On playing through the amazingly diverse and staggeringly beautiful land of Skyrim on several difficulties, I became sorely unimpressed with the differences (or lack thereof) between the levels (Novice, Apprentice, Adept, Expert and Master).

I thought for sure Master difficulty would slow my progress down and finally make me strategize and use all the available resources just to keep up-- as in lower difficulties, all I had to do was hack or cast away at the fragile denizens of this land and gave no second thought to ingredients, food, potions, scrolls or traps. They were all just money to me and I wasn't happy with the lack of challenge.

Master difficulty did not remedy any of this, to my immense dismay. Indeed the only thing made more challenging was combat damage, though a good start, it failed to make the game any more difficult in a significant way. I still walked through the game with a character capable of completing any objective for any guild, the difference being I spent more gold on Healing Potions than I previously had.

So I started thinking about all the things that appeared "broken" to me, and how I would propose to fix them, using the same engines, algorithms and effects already used in the game (basically, vey little effort to make these changes).

I wanted to need to take advantage of the abundance of food, ingredients, money and services. I wanted to be at a true disadvantage, to have to think my way through any given situation and most of all, to slow myself down and enjoy all the wonderful effort put into this game by its creators.

Special thanks to the team at Bethesda for creating the best series (in my opinion) of games I have yet to play and I hope your imaginations will create many more.

Without further ado:

CRAFTING

1. Alchemy

The sheer abundance of ingredients the player has access to and the resulting value of the potions created have once again made Alchemy a huge cash cow. Apart from the core of useful potions (Healing, Magicka, Stamina, and some form of Poison) I found myself ignoring all other possible concoctions and spamming any available effect in order to (a.) burn through ingredients and (b.) sell them for great profit.

I even avoided drinking the found potions that fortified important skills both because I really didn't need to, and again, easy money. I'll address the problem with found potions later, but first let's remedy crafting your own:

I propose that a "Success or Fail" function be put in place similar to that of Morrowind. All created potions and poisons have a percent chance to fail, and the reagents destroyed. Nothing too severe, maybe 20% on Master, 10% on Adept and 0% on Novice. Furthermore, potions of "Unknown Effect" would have a 50% or thereabouts chance to fail with nothing learned from the ingredients (if there were any commonalities).

If you wanted to get really complex with it, make a random percentage chance that you do learn at least one of the effects of the ingredient even though the potion failed and it was destroyed. Chock it up to "insightful experimentation".

This percentage should be reduced in relation to the Alchemy skill so in the beginning of the game, your experiments fail, but as you become a master of this art, your potions no longer fail.


2. Enchant

This is almost in the same boat as Alchemy in that once you get it up and running, you'll be rolling in gold, but the difficulty in acquiring souls and already enchanted items to disenchant (which will be discussed later) and in perhaps finding the ideal item you wish to enchant, make it a smaller candidate for change.

But again, a "Success or Fail" algorithm would work wonders here as well. All created enchantments have a chance to fail either destroying the soul gem and the item, or just the gem, depending on how frustrating you want to make this process. Furthermore, disenchanting an item could result in the item being destroyed, and the player failing to learn its enchantment, particularly if it is a complex enchantment.

Due to the difficulty in acquiring resources, I would suggest the percentage hover around 10% on Master and decrease as the Enchant skill increases.


3. Smithing

This might take the most effort to remedy, depending on how detailed you want to get. The same premise applies in that the player can make large profits by smithing tons of items from found resources. One way to combat this is to again implement a "Success or Fail" algorithm, however I feel there is a better way.

I suggest introducing lower quality grades of equipment such as "Shoddy" or "Dull" and have resulting equipment forged with a lower Smithing skill have these attributes attached, both lowering their usefulness and value. This would afford more opportunity to temper these types of items to improve the player's skill level instead of spamming Iron Daggers.

Of course this would also require re-scaling the item quality to skill level ratio already in place to accommodate the new item qualities, and even more work to scale that to the lower difficulties. The success or fail strategy would be easier and you could simply declare that the player broke or wasted their materials.

For more complexity (and I'm not sure I even support this) you could have the success or fail relate to damaging the forge, and have the smith become upset and require payment before the player is allowed to use the forge again. This would tie into the dialogue option already present: "May I use your forge?"

LIFESTYLE

4. Sleeping

The "Rested" and "Well-Rested" benefits of sleeping are nice, but weren't significant enough to make me want to do so, in lieu of waiting outside my cave entrance or in the street until I was healed or could go into the shop. I feel like the Inns are a wonderful (and cheap) service but are often ignored because they simply aren't necessary.

I propose creating an Active Effect attributed to sleep deprivation where if the player does not sleep at least an hour per day in a player-owned bed, one of two penalties will be applied. Either the player suffers a 10 point deduction to their Fatigue per day with the minimum being zero (which is a pretty severe way of doing this), or more realistically, a Damage Stamina Regeneration effect is added at 10% per day with a maximum of 100% leaving the player unable to regenerate Stamina at all after 10 days of no sleep.

This would directly conflict with play-styles where the player wants to manage his leveling progression 100% manually since the rested bonuses will be applied when sleeping. A compromise will have to be made, though I'm unsure of what that would be.

Also to scale this per difficulty, the effect would have to be toned down, with no effect applied on Novice and probably 5% on Adept.


5. Eating

I'm sad to admit, food is a joke in Skyrim. I'm more aggravated to see it when looting than anything else. The amount of healing or other effects it creates is so insignificant, and the value of the item is even worse. It's a shame because the variety of food in the game is significant and the ability to cook is wonderful, plus there are many vendors trying to pedal their hard-earned wares only to be scoffed at by the player. Let's make them more useful:

Like sleeping, eating should now be a requirement, but more so, eating a cooked meal is the only thing that will satisfy. A carrot on the go, isn't enough to fuel a hungry adventurer. Failure to find a cooking spit or carrying ready-to-eat meals on the go, will result in one of two penalties:

A severe result would be a 10 point deduction to their Health and Magicka per day with the minimum being zero (after all, how can you keep up your Magicka reserves without any energy!), or more realistically a Damage Health Regeneration and Damage Magicka Regeneration 10% per day for a maximum of 100%.

I think Damage Regen is more realistic in this scenario, as it might be highly upsetting for the player to suddenly DIE as a result of starvation, no matter how realistic this concept may be…

Special care will need to be taken so that eating one home cooked meal will remove all 100% of the effect and not just 10%. Again some scaling will be required for lower difficulties.

STEALTH

6. Lockpicking

Some people will likely disagree with me on this and following points, but I have found Lockpicking to be incredibly easy. Once you get used to the system, you can easily have well over 99 lockpicks at a time and use at most 10-15 on Master Locks fairly early in the game. Couple this with any rings or amulets that Fortify Lockpicking and you're set. I never even needed to chug a potion.

I suggest making the "wedges" even smaller on higher difficulties. I feel Master Locks should be nigh impossible to open and for good reason at lower player levels. Even Novice Locks could use some added difficulty.

I don't know the numbers associated with this, but let's say on Novice difficulty a Novice Lock's "wedge" will take up 70% of the entire arc. Let's scale that so on Master difficulty that same lock's wedge will be 30-40% of the arc.

And of course increasing the Lockpicking skill and investing in relevant perks will increase those wedges back to normal size and beyond. But on Master difficulty, even with a high Lockpicking skill, I feel like a Master Lock should be a nuisance if not downright hard still.


7. Pickpocketing

I have to admit, I've not done much if any pickpocketing in game; I've just never had the need to. I may be way out of line here, but I'm going to assume this has the same level of ease as everything else I've mentioned so far. So for good measure I'm going to ask that it's percentage for success be reduced on higher difficulties. There's potions that Fortify Pickpocketing and that's all I'm going to say about that.


8. Speech

The average adventurer is no merchant, and with well over 150 places to loot, many of which recur and quests that reward you 400 septims for walking a commoner across the street, I'll be the first to admit, money is in no short supply. I think on higher difficulties, it should be much more scarce.

Without having to rewrite all the quest rewards, I say we implement a global parameter effecting prices of sold goods. Scale my profits back significantly so I don't have my 100k Achievement at level 20. It literally got to the point where at level 25-30 on Master difficulty, every dungeon was netting me 2-4k per trip. Make me chop would for 4 hours a day in the beginning…

COLLECTING

9. Harvesting

An Alchemist's worst nightmare: bring back the Morrowind technique of plants having a success or fail rate to harvest. Since there is a perk in the Alchemy constellation to harvest double the ingredients, its pretty clear that Alchemy is a relevant skill here, and as such a higher skill level will improve your chances.

Again, lower difficulties will have little to no effect on harvesting, higher difficulties will have a more significant chance. Another way to knock down the staggering amount of resources available.


10. Loot

Again, lets cut down the resources, and put ourselves at a disadvantage. The leveled lists are already built and in place, all we need to do is manipulate our access to them.

On Master difficulty, say we're level 15 and we pop a boss chest at the end of the dungeon: how would it feel if the loot was only for a level 10 player? Well we'd still be happy, because the loot we found at level 10 was significantly lower too. The only difference is, we're not overpowered war-machines that can gallantly stroll through the wilderness.

I don't know the exact figures pertaining to leveled loot and special treasure, but let's find a way to scale it back so we're finding stuff that's a little below our pay-grade.

CONCLUSION AND ONE FINAL SUGGESTION

These ten manipulations would greatly improve the gameplay for experienced players and take advantage of many of the resources already put in place. They present unfulfilled challenges in an interesting and engaging way and in a sense, reward players for taking the next step and bumping up the difficulty by extending the playability of the game.

Moreover, most if not all of these aspects would be easy to implement and scale per difficulty level so no one feels overwhelmed. The Novice player will see very little if any change in gameplay to the current state, but Master level players will get that challenge they've been yearning for.

My final suggestion, and I don't know how difficult or game-changing it would be to implement, is to slow down the experience and leveling system. I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of fun and challenging moments in the game, because I surpass them with rapid leveling (even after avoiding the exploits and trainers).

There is no better indicator of this than the game's unique items. In the early game, they are highly useful, but being unique are harder to find. So by the time you've adventured to enough places and done enough quests to find them, your level has surpassed their usefulness. By the time the player is level 20-30 they've outgrown nearly every unique item in the game and need to resort to custom created ones to be effective.

I'll be the first to admonish leveled unique items, because it's fatiguing to say "Well I can't do that quest yet because I have to wait for that item to be useful." I feel the only solution is to slow down the character's progress, and again, this can be scaled per difficulty so new players can get acquainted with the game and feel it out, while us experienced players can take out time and flush out our characters. I have a feeling this is going to be a highly controversial subject…

I'm positive there is a already a huge community of modders out there already working on similar concepts and maybe some of them will consider the things I've mentioned here. Tragically, I play on the XBox 360, so my fate rests in Bethesda's capable hands for a patch, but by all means TACKLE THE BUGS FIRST!

Let me know what you guys think, or what you would change, or if you think Bethesda should even address this. As always, thank you Bethesda for the amazing games you make!

...... I don't get it.

Why would you want to make the game more difficult?

What is even the point in levelling up if you don't want to make things easier? Might as well just not level up at all. Play the whole game at level 1 on Master difficulty.

I for one would rather experience the game and appreciate its beauty without having to spend the whole time worrying about how long it'll take me to kill the next cave-bear or whatever.

You overthink it, and you basically give the answer here:

"I still walked through the game with a character capable of completing any objective for any guild, the difference being I spent more gold on Healing Potions than I previously had."

You can pause the game, and heal back to full. You can do this whenever, so how can you die. Even Diablo II had a system where a health pot made you regen, and was on a timer, creating a limit to how much damage you could absorb and forced you into playing the game.

How can you get all that you asked for, if they keep the favourite/healpot system?

And I predict the children crying about the gae being too hard.

Or.... y'know.... Fallout New Vegas's "hardcoe Mode"....

Wasn't all that problematic, thankfully.... but it did change the way I played the game somewhat.

Maybe that is all that Skyrim needs.... a "hardcoe Mode" like New Vegas had.... irrespective of difficulty level.



Another thing that made for an interesting game was the Instant Kill mode in Way of the Samurai 3 .... where basically it takes only 1 hit to be able to kill anything, and consequentially, only 1 hit to die from anything. If you were careful and skilled, you could slaughter tons of enemies.... but if so much as one enemy landed a hit on you... BLAM. Dead.

That the sort of thing that challenge-lovers would like? Hmm?

Shame you're playing on a console. There's an awesome mod called Wars in Skyrim, which makes the game immensely harder and a lot more fun. Coupled with the Deadlier Dragons mod, the game's difficulty is perfect in my opinion.

... lolwut?!
I take it you're in some sort of alternate universe where difficulty isn't INVERSELY proportional to fun?

I guess the reason behind me wanting the game to be harder is It's an RPG and I actually want to role-play. Even on master difficulty, I can still make a character that can do everything and overlook all the beautiful things they put into the world. I want to have to take my time and be careful, I want to have to specialize in something and I want to have to play to my strengths. Without that, it basically is Diablo and I just "click" my way through, and pick up the loot. The End. But I know Skyrim can be something more. And I've heard similar complaints from other players. I totally 100% support a hardcoe mode that has all these things, so it wouldn't interfere with the rest of the community.

What exactly do you game for?
Have you ever stopped just to look at the view? To glance at the flowers and the flitting butterflies?
If you're playing the game just for the combat... well.... I just don't get why you'd do that.
It is sad that a completely pacifist playthrough isn't really feasible, to be honest.

I don't know if you've ever played Dragon Age: Origins, but one of the last sections has you trying to defeat a horde of darkspawn that's invaded Denerim. Rather than being normal darkspawn, they're darkspawn "grunts" that have about a quarter the HP of normal darkspawn, basically a 1 or 2 hit kill. I think it was meant to make your character feel more powerful, but for me its the most tedious, annoying section of the game. The battles before and especially after that section though are epic, huge tense affairs with dragons and ogres that really put you to the test. It sounds like you're more of a casual gamer, but for people that like a challenge, things like Wars in Skyrim are awesome.

I for sure didnt want the awfull alchemy system of morrorwind back. Not even remotly.The same is true for enchanting.

But it shouldnt be possible to get 100 in smithing just by making iron daggers and the maximum additional damage should be capped.
The possibility of "oneshotting alduin"...

This is exactly why I proposed this post. Did you read it? I didn't mention anything about combat being harder. I do want to do all this hippie stuff lol. Personally I have a completionist mentality and its one of the hardest things to overcome when I game. If I can stomp through a game and be done I will, and this only happens when its too easy. The harder the game, the slower my progress, the more I get to enjoy it, and I know I'm not alone on this.

I would also like taxes on any owned house, guild dues and having to pay companions. Without even using alchemy and crafting and ignoring most looted armor and weapons money keeps builing up to ridiculous levels. I want some money sinks.

I really resent being called that. I'm not a "casual" gamer. Gaming is all I do. I spend ALL my free time gaming. That is at least 6 hours every day and more on weekends. That isn't casual.

And while I also am not so fond of the last section of Dragon Age : Origins.... it isn't because the enemies are too weak... but only because there aren't more of them (and npcs keep distracting them away). I hadn't even noticed that they were any weaker than the other darkspawn because they mostly die in one hit anyway.


Then what good does adding more grind do?
Adding more content would be far better than just making it so we have to do everything for longer, fail more and for lesser reward.

The entire game doesn't have to get easier just because you reached level 81.

If you want a more diverse difficult playthrough, be a pure mage, if you say the game is still too easy, you are just chatting [censored].

People like to challenge themselves. It's been this way forever. By making the journey hard, the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction is much greater when you're victorious. In fact, older video games were even a great way to teach yourself or your kid an important lesson: overcoming challenges, pushing yourself over the limit and thinking outside the box will result in success. Nowadays we're stuck with this new generation of mouthbreathing gamers who don't understand the concept of challenging themselves and are herded into liking quick, shallow action and shiny sequences with games being significantly dumbed down and tailored to their cheap needs.

hardcoe mode would be really great in Skyrim.. Thankfully atleast the PC version will receive plenty of equivalents in mods.

So people work their asses off to get to level eighty one, and cave bears are still a problem to kill, yeah, no thanks.

Candyland is easy as hell.

It's no where near as fun as Ninja Gaiden.

Reaching level 81 itself doesn't make all that much difference.
You raise a skill, you get better at using that skill. That isn't really all that surprising.
And naturally some skills are more multipurpose than others, while other skills are just stronger than others.

I agree, more content would be great, but there's no way a developer could generate enough content to keep pace with all of us. Instead I'm all about extending the play but I don't consider it grinding in this particular instance, as you said earlier: this game is beautiful and I'd love nothing more than to get a few more hours out of it, for little effort on Bethesda's part. Really it comes down to the player leveling entirely too fast for the game's story to keep up, and everyone and there mother just shoveling gold into your pockets. If both of these things were fixed I'd be happier, you wouldn't even need to change all the things I suggested. There would be no "grind".

IT does a little, cuz you end up having 600 or more magika / health, and super armor, or spells, so you inevitably will be much harder to kill, and people will be easier to kill.

Lord... do I have to do this again?

Please make note of what I actually said rather than slippery sloping.

The entire games doesn't have to be easy.

I'll repeat the keyword: Entire.

I hit level 81, yay!

Wild animals fall down and die by simply being within 100 miles of my presence. Lowly Thugs and Bandits, if they've even heard of a guy with my vague physical description, they throw themselves off High Hothgar.

I hit level 81!

Higher level monsters, like say... giants, Vampire Masters, etc... are fairly equal to me. Meaning, they can put up a good fight, but the fight may still be more in my favor than in their's.

I hit level 81...

Alduin, Dragon Priests, Ancient Dragons, etc, etc... make me earn every single point of damage I do to them. Meaning, when fighting them, I am still in a lethal, fight for my life, battle.

How is that hard to understand?

on Novice, 100hp max
Don't spam perk points in damage skills.
Wear Clothes (you'll need armor evently) (but don't put points into any armor perks)

Works nicely as 1shot kills on weak stuff, mid level and bosses will put up a fight, and stuff can still damage you.
(More so on PC, sinc Ps3 damage is toned down heavly...)
By level 20, you'll wanna start working towards 180hp. (to aviod 1 shot kills from enemies) (Dragons and 2hand users will preform exicution moves on 1hit)

By lv30, 180hp will ether work nicely (as most enemies can knock half ur hp off) You'll want to start wear full armor during Boss fights.

By lv40 200hp (since Elder Dragons will 1shot you at 180hp armor or not.) (During melee that is, Breaths attacks are pretty panzy...)

By 50+ you may or may not want more Hp. If you save often its not much differnt from lv40.

If you aviod armor perks, you can keep both you and bad guys hitting hard. =D
Thats how i solve it each ES title...

Evil tongues say that playing Skyrim while having a full-time job, a wife and children, is the true master's difficulty...