Saint_Proverbius let me know that Bethesda developer Steve "MrSmileyFaceDude" Meister has been talking about enemy levels on RPG Codex. Saint's of the opinion that anything done in Oblivion will carry over to Fallout 3,
and whilst I don't necessarily agree with that on all aspects, I think
this particular topic will be common between both games.
[MSFD on Oblivion]
This means that enemy encounters will get HARDER as you level up. It
means that you won't be able to beat everyone down just because you've
got a 75 blade skill and 100 strength. The idea being to keep the game
challenging as you progress. From your comment, it seems you've
misinterpreted the article to mean just the opposite.
[Saint Proverbius]
Oh boy! A game where a mole rat will always be a challenge!
[MSFD]
Hey, those mole rats can inflict a wicket scratch!
Actually what it'd do is replace the low-level mole rat with tougher
creature types, be they mole rats or something different, depending on
circumstances. It's a very flexible system that expands on the concept
as used in Morrowind. And it's also flexible enough not to be used in
all cases. If you want a leveled encounter, you drop in a leveled
creature. If not, you just drop in a "normal" creature.
...
Not if the Big Bad Guys were set up to be Big Bad Guys. Leveled enemies
don't have to start at level 1 -- they could start at level 30 and go
up from there, for example.
It's an interesting idea (that apparently goes a lot deeper than what's
being talked about publically), but it has to be carefully balanced,
and it sounds like it's an expansion of the Fallout random encounters which scaled according to level. On the
one hand I like the idea of a designer being able to specify,
regardless of player level, 'this area should be hard for the PC to
complete'. However, there should be some areas that a
low-level PC will die in, and others that a high-level PC can easily
wipe out.
Perhaps it's best to have fixed enemy levels unless the player is
within a certain level range which is deemed suitable for the location.
In that case, the enemy scaling comes in, adjusting the difficulty
slightly.
