PUMPED! Gaming

If you’ve played Oblivion you’re familiar with how the leveling system works. Rather than the traditional experience point system, Oblivion opted for a system where ten skill-ups in certain skills must be attained per level. At the outset of the game the player chooses which skills will level him up (major skills) and which skills are minor skills. It almost sounds like a good idea: you can actually get better at a variety of skills (whether it be swordplay, negotiating, or sneaking etc.), even if they aren’t combat-related, to increase your level. It turned out to be a really bad idea. Here’s why:

1. You can only achieve a maximum of ten skill-ups in your major skills per level. This has major implications because…

2. You can only add stat modifiers when you level up based on how many skill-ups you had with skills that related to that stat (e.g. swordplay relates to strength, blocking with a shield relates to endurance). You can add points to three separate stats per level. But to achieve the maximum modifier on a stat increase (5 points) you have to level up a skill that relates to that stat ten times (see the problem yet?). This means that if you want to increase your stats by as much per level, and I prove that you’ll want to in part 3, then you need to spend tedious amounts of time leveling up minor skills that relate to the stats. So, let’s say you want a 5x multiplier in strength, endurance, and agility, which are good combat stats to have. You can’t just use your primary skills which may be things like swords, heavy armor, and marksman, because the most you’ll be able to achieve that way is a 2x, 2x, and 3x spread. You’ll have to use your minor skills, which don’t count toward your leveling. You may want to jump around and fall a lot (acrobatics/agility), repair lots of armor (armorer/endurance), and use your fists in combat quite a bit (hand to hand/strength). That sounds pretty stupid, huh? Well, it’s the only way to achieve the maximum of 5 points for each of the three stats you can improve each level, and here’s why you almost have to do this…

3. The monsters in the game level up with you. That’s right, the stronger you get, the stronger the enemies in the game are. So I hope you aren’t harboring desires to become a godlike master of combat, running around the countryside mowing down everything in sight with your epic blade of destruction and chaos. Chances are, it’s just not gonna happen. If you do want it to happen, and in many cases if you even want to stand a chance against a lot of the normal creatures you’ll run across at later levels, you have to spend lots of time doing tedious stuff like I mentioned in part 2. I understand that Bethesda wanted to make the game challenging at every level, but they effectively removed the feeling of getting stronger in a role-playing game. Big mistake.

So, that’s what I think about Bethesda’s choice of leveling design in Oblivion. It’s a big load of crap. A lot of people played through the game without leveling up, because they could still increase their skills. And because they were fighting the same monsters it made them feel more powerful. If you were lucky enough to have Oblivion for the PC, you could download mods that changed the leveling system in some way, but should you really have to do that for something that is so obviously mediocre?