I wish they would add a real difficult mode, not LOL YOU DO NO DAMAGE AND THEY HAVE INFINITE HEALTH like a mode above Master would be - I play on Master all the time, but reducing our damage to .15 and our health to .15 would be silly. Master really is still very easy, especially for assassins (you still don't get hit 99% of the time). If they added in real difficulty, it would be much better

I'm neither. I want to have fun. I play on Adept and enjoy it.

Let's just say they made quests, areas or difficulties that were suited to people who had maxed armour caps and enchants. That would mean that anyone wanting to do those quests or go to those areas would have to go through the rigmarole of spamming smithing and enchanting, and a lot of people don't want to do that.

Can you imagine if there were things you couldn't do unless you were wearing legendary Daedric armour of fortify 100 health? Everybody would have to wear the same thing.

No, I think Adept is just fine. I do wish that they could come up with a better system for "expert" and "master" other than "you do less damage, they do more". Not that I'd ever use those difficulties (I've always played on Normal in Beth games), but just so that the people looking for more difficulty would make less complaint threads (and, presumably, be enjoying the game more).


^


Character build can have a large effect on things. Even a "normal" one, since every person has different ideas about what "normal play" is.

I play on adept and use mods to increase the difficulty through things like increased spawns and improved AI. Turning enemies into the fantasy equivalent of bullet sponges is not a satisfactory way to increase difficulty.

As to how difficult combat should be, I prefer to immerse myself into the story I'm telling myself, and having combat so difficult that I die too frequently interrupts the flow of the narrative. The game should be difficult enough that you can die if you are careless, but have a reasonable chance to complete a quest without dying if you aren't.

I don't enjoy the ratchet approach to gaming where you are constantly going back to a previous save and playing a scene over and over until you finally get it right. That sort of play replaces the narrative of a quest to an exercise in 'beating a level'.

Or just add in more difficulties.
Master is challenging enough at low levels, many creatures and people can kill me in two hits.
The anicent dragon will probably [censored] me when we do battle.

What about the people who want a challenge, but don't want to get steam rolled nine out of ten times by the op enemies the people who aren't challenged are asking for?

I myself play mostly on expert, although when I play with no HUD I usually leave it at adept since I cannot see my status bars. Damn Bethesda for not including an immersive HUD option in their games. The current mentality seems to be that the majority of players want an easy experience just following quest arrows and such. I don't agree with that mindset but it seems to be Bethesda's mantra these days. Otherwise they would have included more options to tweak the game, like an immersive HUD and difficulty sliders that do more than adjust the damage taken/given. What about a sneak difficulty slider that adjsuted how easily you were detected? A slider that increased the amount of damage for both sides so there were more instant kills for both player and NPC? A slider that increased the level on enemy spawns?

I don't play on Master because I find it just too tedious. A little kiting and such to take down a tougher enemy is fun, but there is a limit to how much kiting I want to do in a RPG. When I have to kite for ten minutes just to take down a dwarven sphere or a tougher bandit, it is time to adjust the slider back to expert.

There is nothing challenging about Skyrim. Most skills are overpowered, npc A.I. is poor, and gold is easy to acquire. I doubt that gamesas will do anything about it because most people want to become overpowered without even trying. In the end, gamesas will do whatever is more profitable, but I doubt that making the game more challenging will increase the company's profits, so it will probably not happen.

There are a number of various mods which tweak immersion and difficulty settings. I have been dabbling with some of them, including making some mods myself. For example, I have made a basic mod which does two things: First, it takes away almost all of your normal stat regeneration. Second, that stat regeneration is added back into the game in the form of long-duration heal over time effects on food items. Once I have this mod tweaked to the point where I am happy with it, it will enforce the requirement to keep track of your food intake in order to have effective regen for your stats, while also having an overall decrease in the maximum regen possible, thus forcing you to make every hit point, spell cast, and sword-swing count...Ther eare quite a few mods which are already looking into balancing the game's difficulty. When I get spare time, I hope to dig around the Creation Kit and find some of the level scaling settings, with the intention of building some mods to tweak the difficulty levels, especially for dragons, dragon priests, and other boss type enemies. My current character is definitely feeling overpowered, and I probably need to bump the difficulty up a little. One-shotting anything weaker than a frost dragon (Frosties and Ancients still take two arrows) is quickly becoming boring...

The one shot part is important, killing an enemy who requires 30 hit to kill while he can one shot you is almost impossible, yes you can shoot mammoths from cower at level 1, try it with an level 10 mage

Main benefit is that the game is more challenging, more fun if it's dangerous but not impossible. This is why I like an glass canon game, you die a lot but you can usually manage it if you take your time. If you can steamroll trough it it get boring fast.

I have run into bandits who can one shot me with an bow, repeatedly, yes aura whisper helped however it showed many bandits, some who was behind the palisade. Very fun sorting out.

Most memorable experience in Fallout 3, around level 5-7 I think, was going to the minefield for a mine as quest objective. Came over Bethesda ruins, I was pinned behind a rock by an sniper who took 70% of my health while the rest of the raiders tried to flank me.