Agreed. And the base game is pretty much broken in that regard, with its dynamic difficulty scaling system that discourages leveling up... of all things. You get to level 20 and now every villager has an ebony armor set on them... which is simply ridiculous.

IMHO you can't really get a decent experience out of Oblivion without Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul (OOO). Though in some instances it makes the game harder (it will statically cap enemy levels in some areas, that if you now wonder into a bit too soon you'll definitely die big time), it will undoubtedly improve your overall experience and won't give you a sense that you have to masterfully design your character and keep an eye on what skills you use on each level-up, which I agree is entirely not fun and breaks any semblance of immersion.

Not replace, entirely remove. Enemies must never be determined by PC's stats, what the heck is the point of developing the character if not to see previously tough enemies become easy and previously impossible ones become manageable?
But we've been through this before.

Then how do you determine how strong the enemies are at a specific location, considering that the game doesn't already do that? (I'm particularly looking at wilderness and non-quest dungeons, where there isn't an obvious way of determining this; for the main quest or other quest chains it's easy enough to make enemies stronger in later quests, and for daedric artifact quests you can design them for the level that's normally required.)

You can't just remove level scaling without having to do some more design work there.

Also, what happens to the daedric quest level requirements?

For enemies, the way any proper game does it, by actually setting their stats. And in case of Oblivion, people speak of mods that remove the scaling, right? So take one and make it canon, implement it officially.
And level requirements can become stat requirements, specific if multiple options exist, covering various builds, or translating level to some total attribute value or possibly checking the highest ones whichever they may be.

There's a couple of issues with Oblivion that I actually find rather puzzling:
* You can't name your save files without the console. The game has plenty of save slots (enough that I haven't encountered a limit), and the engine supports named files (you can create one with the console), but yet the game doesn't actually let you name your files when saving through the usual interface. Why?
* There's no way to delete custom spells. Once you create a custom spell, you're stuck with it for eternity. Even Arena allows you to delete custom spells, so why not Oblivion?

As far as I'm concerned, I actually didn't have much fun with any Elder Scrolls game until Skyrim. The franchise may have had a significant impact on how open-world design was done, but for the most part I just don't think they're all that enjoyable. *shrug* Didn't play either Arena or Daggerfall when they were current, and by the time I did give them a go they just felt too outdated and awkward for my tastes. Morrowind's world might be interesting, but it takes forever and a day to get anywhere and get things done. Oblivion feels generic and there is a whole list of things and gameplay mechanics I'm not a fan of. There's only so much mods can do, and more often than not most do too much. Also, when the community has to step in to make a game tolerable enough to be fun there's definitely something wrong with the original product. Funnily enough I didn't have that problem with Bethesda's Fallouts even with their bugginess.

Skyrim may not be perfect and it has certainly been outdone by others now, but it's still enjoyable enough.

Been doing a bit of Oblivion analysis and theorycrafting, to the point of using Python to calculate how powerful I can make certain spells at certain skill levels.

Maybe it's time for me to start up the game and play a bit?

Current build is something like this magic focused build:
* Race: High Elf (female high elves move faster than other race/gender combinations (assuming equal speed) because they are taller)
* Birthsign: Atronach (plan is to use Alchemy as the primary source of magicka recovery, as that particular effect is easy to get on a potion in this game)
* Class stat bonuses: Endurance and Luck (Luck is harder to increase, while Endurance has a non-retroactive effect on HP growth)
* Speclalization: Magic
* Major skills: Restoration (because it's hard to level and really good at higher levels), possibly Armorer (to more easily reach the point of being able to repair magic items)

Thinking of trying a low Endurance run, where I don't increase that stat at level up. Anyone else try that? (I'd prefer to have to make use of spells like water breathing, rather than just being able to breathe long enough without it.)

Also, thinking that, after each level up, I'll use the console to set each increased stat (except for Luck) to 3 more than what they were before the level up; that approach is certainly better than vanilla Oblivion leveling.

Would you comment on what aspects do yo think it has been outdone, and by what games?
I am not sure that logic is really applicable. The game does reward exploration and playing in a somewhat whimsical way, following the main quest or not, and taking side quests if you will.

It has been said (but this I can mention only second hand) that the game was designed so that you would level up without taking that much care and finish the quests without any problem. You may level somewhat carelessly then and that will not prevent you from exploring or competing the quests.

The tedium and the unnatural things to do come from the itch to level in the most powerful way. Not every player will want to spend their time doing that. But the option is there for those who do...
Did you make a Jupyter notebook that you might want to share?

No, I haven't been using Jupyter here.

To determine how powerful a spell could be at a given magicka cost, I used sympy's solve function, where I can just give it an equation and it will solve it for me. The formula can be found on uesp.net, so I just put it into an equation, and got the answers I was looking for.

I really do think the game would be better without that option, with a growth system that can't be "gamed" via such unnatural means.

Interesting, thanks for the tip.

I whokeheartedly agree with this.

Here's an interesting edge case:

In this game, there are greater powers that you can acquire via your race, birthsign, and possibly via certain special stones in the world or (rarely) through quest rewards. These are like spells, except that they cost 0 Magicka, and they can only be used once per day. (There are other differences, like the fact that they ignore skills and spell effectiveness.)

It turns out that, even though they cost 0 Magicka, you still need to have that much to use the greater power. If you somehow have negative Magicka, and you try to use a greater power, you'll get the "not enough Magicka" (paraphrased) message.

(Incidentally, Morrowind also exhibits the same behavior.)

From Skyrim there are two things or three that are key (for this player at least):

- Freedom and gorgeous landscapes with interesting relief, plus good music ("the morning"...). Remember that promotional pictura of the warrior looking at the landscape. The game delivers exactly that feeling. Well done.

- A story to provide backbone to the experience. I tried without and eventually it became repetitive. With a good mix of story missions combined with side quests and free exploring, things change. Also, there are interesting dilemmas. Plenty of opportunity also for the player to take sides, make mistakes, change your opinion if you must, and show to the game world who your character is.

- Interesting lore. Some of the books are really engrossing, plus the whole thing with Talos.

Now, other people think care more about the combat, or the magic system. For me the points above are the selling point of Skyrim, if I want better horse riding, I go to Mount&Blade. So, would you know of other games that, in your opinion, do equally well or better than Skyrim, respect to the three aspects mentioned above?