actually, what you said are absolutely valid. Though, if someone is stubborn enough to grind daggers to level smithing I don't see a sandbox game needs to somehow prohibit them from doing so. (10 minutes, sure, but still boring and repetitve) I mean, there are already smarter ways to get ebony gear in the game. (either by looting or checking shops from time to time) You can naturally level smithing if you collect material from the wild/dungeons and craft while you are in town. (more profitable too) The process of farming ingots from merchants and spaming daggers is really tedious. It isn't really worth the time or the experience. The problem is really that players somehow keep choosing the grind-y way of doing things in the game. People shouldn't have to rely on the game to tell them not to play the game in a boring way.

well, I won't defend Skyrim's game mechanic because obviously it got its quirks as we all notice them one way or another. However, some of frustrations aren't coming from the design pitfalls. Some people are frustrated because they expect the game to behave in a very particular way and Skyrim, or Elder Scrolls games, doesn't follow that familiar pattern.

In your example, you said that "the game basically motivated the player to become overpowered." It is not true. Skyrim never, in any way, encourages or discourages players to max out smithing at low level. Players do that on their own free will. People do it because they are stuck in typical rpg-grinding mentality. As soon as they see a skill tree, they want to max it ASAP. A lot of us are conditioned to play this way because that's how other rpg games work: you have to race against the game otherwise the later boss fights will be impossible. Open-world games don't work like that-- instead, you do what you want and the game reacts to you. If you don't like the outcome, you can either deal with it or rollback. You can save the game at any point precisely for that reason.

You keep talking about game design but you don't even understand what open-world, sandbox games are about. You keep thinking the game somehow needs to point the players to the right direction and progress correctly... that only applies to linear games.

Don't think WoW; think minecraft. That's what I try to get through here.

In your example, you said that "the game basically motivated the player to become overpowered." It is not true. Skyrim never, in any way, encourages or discourages players to max out smithing at low level. Players do that on their own free will. People do it because they are stuck in typical rpg-grinding mentality. As soon as they see a skill tree, they want to max it ASAP. A lot of us are conditioned to play this way because that's how other rpg games work: you have to race against the game otherwise the later boss fights will be impossible. Open-world games don't work like that-- instead, you do what you want and the game reacts to you. If you don't like the outcome, you can either deal with it or rollback. You can save the game at any point precisely for that reason.

If I have a fast and easy way to max out smithing I won't do it for the sake of having a fun game play but I also won't feel good about it.

Allowing magic to scale, and reducing/changing the massive impact smithing/enchanting have on gear would not break the game. The game is arguably broken after a certain point the way it is simply because high level enchanting/smithing catapults physical damage so far ahead of magic, you can literally plow through the game on expert and even master if you gear your armor high enough.

Some Elder Scrolls players hardly think about "maxing out". Its not a motivation.

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.

So the core in this kind of game is "you do what you want and the game reacts to you", and I completely agree. But that's exactly the problem here. Some players did what they wanted by grinding their smithing skill, and the fact is that the game was not able to react, because even in the master difficulty everything became too easy.

This is so much fail. If you don't like spamming illusion moves then don't! Nobody is asking you to play in a specific order

tl,dr


seriously though. Just because you can do something doesent mean you have to. You do not have to use ALCHEMY, SMITHING, AND ENCHANTMENT on the same character....and complaining that you CAN use them is just stupid.

You do not need to use all three to overpower a toon tho. Far from it.

If you were to CHOOSE to becaome power level in a few Crafting professions, then that is YOUR CHOICE. DO NOT COME CRYING SAYING HOW THE GAME IS BROKEN because you chose to do something which was unintended.

Stonedsoul you seem like a pretty cool person but I'm starting to think maybe this game isn't for you. You seem really unhappy about Skyrim and I can't imagine all that negativity is healthy. I recommend you stop playing and try a different game. Dark Souls is maddeningly frustrating but it might be more on the balanced side of what you're looking for. Perhaps WoW.

Whatever you do I wish you luck. May you walk always on warm sands.

Don't complain about magic is useless and then talk about how magic is OP with illusion. People should be able to lay the game in accordance to their playstyle. If they want to be an evil puppetmaster that turns friends one ach other then by god I thik we should let them.

I chose to level smithing. I did not power-level it, I leveled it as I could from mats I gathered from my dungeon crawling. It overpowered my game. I did not choose to be overpowered, and the fact that I became just that was purely unintended.

So now I no longuer have a choice: i cannot use smithing.


Nah I work in a call center for a box office, and we have about 1 call per 30 min, lasting between 4 and 6 minutes average. Also, everything is blocked but a few exceptions, this site being one for some reason. I enjoy discussing game mecanics, and I love skyrim. I would love it more, however, were I truely able to have freedom in build choices. As it is I dont, and once I'm done with this character I will most likely stop playing, because half the trees in the game are off-limit to a gamer looking for a challenging game. I simply wished that wasn't the case.

As it happens, I have never once suggested to change the actual gameplay of illusion. I simply mentionned of introducing a certaint element of skill into the equation, through having to deal with resists and what comes of them. The idea that those resists could be modified depending on what difficulty setting you select implies that at Novice difficulty, one will find exactly that god feel you are talking about.

The problem is that I am proposing a way to recreate your playstyle easilly while also letting gamers looking for a challenge have theirs. On the other hand, all you (and the people who disagree with the concept of balance) seem to say, is that you want to keep yours and not let us have ours.

Am I wrong here? Can someone explain to me why?

would you please elaborate on how smithing has ruined your gameplay.

Part 1: http://forums.bethso...r-game-for-you/
Part 2: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1289512-bethesda-why-must-we-rebalance-your-game-for-you-part2/
TD;LR: Why do I have to choose 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.

Some perks are made pointless by the very game they are in: I am looking specifically at Lockpicking and Speech-crafting here. The issue is that one is made redundant by the ability one has to open any lock he see's from level one, while the other serves as nothing more then a source of income since its gameplay value is rendered moot by the option of bribing everyone as an alternative to persuade/intimidate options. I would understand if one was to tell me they are there for roleplaying reasons, but the fact is that Speechcrafting has nothing to do with roleplaying since the quests offers little to no option in terms of alternative developpement. You cant talk people into doing stuff, you cant talk your way out of situations. The RP value of it is greatly diminished by the game's lack of real "choices" when questing.

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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.





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EDIT: It was pointed out to me that I had not explicitely expressed any suggestions or ideas as to how to fix the issues I am describing. That person was quite right, so I decided to do just that. Keep in mind those are just my own personnal opinion, and therefore I can only offer my own experience and reasoning as a justification. Not everyone will agree, and I accept that. Thats why forums are there to discuss those things. :

1) Crafting: Crafting needs to be brought in line. There is no other cross-tree synergy in the game, so the fact that those 3 trees do share them makes them inherently more powerfull then anything else in the game. Remove them, or at least put a cap on it. But lets say we ignore the exploit issue and leave it as is for the sake of people enjoying it, we still need to tune down the regular crafting's potency because they simply bring too much. There are two ways of doing that:

- You can reduce the power of the resulting items/enchants
- You can make it harder to obtain the best items

I personally would advocate a mix of both. Reduce enchant's potency for 1h/2h % damage chants, while making it harder to obtain maximum level smithing by making the experience gain corellate to the item's material worth, for exemple, or by making the materials for the best items rather rare and/or hard to find.

2) Destruction: Make destruction spells do a bit more damage for every level in the Destruction skill, and introduce the magic skills' equivalents of + % damage enchants through the Enchanting tree.

3) Illusion: introduce Resists to the game, so that it remains a challenge. If you pop frenzy, but say 1 mob or 2 still stick to you because they resist it, then you have to start reacting by kiting, using various spell effects, etc. Those resists can be adjusted with the difficulty level selected by the slider, preserving the god-mode feeling as an available option.


4) Robes: Let there be an advantage to using robes. If Alteration actually scaled, that would not be such a problem because then you would get good amounts of mitigation at high levels through Mage Armor. Another way would be to make wearing full robes give you an inherant or casted bonus (perhaps through deep alteration perk?), like a big magika regen bonus or a -% cost to all spell bonus, something that will be noti?able enough that one could actually consider Alteration as the robe wearer's "Armor skill".

5) For Speechcrafting, I would implement actual options through the game that one could use actively to complete the game's various objectives. That would include giving Speechcrafting perkers options to complete quests differently, talking themselves out of fights with ennemies like bandits, manipulating/tricking people into helping you, or to achieve your own selfish goals. I do not think that damage and big bangs are the only important things: quite the contrary, I would kill to see speechcraft become a valid way of completing the game without always resorting to violence, as it currently is the case.

As for Lockpicking, its a bit more complicated because you have to consider that you cannot put a limit on the level of the locks themselves (ex: requires 67 Lockpicking to open, or requires Expert Lockpicking perk to open) without limiting the sandbox experience (altho it would be the perfect solution in another setting). In all realism, the only way I see to make the tree more impacting on the gameplay, without just merging it with another like sneak, would be to make unlocking something dangerous. If it did not "pause" the game, or if there were various traps on locks, then one could quickly see the value of a tree that would offer perks countering those dangers (slows time by 75% 3/3 while LPing, -% chance to spring traps, can disactivate traps, etc).

It is quite simple: I had been playing on Expert the whole time and having a blast just dungeon crawling like mad. I went back to do a town run with a ton of materials from it, noticed I could craft myself armor and weapons and did just that. Since I was an Orc Warrior, I wanted to level smithing anyway, so I decided to craft stuff with the mats I had instead of selling them. Result: level 50ish smithing.

I craft my Orcish Armor (yes I bought the Ori ingots to make the set I wore). All of a suddent, I find myself forced to put the game on Master difficulty because I wreck [censored] in Expert. Fast foward some more dungeon crawling and explorining with Lidia in tow, and I show up in Whiterun with her full of Dwarven Metal parts that I meant to sell for $ (and more iron ore/pelts I had collected ). Instead I reallized that I could use those to get Dwarven Metal ingots and, again, since I intended to level smithing, I used them to craft items that I sold. The result was that around level 26 I was wearing my Dragon armor, using a Ancient Nord Hero Greatsword, and nothing could touch me. The only thing in the entire game that posed even remotely a threat to me was the odd wtf-mage. That was before my Daedric Greatsword.

In the mean time I had gotten 2 +2h damage enchanted items, had decided to disenchant one and put it up on 2 of my other items (13% and 8%), with the other drop being at 20%.

You may argue that my using all my mats was "powerleveling", but from where I stand I simply selected a skill tree and leveled it as I normally would, by using the materials the game gave me (I did not even buy anything other then the Ori for orcish armor and the ebony ingots for my daedric later on. That, in turns, made even the hardest difficulty setting a breeze. Which, to me, ruins the game.