I believe this could work for the entire TES series, but we'll specifically focus on Skyrim, along with throwing in a few examples from Oblivion and pull some ideas from D&D and Dragon Age.

First, let's talk about enemies and how they measure up defensively to the player.

Several times amongst this forum I've read that enemies merely gain health when held up against the player. Dragons, for instance, simply have a large health pool that the player has to wade through before getting the kill. So, the obvious, and maybe very simple change could be giving enemies additional armor (not saying we have to do obscenely hard scaling where a Bandit Chief has Daedric gear) and magic resist. A perhaps harder route would be to give enemies access to Perks that the player has access to. If the player has a Perk that can cleave through enemy armor rating, why not give the same to some enemies? Due to AI limitations it would be tougher to pull off things like enemies sneaking up on you for sneak attacks so we won't bother to offer that as a solution however I feel giving Bandits and the like the 20-60% more damage on weapons, or on armor, could make the game challenging despite the ways to grind out powerful characters.

Second, and this is probably the most creative way to handle difficulty, is giving enemies (and environments) access to spells the player has or perhaps even creating spells and effects the player can't use.

Let's touch on Chameleon Armor from Oblivion as an example.

100% Chameleon Armor broke the game, there's no question. What if though, to counter this and tip the balance back into a more even playing field, some enemies such as various level Mages, Vampires, etc, used Detect Life more often... or all the time? Certainly a player walking into a room invisibly would be taken aback if, after killing one enemy unseen, the Vampire Master turned around to face them directly and attacked while being able to follow your every move when you tried to hide.

In Skyrim Enchanting and Smithing are highly powerful, so perhaps a few ideas from D&D should be taken, more specifically Dispell and Null-Magic Zones. Not every enemy has to cast this, and not every local in the game has to have a set up like this, but it would certainly add to the difficulty if a Dragon Priest Dispelled your ward, or if some dungeons were protected with areas that negated all magic.

This could also include the ability to have more "status effect" spells that the enemy could use against you or be attached to wards. For example, Paralysis Wards like those found in Dragon Age, or more enemies casting Fear, Calm, etc on you or your Follower.

Thoughts?

Push for thoughts.

1. Contested checks on all attributes, skills, and effects. For example, against an enemy higher level than the player, the player's effective skills, resists, outgoing damage, and armor value are all drastically degraded due to the enemy being more powerful. This would reach critical mass at around 8 levels...at which point the enemy is drastically more powerful than normal, where an enemy 12 levels higher or more is utterly impossible to kill alone. This would also serve to make the ability and skill enhancing potions and enchantments more valuable and viable.

2. Give enemies access to more perks, spells, racial abilities, etc and give them and creatures an actual armor rating value instead of just bloating their health. To go with that, make it so that where appropriate strong enemies, and boss types always spawn at a number of levels above the player, with weaker enemies being the same level or lower. Dragons for example, ought to be around 4 - 10 levels above the level that they begin to spawn at.

3. Implement control effect immunity timers so that stagger and other things cannot be spammed against the player or enemies. Say, you fear an enemy for 10 seconds, the enemy then becomes immune to fear for the entire duration, and when fear wears off, it becomes immune to all other control effects including fear for 30 seconds, and becomes 40% less likely to be affected by the next control effect.

4. Diminishing returns on enchantment and other statistical enhancers. For example, wearing equipment that boosts your weapon damage will soft cap at around +45% damage, stacking on even more +damage equipment will require an astronomical amount of increase to raise it, say...requiring +95% damage to raise the value from +45 to +49, with +175% raising it from +49 to +50.

5. Drastically improve the AI.

I feel more enemies should just naturally have some resistance or immunity with or without a special system.

For example, Orc enemies could be immune to Fear. Enemies with a high magic resist could also have a bonus Illusion resist, etc.

Well, I imagine certain cases would be handled on an individual basis, though in general I just proposed it as a way of preventing spamming. That way, you have to make a decision on what kind of effect you want to use, along with the duration/effectiveness.

I agree.

Not to mention, for things like Shield Bash, making it so you need the required Stamina, not just have some Stamina.

I have no idea what they were thinking when they decided to make Stamina pretty much a freebie resource while magicka is actually strict.

It isn't too surprising to me. The game generally tends to feel like a case of developing in a vacuum, as though nobody designing the game ever actually played or tested their own mechanics beyond seeing that they merely work.

That makes so little sense.

I'm currently only a student in game production and I know to make both Magicka and Stamina work the same in regards to recourse cost for actions.

It is disappointing, but I have seen developer incompetence a lot through beta testing among other things, although it seems to be quite a bit worse with online games. It is generally a disconnect between the developer and the actual content and its interaction with mechanics, where they simply design things around theory. I've seen online games, where things are horribly overtuned to the point where not even the best players can beat certain enemies, until several nerfs are handed out weeks or months later.

I'm wondering what Bethesda's prototype was like.

I have no idea how you miss the fact that you regulate spells to only be available if you have the required magicka, but Stamina powered attacks only require one point in Stamina to be used.

It honestly makes me wonder if they bothered testing magic much at all, and instead just assumed everyone would make carbon copies of the marketing version of the dragonborn.

I feel having non-scaling magic was a terrible design decision. I also feel at times that some spells require far more magicka to perform than the benefit they produce. I haven't leveled magic much on my Orc Mystic Knight, but one casting of Oakflesh takes up far too much of my 160 magicka.

I think the best way to handle difficulty setting would be to add additional mobs for each setting. If a room would have 2 mobs on normal than is should have 4 on hard and 6 on master.

Also as the difficulty increases, add additional AI functions. On normal and easy they could have the default AI they have now, where everything just simply charges you. On hard and master they should have additional combat routines, like archers hiding behind cover and mages could cast some additional type of spells besides their normal fare. Archers should also start using poisons at higher levels. Add in some additional special attacks on some creatures that they use on tougher settings, like giving Charrus' the ability to ball up into a defensive block where they are nearly impervious to all damage.

Much of the difficulty settings could be handled with improved AI routines and make everything you face just a bit more challenging to handle.

I see you bumped too early and are guilty of spamming.


What if we just added more enemies with additional perks?

...like?

If they are going to fix the difficulty problem it will most likely be when the first expasnion comes out. As changing the scaling on such a degree would be a very large patch and require a good deal of the developement teams time. Not something I think bethesda is going to do unless they are working on the first expansion for the game. Your not changing the difficulty of one enemy like with mmo's, this is just my opinion on it .

It would be a lot of work, but I think it would be a great change for the game

svcks, it would be neat if there would be a leveled spell reference, like leveled item. That way we could have random abilities on certain types of enemies.