Personally there are a few games which left me very dissappointed, after hyping myself up for years in certain cases.
Divinity Original Sin: turns out I prefer more streamlined, less packed games (love Pillars of Eternity) and that coop play in a CRPG stresses me out.
Wasteland 2: I actually managed to finish this one but secretly I admit I was hoping for a better Fallout which I didn’t really get. New Vegas did the cowboy theme much better.
INSIDE: while the design was cool, it was just a ton of boring, easy puzzles in comparison to LIMBO, its predecessor.
I’m glad you attached “the leveling problem”, I understand what that’s saying.
I don’t think I pay close enough attention to leveling in these games because if any enemy is too strong, if I level fireball or long blade whatever or any skill, as long as I move correctly, I can circumvent the challenge. Or there’s a boulder available for me to throw fireballs from, I’m fine no matter what the enemy is.
The challenge of the game definitely until Skyrim anyway, is undoubtedly limited by the controls available to us and as a result, the enemies we’re presented with.
And there’s always a way available to solve any sort of direct defeat in an elder scrolls game (run backward until they swing one step back, one step forward after they swing, strike, run backwards again. Repeat).
I guess the details of leveling differences never made a difference to how I played the game (maybe tes 6 will be different) since the underlying combat system, while fun and engaging, is not yet very challenging to be understood and overcome.
I actually love to Play the game this way, I’m not casting aspersions, I’m glad if I just spend enough time punching people and animals in the face, I get so good at punching things that I get to dominate the entire world, that’s very fun in a video game.
That’s why I never noticed the leveling details, because the leveling of the characters just incidental to all of the stories told within each game, but that is interesting that there’s an entire article about “the leveling problem.”
I know I used a Morrowind mod where I limited all skills to 40, that seems like the only practical solution to the leveling problem as far as I understand it.
Once elder scrolls 9 comes out and we’re all just in virtual worlds ducking and running and jumping with dynamic fields of view and enemy behavior, the fighting will be way more interesting.
Did you play Skyrim a different way because of the leveling system that you noticed while playing it?
Fair enough! Ultimately, I like the game to reward levelling in general with a reduction in difficulty, so I don’t have to obsess over “levelling well” or “gitting gud”. I don’t usually play Soulsborne games for that very reason.
And yeah, I played Skyrim differently. More “fast and loose”. More casually. I didn’t constantly wonder what skills I could/should/would level. If my levelling got imbalanced, the feat system gave me a gentle nudge towards levelling the skills I actually wanted because “shoot, I have these feat points, and can’t put them into anything but potions. I’m a freaking barbarian. Time to go wreck stuff”
Makes sense, I definitely can’t be bothered with leveling “properly”. I don’t mind choosing different feats or paying casual attention to how I allocate skills gained through experience, but I don’t want to turn an open-world adventure into a detail-oriented spreadsheet journey toward an ultimate ratio, haha
Exactly. Which is why I ended up with over 1000 hours between Skyrim and Fallout playthroughs, and far less than that in all the other games of both series’ combines
I didn’t work any harder building up a skill tree in Morrowind or oblivion then Skyrim, I’m usually just walking around talking to people or looking at the forests instead of thinking about the skills at all. Playstyles.
When you mentioned fallout, do you mean that the newer fallout games were easier for you to navigate the skill tree as well?
Kinda. Fallout 4’s levelling system (and decisions) is dramatically easier than earlier games. I’m a bit rustier, but I early-quit my last New Vegas playthrough over it.