That's like picking up Mario and stopping at level 3 because you are invulnerable past that point, despite there being 40 some odd more levels. Your advice would be to replay it as the Princess, or Luigi and that the game isn't to blame but the player right?

That's like picking up Streetfighter and 18 of the 20 characters make the game trivial if you use any sort of combo so your advice for greater challenge would be to just tap fast punch repeatedly or use the 2 characters that don't trivialize it.

Do you not see how overwhelmingly re-tarded you and people that think like you are being?

I agree. Aren't you supposed to be stronger than everything? I mean I'm dragonborn, I can kill things with my voice. I eat dragons for supper, I killed Alduin the world eater with very little effort. Dragons should fear me.

!!!! THEN TURN THE DIFFICULTY SETTING UP !!!!

During one of the load up screens, the game even tells players that they can turn up or down the difficulty settings at any point they choose.
Bethesda once made a statement in an interview that it is their intention that as you play with your character you get to feel as you are becoming the ultimate being. That is one of their tricks to success. It is a common feature of fantasy based games as it makes a character be what most can't achieve in real life.

Bethesda have done it that way since Morrowind. My Nord in Morrowind which was my main character and reached the highest level, could eventually walk into a vampire or skeleton infested cave and just stand there being attacked and he'd barely get a scratch. Once I'd had enough I'd just give them a massive swoop with my enchanted daedric sword and bits would go flying in all directions

I think people who complain that a game like this is too easy should be playing a different kind of game. Pretty much every RPG I've ever played had a breaking point where your character/group would start to out-pace and be significantly stronger than whatever it was you were fighting. Those that didn't either involved fighting other players, had enemies that required teams of people to beat, or capped your level at a certain point to prevent you from overpowering the bad guys.

If you're gaming in a way that this is "too easy" then you should switch to multi-player games that can give you that challenge and put you on that never ending treadmill of "upgrade -> challenge -> upgrade -> easy -> new challenge -> upgrade..." The only reason MMO's don't become "too easy" is because they keep adding new levels of stuff and bad guys, which only makes it "hard" for a certain amount of time. Once you figure it out then it's up to the next release, so on and so on.

Otherwise you have to cap yourself somehow, and even that doesn't really work. Think about this: Riding a bike was never really hard, you just get better at it as time goes on. Then you up the difficulty by getting a unicycle and it's hard. Then you get better at it as time goes on.

Point being that in order to maintain any challenge, you need a constant variable that just isn't going to be there without A) other humans to go against or constant updates. As long as you're fighting the same system then you're eventually going to figure out the best/easiest way to beat the puzzle and have to give yourself some limitations in order to feel challenged.

Kinda seems pointless to say "I can't play the way I want because it makes things too easy" when the way you want to play is specifically designed to make things easier.

Yeah, this game can get really, really easy. It's really difficult for some people(myself especially), but maybe make a new character, and don't go out of your way to maximize everything. I stared playing Skyrim after spending years playing MMO's where you don't get to actually "play" the game until you are level-capped and all skills maxed. So, I ran into Skyrim head-first, plowing through skills, and wound up crushing everything in a few hits.

My current character is expressly to get all the min/maxing out of my system; I'm purposely pushing the skills and stats as hard as possible so that I've done it all, it's out of the way, and I can start fresh with curiosities fulfilled. Level 78 so far, almost there.

My suggestion; make a new character. Start the game on Master difficulty, and don't take more than 1 perk in the +damage% perks (Armsman, Barbarian, etc). Or, heck, don't take any damage+ perks, or use any damage+ enchantments. I bet you'll find the game pleasantly challenging again, at least for the first 30 levels.

There is no fun in a game that isn't a challenge. The sheer fact that you CAN kill dragons is what makes you dragonborn. My entire issue with Skyrim is that it isn't just Easy, it is completely trivial. I've used this example before, it is like playing Chess and you can move an infinite number of times before your opponent can. You know that no matter what, you are going to win EVERY time. The only way you don't win is to move one time, and then let your opponent move. The game should be structured with parameters that make the game fun and balanced and you should not have to impose your own rules for it to be any sort of challenge.

Yep. When you reach a high level, higher than most creatures or NPCs it's supposed to be easy. It was a frequent complaint that by end game at high levels, Dagoth Ur was too easy in Morrowind. They addressed those complaints in Oblivion with leveled scaling and the outcry was enormous. Nobody but a few of us like leveled scaling and thus...it was mostly removed. So now we are back to the game becoming easy at high levels.

We must all be careful what we ask for.

Creating content for characters up to the higher levels would be a start.

The things you say are true, but after you defeat Alduin you should be a god. He is suppose to be the strongest thing in the game, if you struggle against random bandits, lesser dragons, guards, etc after beating him then the game would make no sense. Also what is stopping you from playing on master? That makes the game more challenging. I agree we should'nt have to make our own rules but the developers should also learn to balance the skills. Sheer fact that you can kill a dragon makes you dragonborn eh? wow so those giants most be dragonborn, lydia must be dragonborn, whiterun guard must be dragonborn, that random nord hero in the time wound must be dragonborn, etc. thats not what makes you dragonborn ability to absorb souls is what make you dragonborn.

People keep denigrating the http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SelfImposedChallenge as "gimping yourself". Hmm.

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re: "challenge" and "it gets easy at level X"

It really all depends on your mindset and playstyle.

Different people find different things challenging (as the one guy said "challenge =/= dying alot".... well, some people do measure challenge that way.)
Different builds will give you different level ranges of challenge.
Different approaches ("what warrior wouldn't use the BEST at all times" vs "my patriotic Nord barbarian wears Nord Steel armor. Period.", for example) will give different level ranges of challenge.

Heck, different eras will give different expectations of what to expect, challenge-wise. I'd bet, if Dark & Demon's Souls hadn't existed, the general difficulty expectation for RPGs would be lower, for instance. (Personally, I've no interest in those games. They sound way too hard/frustrating to even approach being fun.)

Maybe Skyrim isn't the type of game that's meant to challenge the "power gamer," but rather is meant to role play a type of fantasy character?

Your adventuring makes you become very powerful, you start out as a lowly prisoner and grow to be the most powerful person in the province, all Elder Scrolls games are like this. If you want proof, start a new character, fights you could easily win on your first character will now be near impossible, espeically on higher difficulties. On my level 50 character, I could take on 4 trolls without breaking a sweat, but when I started a new character, one troll could kick my ass.

Besides, this is not dark souls, the joy does not come from the challege, if you want a challenge, play that

I agree with you. My Nord warrior only wears the armor and weapons of the Dragonborn in the trailer. I don't use the best all the time, I usually give all the best items to my companions or sell them. I'm finding the game more challenging like this as I get to higher levels. Since I mix heavy and light armor I don't use armor perks. I use Alchemy but only for profit, I used smithing to enhance my crappy armor, and I used enchanting to add some stamina and hp. I'm actually having more fun doing this then when I was plowing through everything in my path as the Breton Spellsword.

Spot on man.

Well consider that a logical way to fail a challenge (in combat) is death, or defeat you'd actually end up dying quite frequently in a challenging game like Dark Souls. The amount of failures in Skyrim really amounts to death, or fleeing and death comes more frequently.

So they create a character that is level 100. Meaning to ever beat them they would have to make it possible for your character to be a level 100...then at level 100 your character would again think it's too easy and want a NPC or creature that was more challenge...and on and on it goes. It must end somewhere unless you create characters that will always scale to a higher level than you.

Generally when you reach upper levels you have completed most quests and it's time for a new start anyway. The other option to scaled leveling would be to have the game end so that you could no longer play after beating the toughest beast in the game. Fans of TES don't seem to like that either.

Weren't there characters in Oblivion that were always 10-30 levels above you? I don't remember ever having a problem killing any of those characters. I mean my oblivion char was level 79 and he was fighting some who was level 89 with no problems.

Some were. Most had capped levels.

No maybe about it. That's EXACTLY the kind of game Skyrim (all TES actually) is.

so my point was if they added a level 100 enemy you don't need to be level 100 to kill it.

I agree with your points in general (especially about starting new characters), but there's room for improvement in terms of the amount of challenge for a given level.

For example, I'd say that even on Master, PC > NPC at the same level. An NPC probably has to be 5+ levels above the PC, maybe more, to be equivalent. This is due to AI, player advantages in crafting, etc. I'd personally like to see better (not Daedric!) gear on enemies occasionally, and see more spawns as you gain levels.

I've played ~6 characters on Master, and I see the same pattern with every type of character. Levels 1-10 are challenging, just about perfect. Levels 11-20 are easier on average, with the occasional over-the-top frustrating fight. After level 20 everything becomes easier and easier. There are some minor exceptions, like Dragon Priests and Ancient Dragons, but they're very rare. I see this despite using rules like only 1 crafting skill per character. While I agree with people who want to see and feel character progression, I'd personally like to defer the powerful feeling to level 40 or so. BGS approximately doubled the (soft) level cap, but didn't alter the challenge curve enough to compensate for that.

I don't consider myself a hardcoe player, so if I'm having this experience, there have to be a lot of others as well.

Meh certain playthroughs are more difficult than others

When I was a very high level on Oblivion and had completed almost every quest, had every spell and every weapon the game was still challenging (especially when doing the Shivering Isles). In Skyrim I have less than the above and the game is VERY easy at the moment; dragons go down with a couple of swings of my unenchanted sword... its definitely out of tilt and it needs fixing. I play the conventional Nordic warrior and I haven't abused enchanting or any kind of exploits; the game is so easy it takes allot of the fun out of the game. Its like using a god mode cheat; sure its fun for a while but without challenge it becomes VERY boring.

PLEASE MAKE ENEMIES HARDER AND MORE CHALLENGING AT HIGHER LEVELS BETHESDA!!!!

It seems many of you haven't seen Todd's DICE keynote, where he showed a very simple diagram that looked like this:

Difficulty

Boring.........................Spot On...................Frustrating

In other words, balanced gameplay is what they're going for. Too easy and the game becomes boring (what we have now), too difficult and it becomes frustrating. Seeing as they have announced future balance and difficulty changes, it is my belief that they are committed to making a balanced game, which is important if they want to hold on to the legions of new players Skyrim attracted.

Um no, it's not.

As someone said, you don't see Gandalf one-shotting the Balrog, do you? Just because you are powerful does not mean all challenge should be removed. I should be able to get all the best gear but still be able to find challenge in the game.

Thanks for that I'll take a look... I am level 38 and already over the "Boring" mark. Its got to the point where I just don't find the game fun because killing folk is so easy. I'm taking a break from the game until this is fixed.