Topic and description.

I've read that there are five difficulty levels. Does anyone know if they are interesting in some way? Or is it just an "enemies have more hp and do more damage" type of thing?

I'm a little tempted to play on Hard, but not if it just means that fights will become more tedious.

Previous games suggest harder difficulties are just as you said.

Would be nice if harder difficulties resulted in tougher/smarter AI, or more xp/perks.

Probably not the case though.

Why would hard give you more xp and perks. If it is supposed to be hard then you should get less. I also doubt that Bethesda would lower the intelligence of the AI in their game for other levels.

^ This

I don't know why people always complain about enemy raised HP and attack damage on higher difficulty's, that's really the only way to make it more difficult, except for maybe throwing tons upon tons of more enemy's at you at once, But that would not be fun in a game like this.

More HP= longer fights= you have to stay alive longer by blocking/dodging/spells.

More Damage=bigger threat to you= you cant get hit as much.

The reason dark souls and Monster hunter is so hard is because enemy's can kill you very easily, not because of awesome AI, in fact the AI in both of those games is pretty predictable. But if you take even one hit you are in bad shape.

Ill be starting on hard myself.

Perfect. And I will as well.

I think some folks would rather have smart enemies than ones that are straight up uber. You might expect them to scale...a goblin would be very easy in hard difficulty where the dragons might be epic fights in return. I am not a fan of higher difficulty being a roundabout way of MOAR HP AND DMGS

double post

exactly

Oh, I'm not complaining exactly, just disappointed. A big bag of hit points just doesn't thrill me. Having to hit a goblin 15 times doesn't make the fight epic, and if he only has to hit me twice I just come off as a big wimp. I guess I'm happiest when I have about an equal chance: I kill the enemy in 3 hits, or he kills me in 3 hits. Then it doesn't feel slanted.

Yeah, I would just rather see some effect other than every fight taking 5 times as long. I would rather see an interesting difference.

No big deal, I'll just play on default, but again, I'm a little disappointed.

The difficulty does, from everything I've read and seen and heard of, only change enemy HP and damage. Playing in the tutorial at expert difficulty (hard, not very hard) will make combat take longer and your hits will do very little damage in comparison to enemies total HP. A spiders poison will also OHKO you before you have time to say 'darn, maybe I should heal'.

I don't know about you, but I will get a mod that increases global damage instead of using harder difficulties that make you kill enemeis forever.
Just like OOO did that for oblivion and other overhaul mods for fallout 3 and NV