So after my first playthrough on Adept, I've decided to start again, but this time I've upped the ante. Turned off all autosaves (mostly for stability - on PS3), cranked the difficulty up to Master, and am forbidding myself from fast travel.

Best decision ever. For those of you who've played through the game already, you'll find those first few quests and dungeon crawls especially thrilling.

Yeah.

It tends to get a bit tedious near the end.

Alot of the dragons and dragur tend to just become tanks even with leveled weaponary.

i tried to play at master level but i have to hide myself everytime when dragon attack me, and make the dragonborn fairy.. lol

are u playing as mage or thief or warrior?

My character now is a Bosmer hunter. She favors a bow, but whips out a hefty battleaxe when things get up close and personal. I'm dabbling in conjuration right now; summoning a familiar and letting it tank while I let the arrows fly. Eventually I plan to use bound weapons.

The problem I have with Master Difficulty in Skyrim is enemies do 2x the damage and you do 1/2 the damage, which isn't that much compared to the 6x and 1/6x you had in Oblivion. Would make optimizing enchanting/smithing/alchemy a requirement basically to do well on Master instead of outright breaking the game

The only way master mode is hard is if you nerf yourself which you should not have to do, do not do sneak,smithing,enchanting,do not take the stagger perk for destruction maybe a few others i missed.Taking the stagger perk for destruction for example that one perk will break the whole game and make it a walk in the park.This game was not hard it was way to easy to become god like.

The master tick marker (cuz thats what itwas, there were about 100 difficulties in oblivion) was outrageous in oblivion, this is much better.

I was gonna make this thread. After how op sneak is on adept I started over on master, although I fast travel really need to doing all these thief quests I have made rules.

No making banish daggers for money.
No buying all reagents from all the stores to make potion for money, only reagents I use are ones I find of steal. Only can buy them if looking for specific ones.

It's kinda fun having to steal to make money, makes me feel like a thief. The battles are hard and thrilling, I spent a hour trying to kill two hagravens and it was awesome.

I'm enjoying it as well. As an Assassin it still isn't very hard as long as you get the jump on your enemies but as a Sword (mace, actually) and Board Redguard it's a lot of fun. Gonna roll a mage next, and then another non-combat character once I get my hands on the CK and can fix some of the more obvious bugs.

I don't consider just jacking up the hp's of enemy's and lowering my damage making the game harder. Its just as easy only now it just takes longer to kill something. I find this more annoying than thrilling. I don't feel like spending 2 minutes to just kill a wolf.

Increasing difficulty to me would be adding more enemies to fight through or giving them better tactics like healers to back them up or things of that nature.

Master FTW.

No it's more then that.

For one sneak is no longer called invisibility sneak. If I shot someone and they don't die which with more hp they don't they come looking for me. I can no longer sit in same place and watch them walk past me, they find me right away like they should since it's obvious where they got hit from. I have to either move around or pull out a melee weapon. In adept I could go thru a whole dungeon never being seen, master is a heck lot more challenging.

I agree, in a perfect world game developers would craft an entirely different set of AI for each difficulty. But that probably won't happen often so we should be happy with what we have. And it just taking longer to kill something is dependent on playstyle. If you use range and can get out of reach, that's what it feels like. If you are toe to toe with your enemy and you don't have gear that takes you to the armor cap then it's a lot of fun.

Difficulty modifiers: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=4981

The modifiers are separate for NPC and player.

You may play as a mage and are tired of being one hit, but you want enemies to actually put up a fight, you could make yourself do less damage, while not increasing the damage NPCs do.


Obviously, it would be awesome if the AI got better when you turn up the difficulty.

My biggest problem with no fast travel would be managing inventory space. I come across so many things I want to sell or keep--mainly all the dragon bones you accumulate from travelling--that I don't have enough space. I would have to have the steed stone on permanently and have the pickpocket perk as well

By this, you don't mean damage output but NPC "knowledge"? LIke being harder to sneak around or using better tactics?

I, too, am an archer and used a familiar regularly (especially when hunting) but I was always iffy about bound weapons. 1. I never even came across a bound bow book. 2. I spent the time to smith a good bow and sword, why use conjured ones?

Honestly I don't see the benefit of conjured weapons. If you're using weapons (as opposed to magic) hopefully you already have a decent weapon of your choosing. If you're a mage (who I would assume would benefit from bound weapons the most) you're focus would be on straight magic, not melee.

EDIT: Triple post!

Yes. Like others have said, I've always said the same: increasing damage dealt is the easy way out for the programmers, when it comes to modifying the difficulty level. Many players don't like it. We want them to be smarter!

But if it wasn't so hard to make the AI smarter, they would have done it in the first place.

It is very difficult to make artificial intelligence. The more complex the game, the harder it is.

I remember when I was a kid, I made a tic-tac-toe video game, and had a major breakthrough when I managed to make a computer opponent. As ridiculously simple as the game is, it was hard for me at the time to figure out how to do it.

You know how I made the skill levels? I made the opponent pretty much perfect on the hardest, yet make mistakes on the easier skill levels. I'd rather that was how they did it in Skyrim.

I honestly couldn't play anything else, same with all games, I always choose the most difficult option straight away.

For people saying it doesn't make it harder, just takes longer to kill people, that's rubbish. You need to use more tactics to survive, given how much damage you take, you may need to move away to heal or try to dodge heavy attacks.

word

Also do people actually see benefits (consoles only) from turning autosave off?

I have a pretty flawless bug free game, loading times are 10 seconds at the most on Xbox, has anyone seen improvements turning autosave off?

I became addicted to master difficulty I wont change back.

I've opted for 'Expert', but with zero smithing and zero enchanting. Feels about right to me. Loot actually means something, I was 'rushing' when I found my first Dwarven Sword as it was a good upgrade over the one I was using.

Changed the setting on my level 43 character to Master for the first time after reading this thread. About all I notice is I beat on stuff longer. Enemies still die pretty easily and I don't lose too much health. I guess being a fairly high level its not as noticeable as a new character on Master. I'll leave it on Adept - kind of like being "god-like" at this stage of the game. I am Dragonborn after all.

The problem I see with raising the difficulty setting (not just in this game but in Morrowind and Oblivion too) is that it has the long-term unintended effect of raising the leveling speed of your weapon (since you have to hit more often to kill an enemy) and lowering the leveling speed of your armor (since it takes fewer hits for an enemy to kill you. In my games my armor skill almost always lags far behind my weapon skill, even on default difficulty. I usually don't pay for training so I tend to be stuck with this imbalance, something I don't particularly care for.