Yes, that's one of the problems with the difficulty settings that Bethesda has been using, all it does is affect your enemies. If it also affected things like making things more expensive to buy, making less money when you sell something, affecting the rarity of certain items etc. then it would be much more effective at adjusting the overall difficulty of a game. For instance in Fallout, I didn't see the sense in getting more XP per kill as you bumped up the difficulty. That seemed rather counter-intuitive to me.

Indeed. You should've earned less XP in higher difficulty levels, you just got overpowered sooner.

Like the (obvious and expected) majority I voted for yes, since FO3 was vastly superior in this particular case.

I found that the difficulty went up with Oblivion from morrowind, that's the whole point of the Levelscaling, that's why it's bad. The lack of difficulty in Morrowind kind of meant that you could enjoy the story more, it wasn't like it was good for it's combat anyway. I usually can't understand that people found Oblivion easy, because once you reach level 13, the mountain lions show up, and can at that time kill you in about 6 hits depending on your class, and if you then play on hard, which people obviously should do if they wanted difficulty, then meeting mountain lions is pretty much the end of the game.

Not necessarily. The difficulty slider isn't for difficulty but for enemy HP. A sligth mispelling there

That is one of the very few things i find worth ranting about. Bethesda's "difficulty" (massive sarcasm quotes) slider. And New Vegas "hardcoe" (hypermassive sarcasm quotes) mode too :lmao:

I'm pretty sure I've never seen such a mixed reaction to a subject like the challenge of a game. Some of you are in the same boat with me, saying it was too easy, others are saying it was too hard. I'm just going to have to post some vids on YouTube of my Oblivion character standing there taking his five-minute beating on purpose from the Palace Guards. I DO NOT GIVE A SINGLE RAT TURD ABOUT ANY EXCUSES ANYBODY MAY HAVE. EVEN IF I WAS SOME KIND OF IMMORTAL GAMING SAVANT (most anybody who has played me in online shooters can tell you I obviously am not) -

ANY GAME WHERE THIS IS POSSIBLE WITHOUT CHEATING IS FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN. END OF STORY.

You all can say whatever you want about the diversity in character builds, balancing an open world, or whatever. Being able to get that strong is stupid. WHY SHOULD I WANT TO LEVEL UP MORE IF I CAN ALREADY PWN EVERYTHING IN THE GAME IN A MATTER OF SECONDS?

Now, it's time for some fun quotes by Todd Howard: "It's similar now to what we did in Fallout 3," he revealed, "where we changed it a lot. We now have the ability to set a dungeon and say that 'this dungeon is this hard', so when you come in it will look at you and adjust its difficulty level. But it might be much harder, just because of what it is.

"It also saves the state of the monsters. So if you come in and at the side it says, 'okay, this is going to be hard for your character' - and it might be much easier because of how we set it - but it won't change its difficulty if you leave."

I wonder how many times during Oblivion they said, "this is going to be hard for your character". I should reiterate that INFLATING ENEMY HP TO ABSURD LEVELS DOES NOT CREATE A CHALLENGE IF MY OWN CHARACTER CAN ALSO GET PUMMELED FOR FIVE MINUTES STRAIGHT.

As the post I replied to mentioned, maybe the darn NES games did ruin me. But what I really think is most game devs make their games for puzzies. It seems like 90% of games nowadays give you automatic Health regen, at least they're not going that route. I'm gonna say this part once again: If a game doesn't have any challenge, it's boring. Exploration is only worth so much if it's being done completely uncontested. If I see a group of say, 5 high- level Daedra Lords, I should be going "oh snap! look out!" Instead of "yawn, chop, chop, chop, yawn" ad nauseam. Other than the joys of exploration, boredom and tedium is all Oblivion was after the first 20 hours. This would be fine in a lot of other games that don't take 300+ hours to finish the game. I don't consider the game "finished" until you at least have completed the MQ and all the major guilds and DLC. Not to mention that most RPG games actually do get HARDER NEAR THE END, not ridiculously easy.

I always thought the whole point of an RPG was leveling up your character so that you can defeat a great challenge at the end, not so you can steamroll every enemy in the game except a handful of super-bosses. But whatever, I've got good people like Arwen to back me up. Console-only players with RPG skills, it sure sux to be you.

@ Arwen, I do know how time-consuming these kind of mods are to make. I'm hoping you will have a lot of free time on your hands come this winter. I, for one, will be desperately in need of your services.

@ Daydark, you mean the Mountain Lions that were two-to-three-hit kills for my characters at Level 10 or so? I'm starting to wonder if my copy of Oblivion was defective.... :shrug: BTW, I always play on Hard mode, Very Hard just makes the combat too tedious, especially against player-leveled Ogres and Goblins. Does all that HP actually make those Ogres and Goblins challenging? Maybe a little bit, but not enough to matter if your character basically can't even take damage.


And now, for the whole reason I made this thread:

BETHESDA, IF YOU ARE READING THIS, CAN YOU PLEASE GIVE SKYRIM REAL DIFFICULTY SETTINGS THAT DO MORE THAN INFLATE ENEMY HP FOR NO REASON? THE DIFFICULTY SLIDERS IN OBLIVION, FALLOUT 3 AND NEW VEGAS HAVE INVOKED THE WRATH OF SITHIS FOR COMPLETELY svckING. That is all, I'm going to shut up now. :banghead:

Again, glad to voice the sentiment for you and any others who have it. :foodndrink:

I agree with the Fallout 3 and New Vegas difficulty system much more. The world felt as if it were really a dangerous place to wander, as opposed to Oblivion, where everyone and everything was scaled to be either your exact equal, or a little weaker. Fallout 3 had very dangerous enemies while you were at your lower levels, just starting out, and ones that were a good idea to avoid and run away from! In Oblivion, even at medium difficulty during the first 7 to 10 levels, the enemies could be handled pretty well, but in later levels, they got ridiculously tough to the point it took minutes and minutes to down your opponent, even if they were just humans or elves.

All right. So you go to The Shivering Isles. You take on the mantle of Sheogorath The Madgod, Daedra of Madness. . . you come back into Nirn. . . and get you buttocks handed to you on a platter, lightly charred with an apple in the center by a couple of palace guards. Make sense? Not so much.

I partly agree with you about the five Daedra overlords. . . problem is, in Oblivion, Daedra Captains had a level cap. . . and GOBLIN WARLORDS DIDN"T!!! You had Goblins who could beat the snot out of Dremora Princes, and that JUST AIN'T FRIGGIN RIGHT!!!

I am fine with Dremora Princes being very tough. . . but they should also be relatively rare and special. They SHOULD respawn, I wouldn't want to rid the world of them, God knows. But they should only be found As ruling oligarchies in the larger ancient fortresses etc. And Goblin warlords should not be a match for them or for you after the 25th level. If a level 37 Archmage can't wipe out at least four or five goblin warlords with a single all incenrating explosion of lightning and flame. . . . well that's also a broken f***ing RPG. :brokencomputer: :banghead: :swear: :flame:

You had the mad god's powers only in his realm, once you went back to nirn, you became a mortal again.

Without wading through eight pages of replies, I'm with the majority. I thought it kind of silly that TES4's world leveled up with you. Granted, the intent was to give a challenge to the uber-powerful, but I think it went a bit overboard. Fallout's scaling system worked a bit better, IMO. Any scaling system is going to be imperfect, but Todd and crew moved in the right direction with FO3's system. As he has said in countless interviews, after every game they step back and take a look at what they did right and what could have been better. I suspect that TESV's system will work a bit better than FO3's. It will have its annoyances and imperfections, but it will be an improved version. I doubt that anyone can come up with a system that will please everyone, but I have faith.

The mantra: Ohhhmmmm., Trust Todd. Ohhhhmmmm. TESV will kick a**. Ohhhhmmmm.

Yeah, It takes the special out of a powerful enemies if every enemy is bad ass. Smog wouldn't have been so impressive if everything Oakenshields party ran into was a dragon, by the time the reader got to Smog he or she would have been bored.

Also like I said, a bandit in glass armor is rather silly, the point of being a bandit, is 1) your poor and desperate, 2) the mark has got nicer stuff then you got. If your wearing armor whose collected value could buy up a small town, then why would you pester some townsfolk on his way to visit relatives in a nearby town?

Seeing your rant, again, about how weak the guards are (well, or how strong you were) reminded me that part of Francesco's scaling mod for OB had some optional changes for guards. So I went to the readme to see what it was....




Yes, Francesco's scaling mod had an option to make the guards weaker!

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I really do think that your experience with Oblivion was not typical of the playerbase. Sorry.




(But, again - yes, a better difficulty slider would be a good thing. Not that I'd use it.)

My hope is that Skyrim will not require the amount of Tweaks that FO3 needed. But, from what little that we know about Skyrim so far, I fear that the default game won't be all that challenging for me . . . so I'll likely be modding the game. My skills are average at best (I've been modding for less than 2 years), but I'm slowly getting better at it. It took me a LOT less time to create my NV Tweaks, but it was still 5 months before I had released all 4 of my main modules.

I'm a girl-gamer and, while I do play a LOT of games, I'm not THAT good at the combat part of these games. So it astounds me that so many here found FO3 to be a difficult game.

@ Arwen, it astounds me if anybody found Oblivion, Fallout 3, or New Vegas to be hard. IMO Bethesda's definition of a "Normal" (if they ever even intended to provide one) is like most dev's definition of Very Easy.


@ Kiralyn2000

"Yes, Francesco's scaling mod had an option to make the guards weaker!
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I really do think that your experience with Oblivion was not typical of the playerbase. Sorry. "
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-Well, shoot, maybe I am just a badass! All will bow to the mighty power of Aeoxonius! :toughninja:

yes! fallout difficulty was better for me

It's a very good thing. FO3's leveling system was miles ahead of Oblivion's.

OP, when has Bethesda ever handled difficulty well? What's the difference between an easy game and a hard game to you, having to hit an enemy for an extra minute before it dies? I expect nothing more intuitive out of Skyrim than the standard difficulty slider we've seen in past Bethesda game - the far left makes you a god among men, while the far right turns even the humblest mudcrab into a meat-shield. I'm going to enjoy Skyrim, to be sure, but I don't expect to be overly challenged by it.

That being said, here's hoping that enemies don't simply disappear from a dungeon once you've cleared it out like they did in Fallout 3. I like being able to clear a dungeon, come back in a week, and clear it again with updated enemies.

No thanks, that makes absolutely no sense to me. I felt Fallout 3 was vastly superior to Oblivion just because it didn't respawn everything all the time. They may have gone a bit to the opposite extreme in some areas, but overall it made a lot more sense. That's why I use SPAWN in my Oblivion game, that automatic respawning of each area every 3 days svcked big time IMO.

The difference between an easy game and a hard game has nothing to do with how many hits bad guys can take. It has to do with when you see an Oblivion Gate open, and 2 Xivilai, 2 Daedra Lords, a few Deadroths, and a huge Spider coming out, I SHOULD be going, "Help me, baby Jesus!" Instead its more like - :snoring:
THAT IS MY PROBLEM WITH SKYRIM. IF YOU THINK IT WILL BE HARDER THAN OBLIVION YOU ARE WRONG, THEY HAVE SAID PEOPLE COMPLAINED ABOUT OBLIVION'S DIFFICULTY AND THEY RESPONDED TO IT. THEREFORE, IT WILL BE EASIER, NO MATTER HOW YOU LOOK AT IT.


There are actually some Bethesda games that I found challenging, but it's been quite a long time. Morrowind could also become that easy once you reached a high enough level, but not within the first 20 hours of play. Some of the lesser known games like Call of Cthulu actually are pretty challenging, I really don't know where Bethesda lost their way, but I would have to assume it was during the making of Oblivion.

@ Kiralyn2000, I was thinking about what you said about my experience being untypical of the player base, but they only place I've ever heard ANYONE say Oblivion was challenging is on the forums. Shortly after I made this thread, I asked ALL of my real-life friends as well as those on my XBL friends list who had OB in their achievements (I sent out a M2AF) asking if they thought Oblivion's difficulty was too easy, too hard, or just right. EVERY RESPONSE was that it was TOO EASY. Whether they were stealthily one-shotting everything with their bows, charging in with full-on warrior classes, or using the ridiculously overowered spell-creation system (which includes a FRIGGING INVINCIBILTY SPELL they never even bothered to patch). So, I'm not the only one, I guess all my friends are "elite gamers" just like me. :rofl:


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As soon as Skyrim was announced, I was expecting them to say they heard all the complaints from fans about Oblivion being ENTIRELY TOO EASY, instead, they're acting like people actually asked for it to be even easier...so I'm not only let down by Bethesda for a number of reasons, I'm also disappointed in the Elder Scrolls player base, which apparently contains more noobs than I thought. :facepalm:

The basic fact of the matter is that the Elder Scrolls games will never be "Nintendo Hard". So, if you get your kicks playing Ninja Gaiden, I Want To Be The Guy, or Devil May Cry on max difficulty - you're going to be disappointed. Beth is never going to make the game you want.

You've nailed a huge part of it right there.

Generally, lesser foes pose threats by numbers, leaving pure power threats to greater numbers.

If any of the Goblins or Wargs had been as powerful as Gandalf, most of us would have said "what a load of bull," and closed the book, unless there was a REALLY good explanation. Gandalf was clearly far more powerful than any goblin, and could wipe out dozens of them with ease. But when the company was being hounded by hundreds of goblins and giant, evil wolves/wargs. . . well, that could still be a problem. If any random Goblin was a match for the Great Wizard, we wouldn't have thought much of him as a Wizard. Likewise, if a massive Dragon or a Balrog lurked around every corner, or were frequently encountered in huge numbers, we wouldn' think as much of Dragons and Balrogs.

In Tolkien's original ideas for The Silmarillion there, he imagined hundreds of Balrogs. And then he thought better of it. He took a moment and realized that The Balrogs were the Demon Lieutenants of Melkor, co-captains, along with Sauron, in the service of Melkor The Morgoth, The Dark Enemy of The World. As such, he decided that there would never have been huge numbers of them. They were elite: enormously powerful, dreadfully dangerous, and extremely rare.

It really comes down to what people are playing for. Most of us want some challange in the game, but while most of us are primarily playing for a combination of IMMERSION in a convincing, reasonably consistent, plausible (within the confines of its cosmology) secondary world, as well as for ADVANCEMENT of character. A smaller number are playing primarily for the challange, but constantly increasing difficulty ad infinitum can, if not carefully handeled, often strain credulity and plausibility, as well as making advancement virtually obsolete. That is fine for fighter games like Street Fighter, and for linear obstacle/monster challange type games like Castlevania and Mario Brothers, but for an RPG where you are supposed to be immersed in an open, essentially living game world. The linear formula of tougher bosses and monsters for every new dungeon doesn't add up as well in such a non linear, open world format.

I haven't been paying attention to what's being said about Skyrim in a while. :confused: Was something said about that in a podcast?

@ Nightblade_Y, I've listened to several podcasts with Todd Howard and a few other people on the development team, and IMO it seems like they are saying Oblivion was supposed to be the same difficulty all the way through, since the world leveled up with you. Now, they are saying the difficulty should vary. That is most defnitely a good thing, but Oblivion was too easy for some people. That leaves only a small percentage of the areas in the game that will be designated as Todd said, "hard for your character" (those areas are probably mostly dungeons). So one would assume that most of the areas would be what they consider "average difficulty", and the remaining minority would be split between "easy for your character" and "hard for your character". I want there to be excitement and challenge throughout the majority the game (many RPG's have achieved this).

I don't want the only true challenges in the game to be exiled to a minority of remote, story-insignificant dungeons that are deemed "hard for your character". That's the route it sounds like they're going to me.

And in the Game Informer reveal, Todd did say that at least some of the dragons are possible one-hit kills if you utilize the dragon shouts properly, wasn't it something about using slow-mo and then stabbing the dragon in the neck with some special killing blow? So there went my hopes of epic, grueling, desperate struggles for survival fighting against dragons. I really wouldn't mind if the dragons were damage-sponges, honestly, if they go down in a single strike (as mighty as that strike may be), who really cares that you even killed it? Oh, you activated a buff and one-hitted something? That's so cool... :cookie:

As i have previously stated, and i still stand by this, you cant speculate about a difficulty slider with the game not being out yet, with everything todd howard has said so far, i can say that we will have a very well balanced game (as of right now)
Trust beth and todd
they know what theyre doing.