I've heard some people say that Skyrim is too easy. Of course its an easy game for you. You go out of your way to level up faster and become overpowered and then you say this game is too easy?

I've always like challenging games. So this is what I do with every character to make this game harder:

- I set the difficulty on expert. I use this setting because the way I choose perks even on lvl 60 I die when getting hit 3 times at the most. On master I get one-shoted most of the time and it's not really that fun.

- I never carry more than 3 of any variety of potions so I don't have 20 healing potions on my inventory. What I have is for emergencies.

- I carry one primary weapon and a secondary weapon. (One sword, a shield and a bow for example). I don't bother carrying ten swords, one for each occasion.

- Every perk that I choose that has (0/5) must stay at (1/5). Anything more and I become overpowered and I think that I'm cheating. Might as well turn the difficulty down.

- Turned off the HUD. Now this is a new way to play for me. Without the HUD I get this sense of urgency whenever I get hit because I don't know how much damage I took, how much magika I have left, etc. Also I loose the compass so I found use for the clairvoyance spell and what I thought was a pip-boy feature, the red dots in the compass showing where the enemies are. Now I have to use the detect life spell or aura whisper shout more often.

Overall, this is what I did to make my game more challenging and fun and would like to ask for suggestions on how to make it even harder.

I usually don't do things just to make the game harder. I play the game for less of a challenge, and more of creating stories and being part of a story. I play action games in the vein of modern Ninja Gaiden(I decided against playing the new one) and Devil May Cry for a challenge. My Battlemage hasn't used any perk points yet because I just want to wait until level 20.

I ususally just play on adept and never take the 80% more damage perk for one handed and ususally hardly fast travel thats just to draw it out more though since i don't have a life and play these games 24/7.

Forget social lives, we got fictional gold to make!

Totally, besides being social is why i have a F.b. account xP lol.

no hud and no music to tell me when someone doesnt like me and is coming over to tell me so...with there sword.

I play on Master level difficulty. At level 48 with 94 Archery (5/5 in overdraw for +100% bow damage) (100 in Enchanting, Smithing + Alchemy as well) and my Legendary Daedric Bow + Ebony Arrows do 589 damage per shot. This still doesn't kill everything in 1 shot. A lot of human NPCs take 2-3 shots to die.

I suggest that on Master Difficulty; heavy armor should reduce all physical damage by 50% ON THE LOCATION IT IS WORN.
All light armor should do the same but only 20%. Location specific.

Lightining damage should do + 50% extra damage to people wearing heavy armor.
Fire should do extra damage to people wearing light armor 25% or clothing 50%.
This will help with some of the complaints about magic being weak.

Mods; increased enemy numbers, increased enemy variations, enemies able to use perks and all spells, reworked combat and magic mechanics. You know, the un-half-assed master difficulty

Up the difficulty and refrain from using my most powerful gear.

My PC is crap, so it can't handle most mods let alone increased spawns, monster mods, skyRe, asis, etc. So pretty much play vanilla version and thats why I play ps3 version. But fallout 3 and NV play much better performance wise on my PC, so I have a ton of mods and can handle increased spawns but Skyrim it's like "NO!" and crashes

But I like the music!!! (in a whiny voice)

Yeah, imposing restrictions on yourself is a great way of making the game more difficult, certainly if you think the game is too easy you could just stick to a certain playstyle.
However I play an archer, I think playing an archer could be more satisfying, it doesn't have to be harder in the sense of Enemy Y requires X amount of arrows shot into his face in order for victory to happen.

I would love it if I was rewarded for my aiming skills with the bow and arrow instead of my rearming "skills" with a bow, RPGs are supposed to be more brains than brawn, even if you play a warrior. It is more about anolyzying what type of enemy you are up against and planning what order you want to kill them in and how you go about doing this. Administering poisons, utilizing certain spells. However in Skyrim the concept of skill is mildly introduced in many forms. It is a realtime combat system, you control your character very directly in both movement, attacks and blocking, you almost always have the luxury of dealing the first blow. The game is still very much about intelligence most of the time if you utilize all the tools at your disposal with a normal (not farmed-to-perfection-build) build you will be able to beat almost any foe, even with a normal level of "skill". Lets say you are hypothetically attacking pack of four bandits, one is a light armored berserker, one is a mage, one is a heavy armored protector, and one paladin, based on your own characters trait you should find a way of dealing with these guys, who do you kill first, should you paralyze one of them? who is the next to die, what shout should you use? all of these are decisions based on intelligence.

Of course you could just go for the most optimal build and voila, no intelligence needed to beat the game, and no skill required either.

I personally play games for the satisfaction. I don't get much satisfaction from blushing in anger at the difficulty of a game. I do get satisfaction from pulling off some tricky to do [censored]. Like aiming, planning, and using tactics to my advantage. I still believe aiming in skyrim does not require enough skill, it is fairly simple to hit an enemy with an arrow, especially if you premeditate on the outcome you want and plan your placement, kill order and choice of poisons. I would absolutely love a brutal hardcoe mode where you can't save before picking locks/pickpocketing/assassinating and where your arrows cannot penetrate steel armor and are penalized in damage against leather and cloth, where your aiming skills are actually important, you'll need to aim at bare flesh to get a quick kill and avoid a messy situation. I would find that more satisfying than that feel when I am overpowered by ten guards that I've shot five times in the head each.

So I guess in many ways Skyrim is too easy, if you play things as correctly and professionaly as you can, even on master difficulty with an un-optimized perk tree. You even can impose new rules on yourself to only carry X amount of resources but you will likely win unless you're melee because then you will be forcedly exposed to danger. Because it's so focused on intelligence instead of skill, and the means of which you use your intelligence is quite limited, and the means of which you use your skill is quite limited, this results in an "easy" game.

ASIS, Real Wildlife, Deadly Combat, Deadly Dragons and Occupy Skyrim make the game a hell of a lot more challenging on Master.

Enemies have perks and use spells and potions strategically, including spells from any installed spell mods. The other day an NPC used Master the Time and Space on me and I was frozen in time while they were still moving around attacking me.

If an NPC uses a ward spell at exactly the right moment, they can reflect my Ice Form or Unrelenting Force shout back at me and one-shot me. I've gotten sandwiched in between a herd of a dozen mammoths and a bunch of giants on one side, three dragons, including a Lightning Dragon (uses Lightning Breath), and a gang of 10 mages, who kept healing themselves with potions and spells, drinking magicka potions and using some powerful spells from other mods.

Mods and more mods. Like the ones that Booty Sweat listed. I really want to use that ASIS mod, but I am too stupid to use WryeSmash. I usually play on Adept, but I have increased the difficulty to Master, as of late to help offset some of the better spells from Phendrix. I even opt out for most of them because I feel they are just too powerful.

From the Vanilla game itself. I will only improve weapons to the point of Legendary and stop. If the game was meant to continue to upgrade past that point, they would have names for them.

I just roleplay as my character and don't really have any grand meta scheme for improvement beyond what he/she would have and things are challenging enough. Then again from many of the comments on these boards despite playing every TES since Daggerfall I'm appearently not very good at it. Which actually suits me fine if it makes me have more funout of the games.

I don't really do anything to make the game "challenging" to me, but in sword fights I try to set the difficulty a little higher to add a little sense of "realism". But most of the time I rock my deadric stuff and enjoy decimating the land.

Play dead-is-dead. Problem solved.

If I think my armor looks cool I keep it on like the dawnguard armor.

I exploit this speech leveling so my overall level sky rockets but my combat skills are still low, I don't use speech that much that it makes anything too easy. Still can't intimidate riften guard at level 52, or random roadside thieves and people who call me a milk drinker; obviously they don't know the glory of chocolate milk, also skyrim hates ps3 so my enemies rarely respawn so I can't just go out and train :/ I wish I had a pc

I play on expert, I don't pick perks that I find over powered, such as Dual Savagery, and I change my armor in accordance to my level. I also do a lot of other little things.

I run naked on master and just punch things to death.

I don't know why...but I agree.

That will definitely change the way you look at the game.

Well, Skyrim is an RPG, RPGs in general have next to no skill-ceiling, it is mostly based on intelligence on behalf of the user, having said that, I would say that Skyrim is one of the most skill requiring RPGs out there but that says more about RPGs that it does about Skyrim.

Which one of these things require more skill?
1. Beating with a mace/pelleting with arrows - a peasant guard into submission while gurgling down potions and food.
2. Carefully aiming your cuts/arrows at weak spots in the armor of said guard.

Your perception of difficulty is just modifiers.
% more enemy health
% less player health
% more monsters
And if it isn't this, it is some way of cheaply lowering your effective health.
Sure it makes the game more diffcult but the skill required is still the same.

Why not lessen the drudgery of banging mobs up and rather give players the satisfaction of delivering perfectly aimed blows? I'm sure some of you RPGers are strongly against this, but I feel Skyrim would have been more fun if it was skill based or had a higher level of mastery to it, leaving the intelligent players with their difficulty and the skillful with theirs, and the intelligent and skillful with master difficulty. Mastering the game as it is now is just too laughably easy, and even if you master it completely you can still have the odds stacked against you so heavily that you will die no matter what, you're reduced to playing on the conditions of not getting oneshotted and having enough potions for a fight, which is what Skyrim boils down to in terms of difficulty. But imagine if it had something else do measure difficulty to? Like actual mastery of the game..

I'm staying at level one permanently, no perks, 100 health/mana/stamina, no cheating, no fast-travel, only using gear i find or buy and more ...

See the thread in my signature.

Start a new game on master and dont use smithing enchanting or alchemy, good luck.