Was wondering how come you used that as an example. My Morrowind character was just about maxed (bar luck, which I didn't train on leveling up, so that was down, with the obvious harm done to enchanting ability) when I gave up on it (still mean to return someday, but...) and I was well away from completing the main quest, and hadn't even touched the expansion content really.

I know i played longer than that. After you got past 20th level it was good and fun (vs instant death and too hard of encounters) and i had the pattern of using a weapon/armor until i maxed it out, then moving to a different one. (Finish with one-armed weapons? onto axes... Finish axes? Onto bows...)

Never finished the second expansion since the game was so unstable it wasn't worth trying to keep going.. Else i would have.

Though i really really miss Morrowind's magic/enchanting, where you could but not only multiple effects but at different amounts and specify how they activated. So you could emulate several types of effects or do two or three things at once. My Bound weapon & soultrap combo for a quick offensive spell for quick fights was awesome early on.

Are you using Fortify Restoration potions here?

I hear that you can get even bigger bonuses, to the point of integer overflow occurring. (Is it possible to *lose* skill experience if you put on a ring with a large negative XP bonus?)

That's my favorite aspect of Morrowind, and I wish something like that would appear in a turn-based RPG.

Yeah. I had an argument once on an RPG focused forum about how eventually becoming a god was okay if it took you 100 hours to get there. Even in Fallout 3 for example, a game where it's relatively easy to be great at everything, you're going to be prioritizing early on. I guess what I want is a balance, to not feel overpowered too fast, to have to feel like a stealth character or ranged character for a long time.

I'm more on the lines of "I want to be able to quickly switch between being a stealth or ranged character, but not both at the same time". Then again, however, I tend to avoid stealth, as I find it not as much fun as actual combat.

In any case, my favorite type of character to play in an RPG would definitely be a magic focused character.

It depends so heavily on the game, what kind of gameplay it has, what else it offers. Excellent game gets it right and get 90+ metacritic.

Diablo series seems to get something at least right. Borderland is decent success story too.

I like the D&D approach of low level cap, but I particularly like the Baldur's Gate 2 approach: You start at a mid level (level 7 or 8), so you can already customize your characters a little bit, but still leave a large room for more growth until level 17 or 18.

When I see a single digit level, like 7 or 8, I immediately think "low level", mainly because of how it is in most of the games I play (that have level systems).

In any case, low level caps are one thing I don't like about D&D in general. Consider that, in the example you give, for an entire game you only get to see level ups 10 times during the game, which to me is just not enough.

By what I'm seeing I wonder how did you manage to get those extremely high level in skills and enchantments. I thought skills never get over 100 and that enchantment exploit was fixed by the unofficial patch. Now, if you intentionally exploit bugs to make yourself the One-Punch-Man, that's understandable, but from what I gather, the only stats that will keep on increasing will be Health/Magicka/Stamina. The rest are either capped at 100 or made legendary and reset.

Also, getting to level 240 and not even finishing the game once means that with any other western RPG game that has level caps you would get bored at probably 1/10th of the playtime you have on that Skyrim character. Because getting to 240 means more than 400 hours on a single playthrough. That's more than 3 times longer any other level capped games offer in their adventures.

You forget that Elder Scrolls games are so filled with sidequests that you could just spend all your time with the game doing them and ignore the main quest entirely.

It's not like, say, Final Fantasy 6, or even Baldur's Gate 2, where there's only so much you can do before you need to just finish the game, and it's certainly not like the numerous linear CRPGs out there.

(Also, don't forget Disgaea's postgame (as well as that of the sequels), where you can reach level 9999 and *still* not be strong enough to face the game's hardest challenges.)

I've actually played/beat the game like 6 times. Though after the first couple i went off vanilla and added mods. Mostly tweaks, change in skill tree, etc. To get over 100 i used Elyss's Community Uncapper.

Getting them that high also takes the xp boost which i think was part of the 'more enchantments'.

I dislike equipment that cannot be used until a particular level.

Whilst I understand the mechanic makes sense in some instances (some swords might be too sharp for a novice to use, for instance, and children learn with the rudus) it seems a little artificial when applied to greaves and shields. Perhaps advanced helmets in Torchlight have highly technical feedback mechanisms inducing some sort of augmented reality that might pose too great a risk of distraction to a less mature player? [The link to somatopsychic motor skill improvement, which must come with time playing the game, is an elegant limbic lure and time sink, too.]

I concur about the inverse value of the skews the reward of early risk-taking. Why risk taking a mini-boss early, to gain the metroidvania advantage for the rest of the game when that currency is devalued by inflation after only a short time. The least enjoyable part of Hoards of the Underdark was purchasing a plus-six magic sword. After decades of playing characters whose possession of a magic sword was an early imperative but seldom achieved, and where a plus-three item was literally game-changing, here were a plethora of superpowered exemplars, an embarrasment of riches.
I reached the final battle of StarCrawlers, after a particularly satisfying mission I might add, and tried to winnow out the loot, what to sell and which to keep, But all the loot was uniformly bland. In this case I think the difficulty of completion mars the appeal; Yes, a higher difficulty yields greater reward, but, again, is it worth the effort? I fear quite often this hurdle is relevant.

This could be a thread of its own but I often feel like magic seems weak in real-time games. In a strategy focused RPG... Baldur's Gate, Final Fantasy, whatevs... it can feel very powerful. But in something like Skyrim or Gothic I feel like it usually feels weak, and I spend most of my time running around waiting to use something. Skyrim especially had a cap on magic damage if I remember correctly, resulting in melee or archery being much more powerful after a certain level.

Anyway, I'm big on stealth. In Skyrim I played a sneaky archer and in Fallout I'm a sneaky rifle guy outside and a sneaky pistol guy inside. That's just my jam. A lot of those games will randomly put you in situations where stealth is impossible though, which is insanely annoying. That's another whole thread to itself.

Tried Starcrawlers when it came out and it felt grindy, with protracted, boring battles (I started to avoid combat just because of how boring it was). But the game was still evolving. Maybe you actually finishing the game might mean that combat got fixed? That might be great, because it was a game that I really wanted to like

Earlier Elder Scrolls are much better for magic. You can even create your own spells!

Morrowind has an especially good variety of spells. While combat spells (particularly damage) aren't as good as in the other (pre-Skyrim) TES games, you could do all sorts of other things, like jumping to the other side of the (rather large) world the game takes place in.

Then again, sometimes you could create spells that are gamebreakingly powerful, like in Arena you can create (and feasibly cast, at high enough level) a spell that negates the next 99 damage per level that you take.

Also, the power and usefulness of magic varies in different Final Fantasy games. Here is my summary of the ones I'm more familiar with:
FF1: Great for taking out groups of enemies, but no good single target attacks.
FF2: Damage spells aren't that good, except when the enemy has a weakness. Status effects work great if your equipment doesn't interfere, and single target Berserk is also really good.
FF3 (FC): A Black Mage's damage spells aren't that good, but status effects work really well, except on boss fights where they're arbitrarily disallowed. Late game, Summoners become good. Once you get past the early game, pretty much every boss resists all elements, and even spells like Drain will fail on bosses.
FF3 (DS): Attack magic is decent early on, but weak later on. Status ailment spells are useless. Healing magic is quite powerful this time around.
FF4: In the mid-game, you get access to some powerful magic, but neither the enemies nor your MP supply will keep up. (Sure, it's nice to be able to cast powerful elemental spells for 30 MP each, but when your only caster has 90 MP, that's a bit much.) In the late-game, you get the MP to cast those spells, but now the enemies are able to withstand them; spells are still useful, except when too many late-gate enemies (including the final boss) counter magic but not physical attacks. The pattern is especially apparent in the DS version, where you also have Twincast being powerful at the same time you have those powerful 30 MP spells.
FF5: Attack magic is really good here, particularly summons. This becomes more true the more you progress through the game, though physical attacks catch up when you get the ultimate weapons and high end abilities. Status ailments work on bosses again, though you still might need to find the one status the boss isn't immune to.
FF6: Physical attacks scale better than spells here, but spells have constants so large that they dominate the whole game. (Ultima will reach 9999 well before physical attacks will catch up.)
FF7: From what I remember, spells aren't that great for offensive damage, except for summons (expensive with long animations) and blue magic (Enemy Skill materia). This game is notable for having a summon that could hit 13 times for heavy damage each time; who thought *that* was even remotely close to being balanced?
FF8: Haven't played it, but from what I understand, you're better off junctioning your spells to your stats and never actually using them in most cases. (Aura is good, however.)
FF9: Magic seems fairly tame here, especially later on when everyone, even the non-casters, can do 9999 with the right MP-using skill.
FF10: Haven't played, but from videos magic isn't that great. It may be usable for the main game, but physical attacks scale better, and unlike in FF6, physical attacks will reach the damage cap first. Furthermore, if you have a way to break the damage limit, physical attacks can reach the new damage limit, but it appears spells can't. (Result: Offensive magic is completely useless in most Dark Aeon fights.)

I'd rather have stealth be impossible (though I suppose it could be frustrating if you're using a stealth build in a game that doesn't let you easily change that) than have it be required.