you think fallout 3 u leveled too fast?

NEW VEGAS was too easy lmfao

The whole point I was trying to make is that out of the last several "triple-A" RPG titles I played, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and NV were the easiest unless you count Fable (which to me is more of an "adventure" style game, like Zelda.) I ALWAYS play my games on the default difficulty for my first complete playthrough. I have not felt the need to complain about the difficulty of Mass Effect 1 & 2, Dragon Age 1 & 2, Divinity, Two Worlds II, Risen, the list goes on. The Bethesda games are ALL ridiculously easy by comparison to any of those other games unless you just build a crappy character on purpose (i.e. putting all non-combat skills for your main skills) or something like that. Oh yeah, other than Two Worlds II, all those games were also less glitchy than Bethesda's as well. Even so, I still think the three Bethesda games (except maybe NV) are all MUCH better overall than those games, I just wish there was any kind of a combat challenge in them without having to resort to mods and console commands.

Just use a bow and arrow man. Far more reliable than a clunky old budget shooter with an outdated V.A.T.S.

Statement: Bioware RPGs are generally harder than Bethesda RPGs.

I very generally agree with that, but it doesn't change how much I enjoy either. I love them all. Except Dragon Age - :yuck:

Just to highlight the point, that Bethesda's games aren't really easy because they're designed that way, it's because they're usually designed with some unforeseen difficulty loophole, like how each pellet of a shotgun blast is calculated independently, thus Skyrocketing the damage inflicted by a critical hit.


If you actually play on Very Hard, Fallout 3 is actually a pretty rough game... Especially when you get Super Mutant Overlords with their boosted Tribeam Rifles.

New Vegas was easy, because the game was static, but on hardcoe, set on "Very Hard" The game is actually pretty nasty in parts. Things like Lakelurks and Deathclaws are capable of killing light-armored players in one or two strikes, but what makes New Vegas easy, is how overpowered the Sneak Skill is, used in conjunction with enemies poor pathfinding ability. There were some genuinely fun spots of challenge in that game. Having to do things like set up choke points with makeshift explosives to cripple the legs of Giant Radscorpions near the Nipton Rest stop. Fun!

This is what it comes down to.
There are multiple play styles. Bethesda can't cater to just one. So they cater to them all, to the best of their ability.

Edit: @The_ugly_guy_at_the_Store Didn't know about that, but generally its because of VATs.

You think the best Bethesda can do is give us that lame difficulty slider, which has no effect on the game other than a quick HP tweak. You are the one who doesn't have any faith in Bethesda if you think they can't do any better than that. They even showed they had the right idea with the hardcoe Mode in NV. I am hoping there is some kind of hardcoe mode in Skyrim, anything that will help people like me have more of a challenge besides the blatant enemy HP increase/player HP decrease. Mass Effect's difficulty levels are a good example of what I want. ME2 on Insane Mode was extremely tough. I want an actual different mode that will not just tweak the HP, but also spawn more enemies, make them more act more aggressive, and maybe even smarter. I guess I'll have to mod the game how I want it myself, just like I have had to do to wring some challenge out of Fallout 3. But since I always play my first playthrough of a new game completely unmodded, it's a bit disappointing to know my first playthrough on Skyrim will be such a breeze.

Now here's somebody I can actually relate to! Kudos to you, guy_at_the_store, for actually paying attention to the game you are spending 100+ hours playing, instead of mindlessly pulling a Leroy Jenkins each time you see an enemy then complaining that the game is too hard.

I noticed that with the shotguns too, try the Double-Barrel it's even better with a sneak attack. You can kill Deathclaws on Very Hard with one shot lol...

I am not the only one who thought Oblivion was easy, ALL my friends who played it agree with me that it was too easy. Maybe that's because a lot of my friends play online games like CoD and WoW, where your level of skill actually does matter, compared to Bethesda's single-player/no skill required games.

It is a role playing game, not a shooter. Combat is an add on to the RPG system, not the core of it.

All about you, I see.
No game company can cater to one person or one group of people. It would be like them releasing the game only on PC. Its not fair to everyone else.
I'm with you when it comes to fallout 3. I have MMM set to increased Increased spawns, etc. I always play NV with hardcoe mode on. I also have FCOM with increased spawns on for Oblivion.

Fallout 3 was probably my favourite Bethesda game anyway.

I love challenges. I was raised on the NES era of "Coin op" mentality, where a game isn't a game, unless it's an achievement to beat it, and I still believe that, if a game doesn't offer a challenge, it has fundamentally failed. That said, challenge should be optional, and that's where difficulty settings come in. But it's a delicate balancing act. Nobody wants difficulty that's delivered through cheap means, but at the same time, there's only so much you can do to create challenge with game AI. Good players are always going to be able to "Figure out" the loopholes in AI behavior. At the end of the day, a good "Difficult" game, means it demands the players focus. This is where my "High Risk" combat direction preference comes in. (Yes, I play Vanguard in Mass Effect 2). Even if you seemingly "Steamroll" over the opposition, you have to ask yourself, "Was it because I gave it my all, or was it because they were just stupid" and, a lot of the times, it's the later.

Difficulty in Skyrim needs to really hammer that home. It needs to punish every hit you take harshly. If you become a prodigy of the block mechanics, it might seem easy, but consider your focus level on an encounter, whether you took a hit or not, came out with 1% hp or 100% HP doesn't matter, what matters is that engagement hooked you from start to finish, and never felt dull.

But Elder Scrolls games have one thing working against them, and that's their open nature. When you give the player so many options, it's incredibly difficult to keep the situation equally difficulty, and rewarding across all styles of play, and balancing the game is nothing short of a nightmare, perhaps even impossible without dedicated post-release support.

TES games favour those who pure. Pure warrior, Pure mage, or pure thief. Problem was I didn't pure my first few times.

@ guy_at_the_store: Yeah, in a way I do miss those days when beating your friend's asses in some Street Fighter II not only stripped them of their dignity, it also cost them another quarter! And I remember going to school after the original Zelda came out, once word got out that I had beaten it, people all over school were asking me where to find the silver arrows lol good times...

I am totally with you on the high-risk, high-reward combat. I think that might be one of the main reasons why CoD is so popular among online shooters. It has that "quick-draw" feel to it. If Skyrim could provide even a tenth of the intensity one feels during a good round of CoD like saying "oh [censored], here comes somebody" as opposed to "oh another guard for me to two-shot but he can't hurt me at all", we'd all be good to go. When I play games, I always try my best, even if it is unnecessary to do so. Maybe playing online games against real people a lot causes that mentality, but once again IMO No Challenge = Boring Game.


@ x_death: This is true about the "pure" characters, it really hurts your stats to split things up. If you set him up right, though, a battlemage with good buffs pwns all.

fighting Deathclaws were alot better than fighting Minotaurs this is a good thing that Skyrim has Systems similar to Fallout 3

But it also has to be varied. If it is not varied, if virtually Every Enemy levels equally with you, then not only are your advancements in skill and power made obselete, practically, but enemies who should inspire a sense of mild awe and dread simply become part of the scenery, typical, common, and uneventful.

Sounds terrible.

And yeah, I was playing games in that era. Didn't do fighting games though.

(stuff like that is why I pretty much deliberately avoid both pvp-style games, and pvp-centric game players. That whole scene, and the "beat him down and teabag his corpse!" attitude it seems to encourage just isn't my cup of tea.)

My bad. I'll agree with your opinions from now on!

Well that's certainly not true. In Oblivion I always played a Spellsword, a hybrid of melee and magic. And I would invariably feel bored and unchallenged once I reached a certain point. If anything I was too good, being able to engage both aspects fairly well. I think that will not be the case with Skyrim though, with it's emphasis on Perks for character development.

"Bored and unchallenged" that's exactly what I was talking about. And yes, the battlemage (spellsword) is my favorite class to use as well. I also find it boring to focus solely on magic, combat, or stealth, I think it gives the game more variety if you mix it up when building your character. Plus the full stealth build is pretty useless, since Illusion magic is better than Sneak skill.

@Kiralyn2000, It was only terrible if you were the one losing... :toughninja:

I can definitely see Skyrim putting an end to those all-powerful hybrid classes. While we'll still be able to both magic and melee, with the perk system we'll have to make some trade offs. So a pure fighter will be much better than a hybrid at melee combat, and a pure caster will be much better at magic. That will be a good thing IMO.

Umm, obviously. It was nice not getting my ass handed to me at level 25 by Raiders like I was with Bandits in Oblivion.

you don't even need this poll to tell what everyone thinks.....so YES :hubbahubba:

That is the biggest problem I have with Bethesda games and difficulty. Sometimes I wonder whether they roll dice when they decide how to implement gameplay mechanics. I could list dozens of possibilities how to defeat an enemy 20 levels above you in Oblivion very easily without using glitches. I tried to fix most of them with mods, but as soon as I fixed one thing (either via existing mods or on my own) something else grabs my attention. And some things are very hard or time consuming to fix (plus it's no fun to fix stuff, I'd rather spend my time adding more content). That is the real problem. If they get rid of all these unwanted exploits that only exist because the game designers didn't think more than two seconds about their gameplay it wouldn't be that much of a problem.

I really love Beth games for the fantastic worlds they offer, for the huge amount of quests, NPCs, dungeons, the 1st person gameplay and for their overall quality. But most of the gameplay mechanics are, in my opinion, horribly unbalanced and thoughtlessly implemented. No matter whether it's Morrowind, Oblivion or Fallout 3. I hope it will be better in Skyrim, at least FO3 was better than Oblivion in that regard (although after Oblivion it would have been hard to implement even worse gameplay mechanics anyway).

Fallout 3 was easy but it also suffered from Bullet sponging which you also had in Oblivion with the Goblin Warlords. I think Fallout 3 did difficulty pretty well, if I had to pick one I would go with the "Wait and see group".