I really like might & magic 7. At the start your party has troubles taking down the flying bugs, then the raking goblins one by one. After a few levels they could eat those for breakfast, geared & leveled up, whilst stumbling upon new challenges past the goblins ... like poisonous wyverns

I think the problem isn't level scaling on its own but rather its execution.

Where Oblivion went wrong was that it disrupted the immersiveness and threw away any challenge:
Your amassed experience didn't make you feel powerfull at higher levels, nor did you at any point fell weak at lower levels. You could explore just about anything knowing you would survive.

Also being ambushed by bandits wearing glass armor is just stupid, I suppose you become a bandit because it is a way to bring bread on the table, if you had a single piece of glass armor just sell it and you have enough gold to last you a year.

Darklands comes close to this. Skills matter, but fixed stats, equipment, and strategy all play a huge role.

Although it's a shooter, Ether War is a good example of an environment where leveling up eventually lets you fight tougher opponents without losing sight of weaker ones.
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Kajenx/ether-war

Darklands Rules! :)
Your skills do increase with use, I actually love that though, and there is no set level, your character merely is. Stats are fixed like you said, unless you find the big hairy sasquawch like dude in the black forest! Eat apple. Grow strong. Grrrr! :p

I drank a witch's potion instead and died. :(

I don't like level scaling - viz lukaszthegreat

And i don't like fixed stats either. It is just silly, 'cause you can increase you strenght, dexterity or wisdom quite easily (heh).

I like how Arcanum(1-20 +/- race traits) has it. It is something between Fallout SPECIAL(1-10) and AD&D(1-? was there some limit?) (or diablo(1- sky high)).

Or JA2 for that matter. It has 0-100 but they were all humies, right? :)

ahhh yes, the witch, so ugly and sinister inside, yet so strangely fascinating...wait, there is nothing strange about that! :P
She is so, so mmmm *Quaffs potion. It taste like strawberrrr----
*he dies
She then laughs in that beautiful liquid evil way :D

I was thinking along the lines of both skills and stats being fixed from the start after character creation. You'd depend on making the best of the abilities you already have rather than on training to get new abilities.

This might stretch the definition of "RPG", but most games are doing this anyway. I mean, The Witcher 2 has forgone abstract "block" and "parry" statistics for Geralt in favour of active player action.

But seriously folks. I already expressed my opinion on level scaling in another thread. Like it's already been said - I don't mind it if it's done it subtle way, and done well. Oblivion obviously failed at that aspect.

Morrowind had a subtle level scaling system. All that really changed was the monsters who spawned inside and outside of daedra shrines. Not a biggie, and it made sense in the way it was implemented. Also, if you got to really high levels, you had a chance of randomly spawning extremely rare mobs in forests etc. Quite a cool system.

Nevertheless, I think that a big deciding factor is gameplay. Morrowind and Oblivion unfortunately never required you to do much more than just spam left click next to an opponent (sure it got slightly tougher in some parts, and somewhat different if you were a mage). This fairly lackluster combat system perhaps warrants level scaling.

Compare it to Gothic I/II. Every enemy required a different strategy for taking them out (that is, if you were melee) and the early level enemies still provided a challenge when you were mid level range or so.

When it comes to hack and slash games (is Divine Divinity one? Never played it), my thoughts echo in a similar manner. A lot hack and slash games fail because they are simply a LMB spam. Contrast this with something like Diablo II. What kept me playing that game was the fact that the end game was still always capable of providing a challenge. Fuck, I really feel like reinstalling now. I had a Hammerdin at 94 and a Wind Druid at 96 and doing solo Baal runs or CS runs with them in a full game is some of the most fun that I've ever had with PC games. Probably used about 10 skills on the average, and on a constant basis.

hate Enemy level scaling it sucks :X, when i played diablo 2 at the start the normal bosses and everything used to pwn me in just a few hits, but when i leveled up to lv35 and came back it was 1hit ko's [but got pwned in hell difficulty but thats different rather than just scaling]..

I don't like it. Maybe slight scaling upwards is ok, but nothing drastic unless it can be controlled with a slider during the game.

Did you spend too much time on sidequests and are now overpowering everything? Push the slider a couple notches to the right to get the challenge back.

The scale of Darklands is unusually large. You travel mostly by foot across medieval Germany, so weeks often pass between encounters. Your skills gradually improve through use along the way. It feels very natural. Battles can involve several rooms with numerous opponents, so you need to be resourceful with what you bring in.

Are there any frontends or improved sprites for Darklands? The backgrounds were beautiful, but the engine was buggy and the people were hard to look at.

So, with regards to character advancement, Darklands had it like other RPGs except that it happened far more gradually?

I'm interested in this sort of thing from a design perspective because RPGs are pretty much the only game genre where your character(s) get stronger automatically through regular play. In other games your characters have to rely on picking up new weapons and sometimes heart containers to get stronger.

It's terrible. Horrible. Horr-awful.

It's been well over 10 years since I played it, so I am fuzzy on details.

Your characters get a mix of base stats at birth. You can then grow them through careers before the game begins. As they age, their physical stats eventually start to decline, but their knowledge and wealth grow. So a useful alchemist might start the game over 50 years old. Characters continue to age as the game advances.

I don't think health goes up. There are no character levels, just skill values. As skill rises, characters get better at that skill, but they never increase their base potential. You don't get skill points to distribute, either. They just get better through practice or possibly training.

Anyone can wear any equipment. However, heavy armor is extremely heavy. Most characters are unable to move while wearing more than a breastplate with chain leggings. Armor plays a huge role in combat, negating much damage based on penetration.

It's not a conventional CRPG by any means.