Skyrim - Difficulty Setting

Interesting reading.

I rented the 360 version from Redbox and liked it so much I kept it for 2 weeks - after 30 days ($60), you own it so I decided to keep it until it converts.

I didn't play Oblivion, but I played a ton of Morrowind on both the original Xbox (until my fingers got sore from the triggers) and the PC. I stopped playing after I made some OP weapons and gear and the game lost it's challenge. So while the console version is not as pretty and you can't use the mods, my hope is that a more vanilla experience (and some years of maturity) will help avoid the game breakers.

Also, I spend all day on my PC working, it's nice to kick back on the couch and play on the big Plasma.
 
so the moral of the story is that it's good that it's challenging? or are we complaining that it isn't scaling realistically. I think we had a similar discussion for oblivion way back when.

Some creatures should be tough, very tough, like wish i had more potions tough. while others, the run of the mill bandits, should be a range but capped at say lvl 25.
 
^I enjoy that the characters are tough yet I can still destroy skeletons, mudcrabs Frostbite spiders and Plain Draugrs. I will say that the Dark brotherhood and Thieves guild seems much more straight forward now. Like go kill this guy, done go steal this item, done. No guards chasing after you or stalking required after the first or so missions. This kind of upset me. But I am going to spice things up a bit on my next playthrough and make rules for myself.
 
I'm finding expert to be a very good middle ground. Playing on Master almost necessitates that you play a certain way (sneaking/bow, etc...). Expert allows you to play however, but still with a decent challenge. Unfortunately, after Dark Souls, challenge is a highly relative term I'm using loosely here.
 
I'm finding expert to be a very good middle ground. Playing on Master almost necessitates that you play a certain way (sneaking/bow, etc...). Expert allows you to play however, but still with a decent challenge. Unfortunately, after Dark Souls, challenge is a highly relative term I'm using loosely here.

I though that too, but once i got a little higher level, I was chopping down everything in the game like it was nothing. Been playing on master since about level 50 and it's much more fun with a little more challenge, though it's still not real difficult. Leveling in these games is always bittersweet for me, because it really compels you to make your character godlike, yet once you do, you can just steamroll pretty much any enemy in the game (except the goddamn briarharts, seriously wtf is up with those guys?). I love this game though, everytime I play I'm just in awe at the amount of content, it's unreal. I probably have 100 hours in it already, if not more, and I still have a lot left to do.
 
Yes, I figured I'd probably need to bump it to master once I start to get my enchanting up to snuff. Actually I've yet to enchant anything yet, because it's so much weaker than pre-enchanted gear.

I do hear you about the amount of stuff to do. It's really in some ways annoying. Seems like every time I take a look at the amount of quests in the que, the number doubles. I finish one quest, 4 more take its place. It's at the point now where I have to scroll and scroll to get through the miscellaneous list.

If I was a normal person I'd simply pick and choose the ones I wanted to tackle and ignore the rest. Unfortunately, I've got just enough OCD in me that I *must* do all these quests, and it's getting to be overwhelming. Anybody have any suggestions?
 
If I was a normal person I'd simply pick and choose the ones I wanted to tackle and ignore the rest. Unfortunately, I've got just enough OCD in me that I *must* do all these quests, and it's getting to be overwhelming. Anybody have any suggestions?

The misc quests are basically never ending. My suggestion is to stop doing them and de-list them from you map and never look in their direction again. Either that or kill every single NPC that you can so you never get more quests.
 
^except that the quests generate the npcs.

Just to rant a bit: This game is so f'ing good. HOLY CRAP. I'm the Vane of Whitethelm (though maybe not any more), Arch-Witch of the College of Magic, the Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, the head of the Thieves Guild and a Nightingale. I'm going stormcloak and I am very disappointed I may not get to do the Imperial stuff. I may have also been recruited by a daedra.

Am I missing a faction?
 
^except that the quests generate the npcs.

Just to rant a bit: This game is so f'ing good. HOLY CRAP. I'm the Vane of Whitethelm (though maybe not any more), Arch-Witch of the College of Magic, the Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, the head of the Thieves Guild and a Nightingale. I'm going stormcloak and I am very disappointed I may not get to do the Imperial stuff. I may have also been recruited by a daedra.

Am I missing a faction?

The companions and the bards.

I checked and I have 140 hours invested...holy crap. Only game I've ever played longer than that is gran turismo 3 (300 hours). I hear ya on the OCD stuff, I can't leave a mission unfinished. I scrolled through all my completed quests and I'm freaking dumbstruck how much stuff I've done, I can't even count them all. I'm gonna have 200 hours by the time it's over. That's what I call getting your money's worth.
 
^I enjoy that the characters are tough yet I can still destroy skeletons, mudcrabs Frostbite spiders and Plain Draugrs. I will say that the Dark brotherhood and Thieves guild seems much more straight forward now. Like go kill this guy, done go steal this item, done. No guards chasing after you or stalking required after the first or so missions. This kind of upset me. But I am going to spice things up a bit on my next playthrough and make rules for myself.

I also found the Dark Brotherhood contracts to be rather uninspiring. The main story arc for them was also far too short. Nothing like the DB in Oblivion. I haven't even started on the Thieves guild, so I can't form on opinion on them yet.
 
I also found the Dark Brotherhood contracts to be rather uninspiring. The main story arc for them was also far too short. Nothing like the DB in Oblivion. I haven't even started on the Thieves guild, so I can't form on opinion on them yet.

It's good, but you have to do the mage's guild quest line. They are all about the same length, but the mage college story is pretty epic. It also has the best quest branches that you pick up on along the way, and THE BEST boss fight by far.
 
I went with the hardest one (master I think it's called) mainly because I want the experience to last, and because it seems like with RPGs, hardcore gamers like us are always finding ways to become over-powered and I want to try and compensate for that from the start.

I do have to say, it takes too long to kill enemies at the moment (I'm only a couple hours in), but I'm guessing it will balance out soon enough as I get better gear.

What about you guys? What is your overall impression on the difficulty of this game, and what difficulty level did you start on? I'm anxious to hear from people who have played through Dark Souls. Is Skyrim on the hardest difficulty level anywhere near the challenge Dark Souls was? After beating that game, I can't see ever playing another game on normal mode again.

I agree with this, when you beat the first boss from bleak falls barrow on master without dying, something is wrong with the game. check out this:
http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1269
It makes some AI tweaks and hopefully makes the game more difficult. I don't see it being as challenging as dark souls, (and actually i think the only game that is more challenging is demon souls) however you should see a game play experience with smarter AI that reacts a bit differently. Hope that helps! I'm trying it tonight.
 
^^ I've been playing with PISE enabled for about 3-4 weeks now. I highly recommend it, especially the latest version!
 
I've been playing on master since I started, some fights are pretty tough. The first dragon I fought (accidently ran into a word wall) dominated me about 5 times before it glitched out on my summoned familiar and I could just fire arrows into it until it eventually died. But after a short time I got my archery up and even master isn't much of a challenge except in the odd and annoying situations, level 22 now. One quest put me in a room with a couple of mages and a couple of fighting enemies and it took me a while to beat them, again beat them mostly by moving from room to room and since the AI is fucking retarded, it let me isolate them to finish them off.
 
Leveling in these games is always bittersweet for me, because it really compels you to make your character godlike, yet once you do, you can just steamroll pretty much any enemy in the game (except the goddamn briarharts, seriously wtf is up with those guys?).

It is somewhat annoying in that way - the determination that "Oh, this is an RPG, so we need to have leveling as a major part of the game". If you don't really level, the game feels somewhat...weird and incomplete. If you do...the game starts getting too easy. Unless you intentionally level 'stupidly', or continually increase the game difficulty slider as you go along.

But, then...what's the point?

I'd rather a game somewhat like Skyrim, but without leveling. Maybe - maybe - keep the idea of 'perks', but lose the skill bonus stuff. That might even be pretty easy to do with a mod - just start the various characters at '25' skill to everything (with appropriate racial bonuses over that, so the primary skill of a given race would be at '35', secondary at '30', etc), and then provide no skill improvements as the game progresses. If the perks stay in, then those would become available as you level, but maybe cap at, say, 10 perks, tops. (Just pulling numbers out of the air - maybe '30' skill in each area would be more appropriate, with 15 or 20 perks or something. Some tweaking may be involved, here. And, in any case, the perk tree would have to lose the skill-point-requirement for various things, anyway.)

That ought to make for a more interesting game. More concentration, then, on the story and quest arcs, rather than grinding dungeons/alchemy/crafting/enchanting/etc to level up skills.
 
It is somewhat annoying in that way - the determination that "Oh, this is an RPG, so we need to have leveling as a major part of the game". If you don't really level, the game feels somewhat...weird and incomplete. If you do...the game starts getting too easy. Unless you intentionally level 'stupidly', or continually increase the game difficulty slider as you go along.

But, then...what's the point?

I'd rather a game somewhat like Skyrim, but without leveling. Maybe - maybe - keep the idea of 'perks', but lose the skill bonus stuff. That might even be pretty easy to do with a mod - just start the various characters at '25' skill to everything (with appropriate racial bonuses over that, so the primary skill of a given race would be at '35', secondary at '30', etc), and then provide no skill improvements as the game progresses. If the perks stay in, then those would become available as you level, but maybe cap at, say, 10 perks, tops. (Just pulling numbers out of the air - maybe '30' skill in each area would be more appropriate, with 15 or 20 perks or something. Some tweaking may be involved, here. And, in any case, the perk tree would have to lose the skill-point-requirement for various things, anyway.)

That ought to make for a more interesting game. More concentration, then, on the story and quest arcs, rather than grinding dungeons/alchemy/crafting/enchanting/etc to level up skills.


While I find your points interesting, and I do agree that there is too much stock put into leveling, I don't believe this is what really changes the difficulty of the game. In all honesty the Enemies should become tougher as you move the slider up. Dark souls had one difficulty, frustratingly hard. This combined with AI that was amazing, it almost seemed like as you tried something different, if it worked the first time and you had to do the area again, the AI would learn what you did and not allow you to do it. ( I have no source for this, but only from observation watching the AI)

Skyrim needs something like that, but since everyone likes difficulties other than insanely hard, what bethsoft should be doing for their next iteration is making AI that scales with difficulty. Adept makes enemies predictable, repeatable patterns, pretty much for those that want to play the game through. Master should not only increase the damage that they do and health that they have, but it should also make the enemies try different things. You thought it was cool to flank that bandit? His buddies on the other side of the cave are now doing the same thing to you. You thought that Nord only did power attacks? Now he swipes three times in a row to break your guard.

Personally I think Master difficulty should be so difficult that breaking the keyboard should be a viable alternative to playing the game. Keep in mind the rewarded feeling you would have for solving those issues without breaking the keyboard.
 
Skyrim needs something like that, but since everyone likes difficulties other than insanely hard, what bethsoft should be doing for their next iteration is making AI that scales with difficulty. Adept makes enemies predictable, repeatable patterns, pretty much for those that want to play the game through. Master should not only increase the damage that they do and health that they have, but it should also make the enemies try different things. You thought it was cool to flank that bandit? His buddies on the other side of the cave are now doing the same thing to you. You thought that Nord only did power attacks? Now he swipes three times in a row to break your guard.

I'd seen some games - examples fail me at the moment - that do have a somewhat fixed difficulty, but don't appear to actively hate the end user. If they continue having trouble on a particular encounter, the game will (after a few failures) move the enemy units around some, or replace a few, or 'dumb them down'. Even the 'Brothers in Arms' games, if you failed a mission three times, would pop up a message "War sometimes isn't fair. But a video game should be." and let you re-spawn your squad with full health and ammo restored.

So there are definitely some good examples out there for creating a game that has the level of difficulty the designs were looking for, without making the gamer feel like it's a cake walk...or like it's an impossible chore...and without the gamer having to constantly fiddle with the in-game difficulty slider to get the right level of challenge.

(And part of that is, to your point, something Bethesda didn't seem to bother doing at all - AI tweaks. But, then, maybe that would be asking too much - and, in any case, I'd rather have at any point an enemy that acts 'human' in thinking, rather than either 'blitheringly stupid' or 'godlike omniscience')

Personally I think Master difficulty should be so difficult that breaking the keyboard should be a viable alternative to playing the game. Keep in mind the rewarded feeling you would have for solving those issues without breaking the keyboard.

Well, FWIW, learning button-mashing/combo sequences to defeat a borderline impossible FPS really doesn't do anything for me, personally. I don't like spending tons of time learning a skill with no useful application.

That said, when I'm setting up a torpedo attack on a convoy in 'Silent Hunter'...I have my circular slide rule handy (yes, I'm well under 40 and have a circular slide rule), and work out the math, myself. Why? Mostly immersion, but, heck, knowing how to use a slide rule is a passingly useful skill.

So different things for everyone, I guess - but a game like 'Skyrim', I definitely play more for the stories than knowing the right combination of things to do to level up in the best way possible for combat, etc
 
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