Comment on Oblivion Remastered Impressions (and Discussion Thread)
ceenote@lemmy.world 1 week agoI haven’t played the remaster, but the old Oblivion leveling system was exceedingly hard to do efficiently unless you planned in advance. It very much needed a rework, although skyrim dumbed it down way too much, in my opinion.
Basically, among all the skills, like destruction magic, blade, sneak, you pick 7 (I think it’s 7) major skills. Those get a boost at the beginning. When you raise your various major skills 10 times, you level up. When you level up, you get to raise three attributes, like strength, speed, or intelligence. You get bonuses to how much you can raise an attribute per level, with 1 being the minimum and 5 being the max. The bonuses are determined by what skills you raised during the last level. For example, the sneak skill is tied to the agility attribute, so raising your sneak skill gets you a bigger agility bonus on leveling up. So, to optimize it, you’d have to raise your major skills exactly 10 times (so none of them go to waste) and fill out the bonuses by raising minor skills, to get the ideal spread of +5 to 3 attributes per level.
The main problem with it in Oblivion was that the enemies grow stronger as you level up, and since a lot of people didn’t understand the leveling system, they’d wind up with horribly underpowered characters in the late game. Some people deliberately remained at level 1 to keep the enemies easy.
Stovetop@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yep, the old “optimal” way to play, if you didn’t want to focus so hard on efficient leveling, was to make all of your major skills ones that you never planned to use. That way, for the skills that you do use frequently, you can increase those as much as you want while still sitting at level 1, allowing the player to become considerably stronger while enemies stayed at the same difficulty.
Alternatively, if someone messed up character creation, they could also simply choose to never sleep and never trigger the level up dialog. But there are a couple of quests which require the player to sleep to trigger an event, so folks would have to be smart about how they go about engaging with those.