Why Skills Won't Be Nerfed #2 : V - Skyrim

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 6:42 pm

bethesda games prob aren't for you. you ALWAYS get to be powerful in a bethesda game, you always have the option to play like that. so get over it.

Wow, you just dissed someone who agrees with your opinion, way to read.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 12:26 pm

Wow, you just dissed someone who agrees with your opinion, way to read.

Thats what I was about to say. XD

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 10:07 pm

but how about or th people that svck but still want to play or all the people that want a travelling bard or a pasifist or a either/or one-hitter, there are alot of builds that the game taliors to it cant do everything, some people want the to be come a god, basicly alot of the arguments in this thread are selfish i want it my way arguements, ALOT of varity in character can be made, if you want overly challenging then you have to build a character that way. This is not chess or anyother remotly challenging game mode this a bethesda rpg, personaly i like the freedom. if you want challeng go play a rts or fps against real people. The only challenge you can make in a game like tes is pointless anyway. so you started weak struggling to kill powerful enemeys but then you become powerful but you still want the powerful enemys to be better?! um but your powerful now you did that you progressed the game. can you imagine the complains, ive leved up all my skills made the most power artefact in the game and im being one shotted by bandits... yeah. i always play these game as is. who the hell wants to just have to hit the same guy 15 times with drinking 3 potions every five seconds. challenge you say, lets see:
instant saving, check.
instant healing, check.
faster than everything, check.
semi invincble henchmen, check.
mediochre ai, check.
YEP defo a game built with challenge in mind...face it self nerf or wait for mods dlc to add enemys that have to be slogged at, because personly i cant wait to have to fight the same enemy for 30 mins. Like fallout of veryhard, ahhh i see you take multply sniper rounds point blank to the head, yes the 'difficulty' slider is great. or as i like to call alot of difficulty sliders in games, the teidium or time consumsion slider, want it to be challenging or just cheap, because if you want challenge i thinkwe need to wait a few years for ai and game scope to catch up.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 6:34 pm

Thanks guys :biggrin:

But now I mean it....Good Night.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:35 pm

Next game I develop, I'm not going to put in any of the variables for balance because after all, it's not my job, it's yours as the player.

Instead I'm just going to give you a PokeDex/Beastiary that allows you to use sliders to decide what level enemies are, what health they have, their damage, etc, etc.

Then I'm going to give you the entire game's inventory, also complete with sliders, and all of the abilities and spells written in a journal, again with sliders.

Then, you can choose what level and how much gold you start as.

And you can choose to start the game with all quests already completed or not.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 9:01 pm

How does having better balanced skills and perks prevent you from having those characters you mentioned knock knock?

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 1:32 pm

Thanks guys :biggrin:

But now I mean it....Good Night.

A "50 year old" troll.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 8:57 am

Next game I develop, I'm not going to put in any of the variables for balance because after all, it's not my job, it's yours as the player.

Instead I'm just going to give you a PokeDex/Beastiary that allows you to use sliders to decide what level enemies are, what health they have, their damage, etc, etc.

Then I'm going to give you the entire game's inventory, also complete with sliders, and all of the abilities and spells written in a journal, again with sliders.

Then, you can choose what level and how much gold you start as.

And you can choose to start the game with all quests already completed or not.

Wow. That is amazing. It sounds like a "do-it-yourself" game development kit. I sure hope nobody tries to pass it off as an actual, completed game!

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 12:25 pm

Wow. That is amazing. It sounds like a "do-it-yourself" game development kit. I sure hope nobody tries to pass it off as an actual, completed game!

Oh it will be an actual game! It's an actual game because you, the player, have the task of setting the challenge for yourself rather than me coming up with a system of challenges.

Oh! I know... I'll give you guys TETRIS that allows you to select each and every block that comes down... and the ability to just auto-clear the screen if the game gets too hard, or the ability to instantly lose even with a blank screen.

Y'know, to challenge yourself.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 1:04 pm

Hah!

Well, as to actual solutions to the issues, I would hope something like this could be done, though I find it probably unlikely.

Spoiler

Things that could be done maybe relatively simply
1. Enchantments don't stack. Whichever enchantment you have only accounts for the highest value, thus equipping two items with +40% one hand only counts as +40 instead of +80.

2. Prevent fortify restoration potions from affecting anything but healing amount of spells. Currently they also affect enchantments on equipped armor, sigil stone blessings, basically any buff or effect mechanically considered to be restoration.

3. For anyone who really, absolutely needs the overpowered items, I suppose being allowed to grandfather them may be possible, or in a best case scenario, allow balance changes to be selected separately from essential fixes.

4. Diminishing returns on values. This could possibly be implemented instead to counter high powered smithing and enchantments, by making it require astronomical amounts of increases to equal what was formerly one point of increase. For example, improving a daedric sword to deal 40% more damage before enchants could require 100 effective smithing skill, while increasing it to 41 requires 350, 42 requiring 500 etc. This would also apply to armor rating and enchantment values.

Harder to implement, probably not going to happen outside of mods
1. Contested checks on all attributes, skills, and effects. For example, against an enemy higher level than the player, the player's effective skills, resists, outgoing damage, and armor value are all degraded due to the enemy being more powerful. This would reach critical mass at around 8 levels...at which point the enemy is drastically more powerful than normal, where an enemy 12 levels higher or more is utterly impossible to kill alone. This would also serve to make the ability and skill enhancing potions and enchantments more valuable and viable.

2. Give enemies access to more perks, spells, racial abilities, etc and give them and creatures an actual armor rating value instead of just bloating their health.

3. Implement control effect immunity timers so that stagger and other things cannot be spammed.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 12:12 pm

Ppl continue to talk of perk and skill, when is only the enemy the problem, enemy have stupid IA, only few enemy scale with your level the other stay at level they spawn, and the max is 50(except for 2-3 unique enemy have lvl more 50) the most of enemy stop to 30 , when enemy are weak and don't reach your level , does not matter what skill or perk you take, they will remain at a level less than our

Bethesda must give to use more enemy scale with level (but this create problem with new player) or give us a new difficult with enemy scale with level and better damage and resistance of enemy.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 5:30 pm

A "50 year old" troll.

JPO is not a troll, he is expressing a perfectly rational solution that you are refusing to hear.

While I completely agree that Skyrim is WAY too easy on master, let us consider the REALITY of the situation...

Bethesda did actually indicate they were going to address balance issues. Will they be nerfing skills? Adding/tweaking difficulty levels? How long will this take them? Will they EVER manage to produce a challenging game?

Meanwhile, what am I supposed to do? Wait?

I want to play Skyrim, and I want to play Skyrim so it provides a challenge. Therefore my only option at this point in time is to address the balance issue MYSELF. While I do not feel I should have to do this (because the devs obviously ought to have done this already), I am not particularly concerned with the rights and wrongs of it all, what I need is a playable game RIGHT NOW.

So JPO is in fact providing a very sensible solution. He is saying without perks the game is more balanced, which is precisely what I am looking for. Is it an ideal solution? Hell no. Do I like the idea? Hell no. Is balance even my responsibility? Hell no.

But what is the alternative? I use an XBox 360 so I cannot rely on mods to sort this out. All we can possibly do is try to figure out solutions to the problem of balance ourselves, while hoping that Bethesda tackle the balance issues sooner rather than later. What other option is there?

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 4:44 pm

JPO is not a troll, he is expressing a perfectly rational solution that you are refusing to hear.

While I completely agree that Skyrim is WAY too easy on master, let us consider the REALITY of the situation...

Bethesda did actually indicate they were going to address balance issues. Will they be nerfing skills? Adding/tweaking difficulty levels? How long will this take them? Will they EVER manage to produce a challenging game?

Meanwhile, what am I supposed to do? Wait?

I want to play Skyrim, and I want to play Skyrim so it provides a challenge. Therefore my only option at this point in time is to address the balance issue MYSELF. While I do not feel I should have to do this (because the devs obviously ought to have done this already), I am not particularly concerned with the rights and wrongs of it all, what I need is a playable game RIGHT NOW.

So JPO is in fact providing a very sensible solution. He is saying without perks the game is more balanced, which is precisely what I am looking for. Is it an ideal solution? Hell no. Do I like the idea? Hell no. Is balance even my responsibility? Hell no.

But what is the alternative? I use an XBox 360 so I cannot rely on mods to sort this out. All we can possibly do is try to figure out solutions to the problem of balance ourselves, while hoping that Bethesda tackle the balance issues sooner rather than later. What other option is there?

Perhaps if he had actually put it like that rather than simply spouting the same line over and over again, one would not regard him as a troll.

What you have said is actually a feasible reasoning behind limiting yourself.

He, however, never bothered to explain his reasoning.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 9:45 pm

I'll adapt to it like I did this.

Or I'll go play something else.

I didn't like the way Dragon Age 2 went...so I didn't even bother buying the game.

A well designed game does not require the player to choose not to use certain features in order to present a challenge. Think about time honored games like Chess, Poker, Billiards, or even more modern ones like Risk, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan. These games are great because of the way they are balanced.

No chess player would ever tell you that the way to make the game challenging is to avoid using the knights, or queen, or one bishop. You don't balance the challenge of a game by choosing to avoid using certain game mechanics. You balance the challenge of the game by finding an opponent to suit your skill level, and then you bring all the tools of the game to bear against that opponent. In Skyrim, the "opponent" is the difficulty level. There is no difficulty level that is challenging for any player that uses all the game's features. There should be.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:52 pm

Might say it's more an issue of the master difficulty not being tough enough.
Oblivion max difficulty was enemies did 5x damage and you do 1/5 of default
Skyrim is 2x and 1/2.
Oblivion used an slider who made it hard to remember the difficulty you played on if you changed it.
Solution might be to add some new levels on the dropdown, grandmaster 4x and 1/4 and insane 8x and 1/8.

I agree this might actually be the most realistic option by now.

I don't think it's realistic to hope that Bethesda will actually restructure skills and perks and all that. That would be a major rewrite of the game mechanics.

A somewhat more realistic hope is for them to jigger the numbers a bit to rebalance existing skills and perks and whatnot, to adjust their relative strengths and to make it take a good bit longer, for example, to get smithing to 100, and to reduce the power of, say, enchanting-enhancing alchemical potions, in order to make the smithing-enchanting-alchemy loop take more time to grind through. This is entirely possible.

But you're probably right that the simplest solution would be to make Expert somehwat harder and Master quite a bit harder, so that it's difficult and challenging no matter what you do or how you grind skills. I think Master should be a challenge even if people do the (nearly) impossible and get every single skill to 100 and (actually impossible) take all the perks.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 7:48 pm

A well designed game does not require the player to choose not to use certain features in order to present a challenge. Think about time honored games like Chess, Poker, Billiards, or even more modern ones like Risk, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan. These games are great because of the way they are balanced.

No chess player would ever tell you that the way to make the game challenging is to avoid using the knights, or queen, or one bishop. You don't balance the challenge of a game by choosing to avoid using certain game mechanics. You balance the challenge of the game by finding an opponent to suit your skill level, and then you bring all the tools of the game to bear against that opponent. In Skyrim, the "opponent" is the difficulty level. There is no difficulty level that is challenging for any player that uses all the game's features. There should be.

Well, I actually used chess as an example at another point. People often do handicap themselves against less-experienced players by giving up a queen or other piece, but the point is - who actually wants to do that? If you have two potential opponents to play with, assuming no outside influences like one is a friend or something, and one is on you level and requires no handicap to present a challenge, and the other is a good bit behind you and requires you to give up a queen or rook or bishop in order to be challenged, who would choose the lesser player? Nobody.

And that's the problem, apparently, with Skyrim's difficulty: people are having to handicap themselves even on Master difficulty just to get a challenge. That isn't me, by the way. I'm playing on Adept with 100 smithing but no enchanting, and it still presents a challenge. Elder dragons can take half my health with a single blast, and that's with me wearing legendary steel plate and a heavy armor skill in the eighties. But others clearly have found that they have to handicap themselves to be challenged even on the harder skill levels, and I find that unacceptable.

Now mind, this is by no means an overwhelming criticism of Skyrim in my book. I'm a rather outspoken fan of Skyrim, and I suppose I've probably ticked off at least a couple Morrowind fans in debates at times, but I have to admit that it sounds like game balance is a legitimate issue with Skyrim, at least in terms of overall difficulty. I still think the people that say Destruction is underpowered are just doing something wrong, because I've also seen a number of threads about people saying they're conquering the world with a Destruction mage.

So if a fairly hard-core fan of Skyrim like me is supporting those who say there's a balance issue, I figure I'm being reasonably objective about it, since it runs counter to my usual (knee-jerk) tendency to dismiss a fair portion of criticism of the game as either whining or else nostalgia for Morrowind.

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 1:35 pm

...or even more modern ones like Risk, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan. These games are great because of the way they are balanced.

You just mentioned three modern games that are notoriously unbalanced...

» Fri Jun 08, 2012 7:10 am

You just mentioned three modern games that are notoriously unbalanced...

Not sure that this is entirely a question of being unbalanced, but my best friend and I used to play Monopoly constantly as kids...until one day, we realized that the bulk of the game came down to the roll of the dice, with your decisions being relatively unimportant. Any time you landed on an unowned piece of property, the correct answer to the question "Should I buy this" is always "yes". Meaning, once you discover this key strategic point, there are no more decisions to make - there's no actual judgement call there, since you never want to not buy an unpurchased property - and so the only thing left is the chance roll of the dice, determining whether you end up buying good properties or poor.

Saving your money until later to see if you land on good properties later just ended up with the other guy severaly out-owning you in property, and you just have a lump of cash sitting in the bank getting whittled away every time you landed on his properties.

We quit playing after that.

Not sure how Risk and Settlers of Catan are unbalanced, though.