whats got me concerned is the difficulty slider. All it does is give enemy's more health. I hate that.
The difficulty slider should set the intelligence of the AI as well as lower everyone's damage threshold. NOT just the player, everyone.
That way you can kill people pretty quickly, but you could also be killed quickly. Leaving you no time to think through situations.

To make the combat more immersive, make it scary, make me think about what I'm going to do before I enter a situation. I don't wanna be able to chop at a guy for an hour and realize....hmm i should run now. it should be more split second decision making. If people died more quickly then you'd really havta think about what your getting into.

Also, I feel there should be a difficulty setting that effects locational damage. In Fallout you could shoot someone 13 times in the head and it wouldn't necessarily matter. A bullet is a bullet and it should kill someone as much as a sword would if you got hit in the head. Helmets should protect the head, boots should protect your feet etc.

I think Beth is taking a step in the right direction regarding arrows. Hard to find, can't carry as much, but more valuable and deadly.
Hopefully the rest of the game will be balanced this way.

please add info to this thread and feel free to organize my thoughts. :ahhh:

too late for any suggestions

Maybe replace the "difficulty" slider with a "realism" slider. At very high "realism" levels, potions take time to do their magic, and a few deft swipes with a sword can kill a man, even you. Battles will be quick and brutal, and stamina will be all-important.

well from a bit of the information we got, it seems that the developper too, though that having to strike at a meatbag for hours isn't fun.
they seem to have made it a lot more radical, and a lot tougher too.

Copy that.

Maybe not like a realism slider, more like a setting. But i dont know if it should be bundled into hardcoe mode

I love this idea. Maybe it could be a part of a hardcoe mode if not done with a slider.

I just think itd be cool to feel mortal. Its part of what makes the game fun. In oblivion, once i made the 100% chameleon suit there as no point to playing anymore. I could just wallk through anything- and it wasnt really that different from the regular game. If i pulled the difficulty slider up, it wouldnt make the game harder it'd make it longer.

Somebody made a post about feeling mortal a couple months ago, he had some good points

That wouldn't make sense, though, because generally, the idea of a difficulty slider is to make the game harder or easier for the player so players can choose a difficulty that suits them. Having raising the difficulty of the game make both you and your enemies die quicker would be counter productive as it means that increasing the difficulty wouldn't make the game harder, it would just make fights end quicker

If something like this is included, it should be as a seperate option, much like how in New Vegas, the difficulty slider is independent from hardcoe mode. And you can still play the game on very hard with hardcoe mode off, or on very easy with it on. Players should be able to set the difficulty slider to what they want and, if the level of "realism" in the game is customizable, the former should have no impact on the latter, and neither should the reverse be true.

But from reading the Hub update on combat, I get the impression that combat as a whole will be more deadly, both for the player end for enemies, so combat wouldn't necessaily be easier or harder, but it would be more intense, fights would generally be over more quickly, and one move on either side could decide the outcome, as opposed to being like in Morrowind and Oblivion where combat often became a test of who could get hit more times before dying. And I hope that this time around, difficulty will effect more than just how many hits either side can take, like the behavior of enemy AI. Maybe difficulty could even effect things outside of combat, though if we're going to have that, I'd say combat difficulty could be seperate from the difficulty of things outside of combat.

NPCs also killed you faster with the difficulty up

Heck yeah I want spiders to be difficult!!!

Oh wait...sliders, I guess that too. I just don't want the enemies to turn into nothing but HP sponges when I raise the difficulty meter.

Fantastic critique. I totally agree. people are getting hit with SWORDS here. That's pretty serious. I hope I get freaking owned at least...six or seven times, if not more! : )

I'd be so happy if it was like this. Long battles against random mobs are boring. Especially if I can not be killed by those mobs.

i think the intelligence on the AI should be maxed by default. well, if the AI is beyond anything else ever created, maybe not. we wouldnt want all npc to be that smart. but in the more likely event that the AI isnt that good, i say max it out by default.

and i have to agree with you on the slider though. i made a http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1162551-letting-the-player-win/page__st__20__p__17077228__hl__letting+the+player+win__fromsearch__1#entry17077228 about difficulty in general, and how games let the player win, and the slider was suggested there to make the game more challenging. as i mentioned in that thread, i cant really recall dying in oblivion. it was too easy imo. yes, some enemies were a "challenge", but in the end i always beat them down. well more on my opinion in my thread if you want to read.

im not really a fan of the difficulty slider, because i think the game should be well balanced by default. of course its a good option its there, more opportunities is never bad. its just that it doesnt work for me. i dont want to turn up a slider to get more challenge. id just end up getting my ass kicked by a goblin or somethng like that. on how to improve the slider: tough one. but id rather lower the PC's damage/health whatever than raise all opponent's.

yeah, in 10 months a team of 100 has no chance of adding features.

EDIT: at above post, i was the one that mentioned the slider :3

I want to feel very mortal when i'm playing, even on high levels.

If the slider is turned all the way up, i want to feel the urgency to block or dodge all melee attacks or otherwise i get killed, but i don't want it to just take forever to kill the enemy.

my solution:make the slider only effect how much the enemy hurts you, and NOT the health or defense of the enemy.

I like drbondo's way aswell.....but i still don't mind long fights or battles.
It's how they are done.....if a long fight is based on skills ( both mine and the enemies ) i don't mind a longer fight.If it's just down to how much HP....then no!
Having a long fights with counters and blocks and good AI,would be exciting...knowing after a few badly timed blocks or swings etc, it could end your life....thats better.
Rather than i can get hit 50 times before i die ( lots of HP)...it depends on how it's done.

Off topic: does skyrim sound like a good name for a theme park ride?....does to me

I'm glad the bow damage has been changed to allow more one shot kills that will be so fun. I agree in F3 it takes ridiculously long to kill regardless aiming at their heads.

Easy, just add a damage slider next to the difficulty slider.

It would affect all damage dealt in the world so combat would be more fast-paced and deadly.

This, to me, seems like the easiest solution.

I really hope they fix this. I almost always play on hard, and I want "hard" to do more than just bump up an enemies hit points.

Beth needs to look at Bungie on this. They do difficulty very well. Legendary on their games means the enemies move quicker, smarter, and hit harder. You have to be on freaking guard. ONGUARD!

All for making combat more lethal, the most scary fight in Fallout 3 was the Springville elemental school at level 2 or 3, later few enemies had the ability to kill you easy.
Same is true in Morrowind and Oblivion enemies had problems killing you at higher level,

Much of the problem is probably because you get loads of health at higher level more so as your endurance get high while the enemy damage don't follow, same with high level enemies in Oblivion they got loads of health so it takes forever to kill them.

Not saying it's all bad, no problem if some bosses takes a long time to kill for more fun add a mixture of glass cannons and tanks in the enemy group for a boss battle but not general enemies.

I agree with this beardy man. And no sliding the difficulty-slider to the easiest and make a quick escape. Skyrim needs to be brutal.

Agreed. I hate to use 100+ to kill a single combatant.

Doesn't give enemies more health... It increases enemy damage and lowers player damage
You can see the chart http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:The_Hardest_Difficulty_Strategy_Guide