But the masses want the game play TES presents and its a bad thing or a flaw?


But you just said the elements TES presents are a significant reason why the game is good and has value. Are you are suggesting the developers to change course from a successful game which the masses want in order to placate a small group of hard-core gamers?



That is if we accept your premise of dodgy game mechanics, unrealistic implications of skill choices of which many disagree and would point to is what give TES its character and uniqueness.



Only people looking under the hood are the people who are unhappy. What you see as short-comings many find as points of excellence. Sure there are things that need tweaked, not sure a perfect game is ever created and developers who create squeals always try new things for the most part to try and fix the previous titles perceived flaws. Then when that game comes out more flaws will be exposed and they will continue to try and make a perfect of which will never occur.

I would bet all the money I have (which is not much granted) a significant majority of the people who bought this game, are happy and satisfied with it despite or in spite of its "flaws".

bethesda are known for this. They make fun interesting worlds, but are absolutely terrible with the RPG and game mechanics. We still have a woefully underdeveloped meele combat system from 2004, RPG skilsl that are useless, a massive lack of choice in quests (They are 99% linear). Dungeons all revolve around going in and killing, why are there not any small groups of people living in some dungeons ala secret Ghoul society in Fallout>? game is terribly unbalanced. TES games are great exploration and fun, but as RPG's go they are incredibly flawed. It's always modders that clean up Bethesda mess.

Animation/Ai are a joke. I can punch people in the face, steal from them and they talk to me like nothing happens right after, LOL. Great game that could be one of the best ever but suffers from the same issues every other bethesda game does. Awkwardness, broken mechanics and bad balance.

This is the main problem. You can become too powerful simply by playing 'hey, this looks cool' way. It's hard to predict effects that Smithing and Enchanting will have together before your gear is finally in place and once it is, it's already too late. Unless you have a save file .

At least enchanting is relatively harder to level than smithing. anyway, im not one for long posts; many "thief based" skills like pickpocket and lockpicking seem to be there as filler skills; they didnt have enough for the thief skills so they just put in pickpocket and lockpicking and added some random perks

Armor skills get maxed on accident unless you go out of your way to have things hit you.

This is simply false. I just got my blacksmithing to 100 and I've easily created and upgraded hundreds of pieces of armor and weapons. One trip back from a dungeon to melt down some Dwarven ingots and then claiming you've now maxed out your skill is absurd, and you're clearly trolling. I didn't exploit the blacksmithing skill at all, and I'm level 47 right now.. JUST throwing some Daedric and/or Dragon plate on.

Some of you are clearly playing this game like it's a drinking contest, chugging away until you're bloated and have to burp. Then you come on here to let out all your annoying belching and its inherent gut-rot smell.

@ Cerddor. Interesting idea.

Maybe, maybe not. I would say my orc was still rocking ebony by the time he was finding that on corpses and I had not noticed any material 'power loss'.

Perhaps he would have levelled off later in the game, perhaps not - still have the daedric sets unused/uncrafted.


As I say, it is not a complaint from me, merely an observation than in following a fairly logical progression I crafted an extremely strong character. I intended to get stronger from the process, absolutely, but I did not expect to get that strong.

This is why I say its easy to accidentally overdo it if you're not aware of it. Yes, levelling the smithing was no accident but I expected from that, to see a medium power/survivability increase, not have the ass-whoop-o-meter dialled up to 11 with two tiers of kit still above me.


Edit: I could absolutely turn the difficulty up, of course I could; but needing to do that to maintain a consistent challenge because my kit followed the natural upgrade path seems...odd.

Again, I'm not unhappy with it and if I could change it, my only change would be making becoming so powerful to be a more...considered...action on the part of the player. I'd expect someone doing the normal progression of a character to have a pretty consistent challenge as the game progressed.

Pen and Paper is designed for groups and has more in common with MMO's, only with a variable sentient(at least barely sometimes) GM who can tailor the challenge for the players with a freeroaming storyline. Few games are run with set in stone statistics. CRPG's don't have that luxury, TES tries with levelled worlds etc, but its obviously artificial and jarring. I am thankful that Skyrim does a better job than usual, Oblivion was a sledgehammer in this respect.

Even with this in mind thou, I can't think of any balanced RPG's, different skills are used for different things, its how the party progresses as a unit that really matters. Its interesting how one side of this argument throws around min/max and munchkin (myself included) as a derogatory term, because those sort of players had insensible reasons their character progression, based only on "how much more powerful than everybody else can I be" without thought to being useful to the party as a whole, which does not make you many friends.
In computer games it seems to be worn as a badge of honour that optimal route to game crushing was achieved. Theres probably an important point to be made here.. can't put my finger on it thou other than the obvious Skyrim was never presented to be beaten or crushed as a badge of honour.

This why do bertesda do lazy crap like this? Your lockpicking skill svcks you should NOT be able to open tougher chests, Same as pick pocketing..... Speech is also borked. Quests are too linear with little use for persusaion.

You've just hit the problem on the head. Well the problem the first time you play through anyway.

So playing the game is a chore? So if you think leveling up a skill is a chore, do not level it up... Unless of course you get your satisfaction by maxing your characters ability/skills, but I would then suggest that TES games are not for you, if this is what you are looking to achieve.






Being able to do everything is not variety to some people and it is actually quite the opposite. For instance, being a sneak thief and being able to swing a battle ax with no real draw back makes it pointless to be a thief or having any defined class for that matter. Another example of this is, a mage who practices armor making with out practicing mage thing and then able to go do mage stuff with no penalty seems pointless for them to be called a mage or an armor smith or any class as it does not matter which avenue you go down you can do what ever you want. In other words, it does not matter what choices you make as you will always be able to do what ever you want regardless of the class you make. The current game, is not like this, you can play a class and it actaully can replicate that class and the draw back that class has. However, by your suggestion, the class you pick means nothing as you can swing a battle ax as a mage, or at least you think you should be able to do that if you want. Which you can in this game as well.


That is your choice. That is not the developers fault that you care more about maxing your character than trying and experience the different things you can do.

Even know I always make my own custom class in TES, I always liked seeing the viable combinations Bethesda put together in the presets. You know what I mean?! They kinda tease you with "look at all the possibilities in class combinations!!" Now it's, "figure it out for yourself we don't give a !$#^$# anymore!"


Again, you want to do everything with one character. To me that is boring and brings no real character development or uniqueness to my character. So your mad a warrior can not use magic? Oh, but he can you just have to sacrifice something else......

Here is a hint, turn on TGM and level everything up so you can be a warrior who can steal anything and shoot fireballs out his [censored].


One class that lets you do everything. That's unique alright.

That was me who wrote that and I would like to comment on what you said here. See I am an experienced fallout and TES fan. Played them all... Iv'e stuggled, Iv'e balanced, and Iv'e broken them all. But I've never actually made an OP character, honestly, never happened once. I also wasn't on forums back then, or looking to be OP. But it happened in skyrim and it's the first time I'm on a forum cause of it...

Here's my experience: I jumped in and looked at all the skills. Broke it down to how many perks "I MUST HAVE" to the number of what I would like to have.. The number of perks was like 54-69 or something(For my specific paladin style build). Right away I looked online to find out max level to see its mathimatically calculated to be around 77-81 maxing ALL skills to 100. So I thought crap, I'm going to need to max roughly 15 / 18 skills to get what I want. Dear lord I thought! This seems harder than oblivion but ok here goes.

I start as a warrior roaming caves etc... Next day I played under the mark of the thief and joined the thieves guild. Then went back to warrior cave diving and questing. Hoping back and forth I was naturally leveling faster, and I needed to in order to even experience a boss fight with a end game perk. I didn't like the though of fininshing the game before my potential last perk which offers a pretty cool mechanic. IF anything, I want to practice these end perks in combat and play with alot of them before retiring, or even coming close. From the looks of things. A "normal" playthrough is stale and lacks any end game perks or variety and theres still a feeling of, I havn't really explored much of these 18 trees, at all....

So I ended up finding the lovers stone 15% to all skills rather than 20% to say just warrior. Much better for general leveling. And as I played I would take advantage of situation that offer skill ups. after I hit level 35 or so, I pretty much found it really hard to skill up and went to some old oblivion macro ways. Such things as spamming courage on my follower for 10 minutes to max out illusion. The really easy to do stuff! Summon an atronoch and crank on it with a mace on the hardest difficulty while healing yourself. That sorta thing. Ok, you may argrue that i'm not playing the game "normally", but playing the game normally will eventaully lead you to the same result, but you could potentially finish the game before that, resulting in nothing at all... What's worse>?? If im investing 100+ hours, I better have shield charge and damn well love it!!

Soo here I am now, level 69, most skills are at 100, some are in progress, (waiting on making a mage set for some skills) speech, lockpick, pickpocketing skills sort of need to be level'd as you go.... I have a few maxed out trees, Block, 1 hander (mace spec), heavy armor, enchanting, the heavy side of blacksmithing, most of restoration, half of speech, 3 into pickpocketing (carry weight perk) and basically my last points will be fueled into alteration to finalize my ability to buff and have magic resistance. These are all thing I must have to even feel remotely close to any sort of paladin i was able to create in the past Elder scrolls series. So after about 3 days playing I had my plan and KNEW i needed about 64 perks to feel fofilled as a paladin. In oblivion I wouldn't have to "macro" skills to get this powerful. infact this is just a common paladin build. nothing crazy. I picked roughly 7, and oblivion those 7 would get me to level 70 playing normally. So the ISSUE is that, I have to macro to get the same style character I love playing in these games. Im forced to get a higher level, in order to experience things a lower level character would get in the other games. Therefor, as a human, I cannot backtrack in gameplay. I expect equal or more power than I had in the previous games. And in order to get there, I had to hit about level 50 before I really actually fealt like a paladin (in oblivion it happened at a much lower level). In oblivion I macroed to get all skills to 100... But didn't recieve any bonus's at all for doing so (after your 7 majors are up, your max level).. IIn skyrim I max all abilities to achieve a regular character in oblivion, which is considered OP here.....

They basically made the characters 3 times less expansive... I cannot express it enough. Read all my previous posts (if you can handle it!), I make very valid points.

BESIDES the point.... I will be hitting 80, and will be happy with my 4 maxed trees and 4 other half trees... I will be happy with my overal character, but I had to go out of my way to play three classes to achieve a master in one class.. That's a bit anoying, especailly when I want to master a new class. My whole anology is: in skyrim you must play all three classes, three times each, in order to experience the game once with each class. HAHA! It does make sence in a wierd broken system kinda way

But ya, the factor of this whole topic though, is OP'ness and brokeness etc... Well, even at 69 I die on Master time to time. Pesky mages and things that shout can be a bother. But soon with maxing alteration and enchanting, my resistance will make the game "normal". My character doesn't become OP persay, (im not doing the 3 craft skills cheat either) . But it's really not that hard. I was actually flipping it from Adept to Master from about lvl 30-60 now I just leave it on and deal with the tough situations like it's a rare goldmine.

So I have many rants and posts adding ot what people say or debating opinions. In the end I enjoy TES series, lore, stories, and characters, and defining my roll that I want to play. Skyrim overal, I have 1 of 3 choices to define, and I have to play all 3 to define the one choice. So in otherwords, were all doing the same exact shiat to get to 80... Exactly... And if your smart, you DONT waste your time, and DONT play normally, cause playing normally you never end up finishing with 8 perk trees glowing... But if you do get all 6-8 glowing skill trees, 8 / 10 times the game is REALY "easy". If I was a 80 mage I would be perfectly happy right now with the challange of the game on master difficulty. Only problem is I am having problems wanting to play a mage after reading all this about the crapy mages and no spell crafting. Not to mention 6 less keybindings for xbox (leaving us with 2 now), so it becomes dubachary trying to swap magic skills.. Plus I play arcane warriors, monks, druids, shamans, all the things you can't play in TES anymore....

All in all, ya the difficulty needs to be bumped up so that there is no such thing as OP, and those who are curious can find out that INSANE mode actually looks impossible. Maybe the crafting cheat will become viable on this mode, and still be tough!.. Really, that's not alot to ask, but I gotto rebuy the game on PC to add that myself. And my list of game breaking bugs on my previous posts pretty much just tops of the reason I 'm here whining about balance in the first place lol.. My games slowly becoming unplayable, as I cannot enter or leave my houses anymore. and quest NPC's are totally forgetting about important quests they gave me... At first I wasn't going to wine about the game getting easy later on. But after I lost ability to use my house in riften, and can't become Thane due to bugs. Re-rolling and "hoping" to Re-avoid these game breaking bugs, while knowing the game is going ot be super easy later, just doesn't seem worth it. So now I wine like a baby and hope someone patches my current game, or allows my next one to be a bit more challanging to make up for lost content......

A comment on the text that JonnyFiveAlive quoted: crafting professions aren't really OP until you put perks into them. After that, multipliers from various trees just start stacking too well together. That means that you can still use these trees to boost your character level without becoming too powerful, and simply spend those perks in your main combat trees or even Speech/Lockpicking/Pickpocketing.

(this is for Master difficulty, it's possible that maxed crafting professions on their own, without perks, are still too strong on Adept etc)

I have a question. Why did they cut spell creation? That would easily solve the destruction problem. Werethey just to lazy to implement it?

First off, learn to read. Did I say im mad cause my warrior can't throw fire?! No I said it's rediculas that my Dragon born 250 pound Epic strength warrior CANT swing a 2 hander to save his life... At level 69, on master, a 2 hander does 1 tick of dmg, and my mace 1 shots anything. DO you not see the problem!? I don't want everything.. I want to Be a warrior!... and not just a warrior that uses one mace for 200+ hours of gameplay, I would liek to use that 2 handed orc sword, and actually win without having to use the mace.... The game IS 3 times less expansive. OPEN YOUR EYES!> And I was specifically refering to hybrid classes which DONT do everything in the game. HAVE YOU SEEN the class choice in TES series? the number of hybrids that cross all levels and mixtures of the class choices.. There is no master of all, and nor do i want there to be... Mix matching in this game is completely erased. It's as exansive as the 3 choices in fable 2. Which completely breaks the formula of ROLLS in TES series.... It's limited in comparison.

I can also argue and say my warrior does as much dmg as your maxed out mage. Cause I can make a gear set with 0% mana cost for destruction, only thing I lose out on is a 25% bonus dmg and a finisher... Nearly as strong a mage without a single perk spent... So your "you would like to be every class in one" arguement is not viable, cause ya I can be cause the system is so terribly broken compared to anything in the past. I actually never complained about daggerfall, morrowind or oblivion. I got through them just fine and never fealt op. I actually struggled with them, minus oblivion....

So your saying if i want 2 handers take away from 1 handers. what if i want duels? Oh wait maybe i should play 3 warriors?! just to see 1 lame mechanic change. I would like to decide what's the least lame having them al at eqaul strength, I have to play the game 3 times or just get the answer online. Where's my choice huh?

AND NO, a warrior cannot use magic bye "just taking away somewhere else" You going to throw flames outa your big 2 hander??? or you gunna use the 3 second delay flip to swap between the 2 like a true "death knight" would..... Buddy the system is broken and is has NOTHING to do with not being able ot be EVERY character in one..... each individual class has it's broken areas and sub choices that change the game in such an insignificant way it's not even funny. If I only get power bash with a mace... You better give me more weapon choices... No wait, we limit that to perks now tooo.... HAve you even played TES series dude?

Your blind. Period. Read my posts clearly before responding like a Rtard.

PS: ,my previous post puts up all the strong points to my arguement. Which you never read. Go read it and please reply with some logic...

Sadly I think this goes beyond just Bethesda. All games that I seem to play these days have some kind of game breaking ability. Of the five games with the Bethesda name on it (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, New Vegas) Oblivion seems to be the most balanced to me and it STILL had a game breaking ability, Chameleon. Doesn't matter how high the slider goes when they can't see you. The Fallout games have sneak and from what I hear this game has the same sneak problem.

What happened to the days when you had to press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a and start. You had to jump on a turtle in a freak way or had to crouch in a specific spot or jump at a certain place. Today they seem to be just putting the cheats right in the game and telling people not to use them if you think they are too powerful. Believe it or not there is a HUGE difference in ignoring a cheat code (TGM) and ignoring half of the skills or best equipment in the game.

Too hard > Too Easy

Maybe I just svck, but I use perked weapons and armor (smithing) and I still struggle in fights on normal difficulty. Tho I didnt use the enchant/alchemy loop. I have to circle strafe all the time so I dont get pounded, and random ancient dragons crush me, other stuff does too.

So personally, I dont want to see any changes or nerfs, unless its just nerfs to the way the feedback loop works.

Hmmm, not to sure what you mean... I have speech and pickpocketing, 2 crafting proffesions, and 4 major combat trees maxed...and im playing on master with ease. And i havnt even enchanted my dragon armor yet cause im sitting at 93 and want to wait for full effects. I can't imagine how easy this will be with enchants and i still have like 11 levels to gain to get even stronger......

Woah there, most people haven't maxed out smithing on one save, not without a serious number of hours, and frankly after a ton of hours, 50+ in a bethseda RPGI would normally expect to start owning things left right and centre. Its the journey there that matters.

So Master difficulty was too easy with just armour, even once you reach a level where enemies start sporting high level armours themselves? Then I will tentatively change my mind on difficulty and say it needs to be harder if this is indeed true. Not yet convinced it is thou.


They tried to be more subtle with levelling certainly, Oblivion was poorly executed, and I was one of the vehement 'no leveled list' fanatics as you put it . I hardly say they went nuts because its still very clearly a cornerstone of the gameworld not just in the way you mention, simply its moved away from the "You are level 30, so the bandits are ALL level 30 with daedric armour" absurdity and instead, "You are level 30, so the bandits are between level 20-40 without levelled armour" which is a half-decent compromise which almost works. Hence why I am not raging anymore.
The connection that this leaves us with only making iron daggers is a mystery to me thou. If it wasn't daggers, it'd be dwarven daggers, and to tell the truth I probably have more dwarven metal than I've ever had iron. If you make up your mind to grind the skill to 100 for the best armour in the game, making players switch to dwarven metals, ebony etc is not going to dissuade them from this course. Like I said, they've gone out of their way to obtain 500 iron ingots and leather to do so. Maybe I'm unkind, but I think the only thing this solves is a different google search on where to find items once the mind is made up to grind it to 100. I don't think this really solves the issue the game becomes easy if you choose to do so. Our argument is .. why shouldn't it if you choose to target armour which is excessive to the challenges you are currently facing.


I asked for clarification, so thankyou and I understand your point of view, but I respectfully disagree a world needs to be balanced between primary choices on combat offence for reasons I have given earlier, and in all likelihood are so rooted in the fundamental approach to the game that are unresolvable. I understand your frustration, I simply don't understand why you need a developer to artificially increase destruction so that you feel comparable to a warrior on the same difficulty.
Just drop the difficulty, its up to you to define your experience. Its just combat difficulty after all, and a mage is more diverse than just doing damage, whereas a warrior is almost entirely defined by it, hence the perceived inbalance.

That's exactly my point.

For example, in pen and paper, a player who love rogues will want to roleplay a rogue no matter what, even if the rogue class is completely weak and imbalanced. Right? But then the GM can "fix" that by tailoring the adventures, so that the rogue player can feel more useful in his class and have more fun.

And what I mean is that, even with this scenario in mind, the developers of a pen and paper RPG always try to create balanced rules, even if a possible imbalance can be easily "fixed" later by the GM. Just because this is simply basic good game design. Now, in a computer game, where there is no GM to dynamically fix things, more of a reason to worry about balance, to avoid issues later. And the whole point of this tread is exactly this. We, the players, are having to take the role of the GM to fix balancing issues for ourselves to make the game more fun..

While I can sympathize to some degree with the OP ... not much. My experience with Skyrim is genrally enjoyable, maybe because I just avoid building over powered characters. No reason for a mage to wear robes? How about because he is a mage? Do you need a better reason?

My fear is that if Bethesda caters to the min/maxers there will be no room left for role players. I enjoy Bethesda games because they are a varied sand box that allow me to create and role play multiple characters. If something is OP there is such a simple answer - don't do that. It's your living room and nobody is watching. There are so many ways to play this game. Choose a way that you enjoy.

But you choose to use a mace and mad because you cant swing a two-handed sword as well..... oh wait, it'd be a chore to level up two handed weapons.... You made that choice, not the game.


Like I said you want to do everything. You want to be good at a mace, a sword, and two handed weapons with out having to do the required practice. Here is a hint, type ~ then TGM and hit enter and you can have anything you want.



So you want a warrior to be able to able to be an effective mage and a warrior.....like i said you want to be able to do everything......Here is a hint, type ~ then TGM and hit enter and you can have anything you want.






You want to be able to do everything with one character, which is fine, if that is your choice, it's just not going to be as proficient at all of the things you want it to do. Unless of course you want to do everything with one character and do it well, therefore making class's pointless. Again you want to swing a mace, then pull out your swordss and slice and dice then blast the bad guy away with the fire out of your ass and are mad when you are unable to do this.

You want your cake and eat it too. That's fine, the rest of us do not enjoy games like that where your class is irrelevant because you can use a war ax as thief just as warrior would. You want to be good at everything and are mad that you can not be.

If you have the ability to be good at everything no matter what "class" you decide to be, what choice do you really have when it comes to building a "class'?

I just wanted to add this in.
Choice and control are illusions, you are still limited. You can not be high king, you only have three option.
Do nothing, join the SC or join the Imps.

Balance is subject and the perfectly balanced game for one, may be really bad for others.

Skyrim is a game where you get out of it, what you put in it.

Now on the PC, people can balance and change the game how they want, but others may find that they like it differently.
I think the game is fine.

Absolutely and in a nutshell. The variables in creating a dynamic difficulty which automagically adjusts for different approaches to the game are too complex to be feasible, so Bethseda quite rightly, gives the power to the player.

While they have built an amazing immersive world (bugs aside) they could have spent a lot more time on the skills and perks to make them more or less equivalent.

My take:

1) Certainly all the damage doing skills should scale with the enemies, such that archery, 2hd, 1hd, and destruction should all balance out in damage no matter what level, although I can see the argument that the closer up skills like 2hd and 1hd do more damage since you have to be up close and personal to do damage too.

2) I have no idea why "lock picking" is it's own skill tree. That's so incredibly weird and a poor decision. If they got rid of skills that were one dimensional, why not this? I think they wanted to throw a bone at the person who developed the mini-game to pick locks, because it definitely should have been a branch in the stealth tree.

3) I have no problem with Speechcraft being it's own tree, but it should be about WAY more than just merchants. Driving down the cost of goods/increasing your sale prices should have been a branch. The main thing should have been being able to calm humanoids and races you can speak to so you don't have to fight them; getting someone to be a follower even for just a particular fight, opening up more quest lines, getting bigger rewards out of the person you complete a quest for, and the persuade/intimidate dialogue options.

I agree with the original post, crafting is broken. You should not be able to smith up to master by making iron daggers. Any fool at game design should know this. Iron daggers should cap you out at a relatively low level, then you need to make more complex things or you stay an expert at making iron weapons only. And the higher level stuff should be suffiiciently expensive difficult to find that you need to be high level to craft it. That's naturally how a game should progress, why is Bethesda not thinking here?