They need to bring back those old school customable difficulty screens with dozens of options and sliders and whatnot. A single slider doesn't cut it for most games, let alone a game as complex as TES.

Im having no trouble surviving on master. My thief is level 45 and played master exclusively. I dont have uber gear, just equipment Ive found and upgraded a bit. I dont use enchanting or alchemy, and I havent perked Smithing except for steel smithing and arcane smith so I can still upgrade those found items.

Instead of complaining about it, how about you learn to play the difficulty. If its to hard for you turn it down.

So there really should be three sliders:

1. Resilience - A slider that adjusts the HP of the enemies up or down. This is for players who want fights to last longer because they enjoy really getting their milage out of blocking, dodging, using wards etc.
2. Lethality - A slider that adjusts the damage of enemies up or down. This is for players who want to have to be more careful and methodical because a mistake can easily kill you.
3. Scarcity - A slider that adjusts loot tables, vendor prices, availability of craft resources on vendors, lockpick difficulty, speechcraft difficulty etc. This is for players who enjoy a game where getting good items is hard.

hardcoe gamers will never be satisfied because it goes against their "Take the hard-road" nature, otherwise it would be too easy! Like adrenaline junkies they thrive on the thrill of surviving and facing insurmountable odds... and stroking their [censored] on the forums with it That said, I can see where the OP is coming from, instead of whacking endlessly at a wall with 2000 HPs, why not tweak this Marvelous thing called "Radiant AI" and up the NPC's block, Power attack, and dodge percentage instead? And do not take this as a crack against non-hardcoe players as I simply feel that no one should tell anyone how to play the game that they just bought! (Proudly playing on Adept!)...And yeah, color me a Beth-Devote as well!

I hit, manouver, hit, manouver, strike hard, manouver...... see the pattern?

In a word ; Kiting tactics. Any player worth his salts knows how to kite.

I've been playing the game on master difficulty for a while now, because I enjoy a challenge, and I think it's much easier to judge the balance of a game when you pit various play styles against the toughest possible scenario, as opposed to an easy one. (For example, lots of people maintain that shields are useless and melee is easy because they play on easy difficulties, where your armor easily does all the work, or that destruction magic is overpowered, because on easy difficulties it burns through any number of foes with ease)

The issue I see with Master difficulty is that the way the difficulty is raised in the game is in the absolute lamest, most unimaginative, and cheesy way possible. All the game does is simply increase the damage and hitpoints of enemies, in many cases to an absurd degree.

This leads to two things happening:

1. Enemies can shrug off blows like they are nothing, you can smack them with a power attack from a great hammer and they just don't really care all that much, it takes a couple millimeters off their life bar, but they keep right on rolling. That completely screws up the game however, because it destroys the way a lot of mechanics work. For example, shield bashing someone to open them for a flurry of attacks - useful if the enemies is gravely wounded as a result, pretty much pointless if they still have a mountain of HP left, but it still costs a good chunk of your stamina. Using Fus Ro Dah on an enemy is even significantly cheapened by their inflated hitpoints, because while lying on the floor helpless for a few seconds might be a big deal in regular difficulty, on master difficulty the enemies will simply get back up and keep fighting, since they can take a couple dozen wacks from a decent weapon.

2. Enemies do insane ammounts of damage. This is also gamebreaking in a lot of ways. For example, the first "miniboss" you will encounter in Skyrim on a usual play-through is the big spider in bleak falls barrow. It has a poison attack. Poison attacks ignore armor and blocking. On regular difficulty this spider is a pretty mean foe, no doubt, but on master difficulty it's one bite and you're dead. The only way to survive its poison attack is to instantly pause the game and throw half a dozen health potions in your mouth. The same is true for dragon breath, enemy mages, and high end enemy fighters as well. They end up doing so much damage that your defenses become meaningless.


The result of those changes are that certain play styles become infinitely more potent than others. Stealth becomes incredibly powerful, since the enemies are no better at detecting you. Conjuration becomes an easy way to avoid taking blows, and of course all the various cheese and exploits with alchemy, smithing and enchanting can easily turn master difficulty back into a cakewalk.


I think it's a shame that the difficulty setting in Skyrim are so uninspired. Sure, they make for much harder fights, trying to play through master difficulty as an unsubtle fighter without ludicrously enchanted gear is damn near impossible, since every other enemy takes a minute long beating to kill and can do more damage to you through your shield than you can do to them with a well placed hit. Ultimately the difficulty setting utterly fails at making things more difficult in all areas though. The vendors have the same prices, locks are equally easy to open, enemies are still unable to detect a semi competent stealther.

I really hope Bethesda will take a look at the difficulty setting and reevaluate how they work. Master Difficulty should be more than just making fights absurdly hard for characters that aren't made of cheese and lols, it should make the whole game harder. Bribes should be steeper, vendors prices harsher, locks harder to pick, enemies harder to trick. Playing through master difficulty should mean that skills are more meaningful as a whole, not that everything is skewed towards characters with high DPS and avoidance. If you want to be rich on Master difficulty you should have to invest in some merchant perks or lockpick skills for example. Every individual aspect of the game that is confronted by a skill should be harder to some degree, not one singular aspect that is best confronted by only a hand full of skills harder by an insane amount.

Perhaps we can get the moders on creating a "Genuine Challenge Mode" and not just an "Inflated Enemy Numbes Mode".

Not if Bethesda made the combat actually good like Dark Messiah was. That game puts Skyrim to shame. Honestly, more you play Skyrim and go back to games like Gothic 3, more you realise just how bad Skyrim is in it's game mechanics.

I always love it when people bring up Dark Messiah. They put that game up on a pedestal in regards to combat when in reality, the core melee combat is weak and the general combat is a physics gimmick. Skyrim's core melee combat is easily much better than Dark Messiah's combat.

I never thought I'd say this, but I miss Oblivion's enemy level scaling now. The game was a challenge from start to finish. I wish they just put more enemies for higher difficulty levels if nothing.

Oblivion was a challenge from start to finish? What? In what world? Surely you can't be speaking about vanilla Oblivion.

Ok, first of all:

Achivement Unlocked: Missing the F-ing point.

For all those who just came in here blabbing on about how easy master is for them.


I wasn't writing about how the problem with master difficulty is that its too hard, what I was writing about was that master difficulty takes one singular aspect of the game and boosts it to absurd levels, which completely skews the entire game towards a few viable builds. Most of the game doesn't get harder at all, it's still just as easy to amass a fortune, it's still just as easy to open any lock, it's still just as easy to hide in plain sight.

The increase in difficulty is simply achieved in the wrong way. Someone said they would have preferred more enemies rather than enemies that are unrealistically strong, and that's something I can agree on. That would have made more sense.

The problem with simply scaling up the hitpoints and damage of enemies to make for a more difficult game is that it turns gameplay elements upside down. Let's take another game as an example of this, so maybe people can wrap their head around what I'm trying to say without getting lost in their fan rage.

In Mass Effect 2 if you play on the hardest difficulty the exact same thing as in Skyrim happens. All the enemies have a lot more health and do a lot more damage. This causes a big problem in that game, because it introduces situations where the enemies increased health throws you damn near impossible situations. In Mass Effect one of the tactics the designers use to throw the player for a loop every so often is by having a tough enemy start walking towards you, ignoring cover, and simply try to walk behind you. Once they have walked around your cover you're pretty much dead when you play on the harder modes in Mass Effect 2, so you have to kill them before they get there. On regular difficulties this is a challenge that can be relatively easily met, once you realize what's happening you can focus your fire on that opponent to take him out. On the harder difficulties though it becomes tricky. If it's a powerful Geth or a Krogan walking towards you with shields/barrier, armor and HP you pretty much have no chance to strip all that off with gunfire alone. The only way to kill them in time is to use the hard counters to those hitpoint types in sequence. Warp, EMP, Incinerate. While ME2 is still a great game (like Skyrim) this doesn't really make the game all that much more challenging, it just severely limits who you can take on missions, because unless you have all those skills present you're setting yourself up for a beatdown when you need them.

That's why master difficulty in Skyrim is stupid. It doesn't really make the game harder as long as you specialize in the skills that deal with the changes alright. If you're built with stealth, conjuration, enchanting and archery you probably won't have any trouble besting Master difficulty. On the other hand, there is no drawback to not having invested in Lockpicking on master difficulty, even though the game should be harder in all aspects.

That's the thing that master difficulty fails to deliver in Skyrim. The weak points of your character only come to haunt you if they are in raw DPS and avoidance, not if they are in any other area.

I don't like spelling people's names wrong(even user name) but after I read a post by that person who made the zombie mob for oblivion, about how the game decides when you're instant KO'd no matter what your means of evading the attack is, I stopped taking this game's mechanics seriously and focus on killing everything quickly as possible.

I was really surprised when I went up one level.

I expected a lot more enemies, especially in dungeons, which is the main reason I increased my level because I love dungeon crawling.

Yet, it seemed like the same number, except they had more hit points - which made the fights longer - and they hit for more damage.

I'd much rather see an increase in opponents and a moderate increase in hit points/damage.

No we get that, however it can be set to spawn more enemies when entering the cell with the higher setting. If its to hard lowering the setting makes them as they are on adept there are just a few more of them. Changing cells with the now lower setting would reduce the number of enemies spawning. But that would require a bit of a hefty rewrite of the engine to acomplish it.

The difficulty slider is actually an improvement over Oblivion. What it actually does in Skyrim is amplify NPC damage output, and reduce PC damage output. This means all NPCs get the bonuses, so companions and summons aren't gimped, while your character is.

Basically the AI/NPCs don't have to be drastically different on higher difficulties to have a big effect on how the game feels, so to me it is almost inexcusable that game companies still fall back on this hit point sink, increased damage tactic.