bs, with such a broad definition only games with multiple pcs and storylines and the option to freely switch between them during the course of the game would be truly non-linear. cause in a game with a single protagonist your way through the game always describes a line from start to finish. reminds me of the argument that all games where you play a role could be regarded as rpgs.
Huh? What are you refering to? What definition? I only listed some more or less nonlinear games. I never use story C&C as a means to measure nonlinearity, I always just compare how many different things you can do at a single point in the game to gain XP and level you char/party (in my view developing your char/party and using his/their aweshum newly gained powers afterwards is the true purpose of RPGs).
So:
Mass Effect, PS:T (not sure about this, could also be classified as somewhat linear) or Eye of the Beholder: Very linear
Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Betrayal at Krondor, RoA 3: somewhat linear, still some choices where to go and what to kill at most points in the game
RoA 1 and 2, Gothics: somewhat nonlinear, but not truly, since you can't go everywhere and fight every (nonunique) enemy from the start
Fallouts, Ultima VII, TES series: nonlinear, go wherever you want and do whatever
So the Gothics are not truly nonlinear and for me nonlinearity is very important when discussing levelscaling and the need or advantages/disadvantages of it.
A truly linear game wouldn't suffer from smartly done levelscaling. Just don't set the bar too low, because idiots still need to be punished.
A game with many different paths you could follow simultaneously doesn't need it, sure, but it could still help. The game "just" has to watch the player development like a gamemaster in a PnP game would do and finetune these paths accordingly, making one easier and hinting at that, but letting the player decide.
But why shouldn't it be allowed to raise all the bars? After all lots of guys here are defining CRPGs as an attempt to recreate PnP RPGs. So why take out one of their core elements? Because computers are still too dumb to replace a GM? I don't believe that this applies to levelscaling mechanics. It's just that no nonretarded developer seems to have really tried it yet.
Of course it wouldn't hurt if designers weren't lazy and prebalanced every encounter in the game for the average build, then the computer doesn't even need to be that smart.
As long as the game still gives the player the possibility to fail if he doesn't understand the systems I don't see anything wrong with the concept of levelscaling per se.
The only real problem appears with true open world games like the TES series. There you get immersion breaking galore when you levelscale the content because the player can always just reload an earlier save and see that the gameworld changed extremely just because he leveled up. That's not possible in a more linear game so there that problem disappears automatically.
but even worlds with gated zones that open up one after another are still very different from levelscaled worlds ala bethesda: in the former you can be under/overlevelled for the current zone, in the latter not.
Technicalities. Just raise some content above player level or make it lower and still keep all the scaling and you have the same effect in a TES game.
and i know that you can be underskilled for a certain level in skyrim by focussing on noncombat skills, but that's what you get when you tie the scaling of the game's enemies in a classless skillbased system to an artificial character level calculated from your progression of all skills and not only the combat related ones. sounds quite lazy and counterproductive to me.
It is lazy, but not because of the reasons you mentioned. If you only take into account the combat skills the game becomes even more braindead because the difficulty is always the same for all builds. Take into account all skills so players can screw up their chars just like in nonpopamole RPGs (and people can still cheese by abusing unbalanced parts of the leveling systems) AND tie the scaling to the lore.
Explain where the new enemies come from.
Trigger certain quests containing harder encounters only at certain skill levels.
Randomize it a bit.
Make some zones more difficult than others and tie that to the lore too ....
It still would irritate many players because the gameworld revolves around the player character development (just like in nearly every CRPG ever produced, but there it doesn't break your immersion that much because most are more linear) but it would help against the game getting too easy too fast.
To make it perfect developers could use systems that don't rely on HP bloat and allow even very strong characters/NPCs/monsters to be oneshot even in the endgame (see Fallout), therefore a system that always conveys that fighting is deadly business.