Witcher franchise...

[bennyboy]

Elder Scrolls died with Oblivion, IMO, when they made scaling mobs.
1)  Go to beginner area.  Carefully kill all mobs.
2)  Go back to beginner area.  Kill mobs matched to your level, sell their glass armour.
3)  Go back to beginner area again.  Kill mobs matched to your new level again, sell their even more expensive armour.
What fucking bullshit that is.  I didn't max out my character's level to have an ongoing challenge.  I maxed it out to become godlike, so I can go back and lay waste to those low-level mobs in an act of unforgiving revenge.

The scaled opponents is basically a requirement of the open world gaming style. It allows the player to finish quests in the order he discovers them instead of scripting them one after another. In Morrowind, you could get your character killed very fast by going places where the non-scaling bad guys could basically explode you with a single hit.

I have to disrespectfully disagree about RPGs.  You are saying that an open world game is just about running around discovering new territory.  I don't think so.  I think the mechanics of ANY RPG is that you have to level up your character to access more and more of the content, until you get to a face-meltingly-hard boss fight at the end. As for unfinished quests: if your quest is to go to a starter cave to collect three moon mushrooms for a potion to cure some kid's puppy's sniffles, I really don't see why if you decide to do it later, you should come back and find glass-armor-wearing badass warriors guarding them. For me, a world is a world, and whatever "lives" in that world should have nothing to do with my character's level. Otherwise, I just feel like I'm in some college kids' final design project, running around the world to check out the graphics.

an aside: I've been playing Pillars of Eternity.  So far, I'm pretty impressed.