Lets take a look at an example of how I’ve been frustrated by it thus far. When you go into a building in fable 2, a game where I could see auto leveling working, the situation is hugely different. You have no lockpick skill. You have no explosive skill. You have no science skill. You want to go through a door? Out comes the sword, down goes the door. Snap back to fallout. I’m shooting my way through some raiders on a mission, and because of auto leveling, I’m not deterred by the raiders as we’re an even match. However, when I’ve fought my way to the back of the building and I’m hit with a ‘you need a lockpick skill of 25′, the immersion of the whole mission and any progress I’ve made is thrown in the toilet.

Having auto level enemies but not environmental aspects of the game is TOTALLY out of sync and stupid, as it not only makes me feel way more like i cant do things than just ‘i’ll do this mission when i can take down that mutant’. Lets face it, in a world that big youre never going to go back to the bottom of that dungeon to see what was in the box you couldnt open when your skill hits 40, it’s just impractical unless you have a million hours. Having monsters in areas levelled to the kind of area around them just gives you a linear progression of ability which you have anyway, but keeps it a bit more on the rails.

In morrowind you could still go in swords ablazing if you wanted, you just might need a truckload of skill to succeed. As I mentioned, fable 2 could cope with auto levelling as it doesnt have as much enviromental skills shit attached, so enemies are your only focus of levelling up. Coupled with the fact you can never feel truly powerful, I think auto leveling is more of a hindrance than experience enhancer.

Worse, you can often find yourself effectively regressing through Oblivion, as missions that were easy at level 3 become gradually harder and harder as your skill set becomes more specialised, moving your abilities further from the average that the game is pitched at. You play well, earn a level, and now find that you’re less well equipped for a battle than you were before levelling up. How can that be a good thing? You end up deliberately not spending the experience you have earned in order to keep the game playable. Fallout 3 attempts to reduce this by fixing the area levels when you first enter, but that just shifts this new artificial metagame to a feeling of needing to visit areas early on to ensure you won’t find them too tough later.

As for roaming completely freely being universally lauded, I disagree. Games should be about challenges on some level. There should be places that I want to go to, but can’t yet, providing there is an implicit promise that when I improve my character or my skill level sufficiently, I can go there. Whether this is a dungeon in Oblivion or a secret level in an FPS or an unlockable character in Soul Calibur 23, the promise of revealing extra content once you pass some threshold is generally enjoyed. It gives you motivation to improve and a reward for doing so.

I don’t think that so-called non-linearity should be held up as the ultimate thing to aim for in games. Giving a player some choice is paramount, but only if those choices have meaning, and the order in which they attempt things should be one of the meaningful choices they get to make.

There’s certainly a place for generating missions in ad-hoc locations for ad-hoc players in MMOs, where you can’t attempt to hold together any real sense of storyline since players can’t really change much about the environment. But in single player RPGs, it seems to be throwing out much that is good about the genre in the pursuit of the ideal of freedom, without really examining whether that is a positive thing or not.