That's pretty much how Oblivion's level scaling worked for the most part: PC level offset was the standard for many if not most encounters. Although the types of enemies changed, the difficulty never really progressed except in the teens where if the player's own levelling wasn't ideal it got quite tough, and the mid-high 20s where the enemy level began to level off.
Thing is, that complaint has nothing to do with level scaling. Encounters can be made more or less difficult without changing the amount of levels between you and your opponent to create ridiculous situations where all your attacks are doing 1 point of damage or everything is being one-shotted by the swing of your sword because of obscene bonuses being applied to either the opponent or player due to the difference in level between them.
One would not expect a level 30 guard to possess the same skills, abilities, and challenge of a level 30 vampire or a level 30 dragon, regardless of them being all the same level. All level scaling does is put the opponent at your level, allowing you to run into it at any point during your adventure and not feel like you're wasting your time because a span of umpteen levels exist between you and it.
Equipment types as found both on enemies and in random loot also scaled with the player's level, so again, though its appearance changed, everyone even the most hopeless highwayman ended up using top-class equipment and the stuff from earlier in the game was functionally useless.
How is that any different than the setup in Divinity : OS (which does not use level scaling)? We fight low level undead and they drop low level gear. We fight high level undead and they drop high level gear which makes the previous gear obsolete.
Indeed, especially in an open world like the Elder Scrolls, the point of exploring is totally ruined if there's nothing to explore since instead of finding easy areas and hard areas, and exiting new dungeons, all was hand-tailored for your level.
No exiting "what's in this lair" when you already know anyway.
Yes.. the answer to that question is "Monsters". There are monsters in the lair. Do they have to have a level number tagged next to their name to make that answer exciting?
With the new updates to Diablo 3, they don't even display level numbers next to monsters anymore. You just see a pack of demons bounding towards you, and they have a real chance of killing you. That's all the player needs to know. Their level is just a hidden number and in the end seeing it doesn't even matter. The fact that they represent a real threat and are about to swarm you is all that matters.
And yet, leveling is still exciting as it grants the player access to more abilities and more options - changes which are also happening to the monsters - meaning your fights when you were level 5 are nothing like your fights when you are level 30 (even though the game is using level scaling).
Thus, this suggestion you continue to make that all fights are the same regardless of level is completely false - for that to happen the designer would only be adding health and damage modifiers based on the monster's level - and that's a horribly lazy way to design monsters, one which has absolutely nothing to do with using level scaling or not. You can run into that same boring setup even in a game that doesn't use level scaling.
Level scaling simply makes the monster your level to remove obscene level-difference based bonuses and resistances between the two opponents. It doesn't magically do all the other awful things you're trying to pin on it.. a bad designer does that.
Really, I'm just stunned that people are claiming level scaling removes all challenge from a game, when in reality a challenge is the main thing level scaling aims to maintain. If you're playing a game and constantly having to seek out higher level encounters because the monsters at your level are a joke.. sure, giving you the option of facing higher level monsters is one way to fix that. A much better way of fixing that is doing a better job of designing the encounters so that they aren't a joke at their intended level. However, even when that is done, outside of level scaling there's little a designer can do to maintain the intended level of challenge if you happen upon an encounter that is well below your level.
And I love how everyone is continuing to just pretend concerns weren't raised (repeatedly) about how expansions and user created content would be handled without level scaling. I guess we're all excited about creating brand new characters each and every time someone designs a new adventure with the toolset? I must be the only one who wishes he could continue playing with his favorite characters.
