Well we've all read our share of Casual vs hardcoe debates, haven't we?

I think the point that is missed in most of these is that it is totally possible to develop a game that is for both.

Easy to play, hard to master... most great games have been just like that in the past. Complex and deep, yet not COMPLICATED.

I for one wish for a game that's simple enough to pick up that anyone can play and enjoy, yet still offers great rewards to those that have the skills.

Hopefully it's still possible in 2011. I do admit the general trend doesn't make me super optimistic about this, but I don't think Bethesda will intentionally dumb down their most epic franchise.

Accessible for sure, action-oriented like Oblivion, but imho they are going to try to fix all the issues Oblivion had and create a true masterpiece.

I'm pretty sure that's going to be better for them as a company in the long run than just trying to "sell out" and create a shallow game.

I really want some super secret areas, NPC's and quests, hidden away in the deepest nook of an unmarked cave, hidden away in some mountain canyon, with no clues in game or in a guidebook as to its location or existence.

It is possible to do both. Its whether the developers want to bother to implement it. For example, Spells can be learned by simply buying the scroll from a magic vendor and boom... you have a ready made fireball spell that will serve you quite well on games in Normal difficulty. The casual gamer that just wants to play the game without a lot of fuss can do so. Then they should have a COMPLEX system in place where mages can scour the land for arcane lore, ingredients, and artifacts which can be combined in their laboratory to shape and tailor a spell in a dozen different ways to the mages exact liking. That Fireball spell scroll might be marginally effective on a Nightmare difficulty level, but to have something truly effective in Nightmare difficulty, you will need to learn the complex route.
The problem today is a lot of the casual gamers want to be able to get the 'Nightmare' achievement without actually having to do all the work to get it and developers seem to take the easy route and let them have it. Difficulty levels in games have become kind of a joke lately. When I first got a game, I used to start on Normal difficulty while I learned how the game worked, then progress to higher difficulties on each new playthrough enjoying the new challenges. You pretty much have to start on the HIGHEST difficulty level available anymore to have much satisfaction or challenge. The new definition of 'Normal' difficulty is to be able to play through the game without ever needing to fear reloading.

The difficulty setting gives developers the only tool they need to develop a game for both the casual gamer and the hardcoe gamer. They just have to go back to USING it as such and stop trying to make 'IMPOSSIBLE NIGHTMARE" mode anything other than what it suggests.

In an 8 hour first person shooter, then sure, nightmare will work and I can endure it. But if I'm gonna spend 1000 hours in there, then I need to be able to tweak and refine the difficulties to suit what I'm looking for. If a GM set us up for ridiculously hard fights when the players want the economic challenge because we think the fighting has become tedious, we won't bother showing up after a while. A good GM will adjust the game to what we want from it without sacrificing overall challenge. For us here, the game is our GM, and we need some control over it.

Again, this is not an issue for those who play the main quest and toss the game away, but for those who "live in there". God my life is pathetic

Well the thing is, it's actually more "easy to leard, hard to master" than it was back in the Morrowind for example.
I mean, yes, they pretty much got rid of success rates anf failure rates and all that stuff, but what bugs me is when people think it makes them stop using their heads.
I mean, see it that way
in OB's fighting style, you had quite a few moves you can do, combine, expect your enemy to do... of course it wasn't all that complex, but if you just rushed in without any kinda tactic, then you would probably die ou tougher enemies.
in MW's fighting... well, let's say you play a warrior. you just spam the hell out of the attack button until either fighter dies.

So if any combat was tougher to master, it was Oblivion's!


Also, in case some people haven't noticed, TES is a different brand of game. It's meant to take one heel of a while, and provide some big, diverse experience. It definitely will have a different difficulty level than say, COD.

And yeah, I think the difficulty slider does just what it says it does.
It also even helps you RP! You wanna play a character that has incredible trouble killing anything? slide it all the way to the right! An exceptionally gifted fighter? all the way to the left!


I guess what I'm trying to say is that TES' difficulty is perfectly fine like it is

And I beg to differ You're talking as if fighting is the only thing. In a first person *shooter*, that may well be true. But in role playing, depth is extremely important. That added depth in FONV came with the hardcoe mode. Fighting is still the same. It's still an easy game to learn and play. But there are more consequences for your actions so it encourages you to think more because of it. Dieing companions makes sure to take that fact into account. Inventory balance is more delicate due ammo having weight. All those foodstuffs now actually serve a purpose rather than being filler material. If you played it as a hardcoe roleplayer even in casual mode, there shouldn't be a difference in the two modes. But if you didn't care about role playing, hardcoe forces you to do so.

It all can be done by providing lots and lots of choices, choices that could potentially change the shape of things and affect the whole life of our character, make it easier or harder, and would feel quite different, and give the players an indication of what would come at the end of each path before it is finished and there could be no turning back.

And those choices should provide the players with new content and should result in a whole new experience with the game-play, like new quest lines, new combat styles, new relations and stories, new approaches with any aspect of the game, and they should provide different levels of challenge to solve, and master, and let them choose what they like better.

Some might choose the more straightforward approaches and easier game-play, and others might choose different, more challenging approaches with new outcomes and experiences.

And all would be satisfied.

And this is a hard goal to achieve, and would be real difficult, if the developers do not embrace procedurally generated content and try to develop them to acceptable level of quality.

If the ground base is ready and done by programmers and algorithms, and the job of designers is defining guide-lines and general and global events, and the local trends of behaviors and happenings, and the like, and defining the general outcomes of the choices, and the engine is intelligence and versatile enough to react to the players choices seamlessly according to the guide-lines defined by designers, and reveals new types of events and game-play choices that could not be accessed before, then it would be a never ending flow of new surprises in the game-play.

Developing an engine that provides procedurally generated content like events, quests, land-mass, dungeons, population, dialogs, and voice overs, is definitely something in the future, but one can hope for a first step in the right direction.

And with such an engine, the amount of content available in a game for players to find can grow toward infinity.

Just having veiwed a post by a Developer of the witcher 2, in which in s short space of time he adressed.

1. More detail in dialogue and skill chains devoted to it.
2. A combat system overhauled based on past complaints.
3. The fact they've changed the easy setting to a easy setting ( rather than a modified normal like most games do imo. )
These were due to the none hardcoe game players, not wishing to miss out on the stuff they liked such as hardcoe roleplaying.
Such as not being able to progress past an area due to too high a boss for their skills.

I'd say a company like Beth is capable of doing this.
One reason I've loved Beth games since Morrowind is that it is easy to pick up and play.
As if you feel frustrated with over powered areas you can just shift down to the easiest setting and walk through should you chose to do so.

The one issue is that they have failed in many peoples eyes of creating a harder game at higher settings.
Myself if they do adress the issue of higher difficulty, I hope they don't do so at the expense of the more casual game player.