>>11968020
>Didn't really look like it in that vid.
Therein lies the ultimate issue with Oblivion: you get more powerful, but enemies get more powerful at the same rate. So even if you gain a bunch of levels and get good gear, you can go fight some mudcrab or skeleton from the early game and they'll take almost as many hits (or even more hits) to kill. In effect, getting stronger is meaningless. You could even argue that the meta for beating the campaign quest is to stay as low level as possible. It's shit design.

Their thought process was basically, "we want the player to have complete freedom to explore, so we'll just make all of the enemies scale with his increasing strength", so that the player encounters a steady increase in challenge and feels artificially powerful due to fighting more powerful enemies with cooler looking equipment. This makes sense on paper, because in an ideal situation the player would go from killing the mudcrab to fighting some end-game enemy without ever returning to the mudcrab.

Except, if that's what they wanted to happen, they shouldn't have made an open world game because the entire point of an open world is that you can go back and forth between new and old areas, and providing an incentive to do so. Instead of scaling enemy strength, they should have just had the world populated by mostly easy enemies that die in a few hits, serving solely as an early leveling mechanism and a way to find resources that are useful at any level. They should have taken a Zelda 1 style approach where dungeons and deeper areas of the game are gated by the sheer strength of enemies to prevent you from advancing, forcing you to either level up or concoct some kind of 200 IQ plan to survive in spite of being weaker.