Let's say, hypothetically, a casual player decides to play... A Sneaky Argonian. Thief birthsign, and... say the pregen Thief class. And they're not aware they should pump Endurance, or how the system really works at all. So they might get, say, +3 Agi, +2 Spe, +1 Luck on a level up. Maybe they take a +2 Str instead of the Agi, for the carry weight. Maybe they dabbled with Alchemy, and that +3 Int is looking nice. And they're not having too much difficulty with the wolves, goblins, skeletons, and bandits. Suddenly, at level 6, ghosts appear, and they can't even hit the thing. They haven't even touched magic since the sewers, so they have 5 Destruction and a Flare spell. And then they dip into an Oblivion gate, and run into a Clannfear. And they have maybe a hundred health.
Also happened to me in skyrim. I was roleplaying a thief, and tries to pickpocket, and rob everybody's home, my character got to level 15 or so just from lockpicking, pickpocket and sneak. My character then goes to thieves guild questline, got fucked hard and dropped the character during goldenglow estate quest 😂
Bethesda's RPG stats (and to some extent it also applies to skills) scaling was, at least in morrowind and oblivion, completely broken and utter trash, anyone denying it is either in bad faith or overly attached to it, either because of nostalgia or has some other subjective motivation. I mean, the fact alone that morrowind is an absolute paradox where your skills will likely level up significantly faster between levels 99-100 than between 5 and 6, has at least to give people something to think about. It's not just about it being counterintuitive, it makes progress through the last stages of skills feel like an unnaccomplishment. Even more absurd is, when you take all these things into account, these obvious flaws and holes in Elder Scrolls game design, they somewhat largely contributed to make those games great, either in how they were perceived in comparison to anything that was meant to compete in the same genre, or in how they somehow ended up having their respective fanbase super fidelized.
Yeah, if you "aren't aware they should pump endurance or how the system really works at all" they should have a really weak character. Otherwise there is no room for improvement and any child could just pick up the game and gain mastery making any choices. A game SHOULD have bad choices, rather than have all choices work out just fine. The majority of modern games are too afraid to punish bad decisions, and it really isn't for me. I don't think I'm alone in that either.
@theoldknight85 You're not alone at all, and I'm really grateful for the math on why things work. As a kid playing for the first time my experience WAS bad, but man did it make me want to try again. Skyrim never did that for me.
Ok, so it seems like the core thesis here is that attributes aren't the source of power for an Oblivion character - skills are. Therefore, worrying about maximizing level gains, and other complications mentioned by the critiqued video, are not actually concerns. While I am convinced that is the case, it naturally extends to the question: Is the leveling system a failure if the player doesn't interact with it? Ultimately, leveling up in Oblivion means leveling your enemies up, not you. Is it a good leveling system if I feel weaker than if I didn't engage with it? Why is the character's level used for scaling, if the level, and therefore attributes, do not reflect the power the game needs to scale to? Do you think even the development team had the same misconceptions as the critiques video? Would a good system create this confusion? In all fairness, I love Oblivion too. It was my first Elder Scrolls game and I'm very nostalgic. It isn't easy to accept a lot of poorly constructed criticism on something like that. It is why I am a fan of this channel. However, I do think it is important to remember that a lot of Oblivion's mechanics are knee-jerk reactions to make some of Morrowind's less accessible traits more generally palatable. It would have benefitted more from ground-up designed systems. In the end, the jank is part of the game's charm, so I wouldn't change the leveling system, but I wouldn't make another game with it either.
Attributes aren't entirely worthless, they just are not even close to worth obsessing over. They also aren't worth ignoring your major skills to maximize gains to get them to 100 five levels earlier than normal smart play. Also, major skills under your specialization level more than twice as fast as unspecced minors. Skills outside of your class level very, very slowly. As you gain levels you gain access to better gear and sigil stones. Before level 20, none of the overpowered magical rings drop. I do agree that the system is confusing and that by itself is enough to call it a bad system. I wouldn't argue with that critique. However, I like in-depth systems that take time and thinking to understand, so I feel that is more a preference. I'll definitely need more clarifying videos about this, I don't think I've found a way to articulate my thoughts perfectly yet, but we'll get there.
@@theoldknight85 I didn't say the attributes were worthless. I reiterated what you seem to be stating in the video and in this comment right here, that the attributes weren't valuable enough to make significant sacrifices of other character attributes (like skills) in order to optimize them. I will rephrase my key points that I do not see answered in your comment: If the system does not warrant significant interaction is it a good system to have? I don't mean that the stats in the system are worthless, I mean that a (well informed) player does not have to make much choice, sacrifice, or change in behavior in order to best utilize the system in their unique circumstances. What are you really doing in order to utilize the leveling/attribute system, since you and I both agree it does not require the complications shown in the critiqued video? How hard would it be to automate the decision making? Why do enemies scale to attributes if it is a less important aspect character power? Is it a good leveling system if the character can feel very powerful by not leveling? Is it a good leveling system if the character can "level up", a shorthand way of saying "increase in power and ability," and feel weaker in comparison to the world around them? Replying to your comment in specific: -I never said attributes were worthless, worth obsessing over, or worth ignoring skills over. -I don't know what you mean by bringing up specialized vs. specialized skill leveling speeds. It seems unrelated to anything I wrote. Maybe you meant to reply to another comment? -Gaining better gear and sigil stones might be in reply to my "feeling more powerful by not leveling" statement. If so, a level one or two character can still obtain many sources of power (high skills, some unleveled gear, grand soul enchantments) and put them to use against a 20 hp skeleton instead of a 350hp champion. To be clear, I'm not advocating for the style of play, I'm saying I think the system intended to be a key component of character strength is a poor system because strong characters can be built by avoiding it entirely. There really shouldn't be a choice between what might be an optimal character and seeing a variety of enemies and items either. -I also agree that the confusion alone does not make it a system not worth using. I think is just a compounding element to that end. -I look forward to the video! Thank you for taking the time to reply. I am sorry for the lengthy addition to the conversation, it is just that much of my comment felt misunderstood or avoided.
You have to level up in oblivion if you want to do all the quests. I prefer doing an efficient character grind before I start doing quests. I stop at level 26, because that's when the last enemy type (lich king) starts spawning, and it's also when I have all my attributes except for luck and personality at 100. I make sure restoration and destruction is at 100 so the spell cost as little as possible, and I don't touch the difficulty slider. I can say that playthrough was the most enjoyable, after I finished the boring part.
Except that system is only meant to pad out the game and in some cases, like the fighters guild and rogue... place, it's an arbitrary lock on players for mediocre questlines.
As a new player in my early playthroughs, I constantly encountered enemies that were massive damage sponges while I was leveling my character. I wasn’t able to keep up with the damage output I needed because I didn’t understand the different mechanics of the game or what the 'meta' was. To me, that’s a massive flaw in the leveling system. It doesn’t matter that efficient leveling probably wouldn’t have solved this problem for me-it’s still a core issue that doesn’t exist in many other RPGs from that time. Even as an experienced player, I still care about min-maxing my character, even if attributes don’t matter as much as you claim. Experienced players care more about min-maxing than new players. Even if the increase in my character’s ability is only 5% due to efficient leveling, I still care about it because I’m aware it’s a factor in the game. But in other RPGs, this isn’t an issue-it’s a unique problem in Oblivion. Your premise in this video is that once someone is experienced enough in Oblivion, they don’t need to worry about how bad the leveling system is because they can circumvent the issues by exploiting different game mechanics and understanding the meta way to play. But here’s another approach: just make a game with a good leveling system that doesn’t require all this nonsense. Trying to excuse it doesn’t justify it.
Yeah you hit the nail on the head. The leveling system is Byzantine in its complexity and painful to work with. Just because Oblivion lets you use efficient play or exploits to work around the system, does _not_ redeem the system. I play Oblivion with Ultimate Leveling, which provides a few alternatives. I use the default Fallout-style XP system.
Iam unsure if you saw his other videos, but he greatly explains how you are meant to be powerful in some instances. You know system isn't flawed, you just don't deal enough damage because you probably dont utilise enchants, poisons, fortify spells/potions etc. This is 2006 game keep in mind. You really don't need exploit the game to be powerful, you just need to utilise the tools that game is offering to you. Let's say about your last point, you play World Of Warcraft Vanilla/TBC and you are leveling. You literally cannot pull more than 1 mob or 2 unless you are mage/warlock. Why ? because the game is meant to be hard and grindy to get resources for you to become stronger. Lets say you want to raid with your guild late game raids. If you do not provide buffs for your team or utility, you will not be able to play with them. You have to be resourcefull and take advantage of the tools the game is offering your (again). Dont mean exploits mind you. Every RPG had that core behind it. Become stronger utilise etc. Today players think everything should be effortless and they blame that game is flawed and ultimately thats why Today's games are made that way. Fallout, WOW, Neverwinter nights, Oblivion just to name a few.
@@jakubwarenich4439 NWN2 is a sorely underrated game but yeah, it does require you to do some thinking about your build. Some of the late-game fights are kinda hard
@@rdrrr yeah but that's not the point i initially meant though, i wanted to point out that ppl tend to blame the leveling system is flawed but they dont utilise tons of things that make them stronger, which was again, core gameplay of the game, that player had to figure out themselves, nobody held their hand, thus game was hard to play and it made sense back then. I still enjoy this type of games which make me use my brain to figure things out.
@@jakubwarenich4439 It's not just the game being too hard/tedious though, the strict level scaling in Oblivion robs the player of a feeling of progression. In Morrowind if you go to a smuggler's cave and the Nord Barbarian inside kicks your ass you can return a little later and wipe the smile off his face. No such joy in Oblivion. If anything you feel weaker in late-game Oblivion because it takes a lot longer to defeat enemies than it did at Level 1, because HP inflates faster than damage does. Skyrim fixed that problem (unfortunately, it broke a lot more than it fixed overall...)
There's a mod that carries over unused skill gains to the nect level, which IMO completely removes the FOMO feeling that the levelling system inevitably gives. Also a mod that gives retoactive HP scaling removes any urge I have to rush END in the early game. These two uncomfortable feelings always annoyed me, but those "+5 every time" mods are massive overkill. They basically say "the balance isn't perfect, so let's just remove any sense of balance whatsoever and make ever character perfect every time". They're very boring and rob the player of any sense of earning their attributes.
Good ideas! Pretty sure in Morrowind you could continue to get bonuses in attributes even after getting enough skills to level. In baldur's gate 3 your constitution scales retroactively when you increase it or respec, definitely helps with the fomo
Yep, these are the two mods I use to make the leveling process feel much more natural. If I could only choose one though it would be the retroactive health. It's silly that only HP has a calculation that doesn't retroactively take the increased stat into account like Magicka does for Intelligence. I also use the mod that changes the barter XP gain formula to count each item you are selling rather than each transaction since otherwise barter will never properly level.
I respect the statistical analysis and you taught me some things I didn't know on the weightings on attributes vs skills. But scaled content is still unrewarding crap. Power progression is an important part of a RPG.
In an open world game scaling keeps the gameplay and combat interesting. The second generation of Pokemon gets rightly criticized for its difficulty hitting a plateau after a certain point because they didn't want to make any one path too difficult for the player. Most ARPGs like Diablo and Grim Dawn scale enemies to your level and also consistently drop the same items. It's just a different style of game design compared to CRPGs with a linear progression but even Dragon Age: Origins scales enemies. In fact part of the difficulty setting in that game is that enemies scale more on the higher difficulties so you can't just outlevel content and trivialize the game. Why is it bad to consistently challenge the player? Because it "isn't realistic?" It's a video game lol and there's enough room for both designs to function
@@darkfireslide Alternatively, you could go the Morrowind route of making certain routes too difficult for a low level character to finish. That makes for interesting gameplay and better worldbuilding. If the player wants more challenge they can just go to a higher level area. It makes sense that more dangerous areas to have stronger enemies. It doesn't make sense for the goblin cave just outside a village to be filled with high level goblin fighters each individually capable of soloing the entire village if they just chose to attack just because the player character went up a few levels. Worldbuilding doesn't have to be "realistic" but it should make sense. In the best Diablo game, Diablo 2, enemies do not scale with you, and are simply location based.
@darkfireslide Dragon Age Origins scales enemies to an *extent.* Each dungeon has a hard low and high cap on the level of enemies that can spawn there. You're never going to find level 20 Darkspawn in the Deep Roads, for example. It also doesn’t take 5 minutes for a two handed warrior to dispatch a single enemy with an unenchanted weapon.
@AvengerAtIlipa yes and DA:O's difficulty setting actually makes the scaling range wider And thinking about it most ARPGs in the style of Diablo 2 these days feature enemy scaling so that you can farm the items you want to some degree (Grim Dawn's monster infrequents for example) at a level where the gear is relevant to you, especially on NG+ and beyond. These are lauded features of these games for players who enjoy minmaxing their builds and finding the perfect items for it
While it's definitely comforting to know that many stats are not as useful as they appear, I cannot in good conscience be so dismissive of the mindset of someone wanting to make their levelups as valuable as possible considering it isn't a remediable problem after the fact. As a child, 90% of the fun of Oblivion was eventually becoming a narrative breaking superhuman, and I'd be big bummed if at the end of my journey I was even 5% less powerful or fast vs what I could have been.
@@rorke47 So is anyone who is bad. The game is designed in such a way that it satisfies a power fantasy easily for nearly any player, but permanently losing out on ANY power is a massive bonerkill for a large portion of them. You may think my comment is stupid, but I know for a fact yours is just foolish. You don't understand why people care about these things and how important they are to the experience of the game. This in addition to trying to gitgud over one of the easiest popular games ever made. An actual clownpost.
@@TorSmawbs no its not, you just have a massive mental disorder because you've been brainwashed by all these "l33t top hardcore gamers" on other games that you need to play 100% optimally or else your entire game is ruined. You're fixating on a loss of power that is so insignificant and then going through the mental gymnastics to argue its a problem with the game when its 100% a problem with you.
@@TorSmawbs no its not, you just have a massive mental disorder because you've been brainwashed by all these "l33t top hardcore gamers" on other games that you need to play 100% optimally or else your entire game is ruined. You're fixating on a loss of power that is so insignificant and then going through the mental gymnastics to argue its a problem with the game when its 100% a problem with you.
The main issue (to me) is how absolutely ass it feels to permanently miss out on attributes because you didn't level perfectly efficiently. Even if those attributes (minus endurance) don't matter that much if you understand how to break the game's systems (spell crafting/playing a Breton or Altmer), it's still FOMO. FOMO is unfun.
It's kind of sad that the game never tells you that the strongest build involves having -500 Agility and 9 pieces of gear enchanted with fortify fatigue. With 1 max fatigue, boosted to 451+ with enchantments and spells, you can one shot any enemy in the game on any difficulty with just about any weapon.
@@AvengerAtIlipatheres also the drain health spell which put on a dagger 100pts for 1 second on strike can stack because daggers can attack fast enough to get multiple hits in in a single second, so it drains all the enemy health
@MoraqVos i have my own issues with Skyrim, it is an overcorrection in the other direction from Oblivion. It is too simplified while Oblivion is too obtuse.
Dude, "make a summon skeleton spell that lasts 1 second to grind conjuration" IS NOT natural play. You're just further displaying how counterintuitive thw levelling system is by resorting to exploits.
well, i think this was to appease people that really want to guarantee a +5 on Int for that level. His point was that you don't need to do that, but if you really want to you can do something quickly.
@@memescoper "You don't need to do that" Instead you have to exploit the broken custom spell system or else you won't have the damage output to kill mob enemies in a reasonable amount of time at high levels. The fact that the guy always emphasizes how "you need magic to beat Oblivion" in his videos shows that he's just using cheese to skirt around the shitty levelling system.
I think it's kind of natural play? If you were a person with access to conjuration magic, how would you practice conjuring? Probably by...repeatedly casting the spell so that it becomes natural? Is repeatedly shooting free throws in basketball practice also not natural? Maybe the way it's demonstrated in game isn't very natural, but in theory it does make sense.
@@theblasblas I don't agree that you need magic in this game. I have played warrior characters before, not tracked every single level up on a spreadsheet or whatever, and have been just fine. Same with sneaky characters. The things you *need* to do are completely overblown imo
@@queuedjar4578 I would argue it's only slightly more intuitive than the grind in Final Fantasy 2 where you punch yourself in the face over and over again to level up strength and HP lol
Oblivion's levelling system is still one of the most egregious Ls in game design. The fact that people still defend it to this day is crazy, it's like video game Stockholm syndrome. We spent so much time being abused by it that we try to justify why it's core design isn't stupid. It's counter-intuitive, punishes 90% of players and actively takes away from the gameplay experience. As a kid I quickly mastered it and understood it, and the lizard like part of my brain(The autistic part) got some strange satisfaction from efficient levelling. Yet in retrospect, I spent a lot of time, intentionally running, and jumping, or casting spells at nothing, instead of actually enjoying the game. I avoided using weapons my character would use, playing them contrary to my actual intended build. Ultimately the system is anti RPG, nonsensical in terms of game design, logic, and no matter how much waffling and mental gymnastics we do to cope, it is bad.
Did you watch the video? You don’t have to like it, but the system is factually not anti-rpg, your autistic (your words) gameplay was. Seriously just play normally, it’s a great experience.
efficiently leveling and powerleveling is for bad players that think you need optimal attributes to do quests and close oblivion gates. the game is easy.
Funny that you mention the natural leveling is anti rpg and yet due to the mathematical equations from formulae, the natural levelers are approx. 2 times stronger than effecient levels. The effecient leveling is a trap not a natural leveling. Afterall, it is singleplayer game and you can have fun, not min-max stats which is ironically bad decision.
@@jakubwarenich4439 No, dude. I know what your logic is; "if you raise your Attributes less per level, you can gain more levels in total". Except because of Oblivion's strict level scaling, each level-up has an opportunity cost. You get stronger, but so does everything else. A level 15 character in Morrowind is stronger than a level 14 character. A level 15 Oblivion character may well be, relative to the world around them, weaker than they were at level 14. And anyway, how strong your character is at max level does not matter. The _totality_ of your game experience matters. It makes no sense to judge your gameplay experience by only the end. In any case, Oblivion's wonky "governing Attribute" system isn't even its biggest problem. The real issues are inflated HP pools, low damage, imbalanced skills and the level scaling taking away any feeling of progression and making the world feel artificial (every bandit has Glass armor; every rat is now a Minotaur; it doesn't feel right).
@@DarukiNeo-il2jt no thats the joke, he mentioned in plenty of his videos that these were not smart things to pick, but in this video he is contradicting that
I was mostly with you there, but Skyrim being easy is not a consequence of the leveling system. By your own admission, the attributes do very little so leveling them up is really unrewarding, vs. the perk system in Skyrim which is at worst the same as Oblivion in that you are getting a tiny numerical bonus. Perks in Skyrim are not the best but the idea of getting something unique on level up is definitely a good idea. I do think getting rid of attributes was a lame choice, but ultimately you gain levels in Skyrim exactly the same as in the other TES games, which is using skills to increase those skills, and then after leveling enough skills you can an overall character level. It's not meaningfully different other than not making a class, which I do agree is lame. I'd like to see classes and attributes come back, but acting like the leveling system is that different in Skyrim and is somehow worse than getting a small attribute bonus after all your videos (correctly) showing how not meaningful most attribute level ups are is baffling. Framing it as a matter of difficulty is also sort of laughable because none of these games are hard and you can always change the difficulty at any point in a play through at no cost or penalty. Oblivion literally doesn't even use a difficulty level and just has a sliding bar so you can actively tinker with it to make it feel exactly as hard as you want; it was designed to be changed as you play.
yes, skyrim build is less interesting because of the bland itemisation and lack of spellcrafting. Technically your game could be nothing but finding gear pieces and if the gears + level designs are interesting then it's an interesting game (zelda, outward)
@@mdd4296 Agreed. Skyrim is a weaker game in that department for sure, most items have enchantments that aren't compelling and no spell crafting is lame. I don't miss the nonsense that was fortify skill/attribute since I consider it essentially an exploit but other custom spell options are greatly missed. Big ups to Outward for sure, one of my favorite adventure RPGs in recent years.
I appreciate Oblivion’s attempt to maintain Morrowind’s wide scope of player character development through the point investment system for attributes. However, I often find myself installing mods that automate attribute values based on skill growth-essentially an automatic min-maxing system. Are you practicing schools of magic that require intelligence? Bam! You’re now more intelligent. Are you running and jumping great distances? Awesome, your speed is now higher. I hope the Elder Scrolls series reintroduces the attribute system into the franchise. Ideally, it could feature a system that more organically derives stats based on skill investments. It’s hard to imagine why a player dedicating time to specific skills shouldn’t see a direct return on their efforts.
I agree about the video you were reviewing, but I kind of disagree on the whole "system is fine" point. If you have an optimized character, it will destroy the game at every level, sure. But that optimized character relies heavily on Magic. More concretely, it relies on some combination of Restoration, Destruction, Conjuration and Alchemy. Oblivion is a roleplaying game. And it kind of sucks, that if you don't want to be outscaled by virtually every enemy in the game, you are more or less forced into this playstyle. If you want to play a strong Warrior that relies on its strength and strong magical items, you can, but you will fall behind eventually. If you want to play an Assassin, that relies on stealth, the enemies will start laughing in your face when you sneak attack them for 5% of their HP. My point is, the fact that the scaling of Magic so brutally outpaces Combat and Stealth is what is kind of ass about the system, and because of the way how monsters scale, you are pretty much forced to invest quite a lot into your magic skills, if you want to keep up with them. So it's not like "use your majors and use your minors too", it's just "use these skills regardless of whether they are majors or minors, and forget about the rest of them".
Yeah, it is a shame. It's also lame how multiple skills are just outright invalidated by options. Security being made entirely redundant by the skeleton key is really awful design IMO and I never take it since it feels like an exploit to me. Likewise speechcraft having no real purpose and being 100% invalidated by charm feels terrible.
@@wololopurgisnacht The problem is certain enemies have crazy HP scaling and weapon damage (NPC and player) is too low. Dread Zombies pose absolutely zero threat but take 3-6 business days to destroy. Tedious!
@@rorke47 your weapon skill and your strength is maxed out usually way before level 20, and after level 17 your strongest weapon enchantments are also capped with the transcendent sigil stone. This means that without using schools of magic to further buff yourself and weaken your enemies your damage won't increase in any meaningful way, pretty much all you gain per level is health, while enemies keep getting stronger and stronger. It doesn't matter how good you are, if you are not using Restoration and/or Destruction, or some exploit or game breaking build (you can get to 100% reflect and 100% spell resist), enemies will eventually outscale you.
The first time I played through Oblivion I didn't level at all and it was trivially easy on max difficulty. I conjured something and held block and defeated everything. The 2nd time through, with more knowledge, I leveled up frequently with mostly +5s, got outpaced, and ended up doing 100% camo the whole game. Neither game was particularly fun, which led me to think the game itself is just not fun. The poor balance got in the way. I've seen the rest of your channel I get that you can outpace the enemies if you pick the right weapon and the right race and the right armor and make your own spells, but there's way too many pitfalls where you waste your time training arrows or sneak.
@@ArvelDreth the 2nd playthrough? It was a while ago but IIRC I had to lower the slider all the way down because it was taking like 30 seconds of wailing on a single enemy while completely invisible to defeat it.
@@letsmakeit110 I just mean in general. Lower the difficulty or use poisons and buff spells. The fact that everything took 30 uninterrupted seconds of just slashing meant you must have been doing something wrong. Even just using sneak attack modifiers since you were permanently invisible would have made the process faster.
@@letsmakeit110 If you want to kill enemies faster on max difficulty, just magic weakness stacking. It's a much better experience than whacking away for 30 seconds on every enemy.
I've been playing oblivion casually since 2006 and I've never felt like it was too hard of a game, and I do stupid stuff like wearing armor that looks good to me or mixing light and heavy armor (which is probably super inefficient?). Still never have a problem with it being hard.
Same, though I started unknowingly picking up great habits by the time I started my second character many years ago. I didn't need to do any research to discover "woah hey, breton class is pretty broken" or "wow, stacking weakness is very powerful"
You changed my mind on the leveling system with your other videos. This one just solitified it. I know a lot of people are disagreeing with you, but using magic and enchantments isn't an exploit, it's the tools the developers gave you to directly engage with each individual mechanic in really unique and varied ways that you just can't with most other games.
After watching this, I'm sorry but I really can't agree. Oblivion's leveling is overly convoluted and is directly hostile to players who want to play their own way. Custom spells and enchantments should make you stronger, but you cant seriously expect someone who wants to be just a fighter to work a 9 to 5 at the mages guild.
thats fair, but you can certainly work to level up a primary combat skill as much as possible while also improving your gear if working at the fighters guild. It seems that a high skill is much more important than attribute increase, though you would get both anyway. I do think its bad that magic is so much stronger than any other combat, but that is not much of a leveling issue, more of a balance issue.
@@theoldknight85 The most powerful characters in Elder Scrolls lore are mages anyway. They might not all be pure mages, but they're definitely not "Joe Fighter who never touches a single magical spell."
Dude, "attributes donvt matter when you can just break the game with good equipment and custom spells" is not a good argument. Most people don't want to cheese the game. with broken builds, at least the first couple of times they play through the game and those first playthroughs is what this discussion is about.
@@theoldknight85 It's called paraphrasing. Using exploits like custom spells with a duration of 1 to quickly grind skills is "cheese". Honestly, the entire custom spell system is cheesy.
@@theblasblas I guess we just have strong differences in opinion. I almost never use custom training spells in Oblivion because it isn't worth your time. I address this in my previous video. Maybe to go from 49 to 50 to unlock a new spell, but I'm not going to gain more than a couple levels doing that. As for the custom spell system, it is the best magic system in any game ever created. The only competition is Morrowind, which uses the same system. Yes, there are some exploits like alternating weakness spells and I think weakness to magic should cap at 100% or using telekinesis to gain mana which just shouldn't happen, but those weird game interactions are not the norm and overall custom spells are not very cheesy and don't break the game at all.
Getting better equipment is an important part of improving your character. There is no perfect character build. There is no serious RPG where you can just choose skills at random and expect an enjoyable experience. Creating custom spells is an important part of what makes the game fun.
@@birdybird712 What you're saying isn't wrong, but doesn't really take into account the context. This is a discussion on game design, and a well designed rpg game should: 1. Not require a guide or any other external source to enjoy and complete the game. 2. Be accessible to new players. 3. Be intuitive. You should be able to complete the game by actually playing the game and not have to do shit like cast spells at a wall to grind, or hold off on levelling up because levelling up somehow just makes the game harder. Given all of that, let me introduce you to Timmy. Timmy is new to Elder Scrolls and wants to play a Barbarian so when he starts Oblivion he picks the Barbarian base class. He also really likes cats, so he makes it a Khajit Barbarian. Timmy doesn't use guides so everything he knows about the game is what the game informs him about, this means Timmy doesn't know how the levelling system works, and doesn't know which quests or dungeons give good gear, and he doesn't know about level scaling of the monsters or at most knows it happens but doesn't know the specifics. So Timmy, playing the game intuitively, joins the Fighter's guild and does their quests. It's fun, and whenever the quests sends him to a dungeon he uses his Major Skills a lot and levels up quickly. He levels uo whenever it's available, after all, why wouldn't he? Level ups are a good thing in every other RPG he's played. The loot is... alright, often he gets weapons that aren't a bladr, or have enchantments that aren't really useful for his build so most just getd sold or stored somewhere in case he needs it. Timmy is now a good few hours in and the enemies are starting to get tough. But Timmy isn't worried, when his Barbarian in Diablo 2 was having trouble with Duriel he just went to some of the tombs he hadn't visited yet, levelled up and beat him eventually. So that's what he's going to do here, even if the loot isn't good he's still levelling up so eventually he's going to be strong enough to beat this Oblivion gate... right? Little did Timmy know that he was just a few levels away from reaching the cut off where higher level dremora will start to spawn. Timmy the Barbarian is fucked.
You're not wrong, but the leveling scheme is just overly convoluted, and the balance so bad it makes players do all of the unfun stuff to try work around it. Unarmed? Garbage. Even melee weapons are generally crap without enchants. But run into a daedra and suddenly they punch a hole through your chest. Bandits are never such a big deal, but there are broken outliers, that are common enough, to demand efforts to poke into the leveling scheme to squeeze the most out of it. It's totally "natural". Problem is, pursuit of power by those means are only modest, while enchanting is locked behind the Mage's guild (absent DLC) and recharging is wildly expensive without a daedric artifact. Now that's pretending enchanting needs to be used all of the time - when the only time evening the playing field really matters is when those daedra show up, but I digress. It requires a lot of meta knowledge when there is this entire leveling system right in front of you. Players assume the leveling system is what they should engage with, and sadly that is an incorrect assumption, but absolutely a reasonable one. Skryim simply did away with the less impactful scheme and put your exact recommendation into practice. I miss attributes, but outside of some minor variance, the biggest impact was always kislls. TES5 just eliminated all doubt (only to confound it somehhat with perks, don't @ me).
Too be fair enchanting isn't only locked behind the DLC/guild since sigil stones exist, and the game definitely expects you to be clearing out several oblivion gates so you should have lots of sigil stones to choose from (this doesn't solve the recharging issue though).
I made a "perfect" character, a more or less pure mage. It included a lot of grinding. It wasn't super fun and it was really jarring to step back out into the light and seeing bandits kitted out in full Glass armor when I last saw them in fur. It was fun being a rolling deatball of crazy OP spells, though. It fit my roleplay of an overzealous student of the arcane arts that emerges from the University too powerful for his own good, lol. This video helped me roll a character and "just play the game normally". I'm on my second such character and I'm having a blast. Thanks for curing me of efficient leveling ❤
I think you both have a point. I think efficient leveling is ultimately more trouble than it's worth and attributes contribute little to overall player power. BUT I also think that the enemy scaling is super overtuned and people only pursue the efficient leveling rabbit hole because they're trying to level the playing field. Morrowind has an almost identical level system and also scales things like random encounters to player level, but few people got obsessed with efficient leveling because the tuning of that scaling was far more lax and they were a lot more obvious and crazy exploits to make you overpowered.
@@theoldknight85 Yea i did, i cant help it i watch em all :) Maybe you werent getting hit that much. I remember my paladin character getting staggered all the time with like 40 agility on maxx difficulty, when enemies were pounding me left and right, max restoration and healing ticking on me.
@@shoc2177 max difficulty is a little different that is for sure. If you are trying to play on max difficulty there is a LOT of boring grinding to do to make sure you get those attributes. Not worth it on normal (middle of the slider) in my opinion.
So let me get this straight. -There is no leveling problem in Oblivion -Enemies always get stronger when you level up -You can raise a minor skill from 5 to 100 without ever leveling up -Attributes are completely inconsequential when compared to your level in a particular skill -Attributes are the only thing you increase on level up Nope, Oblivion definitely has a leveling problem. You're full of it.
Attributes are what’s important in the context of efficient leveling. Gaining levels increases your health, attributes (which aren’t entirely inconsequential, i said in the video you shouldn’t just ignore them, they are just severely overrated and you can get them to 100 without min maxing) and more importantly access to better gear and sigil stones which have a dramatic impact on player power.
dude i fucking love you and your spreadsheets. this is almost exactly the problem i ran into playing first, trying to efficiently level. I realized that it was becoming very difficult when my stats were roughly 80s-90s and i was still level 4/5, shit just wasnt all that fun. I installed a mod to fix this since i was just having less fun out of grinding skills that i had unknowingly power levelled at level like 1-2 just to level up once. And yeah i would do this in a normal game because i want the +5s just cause i like getting to the highest stats quickly (preferring mages i want to get my magicka + regen rate maxed quickly just for convenience) but what the guides always seem to leave out is how ass fucking slow it actually is to level up in oblivion once you get past those first few levels. Once your major skills are in the 40-70s range, you genuinely have so little to worry about when it comes to levelling up prematurely, and if you do as you said in this video and use the game's systems strategically it's more than easy enough to get those extra stat modifiers easily through organic gameplay
This is even more true for morrowind. Hit chance scales off agility and SKILL with the attack type. Having those extra points from having your main weapon type a major skill makes early game much more bearable
I agree with you overall, I do have one issue however, and that's your argument of "well just look up up, the game has been out for 14 years" thing. Where is the fun in going to a wiki and having to ingest a ton of info? Where is the fun in having knowledge of a game before even playing it? It's a common thing these days for someone to just look up everything about a game, watch youtube videos on it or watch a streamer play the entire game before ever touching the game themselves and it's a shame. The entire point of playing something new is to go in blind imo, doing anything else is just ruining the experience for yourself imo.
You make a good point. I guess maybe I mean people who have played the game but find themselves struggling could look up guides, and I'd hope those guides wouldn't just tell them to efficiently level. Maybe that's the point I should have made instead.
So in my opinion, there are definitely some problems with the levelling system. There are unintuitive things about it and new players can fck up their character at the beginning of the game without knowing it (especially since most pre-made classes are garbage). However, it is far from the main problem that this game has. I did play with efficient levelling and I still felt as underpowered as I did in my non-efficient levelling playthrough. And watching your channel confirmed my suspicions, that attributes just don't do that much. People say that you "destroy the game" if you level efficiently are wrong. The problem that I have with this game is that it is imbalanced. If you don't abuse magic (custom spells and/or alchemy especially), you don't do enough damage and the game becomes tedious as everything becomes wayyy too tanky. Non-magical damage is capped way too low for the player. If this was fixed, or if the enemies were balanced differently (with less max health), the game would be much better.
This lol. The level system itself is fine. It's just the enemy health values/player melee attacks that are off balance. For years, ive always thought people were putting way too much value on this efficient leveling craze. These trends/misconceptions in video game fandoms are usually started by one or a few youtubers.
I think the spreadsheet is really helpful for understanding why your Attributes simply aren't as important as they're assumed to be. It's enlightening to see the numbers plugged in. It kind of makes me curious what it looks like in the other games as well.
I think it’s objectively wrong to say the Oblivion system isn’t flawed, but the potential for depth that it had was something Skyrim sorely missed. Skyrim brought a lot of its own interesting ideas on how perks and experience scaling occurred, but a lot of builds just never felt all that different from each other. If Oblivion had a system as open ended as spell crafting for each of the 3 specializations, I think the game would have been a lot more palatable for most people in the long run. I did also find the character sheets and artwork really charming, which Skyrim modernized out of the game. At the end of the day, optimizing in Oblivion was more interesting, but Skyrim was more fun to just play naturally. Thank the stars for the ingenuity of modders that breathe life back into both systems.
Hey, failing is part of the learning experience. My first character was awful and retired before level 10. My second character was even worse, maxed out personality and willpower by level 15. But that second character stomped the game with illusion and destruction. it didn't even matter that my endurance was the same as it was at level 1. I mean there are people out there doing challenge-runs on the hardest difficulty setting, beating the game with only hand-to-hand, only rusty gear, only restoration and waaaaaaaaaaaay more crazy and "useless" builds than the average casual gamer could even imagine. In fact, one of my favorite characters was a high elf, apprentice sign, pure wizard with starting level endurance. I had more fun with that character because of the added challenge, not in spite of it.
I was using uesp to guide me on my first playthrough, and my character still ended up as an overleveled jack of all trades. Beginner's luck gave me a Subjacent Damage Healt Sigil Stone from Kvatch, and I used it on a silver shortsword. That thing carried me. I had no chance killing anything without it past level 15. I abandoned the character in Blood of the Divines, when all my magic weapons ran out or charges in the catacombs, and I just stood there surrounded by screaming wraiths that take like a million hits from my broken weapons that I can't repair because my skill isn't high enough.
I remember the only character I ever had to abandon. Nordface, level 25ish Nord. I was re-exploring Arkved's Tower, and had just decided to "clean up" all my saves. I got to the part where you're outside a Fort in a Deadlands clone area (in Arkved's Tower). Bored with my character and having done everything at that point, pre-teen me decided to eat a poison apple because "I bet I can survive this." Needless to say, I didn't. Also, I jumped out of the Fort with no way back up, no saves to go back to. So my character was quadruple boned.
@@testingheyo5087 My character wasn't totally unplayable, it was just boring to spam light attack on every enemy, and the recharge and repair costs were huge. I ended up running past all the enemies in oblivion gates, ignoring the tedious gameplay.
This is basically the Growths vs Base Stats discussion from Fire Emblem. Use the stats you do have in the game, to beat the game. Not the stats that you might have if you grind for 500 hours in your head.
Bro I’ve spent at least a thousand hours in the game stats do matter go through never leveling endurance I get you like the game but you are wearing like 6 pairs of rose tinted glasses The average player shouldn’t have to look at a spread sheet to prove athletics does more than speed
Regarding your last point: pretty much every RPG has some sort of skill or attribute where it's not actually good to invest into. People seem to love Diablo 2, but nobody in this comment section points out that for almost every build, you only put points into Vitality as opposed to the 3 other attributes. However, a casual player can beat the game with an unoptimal build on just Normal and call it a day, similar to how casual Oblivion players can just turn down the difficulty slider. Point is, both games are beatable and enjoyable with either the casual or the min/max style.
i discovered you just yesterday and let me just say that i love both your actual knowledge of the game (not so much the math part since i suck at it but the general mechanics) and how unapologetically and unfiltered you put this all out. The leveling "problem" in particular is a topic that had me in pain ever since it became popular, out of nowhere mind you. The part where you say "Just play the game normally, dont keep notes etc etc" is what i've been telling people as well. Imagine playing ANY videogame backwards or treating it as a minmaxing simulator because your mind has fixated on a non existant issue, christ. Im not saying the game is flawless either but leveling is nowhere near being one of its problems. I also find it extremely ironic how people quiver at the thought of using the most out of Morrowind's mechanics in a normal manner to make a fun character but when it comes to doing the exact same thing in Oblivion, they suddenly turn red with rage and call game mechanics "cheesing" and "tedious" I could also rave on about Oblivion for hours but im gonna restrain myself for now and enjoy what you provide us.
I have thousands of hours in oblivion and I agree with almost everything you've said in this video. I think the one thing that would make a decent change is making so some enemies in the overworld are not scaled to your level. It is a bit unrealistic to encounter only demi-god level bandits everywhere you go from a lore perspective once you're max level. I think the only change this system would need is keep it as is for most dungeons and areas that are a decent distance from towns but lower the scaling for enemies closer to towns to help your characters feeling of power progression. I think the main issue for a lot of people is they feel like their character should be way stronger than most things they fight if they've put many many hours into the character.
I think I agree with that. I know for sure I wish certain bosses like Mannimarco had really high minimum levels (and summoned 5 zombies at once) and bandits near town had lower max levels, with powerful bandits farther away in forts and such
One thing oblivion fundamentally messed up is intelligence and willpower, intelligence increases maximum magicka and that's why i hate it, because i like destruction, alteration and illusion and i don't like using the other ones or even want to just to gain intelligence. would've been better if they both effected magicka.
well luckily, the ones you are not using are cheaper to train from a trainer so you don't have to use the much or at all. You'll get a couple just soul trapping
I've been playing Oblivion for about 18 years. It's my favorite game. When I first started I leveled naturally. Now I do efficient leveling. It's not about "right and wrong," it's about how a person enjoys playing the game. It's a single player game. No one's being cheated if someone chooses to use exploits to level in a way that makes the game more fun for them. Level how you choose and let others level their own way.
I agree 100%. If I was being more precise, I'd say my issue is that many people giving advice will say that you are required to efficiently level, otherwise the game will become too difficult.
I do think a large part of this misconception comes from how the mid game difficulty spike. You play normally, then suddenly a bunch of Clannfears rip you a new bunghole, and you try to find reasons why. The most obvious (incorrectly) being inefficient attribute allocation.
I can't watch atm. But I'll comment & come back later to watch & edit. I adore Oblivion, it was my first & favurite TES game. But unless you're using the +5 every level mod, the level system is counterproductive. Right gotta run.
If melee damage wasn't so horrible you wouldn't have to play on easy or normal. The only way i could play on herd was weekness then damage spell and spell stacking buffs. If people hate the leveling just play on easy or normal I did a run on normal and didn't get any +5 and did just fine. Maybe people should stop worrying about the numbers so much its a fun game with fun quest.
I will say right now I have basically the best character I've ever made and I basically put all the skills I don't use as my major skills... it is definitely a strategy to optimize a character.
If you think the system is good then I simply cannot agree. People shouldn't need to resort to other means they don't want to just to enjoy fighting in Oblivion, and it's a shame that your entire argument amounts to ignoring that people may not want to play the same way you do.
I think the implied point the video creator (the video being watched in this video) makes about how if he doesn't receive the maximum number of attribute points per level, it was a failure of a level is exactly the kind of mindset that has ruined games. Not only how they're played, but how they're made. Everyone plays games competitively now, even if they are entirely single player. They play games as if they are being watched, they compare their play-through to others they watch online and if they are 'behind the meta' they refuse to allow themselves to have fun. This is the problem that Skryim was created to solve. In order to make everyone's play-through optimal, they had to make none of the choices matter. No one wants to learn how to play a game, they want to be dropped in and already be an expert, performing at the highest level. A lot of the time most people immediately go look up a leveling or class guide and follow it to the letter, despite not really knowing why any of these choices make sense, it gives them a sense of security that they are playing optimally, even if they have no way of knowing. They are so afraid of imperfection that they aren't willing to learn, meaning games have to be simple enough to master your first time playing it, usually in the first two hours. Games in general have shifted away from knowledge-based mastery; learning the systems and interactions of a game and exploiting them to gain an advantage and increasingly focusing entirely on input mastery; how precise your aim is, how fast your reflexes are, etc, and I think it's leaving behind the group of players who enjoyed the former.
It doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out leveling endurance is important: "Affects how much Fatigue you have, your Health, and how much your Health will increase when you sleep and raise levels." My biggest complaint with Oblivion's leveling is the creatures with over tuned scaling (goblins) I also kinda wish 30 was a hard level cap, but thats just personal preference
I just found this channel. Thanks for the videos. I'm not gonna lie though, the only two ways I played Oblivion was a level 1 character or 15 plus every level. I grew very tired of the latter and put the game down. Haven't touched Oblivion since.
Idk I agree. I’ve never efficiently leveled in oblivion and never made a “meta class” with the skills I use as minors. Yes technically you’re more powerful if you do that but if your class isn’t awful and you have powerful artifacts and custom weapons there should be no reason you struggle. Especially if you understand the mechanics like fatigue. I’ve hardly ever used magic too I’ve only ever heavily invested in conjuring which trivializes the game once you get stuff like spider deadra skelly champs and liches
after finding your content I still don't much like how oblivion handles its leveling system, but my view has at least softened, granted I like trying to be efficient as I can with it so even if it's a small gain, I'd rather have it than not. in the end though if you play on pc and you want to play with "efficient leveling" I'd definitely suggest just grabbing a mod to give all +5 level ups and call it a day, fixed the issue for me nicely.
See: Attribute Progression Redesign Skill up contributions toward attribute gains roll over between levels. So those odd skill ups of Athletics will eventually tally up to a +5 over however many levels. Playing organic this will makes some of the early level ups potentially inefficient, but in the long run most things will trend toward +5s.
I don't see anything productive coming from this. Patrician thinks the system is brokenly bad, this guy thinks the system is good - just exploit the game. All that video would be is this guy disagreeing.
Skyrim gutting out attributes killed that whole game for me, especially the replayability. If ES6 doesn't have attributes I won't even play it lol and I probably have over 1k hours oblivion, ~300hrs skyrim.
Great insight, I’ve played probably 5 billion hours of oblivion (without mods) and learning that skills>attributes dramatically improves how much I enjoy the game. It would be nice if the levelling system was more intuitive but there is definitely something lost when everything about a game is on its surface and we don’t get dives into it like this decades after it’s release :)
One of my favorite power spikes early game as a generic knight type character is making a shock blade with my first sigil stone. Most of the monsters and people do not resist electric damage.
I play with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul which removes level scaling unless you clear a dungeon, which will then reset over time to be scaled to your level. The problem I have there is that it's hard to progress when even fighting goblins is a chore but I could definitely fix that by adjusting down the difficulty or focusing more on conjuration until my melee skills are higher since my summons do more damage than I do. The main problem with the stat points is that if you don't choose them you can lose them.
The main reason to not put the skills you want to use in the major category is so you don't level too high. The highest you should get to, if you're min maxing, is level 26. By then you should have 100 in every attribute except personality and luck. So you can get the skills you want to use to 100 and benefit from that without leveling up. After level 26, you'll only be making the game harder aince the enemy stats go up when you level, while yours only max out at 100, or 180-200 depending on your enchantments. I like to put acrobatics and alchemy in thr major category since these level up very fast. Whatever you do, never put athletics as a major skill. Also you should be leveling the skills you want to use when you're grinding for those bonus attribute points, so you can have 100 blade or blunt with 100 strength when you're done.
Although I like the leveling system because I'm used to it, I think its easy especially for newer players to power level things like magic skills. Alteration, illusion, Conjuration, etc are easy for someone to figure out how to level somewhat quickly. To be fair conjuration IS a great skill, but even with the level scaling a player could essentially go multiple character levels with little to no progress towards skills that scale damage or health like endurance, if you don't start leveling it early, it will nerf your character. I think late game it's easy for someone to round out their character and skills but i think the focus is early to mid game when enemies jump to the next tier it's going to be very hard. To be fair, the leveling system has so many hypotheticals that are a case to case basis. Plenty of races and classes have lots of nice powers and starting stats to where even if you level inefficiently, you could end up being okay. I think what can be hard with this game is that even with some skills as major skills, they will level unbelievably slow (im looking at you restoration :3). I think for me, endurance is probably the attribute that can be a problem if you're not careful. as you could easily have double or triple the health compared to someone with an untouched endurance (to be fair at that point though, you will probably have very good gear and be a high level but still worth mentioning!) I think you also made a good point about carefully choosing major and minor skills as you could cause some problems lol. Interesting topic of conversation though, loved to hear what you and others had to say!
My only objection to the power of attributes is speed. You have a much different interface with the world when your faster, against one skill being more powerful
I've always felt like it's a really good system for sort of unplanned roleplay, instead of a perfected god of battle and crafting with full 100s like in skyrim, you end up with a character limited by what actions they've taken over the course of the game. Your wizards and such will have 100 int and will with 0 effort, your warriors will have str and end maxed out completely naturally - and it'll come at a cost of other attributes when played naturally. The actual gripe most people seem to have is that the other combat styles and methods of acquiring power just can not handle how absolutely beastly the magic system is. Having a bad time because you neglected the magic system, enchanting and alchemy, when pretty much all builds would massively benefit from buffs and debuffs they offer is a problem with balance, not the leveling system. The balancing issue i don't think is controversial at all, and the actual thing that is going against the role playing nature of the game, missing out on basically exponential power growth because your big orc with a battleaxe doesn't know how to fortify stats through anything besides random enchanted loot is stupid.
Dude, your base premise is wrong. It's not 100 str and 60 Blade vs 60 str and 100 Blade. It's 100 str AND 100 Blade. Even with Blade as a misc skill you can EASILY get it to 100 by level 20. Also, your "you can just look it up" argument doesn't make sense because we're critiquing Oblivion's game design. Meaning how well designed it was for the time it was made and at that time the design for the levelling system was already incredibly counter intuitive. Honestly the fact that you say you "need magic" to finish Oblivion in your other videos just shows that you're using the broken ass custom magic system as a crutch for the shitty levelling system. If Oblivion was well designed you should be able to finish it without magic and without broken gear.
The most powerful characters in Elder Scrolls lore are mages. They might not all be pure mages, but they're definitely not "Joe Fighter who never touches a single magical spell." In the Elder Scrolls magic is important and it's only in Skyrim that magic is subpar.
@@derrickbonsell There are a lot of legendary figures that are never described casting spells. Fact is, this is a video game, and we're talking about game design. They designed the game with base classes that don't have spellcasting as a major skill. The game should be able to be completed using the intended build for those base classes with a reasonable amount of effort(no exploits, no hyper-optimization, no gear with broken abilities, no finishing the game at level 1 because it's easier that way), but it's not.
@@derrickbonsellI kind of agree with this sentiment. If you're just a really strong dude with a hammer, you cannot expect to survive in a world full of people who use magic. One day you will run into a mage who casts a spell that makes him stronger than an Orc. Then he summons a hammer that's bigger and badder than yours. If you are choosing to immerse yourself in a fantasy world that has magic and you willfully ignore every single aspect of it, roleplaying or not, I think that makes you the dumb one. Besides, you don't need spell making and spells for a melee or sneak character to be good/serviceable. (People love to exaggerate on this) The right combination of enchanted self found gear will do just fine. If you for some reason choose to forego all enchanted items for your melee or sneak character, well, that's your deficiency, not mine.
I didn’t say you need magic to beat oblivion, I said “it is a big hindrance and a big pain to pick no magic major skills.” Quit lying about me you weirdo.
@@theoldknight85 Oblivion Standard Classes Ranked! 2:30 mark, and I quote "The old old Elder scrolls you need magic, and Oblivion is the same" I may be a weirdo but I'm not a liar. Regardless, if you meant you literally need magic to beat it or it's a "big pain to pick no magic major skills", my point still stands. If the game was well designed a class with no magic major skills should be viable without being a "big pain" to play.
The real trap is falling down an "efficient leveling" rabbit hole and depriving yourself of fun in an insane effort to squeeze every minute stat gain out of a system which barely effects your gameplay. Yes please I want to cast 5000 more restoration spells in order to get that sweet sweet +5 willpower!!!
Definitely great points. Having 18 years of info, research, etc, definitely should affect our perspective. But I do think the whole system is pretty awful for anyone just sitting down to play. A ton of us didn’t understand how it worked back in 2006. As a teenager at the time, all my characters sucked and I did consistently fiddle with the difficulty. Internet wasn’t a ton of help back then. If you even had it. But idk if researching games is at all typical for kids or adults. Even now. Though I like it, I don’t think Oblivions leveling system is exactly “good.” My issues with it are almost entirely based around balance. Such as the vast differences in xp gains between some skills. And the attributes themselves. Agility and personality are nearly useless for almost all builds (outside RP as you said) and meanwhile, strength for example, is extremely useful for the carry weight alone. I’m also not excited for Hammerfall. Fallout 4s leveling was so much worse than Fallout 3s. Yet I still think FO4 had it better than Skyrim. Even 76 was more engaging…. Somehow. Watch us get a card system in ES6.
Thanks! Honestly I’m insanely busy atm, I have 3 young kids and I’m a full time teacher, hence why my videos aren’t edited My video notes joke was actually pretty close to reality. I can do more recorded gameplay, but streaming isn’t feasible.
My only complaint with oblivion's level system is that I don't like any game where the creature's overly level to match your level because it makes me feel like I'm making my character more powerful for no good reason. I prefer a system in which the more dangerous and obscure and difficult to reach parts of the world have harder creatures and you don't go there if you're level 2 and if you're level 20 then you can go there cautiously and if you're level 40 it might be easy and there might only be a dozen creatures in the world that are a threat.
With everyone talking about balancing, one thing I think massively ruins balance in Oblivion is being able to do DLC right at the start of the game. I feel like DLC should be level gated. For instance being able to go to the Mage Tower and spellcraft right at the start of the game is kinda game breaking, and destroys any sense of progression.
Oblivion’s leveling has a lot of character. I’m quite fond of it in my own way but you have to approach the game in a “break it before it breaks you” mentality which I could see a lot of people that try to get into the game now would dislike to some extent. Grinding skills up to 100 by cheesing a “do x thing for 1 sec” cast repeatedly isn’t very natural. As someone that typically plays Barbarians in a lot of the games I play, Oblivion straight up punishes you for not using magic. The game is designed for you to always use magic to some capacity and that’s unfortunate. I couldn’t imagine trying to brute force my way through Late game with just a Two Handed weapon, slowly slugging my way through each encounter. Magic is king, like in every Elder Scrolls game but especially so in Oblivion. Everyone has to be a spellblade of some sort. That’s pretty nonnegotiable for 99% of people that play this game. I think the main issue for the game isn’t the level of the Player but more so the scaling of enemies and martial weapons. They make playing nonmagic melee/bow only builds painful if not impossible. Abuse all the systems before they abuse you.
Honestly, speed matters more than athletics since it's the slowest skill in the game to level up. Unless you spend a full day doing something else with a paperweight on the w key while underwater with a waterbreathing enchantment. You'll get 100 speed while leveling efficiently long before reaching 50 athletics. I finished the whole game on an efficiently level character, did every quests etc.., and i didn't even reach 60 athletics.
I remember playing a naive marksman character build. I leveled naturally, I've been increasing agility, speed and something else (don't really remember). I've been struggling with low inventory capacity and low hp points (which was especially harrowing due to lack of magic resistance traits/effects). It was really irritating at times. I could have cheesed game in many ways, probably, but I was just a dumb kid. One of many dumb kids playing Oblivion. But as warrior it was always perfectly fine. I can't even imagine playing as a true bard character. Would have been a nightmare The point of 'oblivion leveling is bad' videos is that you can't really roleplay and you always have to keep in mind you skill increases. Yeah, braindead warrior build works fine but even in that case enemies become waaaay too tough at some point. It's not like they pose any real threat - it just takes ages to kill them. Which is not very fun. And there's nothing as deceiving as a concept of a 'natural play', a 'normal player' etc. Everyone has its own concept of a 'natural play'. That's what RPGs are for, for Sheogorath's sake! Well, you can always have a spreadsheet... But come on! There are some games when putting out a spreadsheet counts as an argument. Oblivion is not one of those games. And 'go punch mudcrabs for a couple of minutes' is not a good solution either. Especially at the higher levels. The moment you pull out the spreadsheet you prove the point of Oblivion's leveling critics actually There's endless ways you can break or cheese TES games but it's not for an average player than just want to play the goddamn game without any shenanigans
Yes you are right. I always just assumed Oblivion leveling was broken and with mods people didn't question that. Everyone was just getting it wrong based on incorrect assumptions and not doing the math.
I don't think the math or that most attributes don't matter actually is the important part. The issue with the system is it is unintuitive and feels bad to play the game "normally". That you don't actually have to min-max leveling to created busted characters if you pick the correct race and stack 4x weakness to (element) crafted spells and still 1 shot everything doesn't actually matter or make the design of the level system good.
Hey Old Knight, I made an edit that fixes the durability-to-damage dependency and currently playing through as a sword and board, physical only warrior. So far I'm testing how much easier the game becomes and so far at level 10 game only present occasional challenge. Thank you for that one video!
I have been wondering for awhile if efficient leveling was as critical in Oblivion as people claim, and I think I should try a more "casual" run just to see. But I do think this system is not perfect; I think its reputation is that the system caused players stress even if it wasn't necessary or intended - nobody's fault, really - and then Skyrim fixes it, but a lot of good stuff about the previous games gets lost, and I think it was because they took the easy fix based on Oblivion's reputation with players of TES classic. Funny how it happens, sometimes.
You are 100% right. It's more about balance and resultant (in)viability than about getting +5 / +5 / +5 at every level. Striving for +5(*3) is just doing without understanding lol. And muh clean numbers!
The greatest failling in oblivion systens, and in morrowinds, is that a lot of the math is a little too complicated and the games (+ manuals that they com with) barely explain how all the parts work togheter. For exemple in morrowind the game tells you that "fatigue affects all you do", but it sure never tells you that you get a -20% in all rolls for low fatigue or that you lose more faigue whem running if you are carrying a lot of stuff or that willpower improves the % of ALL magicka skills, etc. But you can kinda understand all the movimg parts of the math with time and experimentation, even you dont have the precise formula. In oblivion i realy think an easier math could helped a lot, like if every point of strenght, skill and fatigue% gave +1% damage instead of being 0.025 in one and 0.5 in another. Once you finally get that magick, good fatigue management and high skills are the path to victory you are pretty much sorted but it take some pondering to get there and you can make wrong assertions about the systens. I think the 2 things that i particularly dislike in oblivion is the restriction to just 5 trainings per level, cause i liked it as a way to try and "fix" a bad character by the mid to late game in morrowind, and the way the game levels enemies, randon loot and artifacts based on your level, the idea is fine but it is a little too agressive in oblivion for my taste, randon bandits using glass and trolls disapearing from dungeons to make place for ogres i dummo, never liked it that much. Sorry for the long wordy post.
People including the dude you sourced are wrong about the leveling system. The real issue is people thinking that levels=more power. oblivion will allow you to level into a weak character if you play it poorly. A new player may not stick to one weapon or armor type or just lean really hard into one skill via training and not have a way to fight effectively. The efficient leveling shit has always been skippable. Just train the attack skill you want to use up early, put the bonus you got into its stat, and the rest will come from your armor and other playstyles.
Oblivion's issue isn't that you can level poorly and end up with a weak character - that can happen in almost any game. The issue is that laveling ALWAYS makes you weaker relative to the enemies. As we know, attributes make little difference when it comes to how much damage etc you deal, skills are much more important and leveling up does nothing for skills There are benefits to leveling such as gaining access to Daedric quests and facing new enemy types, but purely in terms of powergaming you're always better off not leveling. And that's really backwards and counter-intuitive, and absolutely is a problem
Thank god for a voice of reason. I tried “power levelling” where I had one skill for each attribute. Kept track of every skill level up to make sure I got 5 skill points each time. Suffice to say…… Boring! Just play the game and have fun I say.
I really don't understand people playing an RPG like an adventure game, and getting mad because a game is "too hard" because they didn't care about skills they picked
that main issue is the way it restricts so heavily into per level. if you forget to use trainers or level inefficiently you miss out. it's always in the back of your mind. even if attributes arent as important (endurance IS), skill levels are. leveling too fast and/or inefficient combined with the aggressive scaling of enemies is NOT fun. not because it is difficult, but because its tedious. doing 5% less damage against already way too spongy enemies with oblivions combat suddenly makes a big difference and it is not enjoyable.
The only valid complaint about the oblivion leveling system is leveled unique rewards. Why are there ten different versions of Mehrune's Razor? Just level gate the quest. Seriously.
I don't think efficiently levelling (getting 3x +5s per level, selecting commonly used skills as minor skills) is inherently wrong, just when you go to the extreme of only getting 30 skill ups per level do you fuck yourself over. Like you said, you get at minimum 70 wasted skill ups per attributes. If you select 1 major skill per attribute, that ups it to ~100-115 wasted skill ups per attribute (if the attribute starts at 30, which some will be 40, others 50). If I start at 40 strength, and I select blade and h2h as minor skills, with blunt as a major skill, I need 120 skill ups to get to 100 strength. If I got blade at 10, h2h at 5, and blunt at 30 at level 1, thats 255 skill ups available. 135 skill ups can be wasted to still get 100 strength. You can get blade to 60 by level 3 and still be fine with getting strength to 100 eventually. The extreme of efficiently levelling is doing as I said for stat layout at level 1, getting 7 skill ups in blade, and 3 in blunt per level (splitting the 10 major skill ups per level into the 3 attributes being leveled as 3, 3, and 4), such that by level 5 you only have 38 blade and 42 blunt. That's kinda shitty skill wise. You'll have stunted skills until you get the attribute to 100, when you can level the shit out of your minor skill to catch up. Or you can just never level a major skill and get +10 in the minor skill, and then the 10 level ups split between the other two attribute major skills (which fucks over the skills in those attributes). You can do a mix of play casually and efficiently level and be fine. Setting infrequently used skills as major skills lets you dictate when you are ready to level up, and change the enemy pool. Sure, you gotta do farming to actually level, but you have more control over the leveling process and choose your difficulty without delving into custom spells/enchants until later in the game. What I think really sucks is that your combat spells (destruction and restoration) are governed by willpower instead of intelligence. At low level, if you want to be a pure mage, you will be casting the shit out of those spells, but on level up, doing those two skills won't grant you more magicka to cast those spells. Selecting them as major skills gives them a reduced starting magicka cost, allowing you to cast them more before running out of magicka initially, but using them will force you to level up potentially before you get intelligence skills to level up for more magicka. Instead the spells you may cast once at the beginning of battle for soul trapping and conjuring are what give you more magicka upon level up. I get willpower affects magicka regen, but it's as a percentage of total magicka, so if you have low intelligence, your magicka regen will be slow. You can't just be a destruction and restoration mage, you need alchemy to make you magicka potions (which will get you more magicka at level up) or you need to dip into other schools of spell casting just to bump your intelligence.
i remember playing following the main quest but doing every sidequest/ruin/dungeon i came across along the way. i had no real challenge, i was cruising.... until i got to kvatch. when i went thought the first gate i got absolutely murdered.
If i could beat the game as a nine year old that barely understood english at all, just playing a straight fighter. I really dont understand why people think you have to minmax like it's an esport.
I never had a problem with the leveling system. It was very clear to me that getting more numbers would be better so I would just always get +5 and it was clear that something like endurance which augments each future level would be better early on. Especially considering you choose when you level up and all you gotta do is count to 5, it really didn't seem like that complicated of a system. Balance combat stats and out of combat stats and things will be fine. I think I left it on the standard difficulty when I was younger though.
My first time playing i didnt know how to level up at first so i stayed at lvl 1 for many hours of gameplay and i honestly had fun, but when finally figuring out how to level i noticed my experience get significatly worse, my unique legendary sword chillrend, was suddenly useless and every enemy in the game kicked my ass. I was using marksman and it took several minutes to kill a single enemy. Call it a balance mistake, skill issue or whatever you like, but leveling up, the thing that should make the player feel rewarded in an rpg, felt awful in oblivion for me
Just one thing. While I do agree with the general notion of this video, Oblivions leveling isn't that broken when it comes to player power. You say Skyrim's leveling system is the worst. Yet the only real difference between its system and those of Oblivion and Morrowind is the existence of attributes, stats you say barely matter for the strenght of the character. All the depth of the leveling system of those two games exists to support and balance attribute growth. So you're kinda contradicting yourself. If attributes are indeed as useless as you claim, shouldn't you love Skyrim? No major or minor skills are needed if you dont have rpg attributes.
Good point. I should’ve said that the difference between getting all +5s each level and averaging +3s is negligible mid-game, and literally nothing late game for most builds. I absolutely love having a class that I create at the start. Skyrim replaced major skills, birthsigns, specialization, birth stones, and heaven stones with ONLY standing stones. This effectively killed replayability for me. Attributes were replaced with health/magicka/stam, which is think is a lamer choice. I love the attribute system. I just don’t think people should obsess about +5s, not that they are 100% worthless.
Let's say, hypothetically, a casual player decides to play... A Sneaky Argonian. Thief birthsign, and... say the pregen Thief class.
And they're not aware they should pump Endurance, or how the system really works at all. So they might get, say, +3 Agi, +2 Spe, +1 Luck on a level up. Maybe they take a +2 Str instead of the Agi, for the carry weight. Maybe they dabbled with Alchemy, and that +3 Int is looking nice.
And they're not having too much difficulty with the wolves, goblins, skeletons, and bandits. Suddenly, at level 6, ghosts appear, and they can't even hit the thing. They haven't even touched magic since the sewers, so they have 5 Destruction and a Flare spell.
And then they dip into an Oblivion gate, and run into a Clannfear. And they have maybe a hundred health.
this happened to me when i started playing, absolute nightmare
Also happened to me in skyrim. I was roleplaying a thief, and tries to pickpocket, and rob everybody's home, my character got to level 15 or so just from lockpicking, pickpocket and sneak. My character then goes to thieves guild questline, got fucked hard and dropped the character during goldenglow estate quest 😂
Bethesda's RPG stats (and to some extent it also applies to skills) scaling was, at least in morrowind and oblivion, completely broken and utter trash, anyone denying it is either in bad faith or overly attached to it, either because of nostalgia or has some other subjective motivation.
I mean, the fact alone that morrowind is an absolute paradox where your skills will likely level up significantly faster between levels 99-100 than between 5 and 6, has at least to give people something to think about. It's not just about it being counterintuitive, it makes progress through the last stages of skills feel like an unnaccomplishment.
Even more absurd is, when you take all these things into account, these obvious flaws and holes in Elder Scrolls game design, they somewhat largely contributed to make those games great, either in how they were perceived in comparison to anything that was meant to compete in the same genre, or in how they somehow ended up having their respective fanbase super fidelized.
Yeah, if you "aren't aware they should pump endurance or how the system really works at all" they should have a really weak character. Otherwise there is no room for improvement and any child could just pick up the game and gain mastery making any choices. A game SHOULD have bad choices, rather than have all choices work out just fine.
The majority of modern games are too afraid to punish bad decisions, and it really isn't for me. I don't think I'm alone in that either.
@theoldknight85 You're not alone at all, and I'm really grateful for the math on why things work. As a kid playing for the first time my experience WAS bad, but man did it make me want to try again. Skyrim never did that for me.
Ok, so it seems like the core thesis here is that attributes aren't the source of power for an Oblivion character - skills are. Therefore, worrying about maximizing level gains, and other complications mentioned by the critiqued video, are not actually concerns. While I am convinced that is the case, it naturally extends to the question:
Is the leveling system a failure if the player doesn't interact with it?
Ultimately, leveling up in Oblivion means leveling your enemies up, not you. Is it a good leveling system if I feel weaker than if I didn't engage with it?
Why is the character's level used for scaling, if the level, and therefore attributes, do not reflect the power the game needs to scale to? Do you think even the development team had the same misconceptions as the critiques video? Would a good system create this confusion?
In all fairness, I love Oblivion too. It was my first Elder Scrolls game and I'm very nostalgic. It isn't easy to accept a lot of poorly constructed criticism on something like that. It is why I am a fan of this channel. However, I do think it is important to remember that a lot of Oblivion's mechanics are knee-jerk reactions to make some of Morrowind's less accessible traits more generally palatable. It would have benefitted more from ground-up designed systems. In the end, the jank is part of the game's charm, so I wouldn't change the leveling system, but I wouldn't make another game with it either.
Attributes aren't entirely worthless, they just are not even close to worth obsessing over. They also aren't worth ignoring your major skills to maximize gains to get them to 100 five levels earlier than normal smart play.
Also, major skills under your specialization level more than twice as fast as unspecced minors. Skills outside of your class level very, very slowly.
As you gain levels you gain access to better gear and sigil stones. Before level 20, none of the overpowered magical rings drop.
I do agree that the system is confusing and that by itself is enough to call it a bad system. I wouldn't argue with that critique. However, I like in-depth systems that take time and thinking to understand, so I feel that is more a preference.
I'll definitely need more clarifying videos about this, I don't think I've found a way to articulate my thoughts perfectly yet, but we'll get there.
@@theoldknight85 I didn't say the attributes were worthless. I reiterated what you seem to be stating in the video and in this comment right here, that the attributes weren't valuable enough to make significant sacrifices of other character attributes (like skills) in order to optimize them. I will rephrase my key points that I do not see answered in your comment:
If the system does not warrant significant interaction is it a good system to have? I don't mean that the stats in the system are worthless, I mean that a (well informed) player does not have to make much choice, sacrifice, or change in behavior in order to best utilize the system in their unique circumstances. What are you really doing in order to utilize the leveling/attribute system, since you and I both agree it does not require the complications shown in the critiqued video? How hard would it be to automate the decision making?
Why do enemies scale to attributes if it is a less important aspect character power? Is it a good leveling system if the character can feel very powerful by not leveling? Is it a good leveling system if the character can "level up", a shorthand way of saying "increase in power and ability," and feel weaker in comparison to the world around them?
Replying to your comment in specific:
-I never said attributes were worthless, worth obsessing over, or worth ignoring skills over.
-I don't know what you mean by bringing up specialized vs. specialized skill leveling speeds. It seems unrelated to anything I wrote. Maybe you meant to reply to another comment?
-Gaining better gear and sigil stones might be in reply to my "feeling more powerful by not leveling" statement. If so, a level one or two character can still obtain many sources of power (high skills, some unleveled gear, grand soul enchantments) and put them to use against a 20 hp skeleton instead of a 350hp champion. To be clear, I'm not advocating for the style of play, I'm saying I think the system intended to be a key component of character strength is a poor system because strong characters can be built by avoiding it entirely. There really shouldn't be a choice between what might be an optimal character and seeing a variety of enemies and items either.
-I also agree that the confusion alone does not make it a system not worth using. I think is just a compounding element to that end.
-I look forward to the video! Thank you for taking the time to reply. I am sorry for the lengthy addition to the conversation, it is just that much of my comment felt misunderstood or avoided.
You have to level up in oblivion if you want to do all the quests. I prefer doing an efficient character grind before I start doing quests. I stop at level 26, because that's when the last enemy type (lich king) starts spawning, and it's also when I have all my attributes except for luck and personality at 100. I make sure restoration and destruction is at 100 so the spell cost as little as possible, and I don't touch the difficulty slider. I can say that playthrough was the most enjoyable, after I finished the boring part.
I liked morrowinds faction requirements for attributes and skills most of all. No 30 IQ idiot should ever become the master of the mages guild.
@@artcrime2999 the master of the mages guild in morrowind is literally a 30iq idiot 😭
I like that too but those requirements should be higher imo
35 IQ definitely sounds like Archmage material though am I right?
Except that system is only meant to pad out the game and in some cases, like the fighters guild and rogue... place, it's an arbitrary lock on players for mediocre questlines.
As a new player in my early playthroughs, I constantly encountered enemies that were massive damage sponges while I was leveling my character. I wasn’t able to keep up with the damage output I needed because I didn’t understand the different mechanics of the game or what the 'meta' was. To me, that’s a massive flaw in the leveling system. It doesn’t matter that efficient leveling probably wouldn’t have solved this problem for me-it’s still a core issue that doesn’t exist in many other RPGs from that time.
Even as an experienced player, I still care about min-maxing my character, even if attributes don’t matter as much as you claim. Experienced players care more about min-maxing than new players. Even if the increase in my character’s ability is only 5% due to efficient leveling, I still care about it because I’m aware it’s a factor in the game. But in other RPGs, this isn’t an issue-it’s a unique problem in Oblivion.
Your premise in this video is that once someone is experienced enough in Oblivion, they don’t need to worry about how bad the leveling system is because they can circumvent the issues by exploiting different game mechanics and understanding the meta way to play. But here’s another approach: just make a game with a good leveling system that doesn’t require all this nonsense. Trying to excuse it doesn’t justify it.
Yeah you hit the nail on the head. The leveling system is Byzantine in its complexity and painful to work with.
Just because Oblivion lets you use efficient play or exploits to work around the system, does _not_ redeem the system.
I play Oblivion with Ultimate Leveling, which provides a few alternatives. I use the default Fallout-style XP system.
Iam unsure if you saw his other videos, but he greatly explains how you are meant to be powerful in some instances. You know system isn't flawed, you just don't deal enough damage because you probably dont utilise enchants, poisons, fortify spells/potions etc. This is 2006 game keep in mind. You really don't need exploit the game to be powerful, you just need to utilise the tools that game is offering to you.
Let's say about your last point, you play World Of Warcraft Vanilla/TBC and you are leveling. You literally cannot pull more than 1 mob or 2 unless you are mage/warlock. Why ? because the game is meant to be hard and grindy to get resources for you to become stronger. Lets say you want to raid with your guild late game raids. If you do not provide buffs for your team or utility, you will not be able to play with them. You have to be resourcefull and take advantage of the tools the game is offering your (again). Dont mean exploits mind you.
Every RPG had that core behind it. Become stronger utilise etc. Today players think everything should be effortless and they blame that game is flawed and ultimately thats why Today's games are made that way.
Fallout, WOW, Neverwinter nights, Oblivion just to name a few.
@@jakubwarenich4439 NWN2 is a sorely underrated game but yeah, it does require you to do some thinking about your build. Some of the late-game fights are kinda hard
@@rdrrr yeah but that's not the point i initially meant though, i wanted to point out that ppl tend to blame the leveling system is flawed but they dont utilise tons of things that make them stronger, which was again, core gameplay of the game, that player had to figure out themselves, nobody held their hand, thus game was hard to play and it made sense back then. I still enjoy this type of games which make me use my brain to figure things out.
@@jakubwarenich4439 It's not just the game being too hard/tedious though, the strict level scaling in Oblivion robs the player of a feeling of progression.
In Morrowind if you go to a smuggler's cave and the Nord Barbarian inside kicks your ass you can return a little later and wipe the smile off his face. No such joy in Oblivion.
If anything you feel weaker in late-game Oblivion because it takes a lot longer to defeat enemies than it did at Level 1, because HP inflates faster than damage does. Skyrim fixed that problem (unfortunately, it broke a lot more than it fixed overall...)
There's a mod that carries over unused skill gains to the nect level, which IMO completely removes the FOMO feeling that the levelling system inevitably gives.
Also a mod that gives retoactive HP scaling removes any urge I have to rush END in the early game.
These two uncomfortable feelings always annoyed me, but those "+5 every time" mods are massive overkill. They basically say "the balance isn't perfect, so let's just remove any sense of balance whatsoever and make ever character perfect every time". They're very boring and rob the player of any sense of earning their attributes.
Yes that was the mod I was talking about too : -- "Attribute Progression Redesign"
Good ideas! Pretty sure in Morrowind you could continue to get bonuses in attributes even after getting enough skills to level. In baldur's gate 3 your constitution scales retroactively when you increase it or respec, definitely helps with the fomo
Wholeheartedly disagree. "+5 every time" is simplest and best solution to the problems. Completely FOMO free, nice and simple.
Yep, these are the two mods I use to make the leveling process feel much more natural. If I could only choose one though it would be the retroactive health. It's silly that only HP has a calculation that doesn't retroactively take the increased stat into account like Magicka does for Intelligence. I also use the mod that changes the barter XP gain formula to count each item you are selling rather than each transaction since otherwise barter will never properly level.
I respect the statistical analysis and you taught me some things I didn't know on the weightings on attributes vs skills. But scaled content is still unrewarding crap. Power progression is an important part of a RPG.
In an open world game scaling keeps the gameplay and combat interesting. The second generation of Pokemon gets rightly criticized for its difficulty hitting a plateau after a certain point because they didn't want to make any one path too difficult for the player. Most ARPGs like Diablo and Grim Dawn scale enemies to your level and also consistently drop the same items. It's just a different style of game design compared to CRPGs with a linear progression but even Dragon Age: Origins scales enemies. In fact part of the difficulty setting in that game is that enemies scale more on the higher difficulties so you can't just outlevel content and trivialize the game. Why is it bad to consistently challenge the player? Because it "isn't realistic?" It's a video game lol and there's enough room for both designs to function
@@darkfireslide Alternatively, you could go the Morrowind route of making certain routes too difficult for a low level character to finish. That makes for interesting gameplay and better worldbuilding. If the player wants more challenge they can just go to a higher level area.
It makes sense that more dangerous areas to have stronger enemies. It doesn't make sense for the goblin cave just outside a village to be filled with high level goblin fighters each individually capable of soloing the entire village if they just chose to attack just because the player character went up a few levels. Worldbuilding doesn't have to be "realistic" but it should make sense.
In the best Diablo game, Diablo 2, enemies do not scale with you, and are simply location based.
@darkfireslide Dragon Age Origins scales enemies to an *extent.* Each dungeon has a hard low and high cap on the level of enemies that can spawn there. You're never going to find level 20 Darkspawn in the Deep Roads, for example. It also doesn’t take 5 minutes for a two handed warrior to dispatch a single enemy with an unenchanted weapon.
@@darkfireslide no, your take is bad. Make hard zones/dungeons, don't scale the game
@AvengerAtIlipa yes and DA:O's difficulty setting actually makes the scaling range wider
And thinking about it most ARPGs in the style of Diablo 2 these days feature enemy scaling so that you can farm the items you want to some degree (Grim Dawn's monster infrequents for example) at a level where the gear is relevant to you, especially on NG+ and beyond. These are lauded features of these games for players who enjoy minmaxing their builds and finding the perfect items for it
While it's definitely comforting to know that many stats are not as useful as they appear, I cannot in good conscience be so dismissive of the mindset of someone wanting to make their levelups as valuable as possible considering it isn't a remediable problem after the fact.
As a child, 90% of the fun of Oblivion was eventually becoming a narrative breaking superhuman, and I'd be big bummed if at the end of my journey I was even 5% less powerful or fast vs what I could have been.
stupid comment, anyone who is good is super powerful at endgame because they know how to actually take advantage of every skill.
@@rorke47 So is anyone who is bad. The game is designed in such a way that it satisfies a power fantasy easily for nearly any player, but permanently losing out on ANY power is a massive bonerkill for a large portion of them.
You may think my comment is stupid, but I know for a fact yours is just foolish.
You don't understand why people care about these things and how important they are to the experience of the game. This in addition to trying to gitgud over one of the easiest popular games ever made. An actual clownpost.
@@TorSmawbs no its not, you just have a massive mental disorder because you've been brainwashed by all these "l33t top hardcore gamers" on other games that you need to play 100% optimally or else your entire game is ruined. You're fixating on a loss of power that is so insignificant and then going through the mental gymnastics to argue its a problem with the game when its 100% a problem with you.
@@TorSmawbs no its not, you just have a massive mental disorder because you've been brainwashed by all these "l33t top hardcore gamers" on other games that you need to play 100% optimally or else your entire game is ruined. You're fixating on a loss of power that is so insignificant and then going through the mental gymnastics to argue its a problem with the game when its 100% a problem with you.
The main issue (to me) is how absolutely ass it feels to permanently miss out on attributes because you didn't level perfectly efficiently.
Even if those attributes (minus endurance) don't matter that much if you understand how to break the game's systems (spell crafting/playing a Breton or Altmer), it's still FOMO. FOMO is unfun.
It's kind of sad that the game never tells you that the strongest build involves having -500 Agility and 9 pieces of gear enchanted with fortify fatigue. With 1 max fatigue, boosted to 451+ with enchantments and spells, you can one shot any enemy in the game on any difficulty with just about any weapon.
@@AvengerAtIlipatheres also the drain health spell which put on a dagger 100pts for 1 second on strike can stack because daggers can attack fast enough to get multiple hits in in a single second, so it drains all the enemy health
Yes, FOMO from the attribute system is the reason I like Skyrim more than Morrowind and Oblivion.
Someone made a mod that perfectly solves the 'missing out on Attributes' issue IMO -- "Attribute Progression Redesign"
@MoraqVos i have my own issues with Skyrim, it is an overcorrection in the other direction from Oblivion. It is too simplified while Oblivion is too obtuse.
Dude, "make a summon skeleton spell that lasts 1 second to grind conjuration" IS NOT natural play.
You're just further displaying how counterintuitive thw levelling system is by resorting to exploits.
well, i think this was to appease people that really want to guarantee a +5 on Int for that level. His point was that you don't need to do that, but if you really want to you can do something quickly.
@@memescoper "You don't need to do that"
Instead you have to exploit the broken custom spell system or else you won't have the damage output to kill mob enemies in a reasonable amount of time at high levels.
The fact that the guy always emphasizes how "you need magic to beat Oblivion" in his videos shows that he's just using cheese to skirt around the shitty levelling system.
I think it's kind of natural play? If you were a person with access to conjuration magic, how would you practice conjuring? Probably by...repeatedly casting the spell so that it becomes natural? Is repeatedly shooting free throws in basketball practice also not natural? Maybe the way it's demonstrated in game isn't very natural, but in theory it does make sense.
@@theblasblas I don't agree that you need magic in this game. I have played warrior characters before, not tracked every single level up on a spreadsheet or whatever, and have been just fine. Same with sneaky characters. The things you *need* to do are completely overblown imo
@@queuedjar4578 I would argue it's only slightly more intuitive than the grind in Final Fantasy 2 where you punch yourself in the face over and over again to level up strength and HP lol
Oblivion's levelling system is still one of the most egregious Ls in game design.
The fact that people still defend it to this day is crazy, it's like video game Stockholm syndrome. We spent so much time being abused by it that we try to justify why it's core design isn't stupid.
It's counter-intuitive, punishes 90% of players and actively takes away from the gameplay experience.
As a kid I quickly mastered it and understood it, and the lizard like part of my brain(The autistic part) got some strange satisfaction from efficient levelling.
Yet in retrospect, I spent a lot of time, intentionally running, and jumping, or casting spells at nothing, instead of actually enjoying the game.
I avoided using weapons my character would use, playing them contrary to my actual intended build.
Ultimately the system is anti RPG, nonsensical in terms of game design, logic, and no matter how much waffling and mental gymnastics we do to cope, it is bad.
Did you watch the video? You don’t have to like it, but the system is factually not anti-rpg, your autistic (your words) gameplay was. Seriously just play normally, it’s a great experience.
I never did any of those things when playing and I enjoyed the game a lot.
efficiently leveling and powerleveling is for bad players that think you need optimal attributes to do quests and close oblivion gates. the game is easy.
Funny that you mention the natural leveling is anti rpg and yet due to the mathematical equations from formulae, the natural levelers are approx. 2 times stronger than effecient levels. The effecient leveling is a trap not a natural leveling. Afterall, it is singleplayer game and you can have fun, not min-max stats which is ironically bad decision.
@@jakubwarenich4439 No, dude. I know what your logic is; "if you raise your Attributes less per level, you can gain more levels in total".
Except because of Oblivion's strict level scaling, each level-up has an opportunity cost. You get stronger, but so does everything else. A level 15 character in Morrowind is stronger than a level 14 character. A level 15 Oblivion character may well be, relative to the world around them, weaker than they were at level 14. And anyway, how strong your character is at max level does not matter. The _totality_ of your game experience matters. It makes no sense to judge your gameplay experience by only the end.
In any case, Oblivion's wonky "governing Attribute" system isn't even its biggest problem. The real issues are inflated HP pools, low damage, imbalanced skills and the level scaling taking away any feeling of progression and making the world feel artificial (every bandit has Glass armor; every rat is now a Minotaur; it doesn't feel right).
8:07 i want to pick athletics, acrobatics, hand to hand, conjuration, merchantile, sneak, and restoration
nah
sounds good, restoration is powerful and will help you a lot then
@@DarukiNeo-il2jt no thats the joke, he mentioned in plenty of his videos that these were not smart things to pick, but in this video he is contradicting that
If you don’t pick wood elf, you should be fine. Just don’t forget to use alchemy and damage fatigue spells
**I'M RIGHT, AND EVERYBODY ELSE IS WRONG**
I was mostly with you there, but Skyrim being easy is not a consequence of the leveling system. By your own admission, the attributes do very little so leveling them up is really unrewarding, vs. the perk system in Skyrim which is at worst the same as Oblivion in that you are getting a tiny numerical bonus. Perks in Skyrim are not the best but the idea of getting something unique on level up is definitely a good idea.
I do think getting rid of attributes was a lame choice, but ultimately you gain levels in Skyrim exactly the same as in the other TES games, which is using skills to increase those skills, and then after leveling enough skills you can an overall character level. It's not meaningfully different other than not making a class, which I do agree is lame. I'd like to see classes and attributes come back, but acting like the leveling system is that different in Skyrim and is somehow worse than getting a small attribute bonus after all your videos (correctly) showing how not meaningful most attribute level ups are is baffling.
Framing it as a matter of difficulty is also sort of laughable because none of these games are hard and you can always change the difficulty at any point in a play through at no cost or penalty. Oblivion literally doesn't even use a difficulty level and just has a sliding bar so you can actively tinker with it to make it feel exactly as hard as you want; it was designed to be changed as you play.
yes, skyrim build is less interesting because of the bland itemisation and lack of spellcrafting. Technically your game could be nothing but finding gear pieces and if the gears + level designs are interesting then it's an interesting game (zelda, outward)
@@mdd4296 Agreed. Skyrim is a weaker game in that department for sure, most items have enchantments that aren't compelling and no spell crafting is lame. I don't miss the nonsense that was fortify skill/attribute since I consider it essentially an exploit but other custom spell options are greatly missed.
Big ups to Outward for sure, one of my favorite adventure RPGs in recent years.
@@mdd4296Oblivion build is less interesting because of the bland attribute system and lack of item crafting. See how easy that was?
10:57
sounds very fun and you definitely aren't going out of your way to do this
I appreciate Oblivion’s attempt to maintain Morrowind’s wide scope of player character development through the point investment system for attributes. However, I often find myself installing mods that automate attribute values based on skill growth-essentially an automatic min-maxing system.
Are you practicing schools of magic that require intelligence? Bam! You’re now more intelligent. Are you running and jumping great distances? Awesome, your speed is now higher.
I hope the Elder Scrolls series reintroduces the attribute system into the franchise. Ideally, it could feature a system that more organically derives stats based on skill investments. It’s hard to imagine why a player dedicating time to specific skills shouldn’t see a direct return on their efforts.
I agree about the video you were reviewing, but I kind of disagree on the whole "system is fine" point. If you have an optimized character, it will destroy the game at every level, sure. But that optimized character relies heavily on Magic. More concretely, it relies on some combination of Restoration, Destruction, Conjuration and Alchemy. Oblivion is a roleplaying game. And it kind of sucks, that if you don't want to be outscaled by virtually every enemy in the game, you are more or less forced into this playstyle. If you want to play a strong Warrior that relies on its strength and strong magical items, you can, but you will fall behind eventually. If you want to play an Assassin, that relies on stealth, the enemies will start laughing in your face when you sneak attack them for 5% of their HP. My point is, the fact that the scaling of Magic so brutally outpaces Combat and Stealth is what is kind of ass about the system, and because of the way how monsters scale, you are pretty much forced to invest quite a lot into your magic skills, if you want to keep up with them. So it's not like "use your majors and use your minors too", it's just "use these skills regardless of whether they are majors or minors, and forget about the rest of them".
Yeah, it is a shame. It's also lame how multiple skills are just outright invalidated by options. Security being made entirely redundant by the skeleton key is really awful design IMO and I never take it since it feels like an exploit to me. Likewise speechcraft having no real purpose and being 100% invalidated by charm feels terrible.
Watching this channel has taught me that there is in fact an Oblivion Levelling Problem, it's just not the one that everyone talks about.
you dont get outscaled by every enemy, you're just bad
@@wololopurgisnacht The problem is certain enemies have crazy HP scaling and weapon damage (NPC and player) is too low.
Dread Zombies pose absolutely zero threat but take 3-6 business days to destroy. Tedious!
@@rorke47 your weapon skill and your strength is maxed out usually way before level 20, and after level 17 your strongest weapon enchantments are also capped with the transcendent sigil stone. This means that without using schools of magic to further buff yourself and weaken your enemies your damage won't increase in any meaningful way, pretty much all you gain per level is health, while enemies keep getting stronger and stronger. It doesn't matter how good you are, if you are not using Restoration and/or Destruction, or some exploit or game breaking build (you can get to 100% reflect and 100% spell resist), enemies will eventually outscale you.
The first time I played through Oblivion I didn't level at all and it was trivially easy on max difficulty. I conjured something and held block and defeated everything. The 2nd time through, with more knowledge, I leveled up frequently with mostly +5s, got outpaced, and ended up doing 100% camo the whole game.
Neither game was particularly fun, which led me to think the game itself is just not fun. The poor balance got in the way.
I've seen the rest of your channel I get that you can outpace the enemies if you pick the right weapon and the right race and the right armor and make your own spells, but there's way too many pitfalls where you waste your time training arrows or sneak.
What about just lowering the difficulty?
@@ArvelDreth the 2nd playthrough? It was a while ago but IIRC I had to lower the slider all the way down because it was taking like 30 seconds of wailing on a single enemy while completely invisible to defeat it.
@@letsmakeit110 I just mean in general. Lower the difficulty or use poisons and buff spells. The fact that everything took 30 uninterrupted seconds of just slashing meant you must have been doing something wrong. Even just using sneak attack modifiers since you were permanently invisible would have made the process faster.
@@letsmakeit110 If you want to kill enemies faster on max difficulty, just magic weakness stacking. It's a much better experience than whacking away for 30 seconds on every enemy.
the game does let you fall in pitfalls, however, it doesn't force you to play on max difficulty either.
I've been playing oblivion casually since 2006 and I've never felt like it was too hard of a game, and I do stupid stuff like wearing armor that looks good to me or mixing light and heavy armor (which is probably super inefficient?). Still never have a problem with it being hard.
I have as well, and my first character was blunt and all magic schools minus destruction
Same, though I started unknowingly picking up great habits by the time I started my second character many years ago. I didn't need to do any research to discover "woah hey, breton class is pretty broken" or "wow, stacking weakness is very powerful"
If you need an excel sheet to prove your point, the system is fucked.
That’s just how I communicate with people
@theoldknight85 you are not the first, but there is a possibility that i watched another vid of yours. :P
You changed my mind on the leveling system with your other videos. This one just solitified it.
I know a lot of people are disagreeing with you, but using magic and enchantments isn't an exploit, it's the tools the developers gave you to directly engage with each individual mechanic in really unique and varied ways that you just can't with most other games.
After watching this, I'm sorry but I really can't agree. Oblivion's leveling is overly convoluted and is directly hostile to players who want to play their own way. Custom spells and enchantments should make you stronger, but you cant seriously expect someone who wants to be just a fighter to work a 9 to 5 at the mages guild.
thats fair, but you can certainly work to level up a primary combat skill as much as possible while also improving your gear if working at the fighters guild. It seems that a high skill is much more important than attribute increase, though you would get both anyway. I do think its bad that magic is so much stronger than any other combat, but that is not much of a leveling issue, more of a balance issue.
@@memescopera level 30 warrior can complete the game easily as well, just a handful of enemies will feel spongy like goblin warlords
@@theoldknight85 The most powerful characters in Elder Scrolls lore are mages anyway. They might not all be pure mages, but they're definitely not "Joe Fighter who never touches a single magical spell."
I'd recommend always having an 'always +5' mod
@@derrickbonsell"lore says mages are better" is not a good excuse for bad game design.
Dude, "attributes donvt matter when you can just break the game with good equipment and custom spells" is not a good argument.
Most people don't want to cheese the game. with broken builds, at least the first couple of times they play through the game and those first playthroughs is what this discussion is about.
It’s weird that you put quotes in your comment when I never said that. Using good equipment and raising your skills is not “cheesing” the game.
@@theoldknight85 It's called paraphrasing. Using exploits like custom spells with a duration of 1 to quickly grind skills is "cheese".
Honestly, the entire custom spell system is cheesy.
@@theblasblas I guess we just have strong differences in opinion. I almost never use custom training spells in Oblivion because it isn't worth your time. I address this in my previous video. Maybe to go from 49 to 50 to unlock a new spell, but I'm not going to gain more than a couple levels doing that.
As for the custom spell system, it is the best magic system in any game ever created. The only competition is Morrowind, which uses the same system. Yes, there are some exploits like alternating weakness spells and I think weakness to magic should cap at 100% or using telekinesis to gain mana which just shouldn't happen, but those weird game interactions are not the norm and overall custom spells are not very cheesy and don't break the game at all.
Getting better equipment is an important part of improving your character.
There is no perfect character build. There is no serious RPG where you can just choose skills at random and expect an enjoyable experience.
Creating custom spells is an important part of what makes the game fun.
@@birdybird712 What you're saying isn't wrong, but doesn't really take into account the context.
This is a discussion on game design, and a well designed rpg game should: 1. Not require a guide or any other external source to enjoy and complete the game. 2. Be accessible to new players. 3. Be intuitive. You should be able to complete the game by actually playing the game and not have to do shit like cast spells at a wall to grind, or hold off on levelling up because levelling up somehow just makes the game harder.
Given all of that, let me introduce you to Timmy. Timmy is new to Elder Scrolls and wants to play a Barbarian so when he starts Oblivion he picks the Barbarian base class. He also really likes cats, so he makes it a Khajit Barbarian. Timmy doesn't use guides so everything he knows about the game is what the game informs him about, this means Timmy doesn't know how the levelling system works, and doesn't know which quests or dungeons give good gear, and he doesn't know about level scaling of the monsters or at most knows it happens but doesn't know the specifics.
So Timmy, playing the game intuitively, joins the Fighter's guild and does their quests. It's fun, and whenever the quests sends him to a dungeon he uses his Major Skills a lot and levels up quickly. He levels uo whenever it's available, after all, why wouldn't he? Level ups are a good thing in every other RPG he's played. The loot is... alright, often he gets weapons that aren't a bladr, or have enchantments that aren't really useful for his build so most just getd sold or stored somewhere in case he needs it.
Timmy is now a good few hours in and the enemies are starting to get tough. But Timmy isn't worried, when his Barbarian in Diablo 2 was having trouble with Duriel he just went to some of the tombs he hadn't visited yet, levelled up and beat him eventually. So that's what he's going to do here, even if the loot isn't good he's still levelling up so eventually he's going to be strong enough to beat this Oblivion gate... right?
Little did Timmy know that he was just a few levels away from reaching the cut off where higher level dremora will start to spawn. Timmy the Barbarian is fucked.
You're not wrong, but the leveling scheme is just overly convoluted, and the balance so bad it makes players do all of the unfun stuff to try work around it. Unarmed? Garbage. Even melee weapons are generally crap without enchants. But run into a daedra and suddenly they punch a hole through your chest. Bandits are never such a big deal, but there are broken outliers, that are common enough, to demand efforts to poke into the leveling scheme to squeeze the most out of it. It's totally "natural".
Problem is, pursuit of power by those means are only modest, while enchanting is locked behind the Mage's guild (absent DLC) and recharging is wildly expensive without a daedric artifact. Now that's pretending enchanting needs to be used all of the time - when the only time evening the playing field really matters is when those daedra show up, but I digress. It requires a lot of meta knowledge when there is this entire leveling system right in front of you. Players assume the leveling system is what they should engage with, and sadly that is an incorrect assumption, but absolutely a reasonable one.
Skryim simply did away with the less impactful scheme and put your exact recommendation into practice. I miss attributes, but outside of some minor variance, the biggest impact was always kislls. TES5 just eliminated all doubt (only to confound it somehhat with perks, don't @ me).
Too be fair enchanting isn't only locked behind the DLC/guild since sigil stones exist, and the game definitely expects you to be clearing out several oblivion gates so you should have lots of sigil stones to choose from (this doesn't solve the recharging issue though).
I made a "perfect" character, a more or less pure mage. It included a lot of grinding. It wasn't super fun and it was really jarring to step back out into the light and seeing bandits kitted out in full Glass armor when I last saw them in fur. It was fun being a rolling deatball of crazy OP spells, though. It fit my roleplay of an overzealous student of the arcane arts that emerges from the University too powerful for his own good, lol.
This video helped me roll a character and "just play the game normally". I'm on my second such character and I'm having a blast. Thanks for curing me of efficient leveling ❤
I think you both have a point. I think efficient leveling is ultimately more trouble than it's worth and attributes contribute little to overall player power. BUT I also think that the enemy scaling is super overtuned and people only pursue the efficient leveling rabbit hole because they're trying to level the playing field.
Morrowind has an almost identical level system and also scales things like random encounters to player level, but few people got obsessed with efficient leveling because the tuning of that scaling was far more lax and they were a lot more obvious and crazy exploits to make you overpowered.
Agility is never worthless, it also decreases the chance of being staggered by melee/ranged attakcs.
Watch my restoration showcase. I have 0 agility and I’m not getting staggered more than the minimum amount
@@theoldknight85 Yea i did, i cant help it i watch em all :) Maybe you werent getting hit that much.
I remember my paladin character getting staggered all the time with like 40 agility on maxx difficulty, when enemies were pounding me left and right, max restoration and healing ticking on me.
@@shoc2177 max difficulty is a little different that is for sure. If you are trying to play on max difficulty there is a LOT of boring grinding to do to make sure you get those attributes. Not worth it on normal (middle of the slider) in my opinion.
So let me get this straight.
-There is no leveling problem in Oblivion
-Enemies always get stronger when you level up
-You can raise a minor skill from 5 to 100 without ever leveling up
-Attributes are completely inconsequential when compared to your level in a particular skill
-Attributes are the only thing you increase on level up
Nope, Oblivion definitely has a leveling problem. You're full of it.
Attributes are what’s important in the context of efficient leveling. Gaining levels increases your health, attributes (which aren’t entirely inconsequential, i said in the video you shouldn’t just ignore them, they are just severely overrated and you can get them to 100 without min maxing) and more importantly access to better gear and sigil stones which have a dramatic impact on player power.
dude i fucking love you and your spreadsheets. this is almost exactly the problem i ran into playing first, trying to efficiently level. I realized that it was becoming very difficult when my stats were roughly 80s-90s and i was still level 4/5, shit just wasnt all that fun. I installed a mod to fix this since i was just having less fun out of grinding skills that i had unknowingly power levelled at level like 1-2 just to level up once. And yeah i would do this in a normal game because i want the +5s just cause i like getting to the highest stats quickly (preferring mages i want to get my magicka + regen rate maxed quickly just for convenience) but what the guides always seem to leave out is how ass fucking slow it actually is to level up in oblivion once you get past those first few levels. Once your major skills are in the 40-70s range, you genuinely have so little to worry about when it comes to levelling up prematurely, and if you do as you said in this video and use the game's systems strategically it's more than easy enough to get those extra stat modifiers easily through organic gameplay
This is even more true for morrowind. Hit chance scales off agility and SKILL with the attack type. Having those extra points from having your main weapon type a major skill makes early game much more bearable
I agree with you overall, I do have one issue however, and that's your argument of "well just look up up, the game has been out for 14 years" thing. Where is the fun in going to a wiki and having to ingest a ton of info? Where is the fun in having knowledge of a game before even playing it? It's a common thing these days for someone to just look up everything about a game, watch youtube videos on it or watch a streamer play the entire game before ever touching the game themselves and it's a shame. The entire point of playing something new is to go in blind imo, doing anything else is just ruining the experience for yourself imo.
You make a good point. I guess maybe I mean people who have played the game but find themselves struggling could look up guides, and I'd hope those guides wouldn't just tell them to efficiently level. Maybe that's the point I should have made instead.
So in my opinion, there are definitely some problems with the levelling system. There are unintuitive things about it and new players can fck up their character at the beginning of the game without knowing it (especially since most pre-made classes are garbage). However, it is far from the main problem that this game has.
I did play with efficient levelling and I still felt as underpowered as I did in my non-efficient levelling playthrough. And watching your channel confirmed my suspicions, that attributes just don't do that much. People say that you "destroy the game" if you level efficiently are wrong.
The problem that I have with this game is that it is imbalanced. If you don't abuse magic (custom spells and/or alchemy especially), you don't do enough damage and the game becomes tedious as everything becomes wayyy too tanky. Non-magical damage is capped way too low for the player. If this was fixed, or if the enemies were balanced differently (with less max health), the game would be much better.
This lol. The level system itself is fine. It's just the enemy health values/player melee attacks that are off balance.
For years, ive always thought people were putting way too much value on this efficient leveling craze. These trends/misconceptions in video game fandoms are usually started by one or a few youtubers.
I think the spreadsheet is really helpful for understanding why your Attributes simply aren't as important as they're assumed to be. It's enlightening to see the numbers plugged in. It kind of makes me curious what it looks like in the other games as well.
I think it’s objectively wrong to say the Oblivion system isn’t flawed, but the potential for depth that it had was something Skyrim sorely missed. Skyrim brought a lot of its own interesting ideas on how perks and experience scaling occurred, but a lot of builds just never felt all that different from each other. If Oblivion had a system as open ended as spell crafting for each of the 3 specializations, I think the game would have been a lot more palatable for most people in the long run.
I did also find the character sheets and artwork really charming, which Skyrim modernized out of the game. At the end of the day, optimizing in Oblivion was more interesting, but Skyrim was more fun to just play naturally. Thank the stars for the ingenuity of modders that breathe life back into both systems.
Hey, failing is part of the learning experience. My first character was awful and retired before level 10. My second character was even worse, maxed out personality and willpower by level 15. But that second character stomped the game with illusion and destruction. it didn't even matter that my endurance was the same as it was at level 1. I mean there are people out there doing challenge-runs on the hardest difficulty setting, beating the game with only hand-to-hand, only rusty gear, only restoration and waaaaaaaaaaaay more crazy and "useless" builds than the average casual gamer could even imagine. In fact, one of my favorite characters was a high elf, apprentice sign, pure wizard with starting level endurance. I had more fun with that character because of the added challenge, not in spite of it.
I was using uesp to guide me on my first playthrough, and my character still ended up as an overleveled jack of all trades. Beginner's luck gave me a Subjacent Damage Healt Sigil Stone from Kvatch, and I used it on a silver shortsword. That thing carried me. I had no chance killing anything without it past level 15. I abandoned the character in Blood of the Divines, when all my magic weapons ran out or charges in the catacombs, and I just stood there surrounded by screaming wraiths that take like a million hits from my broken weapons that I can't repair because my skill isn't high enough.
I remember the only character I ever had to abandon. Nordface, level 25ish Nord.
I was re-exploring Arkved's Tower, and had just decided to "clean up" all my saves. I got to the part where you're outside a Fort in a Deadlands clone area (in Arkved's Tower).
Bored with my character and having done everything at that point, pre-teen me decided to eat a poison apple because "I bet I can survive this."
Needless to say, I didn't. Also, I jumped out of the Fort with no way back up, no saves to go back to. So my character was quadruple boned.
@@testingheyo5087 My character wasn't totally unplayable, it was just boring to spam light attack on every enemy, and the recharge and repair costs were huge. I ended up running past all the enemies in oblivion gates, ignoring the tedious gameplay.
This is basically the Growths vs Base Stats discussion from Fire Emblem. Use the stats you do have in the game, to beat the game. Not the stats that you might have if you grind for 500 hours in your head.
Bro I’ve spent at least a thousand hours in the game stats do matter go through never leveling endurance
I get you like the game but you are wearing like 6 pairs of rose tinted glasses
The average player shouldn’t have to look at a spread sheet to prove athletics does more than speed
Regarding your last point: pretty much every RPG has some sort of skill or attribute where it's not actually good to invest into. People seem to love Diablo 2, but nobody in this comment section points out that for almost every build, you only put points into Vitality as opposed to the 3 other attributes.
However, a casual player can beat the game with an unoptimal build on just Normal and call it a day, similar to how casual Oblivion players can just turn down the difficulty slider.
Point is, both games are beatable and enjoyable with either the casual or the min/max style.
Underrated channel... Make a video about your favorite mods. There are so many lost mods that you can't find anywhere anymore...
i discovered you just yesterday and let me just say that i love both your actual knowledge of the game (not so much the math part since i suck at it but the general mechanics) and how unapologetically and unfiltered you put this all out. The leveling "problem" in particular is a topic that had me in pain ever since it became popular, out of nowhere mind you. The part where you say "Just play the game normally, dont keep notes etc etc" is what i've been telling people as well. Imagine playing ANY videogame backwards or treating it as a minmaxing simulator because your mind has fixated on a non existant issue, christ. Im not saying the game is flawless either but leveling is nowhere near being one of its problems. I also find it extremely ironic how people quiver at the thought of using the most out of Morrowind's mechanics in a normal manner to make a fun character but when it comes to doing the exact same thing in Oblivion, they suddenly turn red with rage and call game mechanics "cheesing" and "tedious" I could also rave on about Oblivion for hours but im gonna restrain myself for now and enjoy what you provide us.
I have thousands of hours in oblivion and I agree with almost everything you've said in this video. I think the one thing that would make a decent change is making so some enemies in the overworld are not scaled to your level. It is a bit unrealistic to encounter only demi-god level bandits everywhere you go from a lore perspective once you're max level. I think the only change this system would need is keep it as is for most dungeons and areas that are a decent distance from towns but lower the scaling for enemies closer to towns to help your characters feeling of power progression. I think the main issue for a lot of people is they feel like their character should be way stronger than most things they fight if they've put many many hours into the character.
I think I agree with that. I know for sure I wish certain bosses like Mannimarco had really high minimum levels (and summoned 5 zombies at once) and bandits near town had lower max levels, with powerful bandits farther away in forts and such
@@theoldknight85 absolutely, the difference in power between a random bandit in a cave and a legendary ancient necromancer is not high enough lol
One thing oblivion fundamentally messed up is intelligence and willpower, intelligence increases maximum magicka and that's why i hate it, because i like destruction, alteration and illusion and i don't like using the other ones or even want to just to gain intelligence. would've been better if they both effected magicka.
well luckily, the ones you are not using are cheaper to train from a trainer so you don't have to use the much or at all. You'll get a couple just soul trapping
I've been playing Oblivion for about 18 years. It's my favorite game. When I first started I leveled naturally. Now I do efficient leveling. It's not about "right and wrong," it's about how a person enjoys playing the game. It's a single player game. No one's being cheated if someone chooses to use exploits to level in a way that makes the game more fun for them. Level how you choose and let others level their own way.
I agree 100%. If I was being more precise, I'd say my issue is that many people giving advice will say that you are required to efficiently level, otherwise the game will become too difficult.
I do think a large part of this misconception comes from how the mid game difficulty spike.
You play normally, then suddenly a bunch of Clannfears rip you a new bunghole, and you try to find reasons why. The most obvious (incorrectly) being inefficient attribute allocation.
I can't watch atm.
But I'll comment & come back later to watch & edit.
I adore Oblivion, it was my first & favurite TES game.
But unless you're using the +5 every level mod, the level system is counterproductive.
Right gotta run.
Someone made a mod that perfectly solves the 'missing out on Attributes' issue IMO with Oblivion's original design -- "Attribute Progression Redesign"
If melee damage wasn't so horrible you wouldn't have to play on easy or normal. The only way i could play on herd was weekness then damage spell and spell stacking buffs. If people hate the leveling just play on easy or normal I did a run on normal and didn't get any +5 and did just fine. Maybe people should stop worrying about the numbers so much its a fun game with fun quest.
I will say right now I have basically the best character I've ever made and I basically put all the skills I don't use as my major skills... it is definitely a strategy to optimize a character.
If you think the system is good then I simply cannot agree. People shouldn't need to resort to other means they don't want to just to enjoy fighting in Oblivion, and it's a shame that your entire argument amounts to ignoring that people may not want to play the same way you do.
I think the implied point the video creator (the video being watched in this video) makes about how if he doesn't receive the maximum number of attribute points per level, it was a failure of a level is exactly the kind of mindset that has ruined games. Not only how they're played, but how they're made.
Everyone plays games competitively now, even if they are entirely single player. They play games as if they are being watched, they compare their play-through to others they watch online and if they are 'behind the meta' they refuse to allow themselves to have fun. This is the problem that Skryim was created to solve. In order to make everyone's play-through optimal, they had to make none of the choices matter. No one wants to learn how to play a game, they want to be dropped in and already be an expert, performing at the highest level. A lot of the time most people immediately go look up a leveling or class guide and follow it to the letter, despite not really knowing why any of these choices make sense, it gives them a sense of security that they are playing optimally, even if they have no way of knowing. They are so afraid of imperfection that they aren't willing to learn, meaning games have to be simple enough to master your first time playing it, usually in the first two hours. Games in general have shifted away from knowledge-based mastery; learning the systems and interactions of a game and exploiting them to gain an advantage and increasingly focusing entirely on input mastery; how precise your aim is, how fast your reflexes are, etc, and I think it's leaving behind the group of players who enjoyed the former.
It doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out leveling endurance is important:
"Affects how much Fatigue you have, your Health, and how much your Health will increase when you sleep and raise levels."
My biggest complaint with Oblivion's leveling is the creatures with over tuned scaling (goblins)
I also kinda wish 30 was a hard level cap, but thats just personal preference
I just found this channel. Thanks for the videos. I'm not gonna lie though, the only two ways I played Oblivion was a level 1 character or 15 plus every level. I grew very tired of the latter and put the game down. Haven't touched Oblivion since.
Idk I agree. I’ve never efficiently leveled in oblivion and never made a “meta class” with the skills I use as minors. Yes technically you’re more powerful if you do that but if your class isn’t awful and you have powerful artifacts and custom weapons there should be no reason you struggle. Especially if you understand the mechanics like fatigue. I’ve hardly ever used magic too I’ve only ever heavily invested in conjuring which trivializes the game once you get stuff like spider deadra skelly champs and liches
What about achieving 255 endurance in level 1, and leveling up to level 200?
after finding your content I still don't much like how oblivion handles its leveling system, but my view has at least softened, granted I like trying to be efficient as I can with it so even if it's a small gain, I'd rather have it than not. in the end though if you play on pc and you want to play with "efficient leveling" I'd definitely suggest just grabbing a mod to give all +5 level ups and call it a day, fixed the issue for me nicely.
See: Attribute Progression Redesign
Skill up contributions toward attribute gains roll over between levels. So those odd skill ups of Athletics will eventually tally up to a +5 over however many levels. Playing organic this will makes some of the early level ups potentially inefficient, but in the long run most things will trend toward +5s.
Please do a similar video covering PatricianTVs Oblivion video's section on the leveling system
I don't see anything productive coming from this. Patrician thinks the system is brokenly bad, this guy thinks the system is good - just exploit the game.
All that video would be is this guy disagreeing.
@@Syenthros Controversial takes is what makes fun UA-cam videos.
I, too, would enjoy the aforementioned.
Skyrim gutting out attributes killed that whole game for me, especially the replayability. If ES6 doesn't have attributes I won't even play it lol and I probably have over 1k hours oblivion, ~300hrs skyrim.
>you can look at this spreadsheet
oh, come on
@@d4rz0t667 welcome to my channel
Great insight, I’ve played probably 5 billion hours of oblivion (without mods) and learning that skills>attributes dramatically improves how much I enjoy the game. It would be nice if the levelling system was more intuitive but there is definitely something lost when everything about a game is on its surface and we don’t get dives into it like this decades after it’s release :)
One of my favorite power spikes early game as a generic knight type character is making a shock blade with my first sigil stone. Most of the monsters and people do not resist electric damage.
Oblivions Goated, great video.
Least dedicated Oblivion fan:
This man speaks the true true.
I play with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul which removes level scaling unless you clear a dungeon, which will then reset over time to be scaled to your level. The problem I have there is that it's hard to progress when even fighting goblins is a chore but I could definitely fix that by adjusting down the difficulty or focusing more on conjuration until my melee skills are higher since my summons do more damage than I do.
The main problem with the stat points is that if you don't choose them you can lose them.
The main reason to not put the skills you want to use in the major category is so you don't level too high. The highest you should get to, if you're min maxing, is level 26. By then you should have 100 in every attribute except personality and luck. So you can get the skills you want to use to 100 and benefit from that without leveling up. After level 26, you'll only be making the game harder aince the enemy stats go up when you level, while yours only max out at 100, or 180-200 depending on your enchantments. I like to put acrobatics and alchemy in thr major category since these level up very fast. Whatever you do, never put athletics as a major skill. Also you should be leveling the skills you want to use when you're grinding for those bonus attribute points, so you can have 100 blade or blunt with 100 strength when you're done.
Although I like the leveling system because I'm used to it, I think its easy especially for newer players to power level things like magic skills. Alteration, illusion, Conjuration, etc are easy for someone to figure out how to level somewhat quickly. To be fair conjuration IS a great skill, but even with the level scaling a player could essentially go multiple character levels with little to no progress towards skills that scale damage or health like endurance, if you don't start leveling it early, it will nerf your character. I think late game it's easy for someone to round out their character and skills but i think the focus is early to mid game when enemies jump to the next tier it's going to be very hard. To be fair, the leveling system has so many hypotheticals that are a case to case basis. Plenty of races and classes have lots of nice powers and starting stats to where even if you level inefficiently, you could end up being okay. I think what can be hard with this game is that even with some skills as major skills, they will level unbelievably slow (im looking at you restoration :3). I think for me, endurance is probably the attribute that can be a problem if you're not careful. as you could easily have double or triple the health compared to someone with an untouched endurance (to be fair at that point though, you will probably have very good gear and be a high level but still worth mentioning!) I think you also made a good point about carefully choosing major and minor skills as you could cause some problems lol. Interesting topic of conversation though, loved to hear what you and others had to say!
My only objection to the power of attributes is speed. You have a much different interface with the world when your faster, against one skill being more powerful
I've always felt like it's a really good system for sort of unplanned roleplay, instead of a perfected god of battle and crafting with full 100s like in skyrim, you end up with a character limited by what actions they've taken over the course of the game. Your wizards and such will have 100 int and will with 0 effort, your warriors will have str and end maxed out completely naturally - and it'll come at a cost of other attributes when played naturally.
The actual gripe most people seem to have is that the other combat styles and methods of acquiring power just can not handle how absolutely beastly the magic system is. Having a bad time because you neglected the magic system, enchanting and alchemy, when pretty much all builds would massively benefit from buffs and debuffs they offer is a problem with balance, not the leveling system. The balancing issue i don't think is controversial at all, and the actual thing that is going against the role playing nature of the game, missing out on basically exponential power growth because your big orc with a battleaxe doesn't know how to fortify stats through anything besides random enchanted loot is stupid.
Dude, your base premise is wrong. It's not 100 str and 60 Blade vs 60 str and 100 Blade. It's 100 str AND 100 Blade.
Even with Blade as a misc skill you can EASILY get it to 100 by level 20.
Also, your "you can just look it up" argument doesn't make sense because we're critiquing Oblivion's game design. Meaning how well designed it was for the time it was made and at that time the design for the levelling system was already incredibly counter intuitive.
Honestly the fact that you say you "need magic" to finish Oblivion in your other videos just shows that you're using the broken ass custom magic system as a crutch for the shitty levelling system.
If Oblivion was well designed you should be able to finish it without magic and without broken gear.
The most powerful characters in Elder Scrolls lore are mages. They might not all be pure mages, but they're definitely not "Joe Fighter who never touches a single magical spell." In the Elder Scrolls magic is important and it's only in Skyrim that magic is subpar.
@@derrickbonsell There are a lot of legendary figures that are never described casting spells.
Fact is, this is a video game, and we're talking about game design. They designed the game with base classes that don't have spellcasting as a major skill. The game should be able to be completed using the intended build for those base classes with a reasonable amount of effort(no exploits, no hyper-optimization, no gear with broken abilities, no finishing the game at level 1 because it's easier that way), but it's not.
@@derrickbonsellI kind of agree with this sentiment. If you're just a really strong dude with a hammer, you cannot expect to survive in a world full of people who use magic. One day you will run into a mage who casts a spell that makes him stronger than an Orc. Then he summons a hammer that's bigger and badder than yours.
If you are choosing to immerse yourself in a fantasy world that has magic and you willfully ignore every single aspect of it, roleplaying or not, I think that makes you the dumb one.
Besides, you don't need spell making and spells for a melee or sneak character to be good/serviceable. (People love to exaggerate on this) The right combination of enchanted self found gear will do just fine.
If you for some reason choose to forego all enchanted items for your melee or sneak character, well, that's your deficiency, not mine.
I didn’t say you need magic to beat oblivion, I said “it is a big hindrance and a big pain to pick no magic major skills.”
Quit lying about me you weirdo.
@@theoldknight85 Oblivion Standard Classes Ranked! 2:30 mark, and I quote "The old old Elder scrolls you need magic, and Oblivion is the same"
I may be a weirdo but I'm not a liar.
Regardless, if you meant you literally need magic to beat it or it's a "big pain to pick no magic major skills", my point still stands. If the game was well designed a class with no magic major skills should be viable without being a "big pain" to play.
The real trap is falling down an "efficient leveling" rabbit hole and depriving yourself of fun in an insane effort to squeeze every minute stat gain out of a system which barely effects your gameplay. Yes please I want to cast 5000 more restoration spells in order to get that sweet sweet +5 willpower!!!
"I couldn't beat Oblivion as a 9 year old" Speak for yourself, I did beat Oblivion as a 9 year old 😏
You should make a video going over your favorite builds. Would love to see how you make a strong and fun class
Definitely great points. Having 18 years of info, research, etc, definitely should affect our perspective. But I do think the whole system is pretty awful for anyone just sitting down to play.
A ton of us didn’t understand how it worked back in 2006. As a teenager at the time, all my characters sucked and I did consistently fiddle with the difficulty. Internet wasn’t a ton of help back then. If you even had it. But idk if researching games is at all typical for kids or adults. Even now.
Though I like it, I don’t think Oblivions leveling system is exactly “good.” My issues with it are almost entirely based around balance. Such as the vast differences in xp gains between some skills. And the attributes themselves. Agility and personality are nearly useless for almost all builds (outside RP as you said) and meanwhile, strength for example, is extremely useful for the carry weight alone.
I’m also not excited for Hammerfall. Fallout 4s leveling was so much worse than Fallout 3s. Yet I still think FO4 had it better than Skyrim. Even 76 was more engaging…. Somehow. Watch us get a card system in ES6.
did you think about doing any livestreams or recorded playthroughs? Your videos are very interesting, I would love to see you play this game
Thanks! Honestly I’m insanely busy atm, I have 3 young kids and I’m a full time teacher, hence why my videos aren’t edited
My video notes joke was actually pretty close to reality.
I can do more recorded gameplay, but streaming isn’t feasible.
My only complaint with oblivion's level system is that I don't like any game where the creature's overly level to match your level because it makes me feel like I'm making my character more powerful for no good reason. I prefer a system in which the more dangerous and obscure and difficult to reach parts of the world have harder creatures and you don't go there if you're level 2 and if you're level 20 then you can go there cautiously and if you're level 40 it might be easy and there might only be a dozen creatures in the world that are a threat.
With everyone talking about balancing, one thing I think massively ruins balance in Oblivion is being able to do DLC right at the start of the game. I feel like DLC should be level gated. For instance being able to go to the Mage Tower and spellcraft right at the start of the game is kinda game breaking, and destroys any sense of progression.
Oblivion’s leveling has a lot of character. I’m quite fond of it in my own way but you have to approach the game in a “break it before it breaks you” mentality which I could see a lot of people that try to get into the game now would dislike to some extent. Grinding skills up to 100 by cheesing a “do x thing for 1 sec” cast repeatedly isn’t very natural.
As someone that typically plays Barbarians in a lot of the games I play, Oblivion straight up punishes you for not using magic. The game is designed for you to always use magic to some capacity and that’s unfortunate. I couldn’t imagine trying to brute force my way through Late game with just a Two Handed weapon, slowly slugging my way through each encounter. Magic is king, like in every Elder Scrolls game but especially so in Oblivion. Everyone has to be a spellblade of some sort. That’s pretty nonnegotiable for 99% of people that play this game.
I think the main issue for the game isn’t the level of the Player but more so the scaling of enemies and martial weapons. They make playing nonmagic melee/bow only builds painful if not impossible.
Abuse all the systems before they abuse you.
Honestly, speed matters more than athletics since it's the slowest skill in the game to level up. Unless you spend a full day doing something else with a paperweight on the w key while underwater with a waterbreathing enchantment. You'll get 100 speed while leveling efficiently long before reaching 50 athletics. I finished the whole game on an efficiently level character, did every quests etc.., and i didn't even reach 60 athletics.
I'll die on the hill that Oblivion is the BEST Elder Scrolls game
I remember playing a naive marksman character build. I leveled naturally, I've been increasing agility, speed and something else (don't really remember). I've been struggling with low inventory capacity and low hp points (which was especially harrowing due to lack of magic resistance traits/effects). It was really irritating at times. I could have cheesed game in many ways, probably, but I was just a dumb kid. One of many dumb kids playing Oblivion. But as warrior it was always perfectly fine. I can't even imagine playing as a true bard character. Would have been a nightmare
The point of 'oblivion leveling is bad' videos is that you can't really roleplay and you always have to keep in mind you skill increases. Yeah, braindead warrior build works fine but even in that case enemies become waaaay too tough at some point. It's not like they pose any real threat - it just takes ages to kill them. Which is not very fun. And there's nothing as deceiving as a concept of a 'natural play', a 'normal player' etc. Everyone has its own concept of a 'natural play'. That's what RPGs are for, for Sheogorath's sake!
Well, you can always have a spreadsheet... But come on! There are some games when putting out a spreadsheet counts as an argument. Oblivion is not one of those games. And 'go punch mudcrabs for a couple of minutes' is not a good solution either. Especially at the higher levels. The moment you pull out the spreadsheet you prove the point of Oblivion's leveling critics actually
There's endless ways you can break or cheese TES games but it's not for an average player than just want to play the goddamn game without any shenanigans
Yes you are right. I always just assumed Oblivion leveling was broken and with mods people didn't question that. Everyone was just getting it wrong based on incorrect assumptions and not doing the math.
I don't think the math or that most attributes don't matter actually is the important part.
The issue with the system is it is unintuitive and feels bad to play the game "normally". That you don't actually have to min-max leveling to created busted characters if you pick the correct race and stack 4x weakness to (element) crafted spells and still 1 shot everything doesn't actually matter or make the design of the level system good.
Hey Old Knight, I made an edit that fixes the durability-to-damage dependency and currently playing through as a sword and board, physical only warrior. So far I'm testing how much easier the game becomes and so far at level 10 game only present occasional challenge. Thank you for that one video!
Haven't watched this yet but anyone who doesn't like oblivion's leveling deserves the dreck they gave us in skyrim
I have been wondering for awhile if efficient leveling was as critical in Oblivion as people claim, and I think I should try a more "casual" run just to see. But I do think this system is not perfect; I think its reputation is that the system caused players stress even if it wasn't necessary or intended - nobody's fault, really - and then Skyrim fixes it, but a lot of good stuff about the previous games gets lost, and I think it was because they took the easy fix based on Oblivion's reputation with players of TES classic. Funny how it happens, sometimes.
based spreadsheet chad
You are 100% right. It's more about balance and resultant (in)viability than about getting +5 / +5 / +5 at every level. Striving for +5(*3) is just doing without understanding lol. And muh clean numbers!
The greatest failling in oblivion systens, and in morrowinds, is that a lot of the math is a little too complicated and the games (+ manuals that they com with) barely explain how all the parts work togheter.
For exemple in morrowind the game tells you that "fatigue affects all you do", but it sure never tells you that you get a -20% in all rolls for low fatigue or that you lose more faigue whem running if you are carrying a lot of stuff or that willpower improves the % of ALL magicka skills, etc. But you can kinda understand all the movimg parts of the math with time and experimentation, even you dont have the precise formula.
In oblivion i realy think an easier math could helped a lot, like if every point of strenght, skill and fatigue% gave +1% damage instead of being 0.025 in one and 0.5 in another. Once you finally get that magick, good fatigue management and high skills are the path to victory you are pretty much sorted but it take some pondering to get there and you can make wrong assertions about the systens.
I think the 2 things that i particularly dislike in oblivion is the restriction to just 5 trainings per level, cause i liked it as a way to try and "fix" a bad character by the mid to late game in morrowind, and the way the game levels enemies, randon loot and artifacts based on your level, the idea is fine but it is a little too agressive in oblivion for my taste, randon bandits using glass and trolls disapearing from dungeons to make place for ogres i dummo, never liked it that much.
Sorry for the long wordy post.
Thank you. Finally someone says it!
People including the dude you sourced are wrong about the leveling system. The real issue is people thinking that levels=more power. oblivion will allow you to level into a weak character if you play it poorly. A new player may not stick to one weapon or armor type or just lean really hard into one skill via training and not have a way to fight effectively. The efficient leveling shit has always been skippable. Just train the attack skill you want to use up early, put the bonus you got into its stat, and the rest will come from your armor and other playstyles.
More levels SHOULD mean more power. The fact that Onlivion doesn't follow this design philosophy is whatvs wrong with it.
Oblivion's issue isn't that you can level poorly and end up with a weak character - that can happen in almost any game. The issue is that laveling ALWAYS makes you weaker relative to the enemies. As we know, attributes make little difference when it comes to how much damage etc you deal, skills are much more important and leveling up does nothing for skills
There are benefits to leveling such as gaining access to Daedric quests and facing new enemy types, but purely in terms of powergaming you're always better off not leveling. And that's really backwards and counter-intuitive, and absolutely is a problem
Thank god for a voice of reason. I tried “power levelling” where I had one skill for each attribute. Kept track of every skill level up to make sure I got 5 skill points each time. Suffice to say…… Boring! Just play the game and have fun I say.
I understand what most these comments are saying. But you are just factually right. People are just austisticly min maxing
I really don't understand people playing an RPG like an adventure game, and getting mad because a game is "too hard" because they didn't care about skills they picked
Fucking love this guy
How is everything level-scaled except traps
that main issue is the way it restricts so heavily into per level. if you forget to use trainers or level inefficiently you miss out.
it's always in the back of your mind. even if attributes arent as important (endurance IS), skill levels are.
leveling too fast and/or inefficient combined with the aggressive scaling of enemies is NOT fun. not because it is difficult, but because its tedious.
doing 5% less damage against already way too spongy enemies with oblivions combat suddenly makes a big difference and it is not enjoyable.
The only valid complaint about the oblivion leveling system is leveled unique rewards.
Why are there ten different versions of Mehrune's Razor? Just level gate the quest. Seriously.
I don't think efficiently levelling (getting 3x +5s per level, selecting commonly used skills as minor skills) is inherently wrong, just when you go to the extreme of only getting 30 skill ups per level do you fuck yourself over. Like you said, you get at minimum 70 wasted skill ups per attributes. If you select 1 major skill per attribute, that ups it to ~100-115 wasted skill ups per attribute (if the attribute starts at 30, which some will be 40, others 50).
If I start at 40 strength, and I select blade and h2h as minor skills, with blunt as a major skill, I need 120 skill ups to get to 100 strength. If I got blade at 10, h2h at 5, and blunt at 30 at level 1, thats 255 skill ups available. 135 skill ups can be wasted to still get 100 strength. You can get blade to 60 by level 3 and still be fine with getting strength to 100 eventually.
The extreme of efficiently levelling is doing as I said for stat layout at level 1, getting 7 skill ups in blade, and 3 in blunt per level (splitting the 10 major skill ups per level into the 3 attributes being leveled as 3, 3, and 4), such that by level 5 you only have 38 blade and 42 blunt. That's kinda shitty skill wise. You'll have stunted skills until you get the attribute to 100, when you can level the shit out of your minor skill to catch up. Or you can just never level a major skill and get +10 in the minor skill, and then the 10 level ups split between the other two attribute major skills (which fucks over the skills in those attributes).
You can do a mix of play casually and efficiently level and be fine. Setting infrequently used skills as major skills lets you dictate when you are ready to level up, and change the enemy pool. Sure, you gotta do farming to actually level, but you have more control over the leveling process and choose your difficulty without delving into custom spells/enchants until later in the game.
What I think really sucks is that your combat spells (destruction and restoration) are governed by willpower instead of intelligence. At low level, if you want to be a pure mage, you will be casting the shit out of those spells, but on level up, doing those two skills won't grant you more magicka to cast those spells. Selecting them as major skills gives them a reduced starting magicka cost, allowing you to cast them more before running out of magicka initially, but using them will force you to level up potentially before you get intelligence skills to level up for more magicka. Instead the spells you may cast once at the beginning of battle for soul trapping and conjuring are what give you more magicka upon level up. I get willpower affects magicka regen, but it's as a percentage of total magicka, so if you have low intelligence, your magicka regen will be slow. You can't just be a destruction and restoration mage, you need alchemy to make you magicka potions (which will get you more magicka at level up) or you need to dip into other schools of spell casting just to bump your intelligence.
i remember playing following the main quest but doing every sidequest/ruin/dungeon i came across along the way. i had no real challenge, i was cruising.... until i got to kvatch. when i went thought the first gate i got absolutely murdered.
If i could beat the game as a nine year old that barely understood english at all, just playing a straight fighter. I really dont understand why people think you have to minmax like it's an esport.
I never had a problem with the leveling system. It was very clear to me that getting more numbers would be better so I would just always get +5 and it was clear that something like endurance which augments each future level would be better early on. Especially considering you choose when you level up and all you gotta do is count to 5, it really didn't seem like that complicated of a system. Balance combat stats and out of combat stats and things will be fine. I think I left it on the standard difficulty when I was younger though.
My first time playing i didnt know how to level up at first so i stayed at lvl 1 for many hours of gameplay and i honestly had fun, but when finally figuring out how to level i noticed my experience get significatly worse, my unique legendary sword chillrend, was suddenly useless and every enemy in the game kicked my ass. I was using marksman and it took several minutes to kill a single enemy. Call it a balance mistake, skill issue or whatever you like, but leveling up, the thing that should make the player feel rewarded in an rpg, felt awful in oblivion for me
Just one thing. While I do agree with the general notion of this video, Oblivions leveling isn't that broken when it comes to player power.
You say Skyrim's leveling system is the worst. Yet the only real difference between its system and those of Oblivion and Morrowind is the existence of attributes, stats you say barely matter for the strenght of the character. All the depth of the leveling system of those two games exists to support and balance attribute growth. So you're kinda contradicting yourself. If attributes are indeed as useless as you claim, shouldn't you love Skyrim? No major or minor skills are needed if you dont have rpg attributes.
Good point. I should’ve said that the difference between getting all +5s each level and averaging +3s is negligible mid-game, and literally nothing late game for most builds.
I absolutely love having a class that I create at the start. Skyrim replaced major skills, birthsigns, specialization, birth stones, and heaven stones with ONLY standing stones. This effectively killed replayability for me.
Attributes were replaced with health/magicka/stam, which is think is a lamer choice. I love the attribute system. I just don’t think people should obsess about +5s, not that they are 100% worthless.