. The game almost requires you to efficiently level or basically abuse game mechanics.
Not even close. The idea is that you play to your strengths. Didn't level HP? Maybe use Shield or don't get hit. Kinda how it's supposed to work?
This is one of the things I don't like about Skyrim. In every other main title, your character always increases in health, but in Skyrim, it's a choice.
Of course, in Arena and Daggerfall, the effects of endurance are relatively minor.
I jumped back into Oblivion a few years ago on my pc after having not played it since it released. I legit completely forgot I had to sleep to level up, never saw a reason to sleep, and got through the entire game without getting to level 2.
My friend lent Oblivion to me. I had no knowledge of Elder Scrolls and almost no familiarity with free-form character development. I made a custom class with Speech as a core skill, because I talk to NPCs often, and the idea of interacting with people as a primary talent that empowers me seemed really interesting. I spent a couple of hours in the first town talking to people, discovering that picking up items in a store means I STEAL them, and gaining a few levels from the chatting minigame. I leave town and everything is murdering me. After I tell my friend this, he explains the leveling problem to me, and I never gave the game, or series, a second chance.
I insist on playing games blind, so my friend did nothing wrong.
I'm sure that this system looked really neat and interesting on paper. Just like most other needlessly convoluted RPG systems that end up doing more harm than good.
Looked pretty good from end game, too?
1:20 You know, this reminds me of The Last Remnant's leveling problem in a similar way. On the original Xbox release it was horrible, you had to fight and choose "certain kinds of fights" so that you increase your stats *efficiently* while raising your Battle Rank only slightly, if you fight weak mobs you don't get any stat increase but it still raises your Battle Rank. Battle Rank going up increases the enemy and boss difficulty a lot, so if you mindlessly grinded without grinding your actual stats efficiently you'd actually get unwinnable boss fights, and worse is if you do all side quests in the game you get a super-powered final boss, making the game unbeatable if you didn't make extra saves. Yes you read that right, so doing a "only mandatory encounters" run would actually be easier than grinding and playing normally. 😂Thankfully the issue was mostly fixed in later releases of the game.
Never played it but that does sound pretty annoying. Cool that they fixed it though. Bethesda definitely isn't gonna patch Oblivion now, but I could see them changing things if they make a remaster down the line.
Thank you! It was mad immersion breaking that a wolf pup gave me the same difficulty as a dremora, scamp and/or a flame atronach. The illusion of challenge was broken when I had to decide if my opponent will be the paperbag, I would or both of us!
I think this is a great pre-watch video to "Why did Skyrim remove all the stats?" If you never saw this leveling system, it's hard to appreciate how this complex monstrosity impacted Skyrim. Now, whether they over-corrected or not is a different topic altogether...
BTW Efficient Levelor for lyfe. I still have notebooks filled with tallies keeping track of my level ups in this game.
The problem wasn't the stats or even really the leveling system, but the fact that enemy scaling was so broken and unfair. They got it right with Morrowind, where enemies aren't scaled and have fixed levels.
So, recently, I got an original launch copy of Oblivion, because why not have a physical copy of the game with it's original "T" rating (despite having had the GOTY edition from Steam for a while bow). Anyway, getting the original copy made me finally decide to try and play through the game seriously. Before even getting out of the beginning / tutorial area, I decided to increase my sneak skill a bunch just by auto-walking into a corner with an enemy nearby with it's back turned to me. My sneak went up a lot, and I still didn't know why I wasn't even gaining any levels (and no, I didn't think to check the manual that came with the game...)
Anyway, once I was out of the beginning / tutorial area, I randomly decided to use a nearby bed roll to sleep, and realized THAT'S how you level up in the game, and just from all the sneak skill ups, I could sleep repeatedly and gain a bunch of levels.
After getting my character to about level 13-17, I eventually came to some inn where the innkeeper randomly wanted me to go into a nearby cave to kill a necromancer or what ever who was raising a bunch of undead. I get into that cave, and I swear, everything in there was annihilating me, and I'm doing such little amount of damage to anything, basically I had the choice of die left and right, OR use the console to give myself a few hundred potions just to keep myself alive to 1v1 or 1v2 fights. After doing that through that entire cave, I quit playing the game and I went back to Skyrim...
I'm really glad I found your video here, I had no idea any of this was what was going on, or any idea that a mod could fix it. Thank you so much, I will probably give the game another go sometime soon.
The only time i lowered the difficulty is when enemies in shivering isles were quite literally too tanky for me to enjoyably fight. Grummites were taking 8 consecutive sneak attacks with max blade and stealth let alone the healing they did every now and then.
going through the same thing rn lmao
Yeahm when my weapons are going from full health to zero before the enemies are, it is time to turn it down a bit.
Or make a bigger spell
Ugh. I recall that. I think I ended up doing two quests in SI before I noped out.
when you start, have high difficulty. go down as you level up. morrowinds leveling system achieved.
This is so true! Unless you cheese it from the start like some people. lol
As someone who likes keeping as many NPCs alive as possible, Kvatch was an absolute nightmare because of the leveling system. Literally had to delevel my character at that point.
For me it was the battle of Bruma.
Considering how many times my character nearly died in the Great Gate because I was more busy trying to rush through it because I only had 15 minutes to get to the Sigil Stone, I was like "fuck it, I'll only fight what I have to."
That kvatch level felt so lonely when they (npc) start dying
Lol same here. I still insist on playing the Kvatch mission first as that is when I'm strongest relative to the enemies.
As someone who’s put hours into oblivion and is thinking about replaying it, I think I speak for everyone when I ask: what the fuck
Speak for your self.
yeah try that same comment but days.
@Mal Theri I think your a bit late to this thread.
@@mrchrome3476
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@@travisclark7286 what about you?
Oblivion is by far my favorite game. I just put the difficulty slider right in the middle and never change it. How I prefer to play is; pick major skills according to the play style of that character, Force the minor skills for the attributes I want for the next level, enjoy the game till I level up, then back to step two. It allows for efficient leveling without any stress or tracking and I don't have to force my level ups. Thanks for the video. It was quite entertaining!
That's genius
Seems like how it was intended to work and did for most folks? Gaming the system is the weird approach.
@@HallyVee Absolutely agree. Oblivion was my first entry in the Elder Scrolls series. Played it on Xbox 360, just to give you an idea of how scuffed my playthrough was. I chose my main attributes according to the style I wanted to play and sank literally hundreds of hours in the game without hitting any gamebreaking walls. Never cared about min/maxing or anything, just enjoyed the game.
@@smaller_cathedrals same, I closed several gates without noticing any difficulty issue. Same with Morrowind on Xbox. Wonder if the slider is the biggest factor.
That seems super smart to level that way but I’m not sure I understand what your saying
Also. There is one very easy fix the developers could have done. Just make it so the skills contribute to attributes up to when you sleep, not when u hit the 10 major skill cap. How it works now, when you are ready to level, all just skill increases will start controbuting to the next level, not your current one, even if you havent slept and leveled up yet.
So this simple fix (which is basically how it worked in Morrowind) would make the leveling process 100 times better.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Morrowind is like this. I remember playing OpenMW and it was tracking how much each attribute was being increased, and that included skills up until resting/sleeping. Why did they change this so sneakily I wonder. For older ES fans, it would confuse them, and for the newer ones, well...
I remember cheesing skellys , SKELLYS. I fought literal demons with ease, why bones so. stronk
milk
Because in skyrim they all drink nasty shit. In cyrodill, they drink milk and such for cow's are more plentiful and mill is accepted. Thus, strong bones.
I was an under leveled sneaky archer. Somehow, on that playthrough I managed to get a daedric bow, and I went through most of the game fairly smoothly.
I love Oblivion but that leveling system was a nightmare. I always care about trying to maximise my attributes on the first few levels, then just get frustrated with it and play the game normally
I can deal with overpowered enemies, I usually like making stealth builds so in open combat I’m usually at a strong disadvantage until at least mid game. What really annoys me is the insane health pools these damn things have. Like one shot me idc I’ll just keep jumping around and dodging but don’t make me hit something with like 40 arrows just to end a random encounter lol. Oblivion basically needs mods to be fun imo, or else it runs out once you reach the bottom of the difficulty slider, which is usually somewhere around lvl 20 I think, if you drop it a tick every couple levels especially after 10