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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8217822" data-attributes="member: 6779196">You mean Oblivion?The latest three Elder Scrolls games (not counting ESO) actually provide great examples of the sandbox approach, the party approach, and the hybrid approach. Morrowind was hard sandbox. Different areas had opponents of different levels and with different gear, all of which were fixed, which mostly meant you couldn’t survive in certain areas until you had spent enough time in others. But, if you were up for a challenge, you could try to punch above your weight class, and in the (admittedly fairly unlikely) event that you succeeded, the rewards felt proportionate to the challenge. You could get high-level gear much earlier than you were “supposed to” if you knew where to look and were sneaky enough and/or fast enough. Oblivion went in completely the opposite direction, absolutely everything scaled to your level. No matter where you went, you found opponents that were an appropriate challenge for you and had appropriate gear for your level. This prevented sequence breaking, but it was pretty unimersive and completely flattened the difficulty curve. Skyrim used a hybrid approach. Different areas had different level ranges, but things scaled with your level within the limits of those level ranges (actually I don’t think there was a cap for the scaling, but different areas had different minimum levels, and there was probably some proportional scaling going on, so that a harder area always felt harder than an easier area, even though both areas scaled so that you wouldn’t totally outpace them). The effect allowed you to explore more freely than in Morrowind, while still allowing for something of a difficulty curve. They addressed the immersion problem by not having enemy gear scale with their level like it did in Oblivion. A high level bandit might have more HP and do more damage, than a low-level bandit, but they used weapons and armor that felt appropriate for a common bandit regardless of their level. No more bandits in full daedric plate.</blockquote>

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