Playing this an unhealthy amount (17 hours), so I guess it's successful enough. However, cynical PC gamer rant time!
The loot and quest reward and merchant shop scaling is effectively no different from Oblivion. Everything is level-appropriate at all times. The bandits still wear crappy armor so I guess Bethesda heard the anecdote that everyone likes to use but missed the underlying point.
It just irks me since it's so unnecessary. For example, I check the blacksmith shop for ingots, and they're only selling materials for iron and steel and so forth. I get my smithing up to the level for making Elven, check back again at a higher character level and there are 100 ingots for making Elven armor in the shop. What the hell's the point? You have perk and smithing skill investment requirements of a significant nature to get to that point. You have the monetary investment required to buy the raw materials. Why does it all need to magically appear in the store as soon as it's arbitrarily level appropriate? The barriers to entry are already in place. Why are you still so damn scared of players getting anything too early? It keeps it from feeling like a reward for progress made, instead more like a handout.
The quests tend to be more carefully crafted, however most of them still involve going to a random dungeon in the woods and spending an hour or more clearing it out. Many times this just doesn't actually make any sense at all, and it makes the real quests unnecessarily similar to the shitty randomly generated quests you get from one line of dialogue that also send you to a random dungeon in the woods. Stop making me clear out an hour long cookie cutter dungeon as part of every single quest, Bethesda. Even these Thieves Guild quests...start out in the city doing something interesting, but oh wait, the city location's actually connected to a "grotto" just like in all the other quests that I need to clear out. It's starting to feel like a massive timesink.
). Doesn't stop some of them from being tough as nails, though.
