I've been reading posts about some saying that the game is too easy and others saying that people should handicap themselves to make the game more enjoyable.

I think that both sides have a point but none is entirely correct.

As you know last ES games were easily breakable. You could get "100% chameleon", invisibility, you could use "dmg strength 100" or "dmg intelligence 100" in morrowind which would grant you a win in every battle, you could levitate when you were having problems, 100% resist magic or reflect or absorption, weakness to magic in oblivion.... well too many ways to break the game.

However there's a difference between those and what happens in skyrim. Skyrim is breakable but not even as much as the other two, however, you can break it without exploiting anything. You just need to train your normal skills and after that, not even master difficulty helps.

What some people have been proposing is that you should handicap yourself to make the game more challenging. Well, I find their point correct when it comes to those exploits like "100% chameleon" or "dmg strength 100", but with regard to stop using your best weapon and start using iron swords to beat the enemies I consider that ridiculous.

I think things should go back as they were in other ES games. You can break the game if you exploit some of its nuances but if you play normally the game is reasonably well balanced

I should have put in the topic "SOME people"

I agree entirely. The game should not unbalance itself through normal gameplay. But you should be able to go full on godmode if you want to.

I think you are somewhat correct, however in my opinion, playing normally in Morrowind or Oblivion would still make you a god.

Well I didn't have that experience. I remember getting my ass kicked lots of times. Well, but if you say so.

Keep the comments coming

It's just my opinion and I didn't use exploits. But the game should still provide a challenge when you play the game "normally". I enjoy exploring as much as the next guy but sometimes a guy/lady needs a challenge.

About morrowind i agree, about oblivion i dont. If you played oblivion without thinking how and what and when you were going to lvl, you'd ruin your character. I did not like that, cause you dont have the range of options skyrim gives to us.

The problem is.... what is "normal gameplay". I thought I played "normally", and I had challenge - in Adept difficulty - up into the high 40's.

But obviously, my "normal" isn't someone else's "normal". Which, further, isn't someone else's "normal".

Played as a warrior in Oblivion and after a while it didn't really provide that much of a challenge. Morrowind was the easiest and Oblivion and Skyrim are just as hard in my humble opinion.

In a certain way that's true. There is a risk associated with the way you choose your major skills in oblivion. If I chose mercantile, lockpicking, etc. as major skills I would be forever in lvl 1-10 and would have combat skills in lvl 100 which would make me invincible when fighting against rats and other creatures with lvl below 10. But that I think counts as a exploit

Well, in that matter I think skyrim's leveling system is a bit more intuitive which, in my opinion, made it a little less interesting. But that's just an opinion

Morrowind yes , same with daggerfall, both who lacked high level enemies, so at high level with good gear you had to work hard to get killed.
In both Daggerfall and Morrowind you could do single hit to kill on the strongest standard enemy in the game with backstab using a daeric twohand weapon.
You need a sword with 150 in damage to do that in Skyrim on a mammoth.

However in Oblivion at high level you could easy run into enemies with over 500 health, with an weapon doing 24 in damage. You would use time killing them unless you used spell or enchants with weakness stacking. Even this hardly made you an good.

This was changed in Skyrim, weapons do more damage but enemies also do more damage, enemy archers often do over 200 in damage to you at high level.
Now it's possible to get very powerful in Skyrim with normal play, you will run into +30-40% damage increase enchants from time to time. This together with a lightly upgraded weapon will make you pretty powerful, more so with sneak attacks.

Simplest solution is probably to add more difficulty levels highest is enemies take 1/2 damage and deal double damage to you. something like max in Oblivion 1/6 and 6x would shut people up.

Im not sure what is OPs point. Bethesdas games are hopelessly broken if played "right" and by now it should be obvious that it is a design decision and Bethesda isnt going to change it. So stop complaning, the game isnt broken, it just gives ultimate freedom, for everyone.

Sorry, MW was not balanced if you had artifact weaponry and Daedric armour, it was very easy
Limiting ones character was very much a part of keeping MW challanging

For me, that didn't happen in Oblivion until WELL after I finished the main quest line and a large chunk of the major side quests. Skyrim? It happened much, much earlier.


Why? It's a single player game, and there's no negative reprocussions for doing so. I can sorta understand that after 15 years of "progression" essentially being equivlent to "loots" in RPGs that people get attached to their stuff, but I also see that people are asking for DEVELOPER intervention for something that is essentially solvable by the player. It's mind blowing to me that people can get "locked in" to only one method of having fun.

Morrowind wasn't that easy in my opinion. Sometimes I entered in a dungeon that I shouldn't enter and my ass was kicked really hard because the lvling system didn't work as the oblivion and skyrim's system. (I preferred the morrowind system),

Also, in the case of morrowind, they didn't work with percentages (not the case for oblivion) which meant that I could be killing golden saints without any problems but when I reached bloodmoon, monsters were a real challenge. In skyrim, they used percentages for magic resistance again. Which gives us the chance to become invincible against magic just by enchanting our gear with magic resist. I don't know if this count as an exploit. However, I don't think working with percentages when it comes to fortifying attributes or skills is the wisest way to balance the game

So how come Beth rebalance slightly in patches, and/or completely remove such features from succeeding games? What works good tends to stay.

Because people enjoy becoming stronger by normal methods. That's part of the fun in games. People don't enjoy becoming stronger using glitches or exploits and don't enjoy handicapping themselves on purpose to have challenge. They like the challenge to become good at a game through their effort. Telling them to handicap themselves if they don't see challenge in the game is like telling them there is no purpose in playing the game. They want a game, not a toy

Don't know what to say. Never had a problem with Oblivion. You are right about your solution though.

Well but until getting daedric armour I struggled a bit. Sometimes there were really powerful opponents. Oblivion you also become a god in the end with the best items. But in the proccess people struggle more than in skyrim

if i upload my gameplay video , i think many people out there will laugh so hard .
back to the time when i played world of warcraft 90% of my PvP matches were EPIC fail , the point is i'm not fast moving/clicking player and warrior/tank been always my favorite class .
when i started playing Skyrim i started adept difficulty and now Master .
Nord warrior level 48 , 523 health 2 handed weapon , heavy armor and now i have 8 unallocated perk points .
i "normally" crafted daedric armor , "normally" improve it and normally enchant it , i don't use sneak attack at all , didn't max my jobs , didn't use the alchemy/enchanting trick , and the game still easy for me ..
dungeons bosses are not challenging at all , and its only fun when killing dragon priest they spam spells and run around and they got decent health.
so if there's any thing i can do to make my game more challenging please point it out .

I don't play the game on the Master difficulty. I don't care what difficulty. I am playing it the way I want to play it and nobody can convince me otherwise.

I don't see any professional sportsmen breaking themselves a hip to make it more challenging.

Playing on master here and having finished the game i am disappointed on how easy Skyrim got after the first 10, maybe 15 levels. Having the option to make gear for yourself and enchant it i don't think Bethesda thought about the power behind these professions and how they could ruin the game's difficulty hands down. Thing is, and like you said, you can pretty much be overpowered without any kind of exploits and that's the problem. Playing normally and without rushing, i felt that there could be no monster, no dragon and no npc that could match me in combat. This is because the in game difficulty doesn't really scale according to how strong you become on your professions for example. It just increases their health and damage they do to you, it doesn't make fights more difficult because the script changes to make the combat more complex.

I fixed the problem by playing with a long bow and iron arrows (but on adept difficulty) which I upgrade a little with smithing. You might think it's ridiculous, but when you have a solid RP reason for doing that (ie. family heirloom), it's tremendously fun, especially if you prefer the look of the crappier weapons (which seems to be the case for a lot of forumers).

wish if there's some challenging bosses where you need brain and some real skills to beat them , and im praying .. Beth will add those in upcoming DLCs
i love Skyrim and it will be the best game i ever played if Beth fixed the messed up economy , add some useful loot and hardcoe dungeons/bosses