The game is to hard on hard mode? Are you serious? Gimme a break.

Or I can claim that it's unrealistic to expect massively differing difficulty settings (Well thought out and well fleshed out) in a game the scale of Skyrim? Um, yes, I'll go with that. There are genuinely difficult encounters in Skyrim, whether or not you agree is not of my concern.

It's not unrealistic to expect advancement. It's fine, you'll be dragged along by progress whether you like it or not.

Talk about the good ol' straw man argument. The way you talk you make it seem like Skyrim is a carbon copy of Oblivion without any progression or regression. Lol.

I can't see how an open world action-RPG should be more inspired in terms of difficulty settings than modifying the damage penalties and enemies health. This is not a game of chess where you can set how many moves the computer can compute. And yes, I've read the OP and I don't agree with anyone of his proposals. As far as I'm concerned, difficulty settings shouldn't even exists in first place.

They didn't in Morrowind. It was brought in later through one of the expansion packs and was also bundled with one of the patches.

They did not? My memory serves me wrong, I thought they were always there.

It was brought in by Tribunal if I recall correctly. In any case, the difficulty slider wasn't there in the vanilla un-patched Morrowind.

I guess Daggerfall had a "reflexes" setting that could be considered somewhat of a Difficulty setting... but it didn't seem all that important in the grand scheme of things.

I actually had a more difficult time with that spider my first time through on the default setting because I was paranoid and tried to stay at range with a bow. Had to play a lot of peek a boo retreating from the entrance to the lair.

This last time on master difficulty, my char drank some poison resistance potion and charged the spider wearing nothing more than leather armor and wielding a couple of steel war axes. If I recall correctly it was a short fight.

But to the OP's main point, I hate bullet sponge leveling. It's what I hated most about Oblivion. It seemed to not be as bad to me in this game but I'm only level 20 something on Master so I've yet to see what is to come.

I don't know what strawman you think you see, but actually the way I said that made it sound like things will always progress with no regression. Which is of course wrong as Skyrim has plenty of that. What I meant to say is that AI is already capable of being smarter than it is in Skyrim, but if it it's too difficult(as you claim) to implement for them currently it's going to get easier going forward. In the meantime, I won't defend what I think is a bad system from criticism just on the feeble defense that it might be too hard for them to do right.

I agree but to be fair, he used an example of a mini boss being ridiculously hard to illustrate his point. Well that falls flat with folks that found that same spider hella easy. I would count among those but I still agree with his premise. Every Bethesda game I've ever played had a bullet sponge mentality. So far in Skyrim, I haven't found it to be particularly bothersome so I'm just not as annoyed as the OP but I do get his point.

The AI is already capable of being smarter than it is in Skyrim and I bet you [censored] pure awesomeness every day all day. Right. Maybe you should go apply for a job at Bethesda and you'll be able to set things right with the next Elder Scrolls games since you clearly know what they're capable of and you know all about moving forward and just being pure awesome because that's what you do.

Yeah, lets forget about priorities in game design and about budget placement and about everything else that's in such a huge game that is Skyrim. A huh... You'll make it happen because you [censored] out pure awesomeness. Good for you.

Now we're talking strawman.

It could certainly be much, MUCH more inspired than that... that is, ofc, considering there was a good AI in place. Increase the mobility of enemies, the spells and skills they have in their disposal, then it's pretty simple to just limit some depending on difficulty level. On hard, they would face you with full dodging AI, a full arsenal of spells and weapons enchanted with things like paralyse... on easy they would just stand in place and take a beating, have very basic armors and weaponry, the mages would only cast novice spells etc... the other levels would be somewhere in between...

Or, even better, get rid of the difficulty levels, along with the enemy level scaling. With a bit of careful placing of enemies and dungeons, and maybe even the use of some level modifiers or damage caps for lower level enemies (for example, you deal 755 damage to enemies more than 5, and 50% damage to enemies more than 10 levels below you) it's perfectly possible even in open-world skyrim... which would also bring the difficulty to the good old style that has always worked: too hard for you, go back and do quests to level up, too easy, go tackle that high-level dungeon...

As opposed to just talking straight up bull [censored]? Right? Lol.

Read it again. His bulletpoints are talking about what the results of the lack of effort into making Master difficulty are. His main arguments are in the two small paragraphs preceeding the bulletpoints.

After your last post do you really believe yourself capable of rational discussion anymore? All I'm saying is it could be better. That's [censored] to you?

Your point is that it hasn't been done before so it can't be done, I know. A mentality even more uninspired than the difficulty settings.

It's called being realistic. Not only has it not been done before, but difficulty has never been the main focus of The Elder Scrolls series. You seriously must be confusing The Elder Scrolls series with the Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry series. Seriously. Toodleoo.

I really, really liked the combat at low levels on Expert difficulty. My character was a barbarian type with a 2-H weapon and fur armor. Melee fights were fantastic. I took out enemies in 2-4 well placed hits and they did the same to me. Combined with finishing moves it made the combat fast-paced, exciting and visceral. The best part was that it actually felt like there was skill involved because I needed to dodge their attacks in order to survive and to use the environment, traps, and whatnot to my advantage if I wished to have any hope of victory.

Later on it got to me power attacking enemies in the face with my upgraded claymore only to have them barely notice. T_T


But I usually just abandon whatever is too challenging and come back later when Im stronger. Though this approach can cause a bit of immersion breaking dissonance during certain quests that are by their nature, races against time and requiring immediate action. (e.g.: In the midst of a heroic rescue at one locale I was confronted with horrible bug creatures that just one shotted me... Poor farmer guy will have to wait another month (ingame) or so before I can come back and help him save his [censored].)

Okay. Toodleeyloo. And though you didn't outright say it there I took it that you're disassociating difficultly from roleplaying which if so would be quite wrong.

The first order of business in improving the difficulty settings should be that on Expert & Master level enemies learn how to jump. That'd be awesome. No more standing on 3 foot high rocks to confuse them.

I would suspect it could not be done with the current gen, at least not at significant cost of other resources in the game.

Just a guess though.

I dont know.. When they told meto go to every damn city and shut oblivion gate after oblivion gate in tedious succession... It got pretty damn challenging to keep playing.