Thinking back, I must admit I was impressed by one puzzle for a Mages' Guild quest involving a crystal and moving rings on the ceiling. Can't remember what quest, but that was a good one, as far as adventure game puzzles go anymore. Just about right in difficulty, with a perfect amount of trial and error to get the answer right. No journals, no obvious hints, just the quest giver telling you how to interact with the crystal. Ahhh... Perfect. :disco:

Well if it's a case of 'dumbing' it down for 'average' consumers, then they should just dump it out of the game completely. In it's current incarnation it's just tedious.

I can't believe people are this dumb though. I must live in a really intelligent community, as like I said, I was solving harder puzzles in legend of zelda when I was 10.

Are Bethesda secretly trying to make dumb people think they are smart, and lauding about it in their evil tower of production? I hope so, atleast that gives it a little credence!

As for the guy who's friend had to google it after all the clues about the answer being in the palm of the hand.... Wow, just wow! He must have been flying through it and not took any notice, that is the only way he wouldn't have got it. A chimpanzee wouldn't struggle with that puzzle, and would find more stimulation going back to scratching it's [censored]!

Haha lord Rael! That one actually had me stumped! Know why? The game doesn't render the light rays on my graphics card.

I realised this after about an hour of different combinations and looking for clues!

Well atleast there was one really hard puzzle, even if it wasn't intentional!

I never played Fable 3, but I remember in Fable 2, your character couldn't even DIE. You'd just get knocked unconscious, and then an explosion would knock everyone away while you got up with full health. You didn't get any XP for that fight you "lost", but there's still no consequences.

You could literally play the game one-handed and blindfolded and still eventually win. [censored], you could play with your FEET and still make progress! :banghead:

I never really considered the Elder Scrolls games to be puzzle solving games.

Well that's fine jRaskell, if it isn't done properly, just don't do it. Currently its just a pointless time waster...

A problem is that IQ is based off the average of all people, so if everyone was a lot smarter, the average IQ would still be 100.

And then there's those among us who have lots of trouble with some tasks, but are genius at others. If puzzles are the troublesome ones for you, you got a problem. I agree I'd much rather would've had a bunch of good clues lying around hidden somewhere though, with perhaps in a few cases it being necessary to ask an NPC what they think of a riddle and them providing a clue.

i especially liked it when there was the dead body of some scholar who spent their entire lives investigating the secrets of this ruin, tracked down the claw for you, only to die horribly because they couldn't figure out the puzzle and leave the claw and their journal for you to find .

I just tell myself the pictures are dragon pictures and like dragon words on walls, unintelligible to the common non-dragon born.

Thats why they could put the answer right in front of you, while you interpret the picture correctly, a normal person wouldn't see an "eagle", just an indistinct blob.

Thats my in-character reasoning on how these doors stay locked and I'm sticking with it..

This was by fare the best puzzle! Having to read a book to figure it out is awesome! Kept on forgetting to allow the handles to reset! There should be more puzzles of this nature I think! Preferably even more challenging!

Cerddor, that's the only way anyone can explain away these incidents-role playing around it.

I might take up your explanation, as my explanation of mentally disabled field trip gone wrong is quite immersion breaking!

I personally hate Puzzles, so I am glad they are kind of easy. However, it took me several of them before I noticed the clues to the puzzles. So, now I am waiting for the next one so I can find the clues first.

However, if they leave puzzles out of the next game, I will be a happy gamer. If I want a puzzle, I will play Prince of Persia or Tomb Raider or Castlevania or Metroid or........

Just out of interest and completely irrelevant, what platform do you play on CCNA?

This isn't a puzzle game; most of the puzzles are just difficult enough to make you stop and think for a minute or so when you first start. I didn't know the answer was on the claw my first time and only really found the pattern on the claw by accident. The puzzles aren't the challenging part of the game; they're just a very slight aside.

Also, the dead bodies around the puzzles are probably just people who pulled the lever without realizing there was a puzzle involved; something I also did on occasion on my first play.

Here's the thing about the puzzles: they are literally meant to ensure that the doors can only be opened by someone with a working brain.

As explained in the ingame book http://uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Death_of_a_Wanderer:



The mistake you're all making lies in assuming that the bandits and the like that you end up fighting against have functioning minds. Given their tendency to suicide-charge someone in full Daedric gear despite having leather armor and iron weapons, I think we can safely rule that possibility out.

Play the Portal series? Meanwhile true Nords bonk all their problems with a stick.

Ah so they put some lore in a book to justify their laziness. It is quite amusing that some people get stuck on them though!

@Gomer, that's not the point if the thread. I'm not calling for more hard puzzles, I'm simply saying do it right or not at all. Either way, I'll be happy, just not this time consuming, pointless bore.

I got all hyped when they first showed the demo with the golden claw quest.

I had visions of all kinds of items with little secrets on them.

Imagine finding an extremely rare one of a kind weapon with someones name etched onto the blade. Now imagine that by examining this blade/blunt/whatever you would unlock dialogue options to ask people about this person. Now imagine finding out that he/she/it is a reclusive smith who can craft interesting/unique weapons for a hefty sum of coin or a series of quests.

Too bad all that 3d modeling of items was simply to put 3 symbols on some dragon claw keys. Yeah, the "puzzles" are pretty insultingly dumb. The only puzzle I thought was relatively neat was the one where you inscribe that dwemer lexicon with the big planetary thing for septimus sigwhatever for the Oghma Infinium quest (And for the record, I completed that by blindly pushing the buttons until I succeeded).

Other than that, pretty much every dungeon puzzle consists of:
1) See symbol pillars or dragon claw door.
2) Look around room for pillar order or look at claw for symbol order.
3) Puzzle complete.

They should have saved all the time and resources they spent on all that fancy 3d modeling and spent it on bug testing and optimization in my opinion. All we have to show for it is fancy load screens and horribly boring puzzles.

PC




Yes, I have to wonder about those people. Then again, if they had a clue, they would not be bandits, they would have a real trade.

omfg so many whiners.

People aren't unintelligent, you are just narrow-minded. It's all too easy to visit the internet today if a puzzle is hard, so Bethesda WANTS you to be able to solve the riddles on the fly. With load times on the ps3 for example it would be so tedious if you had to walk around and gather all journals you find, in hopes of finding the key to the puzzle you happened to fall upon 50 hours back. There is a million items in this game and so many places you can go, that if every clue to every puzzle was hidden away, even you OVERINTELLIGENT guys, would go insane.

I for example happened upon a cave. First thing I see is an puzzle entrance to a nordic tomb and next to it is the ruby dragon claw. This was before I knew that the answer could be found on the claw, and since i couldn't solve the puzzle with trial and error i left the cave. Now 50 hours later i know the answer, but I don't know which cave that was, because there's SCORES of them. Get my point?

I'm probably 75 % done with the game and I've played for almost 200 hours. Why are you people so greedy for more content?

Bethesda has never been great at designing a dungeon. But I do think Skyrim contains their best so far.

I do think what can be considered a "puzzle" isn't just a few stones to turn. It should be mentioned that there are a few different puzzles as well. There are at least two crystal align puzzles in the major quest chains. And you can't forget all of the booby traps. Still, all of these types of puzzle are usually easily handled in the game. Trigger plates might as well be glowing bright orange.

This is more of a symptom of modern dungeon design than Bethesda's fault. MMOs and action RPGs have left gamers comfortable with plowing their way through rooms full of bad guys rather than having to think about riddles and obstacles. They want to keep following the breadcrumbs and progressing into cooler looking armor than to actually use their brains.

I miss the days of classic dungeons when you would find a book of strange symbols, a lever, and a pile of rocks and would some how have to figure out how to open the gate without the room exploding.

Remixofcyrodiil- try reading the thread. All we are saying is do it right or not at all. Either way is good and better than half arsed attempts at puzzle design. If they want us to fly through, great, just put a button on the door.

As for you not getting what the claw was for...well that says it all really.

I guess I can agree on variety of puzzle types being on the low end. But I don't think I'd want them to be plain difficult/impossible to solve for most gamers. In dice games puzzles where a lot harder, but we often had a lot more brainpower working on them, and a GM to provide the needed clues in a good fashion if we were ever stuck.

I admit I had to use solves to get through some of the harder puzzles/riddles in Bards Tale (ages ago ) and even some of the more difficult (navigational) puzzles in Daggerfall. To me, being able to solve easy puzzles is more fun than having to cheat through hard ones.


Indeed. That puzzles have to suit many. It's an impossible puzzle (excuse the pun) for the devs to solve brilliantly - there is no perfect middle on this one...

"The answer is in the palm of your hand" :thumbsup:

Go to Ygnol Barrow. That puzzle was quite interesting at first I didn't get it, but then went OH.