Actually, it's exploiting the crafting. You've indicated that Beth plans on fixing it up a bit. And they've used the term "exploit." I always felt exploits were a way of cheating the game. It's a massive game. There are oversights. That's not the way the game was intended to be played.

If you're supposed to use the crafting trinity, then it's not an exploit, you're supposed to be way OP, and there's nothing to be fixed.

@Cy Tolliver:

Stealthy combat is insanely OP, arguably even more so than the crafting trinity if the player knows what (s)he is doing, because the AI is a complete moron and doesn't understand that their buddy having an arrow through the nose means there's an assassin in the room and they might want to go find him/her before they end up the same way (which they do, because certain Stealth perks are OP in and of themselves). I made such a character (Archer style), played it for a long time, then retired her because combat was a total bore; made a second, didn't do much crafting this time, but retired him after a fair amount of play too for much the same reason.

The AI simply cannot compete with a stealthy character in its current state, especially if the player thereof is experienced at stealth combat. Hell, the only times either character was even close to being at risk was during close-quarters fights involving multiple boss-class foes, since there was no way to pick a 'best' target to start the killing sequence with and killing one was guaranteed to alert the rest.

Wasn't expecting or asking for 'hard'. Wasn't expecting a complete punt on the game balancing though, either.

That... is exactly the opposite of what we've got here.
The person is effectively complaining about a lack of walls where they believe there ought to be some (to compensate for their own complete inability to self-regulate, by the sounds of it).




You drawing imaginary lines where there are none? The situations are completely comparable.
Folks who try to put imaginary lines up in such places are not the sort of people I'd want to be around... as those imaginary lines fall all too easily.

Balance? What balance? The game is open to be played pretty much however you want. Single-player. Unregulated. There is no competition from other players. Nothing need hinder your ability to play it however you want. But instead you play it as you don't want to and complain about it.

And you could see it coming, couldn't you?
This isn't something that was just sprung out of the blue on you... Skyrim lacks the subtlety for that. No... you engineered your own dissatisfaction through your own actions, willfully. You have nobody to blame but yourself.

Look if you don't need that extra +damage perk then don't take it and put it elsewhere, simply stopping the need to become overpowered and complaining about it, this isn't WoW or any other mmo that you require a powerful character to be at its best.

Wow, Eric. Who'd have thought we were actually the bad guys, for wanting a game company to properly balance their game, when we should have just shut up and accepted the broken status quo that forces us to not use half of the features built into the game in order to be able to enjoy it? I feel so bad now...

No, we didn't engineer our own dissatisfaction... Beth managed that quite well from the get-go with their utter lack of any semblance of game balancing.

@General Masters

Yeah, I can see how the stealthy build is OP. The AI is totally trash (when it comes to dealing with the stealthy types). There really is no easy fix for it. They'd have to overhaul the AI. Like you said, if a bandit dies, its partner should search for far longer. If it can't find you, it should do something other than sit down at the table where its partner was just killed. The bandit should move to another area and alert the others that someone's dead. Something..

The game isn't broken. It was made the way it is deliberately.
I'm hardly satisfied with it myself, but my reasons are obviously completely different to yours.
In any case, game balance isn't an issue in the Elder Scrolls games. It never was, and it likely never will be.
More important, it shouldn't be. As pretty much the only series that doesn't effectively concuss the player for going off the rails, I'd be rather pissed off if they did decide to "balance" it.


On an unrelated note, you throw that word around like it is going out of fashion... but it doesn't have half the impact to anyone else that it seems to have for you.

Your opinion. I heartily disagree. I presume we can agree to disagree? Good enough for me.

His logic makes perfect sense. You played it once, and became so powerful than it wasn't fun for you. If you that again, it's your fault. No matter how you rationalize it, the company is not going to change the game to suit your desires. Quit playing the game, or find a way to have fun with it (challenge yourself).

The work that is still going on is finishing up stuff. And changing the way the game works that radically is far beyond what has been paid for. You can say anything you like about the philosophy of it.Bad game or good game. It's not going to happen. It's business. Even if some developers say "you know what, he's right", even then nothing will change. It's too late. You can quit playing, or you can learn how to have fun with it.

Or you can keep complaining. Doing the same thing over again, and expecting something different to happen, is the definition of insanity. No matter how eloquently you argue your point. No matter IF every single person agrees with you, they are not going to change it now. It's far too late to make that big of change. If you keep playing, and expect to have fun, you have to do something different..because they are not going to make THIS game different for you, or even all of us combined.

You can hope they'll take your insights to heart, for the development of the NEXT game. But until then, you have to change how you play if you want to have fun, or quit playing

Master difficulty is supposed to challenge the players who want a challenge. If it isn't, it's worth discussing. Being condescending and patronizing isn't discussing. Telling people to 'svck it up' isn't discussing. I'm happy that most people enjoy the game. I don't want to ruin that for anyone. But making Master level difficulty more difficult isn't affecting anyone but the people who want the challenge. Ergo, it has nothing to do with people who are happy with the default settings.

But if it's disappointing the people who want that challenge, I, as a developer, would want to know that. It's a little cynical to assume that BGS doesn't care at all about how the players feel about the game, even if it is a small but vocal minority. If they had satisfied those players, we'd be praising the game instead of complaining about it. The same way Dark Souls players praise the challenge in that game. What does BGS have to lose by having a small, vocal minority of players loudly proclaiming how great the challenge is? How it easily compares to the challenge in Dark Souls? Tweaking the difficulty would go a long way towards restoring many hard-core (maybe I should say 'extreme'?) gamers' opinion of the franchise, of winning back fans that are looking to other franchises for the experiences they're craving. It would be trivial for BGS to win a lot of credit in the gaming community. And they could do it all without affecting the large core of the current fan-base. At. All.

Here's an easy fix: get rid of the Novice/Apprentice/Adept/Expert/Master settings. Instead, have a slider that you can set anywhere you want that acts like a multiplier for your level. Default is 1:1. Lowest is, let's say, 5:1, so enemies spawn as if you are 1/5th your actual level. Highest is 1:5, so enemies spawn as if you are 5x your actual level. Then add extra leveled lists that will only spawn at the artificially inflated levels. In other words, make leveled lists that spawn level 100 and higher enemies. It's impossible for players using the default setting to spawn these enemies because they will never go past level 81. Players using the hardest setting will potentially spawn enemies up to level 405 (though probably much lower than that). Players using the lowest setting will spawn enemies up to level 16. No fancy AI, no cut-and-dried settings for people to argue over, just a single floating point multiplier that artificially inflates the player's level when spawning enemies and calculating leveled enemies' levels. Players could tweak it to whatever multiplier works best for them so no more complaints about one setting being too easy and the next setting too hard. This kind of change would be trivial to implement. No one would have to gimp themselves. (I'm sure a level 300 giant would be more than enough challenge for DE.) BGS wouldn't have to figure out the 'perfect' setting for each difficulty level because players would be doing it for them.

Um... just because it's deliberate doesn't mean the balance isn't broken.

Let's go back to Chameleon Armor, shall we? The ability to create 100% Chameleon Armor was an arguably deliberate choice (or they didn't care about fixing it) and it made combat completely non-existent. Not a single enemy could touch you, ever. That breaks the entire combat system because now there is no longer a balance between the player and the environment, which Skyrim's balance is based on.

Look, I've worked in the game industry and am currently going to school to get back into it, I'm sorry to say but things can be "by design" and still be broken when put into actual play. There's a difference between "paper" and "practice," what looks good on paper could be terrible in game and vice versa. Skyrim, as well as TES in general, has a lot of this.

After you break the game and own it utterly, I posit a valid next challenge is in fact to find a better way to break it even more in even less time.

Theres more than one way to enjoy a sandbox.

Sure they should make it easier. The idea is that it becomes too much of a reward. Having the best gear and high skills should make the game easier, but not easy, certainly not on the higher skill levels.

Numerous things said to make the game too easy are redundancies. It is the same basic gameplay whether you are doing 5 damage per hit or 100, or taking 5 points of damage or 100. Changing the game so that you won't become overpowered by taking a perk for extra damage or for extra defense would not allow you do more than you already can do. You do damage and you resist damage. Whoopty doo! Fixing the game so you don't become overpowered would only gain you what you already have, but it would intrude on the gameplay of players who can appreciate the extra defense or damage. Cap your damage at 100 if you think 150 makes the game too easy. Cap your defense at 400 if you think 500 makes the game too easy.

Balancing the game isn't the job of the player. There's no reason not to have difficulty levels that are a challenge for everybody.

There is a reason not to leave it to difficulty levels alone -- it's too difficult. What you find overpowered for your build is just what someone else's build needs to get by. He neither needs nor wants everything else to be made too easy by selecting a lower difficulty setting. He just needs the extra perk or two to offset his weaknesses and keep the level of challenge enjoyable.

If the difficulty sliders actually did what they were supposed to do, people wouldn't have to gimp themselves. They'd have to use the best armor and weapons, perk out combat, invest in Health, and 'abuse' crafting to survive on Master difficulty. I don't do any of these things on Master and I still find the game too easy, so I also have to gimp myself to increase the challenge. All some people want is a little challenge that isn't self-imposed, so that you can cut loose, build the character the way that you want to, and still find a challenge.

The small variances between different builds could be accommodated by using a slider scale instead of discrete levels.

Lower difficulties, sure. But Master difficulty should be at least nominally challenging for *any* character with any of the good gear/perks/whatever that can be attained in the game. Just playing the game to create a strong character by normal, legal means quickly shows up their failure to do this simple thing. Master difficulty should be just that- the difficulty level at which even the best equipped, best perked and most skillful players can still find a challenge... with no gimping needed whatsoever. If that is not the case, then they failed in basic gamemaking 101. As it is now, you just have 3 levels, really- Barney 2-yo difficulty that kindergartners could trounce, easy as pie mode, and normal mode (otherwise known as 'master'). They stopped before attempting to make a truly difficult mode that matches up with the level of gear and weapons and perks that they made readily available for use. There is no actually difficult difficulty, in Skyrim.

You're missing the point. We aren't talking about situations where character type A finds scenario 1 easy and scenario 2 hard, while character type B finds 1 hard and 2 easy, while both are on the same difficulty level. We're talking about scenarios where if you do X, Y and Z, you'll make everything in the game too easy on any difficulty level.

And what Smokeyman said is exactly correct: Master difficulty should be challenging for any character at all times, no matter what they do in the game. It should require you to play the game to the hilt and make use of every little scrap of advantage you can get your hands on.

I disagree, op. Gimping is gimping. Limiting yourself does not mean what you think it means anymore. What you described as a good thing, choosing different ways to acomplish your goals, is limiting yourself, and it's a good thing, as you said.

Now that is solid criticism. Reasoned observations with an implementable solution. Is that possible to do with a patch?

The issue lies in the core design choices behind many of the mechanisms in the game. For example, with a level cap of 81, and content trickling off in difficulty at around level 46, combined with all content apparently being designed around base level equipment without upgrades, and seemingly untested perk effects, it is easy to see why even master difficulty becomes too easy.

They ignored or undershot the mechanism of player progression, ability and gear wise. Plain and simple, they should have implemented diminishing returns, contested skill/ability checks, enemies above cap, and enemies that combine or subvert the more fearsome aspects of lesser foes, to keep players on their toes, along with grouping multiple types of enemies more often, that force the player to improvise and observe.

I've said it before, a game developer should always balance for potential. You don't ignore something Just because not everyone can do it, the fact that anyone even can needs to be accounted for.

Gimping = choosing to limit your character to something less than the best they can be, not using the better items, perks or skills, not utilizing all of or significant parts of the available crafting opportunities ingame that allow you to improve your gear, and generally avoiding acquiring or doing things that make you noticeably more powerful than the enemies you are fighting in your chosen difficulty level. Or some combination of all those. Ergo, gimping = going out of your way to avoid letting the standard gameplay systems lead you inexorably towards mega-overpowered godhood, which it inevitably will if you just play this unbalanced game the way Bethesda made it, and don't gimp yourself.

Yep. I've played a LOT of games of all different kinds in the past 15 years since I got into PC gaming- and I've almost never been able to play at the top difficulty level, in any of them. Shooters, civ builders, RPG's, sims, you name it... I've usually alwasy been relegated to playing them on Normal mode or maybe sometimes the level just between normal and Master/Hell/Nightmare or whatever they called the OMG THIS IS HARD maximum difficulties... and that was fine with me. I've never pretended to be a leet master gamer, who sneers at the uber difficulties.

Nope, I'm average in most ways, and don't mind sticking to the intermediate levels in games, if that's where I'm comfy at. So when I got all geared up just playing my regular old usual normal way in Skyrim, and noticed the enemies were getting too easy, I said "what the heck, I'll turn it up to MASTER, and let it deliver me some PAIN!". Punch the throttle a bit, pop the clutch, see what she could do. Boy, was I surprised. I still romped over everything with ease. Like the ol' gal in that commercial asking "Where's the BEEF?!?", there I was, asking "Where's the difficulty?!?" And there was none. And it was not good.