Indeed my friends as a gamer who has played blizzard game for far too long, I have something called the "Game Balancing Syndrome" or the "omgIjustpwnedgod" this syndrome forces me to think about game balance every time I play.

My question is don't you think that putting a "cap" on some things in the next ES game would make it much more fun/challenging?

example:

1- "OMG fire elemental attacks me, I must fight with ice magicz, Oh wait...... I drink zis potion *gulp*, haha fire elemental tickles me I have 150% resistance to fire lawl"

aside from the silly story, what I mean is that maybe fire resistance should never go above 75%, absorb magic should never go above 25%, and reflect is an active spell that reflect 100% of the time ONLY ONCE (per cast), why? because whats the point if the game ALLOWS you to cheat? if you can make a potion that adds 10000life, 300% resist all then whats the point of finding gear or leveling skills or doing quests, you just spam fatigue potions, make god potion go face dragon and kill him by standing their firing fire bolts at its face.

I really hope we see "some" kind of balance this time around, because a game with no balance gets boring really fast.

In The Elder Scrolls anything can be done with magic and is only limited by the power of the Mage. I want to see no caps whatsoever. There is always room for improvement. Otherwise the game is not as fun.

You have to treat Tamriel as a real world to get the most out of it.

I agree with this guy.

Going to respond to the first post by dealing with a very specific point in it:

If you can make a potion like this then your Alchemy skill is probably already beyond godly, so being able to make "god potions" makes sense. That's more balanced than not - it makes it actually feasible to play a character with Alchemy as a central skill. I don't think you could actually make potions anywhere near as ridiculous as that in Oblivion either, but if they were overpowered in general at the lower levels of skill then that's an issue they need to deal with by changing how the ability scales so that lower Alchemy skill levels can't produce potions as good as they do, not by capping off everything the skill can do to arbitrary and insanely low levels so that the skill itself becomes virtually useless.

EDIT:
In terms of lore, there are a lot of things that can't be done at all with magic, and in more general terms it usually isn't a good idea to let this kind of thinking drive your game design. Keeping the game world in mind when creating the game's mechanics is a good thing, but letting the universe the game is set in define those mechanics entirely would almost certainly result in a terribly broken game.

I was just referring to a post made a while ago that everyone agreed with. I know they will never make the game capable of everything magic can do lore wise. I am wondering though what magic can not do? I assume it can not resurrect people from the dead. It can, however, prolong your life...

If you could only specialise in a few skill then this mage problem wouldn't be a problem...

It is not currently a problem.

As long as NPC's can't get ridicilously high attributes...
*Cough* Gaenor *Cough*

I'll be happy.

It can prolong it, but as far as I know cannot prolong it indefinitely without the help of Aedra, Daedra, or some artifact related to one or the other. Actual shapeshifting's also impossible as far as I know - I'm pretty sure they explicitly stated in one of the books that one of the Aedra makes it impossible (again, without the Aedra or Daedra to assist), since I remember having a bit of a chuckle that they'd written out an excuse for the fact that the shapeshifting spells in Daggerfall didn't work.

Hehe, I was wondering why that was...

Again, I had no reliable source for my information and I can see how it is wrong.

Mankar Camoran was supposed to be over 400 years old when he died. The Commentaries on the Mysterium Xarxes were written around the same time as Tiber Septim was alive according to Tar-Meena.

Disagree.. I like options over limitations. Its just another tool to use no need to cap how powerful you get if you put the time in.

I'd be against any sort of hard cap. What I wouldn't mind seeing is negative side-effects when attributes are fortified to more than, say, double their base attribute.

its a single player game..there doesnt need to be MMO level balancing here..

no caps!! anywhere.
i dont even like the fact that skills and abilities are capped at 100.

This

who is gaenor?


this what?

You do not want to know...

This is the Elder Scrolls, so what the heck, gimme a god character.

If this were Fallout on the other hand.....

The luckiest wood elf in the world. Don't you already know?



Look at the quote :wink_smile:

I agree with the OP. Seeing how some people want god characters, though, maybe it should be made optional.

Currently, it IS a problem. Remember the Morrowind Playthrough video where someone beat the main quest within a couple of minutes? The base of this was creating a potion that increased the intelligence, then creating a better potion that increased the intelligence et cetera until the intelligence was at over nine thousand - then any potion could be created with extreme effects.
This is described in lore, though, in a book, so I would not completely remove it. I'd limit it though: For example, an attribute should not possibly get over 200 with magical means. You could still use the intelligence potion trick, but it wouldn't make you as strong as a god anymore.

To give you a logical reason: If it is a known fact that intelligence potion stacks can be used in Tamriel - why has noone else become a god-like fighter by these means then? Anyone who read the book in question would be able to easily re-create the effect, given a basic understanding of alchemy. This means just about every mage in the game would be capable of becoming god-like. Why did it not happen, if it wasn't for some sort of limit to this?

Imo it is completely illogical NOT to have caps. On that note, I'm a low-power player who likes to be just as strong as my average enemy. I can see how some high-power players would want to be able to actually become godlike, which is why, if by any chance we ever got a hardcoe mode (why call it so anyway... let's just call it "high difficulty setting", like in every other game), this should be part of it.

If we do NOT get such a mode, it should be still added to the game for the sake of logic.

I like this idea but still there should not be level caps. They could come up with a lore reason why the Mages Guild has banned doing this or something or how Akatosh throws a fireball at those who try to become god like but unless they do that, no level caps.

You'd have Akatosh throwing fireballs at the player character then, though ^^

I hate when people (and I'm not having a dig at you, just going off on a slight tangent) bring stuff like this up as if it adds some sort of substance to their argument. People doing that are making a conscious decision to go to some effort to exploit a game mechanic. It is something that, in quite possibly a thousand hours of gameplay, I never did in Morrowind. That an exploit exists is not a problem if the system being exploited is otherwise sound. There will always be unintentionally available exploits, they just need to make sure they're not exploits people are likely to stumble upon in everyday play.

Why does it need to be balanced? It's a single player game.

Because it's considered good game design? Pick any singleplayer racing game where you unlock faster and faster cars. Do you still face the competition you did in the beginning? No, the competition scales up too with you so you actually have a challenge. A GMs approach is simply to kill a character that grows too strong. But in a dice based game the player creates a new character and continues the game. That doesn't work here. Also you can't scale your enemies beyond comprehension just to match your godlike powers. We only have two options left; capping our abilities or multiply number of foes. I tend to quit games that use the last approach.

How much fun was cliff racers at the endgame of MW?

I don't know any other game that allows this kind of nonsense. And the worst part is, I feel like I'm forced into exploiting multiplier raises in order to have a character that can survive the scaled foes. So choosing not to use skills because it doesn't fit the character I want to be, isn't really an option anymore.