Oblivion is the go-to example of how not to do level scaling. It’s impressive how badly they fucked it up. Like, they managed to make exploring pointless and unexciting.
You find a tomb, but you know that whatever’s inside will be “level appropriate”. If you’re low level it’ll be steel weapons, and if you’re high level it’ll be daedric. There’s not really any point in going in at low level. Might as well level up some other way and come back when the loot will be good.
On top of that, the gameplay is so bland and unresponsive that you can’t really punch above your weight class. The game is very much a levels game. It’s not like Dark Souls where someone can get really good and beat the whole thing while naked (and in the game, too). There’s a lot of “well, this guard is level 30 and you’re 10, so no matter how many times you hit him with your hammer he’s not going to flinch.” Knowing you’re always going to get kind of bland treasure wouldn’t be so bad if the act of getting it was fun. Like, sometimes a tomb or whatever in Elden Ring will have crap loot, but it’s still a solid core gameplay.
Morrowind had a lot of these problems, but it was also kind of wacky and heartfelt.
I recently reinstalled BL3 for a bit and I think I spent more time downloading it (like 100gb for unknown reasons) than I did playing it.
The pacing is bad. Too much walking around or listening to people talk, not enough doing stuff.
The itemization is kind of bad. Like yeah there’s millions of guns but most of them are trash, and looking through a dozen to compare [damage, clip size, reload speed, etc] in that fucking awful UI is tedious.
The gameplay is kind of bad. Most things don’t really react to being shot. It’s just shield and HP sponges.
They haven’t really changed much since like the first game launched in like 2009. That’s like 15 years. Still basically the same game.
It’ll probably sell a bunch of copies because of the brand, and a lot of people are low information, but I don’t think it’ll be good.