Part 1: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1288414-bethesda-why-must-we-rebalance-your-game-for-you/
TD;LR: Why do I have to chose how to build my character in function of how hard I want the game to be instead of how I want to play?

Crafting is out of control: If i want to make a warrior and still have a challenge, I can't use all three crafting professions (and even 2 is iffy). The synergies between them are so powerfull that they make the very idea of min/maxing as a type of gameplay completely absurd. You cannot take the best character developpement decisions, the ones you know you need to be the best at what you are doing, without turning the game into Hello-Kittie-Adventure as far as difficulty goes.

Destruction is a flippin' joke: The tree does not scale! That means that, unlike every single other combat ability in the game, there is a point after which you will -never- hit harder, while everything keeps scaling up. What that means is that we have a situation where a destruction mage, at a certain level, will actually do more damage with -unperked- bows then with -fully perked- destruction spells. Now it wouldn't be a that big a deal if that level was very late, but that level is 35. On a game with 81 levels in total, you will always hit as hard as a level 35 mage.

What that means is that mages are forced to turn themselves into summoners by taking up conjuration, effectively completely changing the gameplay and restricting their possible options. And guess what: Even that doesn't scale!

Illusion trivalizes the game: Here is a skill I am quite happy to see finally shine... except they overdid it! It trivializes all form of content, same as crafting synergies. The problem is that there is no element of damage nor resistance involved. What that means is that once you have the master spells and the appropriate perks, you can just invis in, frenzy, invis out and grab a popcorn. Then just calm + shoot the last man standing. Nothing can resist it, nothing can counter it, nothing can mitigate it. With destruction spells you need to kite, with arrows you sneak, with weapons you need to stagger them first if they have a shield or are blocking, etc. Illusion is an "IWIN" button; the only strat is "press it".

There is no incentive to ever wear robes: Even as a mage, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear more then a single piece of robes, because you gain absolutely nothing from wearing them over a light armor piece with the same enchant. If I have a cloth glove with -20% cost to Destruction spells, and a light armor with -20% cost to Destruction spells, then there will never be a question that the Light armor piece will be superior. Sure there is the Alteration perk, but again, the mage issue: it stops scaling really fast, and then falls behind. Hell, all the masks (best mage helmets) in the game are Light Armor!

As it stands the only Cloth piece worth wearing over anything else is the Robes from the College quest line, because you cannot reproduce its stats through other means.

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I keep reading on this forum about how the game is supposed to be about Choice...

Then why is it that every time someone brings up any of these points they are told to just not use them? So far, if I had listened to these boards, I would say that I cannot use: Enchanting, Smithing, Alchemy, Illusion, Destruction, Sneak and Dual Wield. Those are just the ones that I have personally read here.

Doesn't that actually restrict my choices considerably?!?

Yes, you should be able to become God if you want to, but you should also be able to have a good level of challenge as well if you want to. You should not have to restrict your own options to keep the game interesting, if anything, that is sort of killing it for me (as in, my opinion, I know its not everyone's).

Isnt there already a difficulty bar setting?!?

What is the point of there being a difficulty setting if the acutal in-game difficulty is dictated by wether you chose the OP or the UP build? You want the game to be very easy? Shouldn't you obtain that by putting the setting on "very easy" ("Novice")? You want the game to be very hard? Shouldn't you obtain that by putting the setting on "very hard" ("Master")?

Yes, there will be mods. Tons and tons of mods. I play on Xbox. I will never get to use a single one of them, yet I paid the same price for my game.

P.S. sorry for the typing/grammar/spelling mistakes, english is not my first language.

Part 1 went over post limit, so reposting on a new thread.

Couple points from the previous thread I would like to reply to, just to keep things going:




^ This. People throw the "just dont exploit" line left and right, but the issue is that you can very easilly overpower your toon by playing the game 100% normally. Taking up a certain perk and using it as it is meant to be used should never be called exploiting, the very idea is ridiculous. There is no warning in game that certain trees will trivialize everything, no way for people to know that before hand.

An exploit, in video games, is the use of a bug or design flaw by a player to their advantage in a manner not intended by the game's designers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploit_(online_gaming)

Yet for a lot of players, min/maxing, or the act of figuring out how to build the best character possible (for your playstyle) is what keeps them playing RPGs over other types of games. We like figuring out new builds, new combinations, new ways of kicking ass.

This game system stops all of that. A lot of options are off the table because they are blatantly OP, while a lot of options are off because they are UP. It is quite possible to have a game where you can strive to be the best and still have a challenge if you hit the maximum difficulty: most game I have played actually fit in that description. All it requires is a working difficulty slider!

I agree on the crafting, destruction and robes, though I personally think Illusion is just as much a victim of the levelscaling, and just poor design in general. A skill that only works on half the enemies until you hit 100 in it has serious issues, and sine you can't up the level of what your illusion spells work on by any means after you max the skill out you still eventually find enemies that are leveled to a point where they can't be affected. Also I've never been a fan of putting abilities in the game that the enemies can't use. I just find it lame to give the players a power that would absolutely wreck your game if the NPC could use it on you.


Also, in order to preempt the dumbest argument from the other thread:

Your skill choices should never adjust the difficulty of the game, that's what the difficulty slider is for. The difficulty slider is not there so you can adjust the game to your skill choices because Bethesda was too lazy to make all skills equally valuable.

Completely agree with you OP. Having to create invisible barriers just to keep my character playable is ruining the game. Almost half of the skill trees are either game-break overpowered or completely useless. Take pickpocket for example. The only decent skill in the ENTIRE TREE is extra pockets. Lockpicking is also completely worthless. Even with a lockpicking skill of 5, anyone can pick a master lock with ease. Treasure hunter is probably the only redeeming skill in the entire tree & its horrible. WOW, I increase the chances of finding enchanted items by 50%! So now instead of a 10% chance I have a 15% chance. A player can put 1 point into haggling (The first thing in the speech tree) & likely make more money over the course of the game then taking treasure hunter.

Was any play testing done at all???

Preempting isn't countering. The point of that argument is that you are the games master of the world. I plan to try a travelling merchant/black market/professional thief character, and will probably be on easy as I try to push the limits of speech, pickpocket and lockpicking. At no point have I requested the game be balanced so that I can talk the undead out of attacking me, I simply adjust the difficulty of the world so that an unusual archetype can be played.

And sorry, a simultaneously master enchanter/blacksmith/alchemist.. is not a usual archetype... so again you adjust the difficulty for that archetype.

See sig for further details.

Yes. In the last thread someone stated that Skyrim is not the game for that kind of player, that we should play WoW. And I sort of agree with him.

However, as I said before, the game is so great in many other aspects that worth trying to motivate the devs (or the modders out there) to come with a few tweaks related to game mechanics to turn it into an even more awesome game. I'm sure no one here want to change the core ideals behind the game (exploration, freedom, etc), much less turn it into WoW. But I for sure would like to say this is the best game I've ever played, and it's almost there seriously.

Most of us are not roleplayers. We are gamers. We are human beings who enjoy playing RPG type video games.

Yes, to us, enchanter/smithing/alchemist is not only a usual archetype, its the instinctive one. You are a melee toon, you want to improve your melee performances past weapon and armor skills? Well the only way to do it in this game is by leveling enchanting, smithing, and alchemy. There is no melee-synergic magic, and even if there was you need stamina and health so your magika reserves will be extremely low, and nothing in the thief trees will help you in combat. Whats left? Crafting.

Nobody is asking that you can use pickpocket, speech and lockpicking to defeat the undead, but why is the game designed in such a way that you never need them at all?

You insist that someone without combat skills shouldn't be able to defeat hordes of undead on master difficulty ... alright, sure.
But why can you still open any chest without a single perk point in lockpicking on master difficulty?
Why can you still just bribe anyone if you don't have the persuasion skill to convince them of anything on master difficulty?
Why can you still hoard millions of gold without ever learnign the merchant trade on master diffculty?
Why is pickpocketing never useful for anything in the entire game even on master difficulty?

Your argument doesn't make any sense, sorry. You simply take the imbalance of the game and think that skills have a certain value according to it. Enchating and Smithing are really overpowered? Oh, those are master difficulty skills. Lockpicking does nothing? Oh, that's a Novice difficulty skill. Sorry, that's just an absolutely lazy way to apologize for huge imbalance.

Also, even if you fancy yourself a roleplayer, the idea that a smith/enchanter is the most powerful possible character because he can make a set of weapons for himself exclusively that is orders of magnitude better than anything else that exists in the world including artifacts created by gods is still absolutely absurd.

The truth is that Bethesda clearly designed the game mechanics thinking only about roleplaying. And I have to say they are really good on that, I'm really enjoying the game even with the balance issues. But I believe we reached a point in the game industry where you can't be naive enough to think your players won't notice if you haven't tested some mechanics, skills, character development, etc. Some players will for sure enjoy getting perks in the speech tree for roleplaying reasons, and this is great. But I bet most will think "Why? I'm rich already".
I really think that for a modern game with years of development can't be so hard to please both sides.

I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry.

I'm sorry that the skill level of 100 represents the ultimate in mortal achievement and allows you to possess abilities that appear godlike.

I'm sorry that waiting and buying hundreds upon hundreds ingots of iron, and using it solely to achieve mastery isn't considered normal play.

I'm sorry that destruction magicians aren't walking nukes

I'm sorry that you have a psychological compulsion to create a game avatar whom is all-powerful and all-skillful as fast as possible, and then find it ultimately unrewarding and unfulfilling.

I'm sorry that grinding levels, quests and skills as you would in WoW meant you missed out on the true enjoyment of an RPG.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces.

I'm very sorry you feel the difficulty slider is an enemy to be defeated and overcome in order to be satisfied.

I'm sorry that deities are wise enough not to place too much power into a single item, wisdom that mortals sorely lack.

I'm very sorry that it probably isn't possible to make a game that pleases everyone.

Love you lots,
Bethseda.

Sorry, what? The RP aspect is easily the part that suffers the most in Skyrim because of lazy design. I mean look at the mission design, if you come across any task that you don't agree with you pretty much never have a choice to resolve the situation in another way. You pretty much can't play anything your own way. For example, let's say you join the thieves guild, the game simply assumes your character is a thief and is perfectly fine with stealing every last drake someone owns. It doesn't let you play the missions from the point of view of someone who infiltrates the guild, or someone who's an honorable thief who only steals from the rich. You run into a struggling merchant who can hardly make ends meet but the game doesn't give you the option of paying off his protection money and helping the guy out, you have to take the money from him or the quest doesn't advance. How the hell does that kind of system think about roleplaying?

The skill system is the same way. How the heck were they thinking about roleplaying when they designed a system where a crafter can make a sword that hits ten times harder then the best spell a mage can cast? How is that roleplaying? That's just stupid.

I hate doing the piece by piece posts, so I'll just adress everything together.

I am not even 100 in any single skill on my 2nd character, and I quit the first one after overpowering it purely by mistake. I was an Orc 2h warrior and, being a typical RPG player, I figured "what goes best with mah big sword... oh right, something that lets me make a bigger sword, and something that'll let me enchant it i guess since there isnt anything else combat-related that fits with the build...".

Well first thing I know, I am hitting 100 smithing by farming (I dungeon delved for the first 20 hours I played, just cause I couldnt get enough of how beautifull the world was, I wanted to explore it) and all a suddent I have to switch difficulty from Expert to Master. Get my mats and craft my Daedric weapon (bought a few ebony ingots here), and suddently even in "Master", I am 3 hitting dragons. All I had was + fire damage on my sword and 3 +2h enchanted pieces, one I had gotten as a drop actually.

This line about how the difficulty slider is an ennemy is just silly... the difficulty slider is there to set the difficulty setting. Its straight up common sense. Its its very definition. It is that which sets the difficulty. What I am saying is that if I set it on a hard difficulty, I would expect the game to be hard, just as if I set it on an easy difficulty, it should be easy.

Now of course, it is impossible to please everyone. Someone may want to play the game with purely non-offensive skills (heavy/block/restoration/alteration) and will find the game more challenging then a heavy/2h/smithing warrior, that is normal. But at the same time, there is a certain margin of... shall we call it "acceptability"? It is acceptable for some outliner build to be somewhat more challenging. It is not acceptable for two mainstream builds (DW warrior vs Destruction mages) to be at a 500:1 damage ratio. It is not acceptable for some trees to completely trivialize every single aspect of the game simply by putting points into it.

It is not acceptable to be this unbalanced, so much so that the difficulty slider becomes completely incapable of actually setting the difficulty.

As for the rest of your post, you seem just confused... I do not have any kind of compulsion, nor am I looking for any sort of grind. Yes, I enjoy character developpement a lot, what of it? What I am saying is that by playing completely normally, the game becomes so unbalanced that my choices in terms of character developpement becomes actually extremely restricted, and I end up building my character with how hard I want the game to be in mind, instead of how I would like to play it. And yes, to me at least, that is a problem.

Your contempt for anyone not playing soleley for the roleplaying is not welcome here. It is not a crime to enjoy overcoming challenges when playing a video game - in fact one could argue it is what most players play for.

I have a question. Is threre a way to get faster magicka regen without the restoration perk.

Well, you're right in saying that the difficulty slider is the thermometer of a game balance.

Casual players should be able to handle the average difficulty. Players with no skill or not willing to spend time creating strategies should be able to drop to easy and have fun. Min-max players who like spending lots of time researching and discovering better builds should rise to master and feel challenged.

Now, when anyone can easily decide to grind a few skills, go directly to master, and still have an easy time there, then something got to be wrong.

You can break Morrowind in minutes.

Do the quest where you are ambushed by two bandits, one wearing a chameleon amulet. Get that amulet.
You are now in possession of a 80% chameleon amulet, capable of being nearly completely invisible while doing everything, like emptying the Ghostgate getting a full Glass set of equipment without any skill whatsoever.

And equipment scaling is bad too huh?

There is, through regen enchants. The catch, however, is that regen is so low in combat that it is not worth it; especially considering you can get 100% reduced cost on your spells through the same skill (enchanting).

That is actually part of the problem, because I suspect it is used as a balancing element for magic damage (you can shoot more of it!). The issue tho, is that since damage stops scaling at 35, you eventually end up at a point where, sure, you can spam destruction spells all day... but it takes you a full minute to kill a draugh wright. As you level up past 40ish, you will feel weaker each level, instead of stronger.

The only alternative is to grab Conjuration for the pets, but that completely changes the gameplay, basically removing the traditional "nuker mage" archetype completely.

EDIT:

While that is true, I would like to bring up two elements:
1) We are talking about taking a specific action requiring that you kill a specific NPC at a specific time. The problem is that in skyrim, to break the game, all you need is... select certain perks and use them.
2) Just because a previous instatement of something was broken does not justify the current one also being broken. The idea is to evolve and get better.

Sorry. I'll have to post this..

Eletronic games are all about challenge. So lets consider Skyrim as a very complex Lemmings game. The developers designed the challenge and gave us the tools to overcome it. Now lets say that, in addition to all other tools, they added infinite uses of a tool that make your Lemmings fly and safely reach the goal. By using this tool the game obviouly becomes too boring. So, some people will argue that the solution is simple, just force yourself to not use the tool. And this will kind of solve the issue. However, in the end, you'll always feel that something is wrong with that design.

Of course I'm being too simplistic here. But, weel, it's damn fun

What is the point of slowing down magicka regen. I say they bring back attributes.

How exactly is pointing out that breaking the game in morrowind was possible any kind of argument for why they couldn't have done a better job in Skyrim?

I don't think there is a perfect leveling and/or scaling system that will please everyone and I'm not having a problem with what is in Skyrim up to my Level 23 character. So far the game is exactly as they described it and I'm having a great time figuring out what works and what I need to make adjustments on. Awesome game and I think the subject line on this thread is insulting.

Have you actually tried blacksmithing?
There are numerous ways to max the skill without trying.

How about people who went dungeon crawling and thought oh cool if I upgrade my weapons and armour I can make them more valuable and make some money selling them for more?

Mmm this quest had sent me to markarth, not that I wanted to go there yet, oh look a dwarven ruins full of dwarven metals to melt down. One trip later im maxing my blacksmithing.

These things were put in game by gamesas and were too easy to max without even trying to exploit mechanics.

That's exactly a counterargument. They could have learned from the past.
I haven't played Morrowind, but I suspect players' expectations regarding game mechanics were not so high at that time.

I found that amulet by sheer chance.

It's not even hidden, it's not even a hard battle, it's not even some dark secret.


And if it's just about breaking the game by sheer character, I present you the Spellmaker...

LOL @ the "You just svck at Roleplaying" argument.

Sure, in Oblivion you could break the game with the spellmaker, so Bethesda removed it.

Too bad they added the gearmaker to break the game all over again.