I am just a little concerned because I'm really looking forward to Skyrim, but I felt like the player was way too overpowered in Oblivion, especially if you use magic. Rapidly casting 100 HP Heals on Self barely even puts a dent in my battlemage character's mana bar at only Level 15. I like to level up my character by just randomly exploring before I take on any of the main quest. I also didn't like the way they handled increasing the difficulty in Oblivion, by simply lowering the player's HP, and increasing the enemes' HP, and nothing else. I wish that the game difficulty changed the experience as much as it does in games from some of the other genres like Halo, CoD, and Left 4 Dead, making the enemies not only more resistant to damage but also more numerous, and they use more aggressive tactics. So just to be clear, I'm NOT saying they should make Skyrim anything like those other games, this is just a comparison of the difficulty settings in them compared to the DEFAULT difficulty (Normal) on Skyrim.

it will definitely be on the easy side. thank god for mods.

Yeah, unfortunately I'm gonna be on 360 so it'll probably be another walk in the park. Will I have to purposely make a BAD character one day? I seriously might try it eventually...

Honestly, the first time playing Oblivion, I dropped the difficulty significantly. I was playing as an Imperial, so most of my battles lasted five minutes just slashing, slashing, slashing, etc.

I just hope that an increase in difficulty is only an increase in health, which seemed to be the case in Oblivion.

the slider will be in the middle of the difficulty bar
if they use that system again

Oblivion's difficulty was less affected by the slider than it was how you built and leveled your character. You really can't say it was easy nor can you say it was hard, it had the full range of difficulty spectrum due to the strange scaling.

I'm assuming Skyrim's default will be easy-ish at mid-high levels but it'll depend on how much you want to challenge yourself as in most TES games. You can play it safe and tackle stuff you know you can take to level up, or you can take great risks and struggle against things in a league or more above you.

You can always set the difficulty to high and run up against Necromancers who are impervious to assault, Xivalai who have complete magic resistance all the time, and vampires who can kill your character with one blow.

Frankly, after level fifteen, aren't certain parts of the game supposed to become easier? Yes there should be great challanges in certain places, and certain Hostile NPCs should still be a match for you. . . some should still be way out of your league. But if the entire game levels with you like much of Oblivion did, to the point that the mightier you become the harder it is for you to defeat anything. . . well, then what is the point of leveling anyway? The joy of seeing your new lighning and ice storm spell that has less effect on your new upgraded enemies than you simple snowball spell used to have on the old enemies?

Difficulty will be way too easy once you get that high on default most likely but who knows how the difficulty system will change or if it even does.

Either way there is a clear trends of game these days of being "easy" for me atleast which pleases the majority of consumers. So I will not be getting my hopes up with Skyrim I will just see what if the difficulty system changes or not and if not Mods ftw

I hope it is hard but without crazy stuff like those lvl 50+ goblins on oblivion geee i hate those things :meh:

Goblins in Oblivion go from being the weakest creatures in the game to being mini gods at later levels.

The only thing I waat the difuiculty setting to change is AI and Agressiveness. Like it does in Stalker.

Exactly what you said. I want my level 30 plus characters to feel and be treated like legendary forces in the game. I want them to still have challanges, but the challanges should be fewer than they were at level 8. And they should make sense. A Dremora Valkynaz who has overwhelmed and enslaved the mages who summoned him and is capturing wanderers in the wilds to make sacrifice, a Lich who has made a lair for himself and is gathering an army of undead, a mighty dragon etc. These should be challanges I have to be concerned about. A Goblin Demi-God? Well if it really is a Demi-God and I only rarely encounter them fine. . . but if EVERY damned Goblin chieftan in the game becomes a demi-god by defaulat just to make my life difficult. . . no thank you. That is garbage.

Meh. I've never had a problem with the difficulty per say. I could always move that slider up. But I HATED what changing the difficulty did. I played as a stealth character, and rarely got into combat anyway, so I always used to play on very easy so that an arrow between the eyes would still kill an unsuspecting enemy. However, when I was forced to combat, my experience was broken immediately by how useless the enemy's attacks were. I could leave the room and come back five minutes later and probably still be alive. Medium should just be a more realistic difficulty. All in all I agree with most of your post, but really I just want to be doing a similar amount of damage to enemies, as they do to me. And when I do something to someone that SHOULD kill them, (Arrow to an unsuspecting face/ Direct hit from a power attack on an unarmoured NPC using a big ass hammer) I want them to fall down and stop living.

Yeah, one of the main points I was trying to make is that I don't like the fights to turn into long damage-soaks where it takes 5 minutes to kill a Troll. That's all the difficulty bar does, which doesn't affect gameplay in a meaningful way. Making the enemies more numerous, cunning, and aggressive based on the difficulty level ALONG WITH an increase in health, and a decrease in player health would actually improve the game for a lot of people who want a challenge. If a game is not challenging me, I will get bored. I'm not trying to brag, but even that Gatekeeper boss at the beginning of Shivering Isles went down in about 10 seconds from my level 20 battlemage, I specifically did not get the other guy's help to fight him (the guy with the special Bone Arrows) because I wanted a challenge. I didn't get one, and even with the setting on Very Hard, the Heal spells are too powerful and don't cost hardly any mana to cast if your Restoration skill is decent. If I leave it on normal, pretty much everything besides him in the game is a one-to-three hit kill, and most of it is a one-hit except ogres and goblins, which strangely go to exactly your level. That's not even counting the area-effect and projectile spells I have for 100 damage health or any elemental damage per attack. Or that I can get a Shield spell that absorbs 100% of incoming damage.

:excl: Or the fact that simply doing a Chameleon spell for 100% then equipping any item (like an enchanted ring or amulet) equipped with Chameleon, just enough so that the spell effect does over 100%, you are basically INVINCIBLE. Enemies cannot see you at all, they do not attack. The effect does not end when you attack/cast like it does with Invisibility spells. I was able to get that on a legit Level 10 character, all you need is a good Illusion skill, the base Chameleon spell, & Spellmaking/Enchanting Altars, and it involves no glitches, exploits, or console commands of any kind. After all the updates they did on Oblivion, they never fixed it. :excl:

It's hard for me to believe any game featuring that spell/equipment combination is difficult, but it's not just that, there are tons of overpowered spells and you don't even have to be a character focused on magic to do a lot of them. I know that I shouldn't compare Skyrim and Oblivion too closely, there are certainly a lot of differences between the two, but from past experiences, my prediction is this: Skyrim will not be challenging to a lot of the people who play it. I still think it will be awesome, though. :tes:

I just hope nothing like that Chameleon glitch (I guess it's a glitch that's just super-easy to find) gets in again, it's hard to resist the temptation to use it since it's not even considered cheating... And to the two people who said it was going to be as hard as Veteran difficulty I say: lulz. :rofl:

Relax everyone It's been said that some areas will be just too difficult for the player to handle. There was no such thing in Oblivion, with the right use of "Hit and Run" you could've passed every dungeon. Now it's impossible, we run backwards slower than we used to, enemies are much smarter and now we have to handle a few opponents at once as been shown in the trailer. Plus, we're promised with tough dragon fights which are not scripted, so we don't really know what to expect.

Woah woah woah. Did any of those games the OP mentioned actually do that? Because I have played and beat halo 1-3 and CoD on legendary/veteran and they never got smarter for me. They just needed more hot lead from better cover.

AI is incredibly hard to program and as much as I'd like to see better AI for higher difficulty, it's easier to give enemies more health and strength and call it hard.

Yes, that is exactly what I said. It's an "easy way out" for the game devs to just give the enemies more health, the player less health, and call it a day. You were obviously not paying much attention if you think the enemies acted the same on Normal compared to Veteran/Legendary. It's not as noticeable in CoD as it is in Halo, but it's still there. The enemies may not exactly be "smarter", but they definitely shoot/attack a lot more often. If you put CoD on Normal, the enemies may not necessarily appear to act different, but they do become more accurate, aggressive, and fire more shots. Halo is an even better example of the way I want the difficulty to increase. Going from Normal to Legendary not only makes you less resistant to damage and the enemies more resistant, it also adds more enemies, they become more aggressive and attack more frequently. Then they took it to another level with the skulls. The skulls you could activate in Halo provide another example of the way I think difficulty should be increased. For example, the Thunderstorm skull makes all the enemies gain a rank. That means wherever you would've seen a plain Grunt before, now they will all be Special Ops Grunts, which not only have more health, they are waaay meaner, and some even have the ability to spawn with heavy weapons. Then activate the Catch skull so enemies throw more grenades. THAT is the kinds of things that I think actually increases difficulty in meaningful ways, as opposed to the "easy way out". It wouldn't be such a problem if the default difficulty in the last two Elder Scrolls games wasn't tuned so that any unskilled noob can easily beat the game after getting to a meager Level 15 or so (since I will probably hit Level 15 within the first 10 hours of gameplay in this 100-hour game). Oh well, I guess that's what mods are for, I just hate that I'm gonna have to wait for somebody to mod the game before I get to do a playthrough that actually tests me in any way, I get bored if there's no challenge in a game. :toughninja:

I don't plan on using the default difficulties. First thing I do when I get a TES or Fallout game is mod it to make all NPCs have within 30% the same health as each other (varying due to race and stats), balance the damage of most weapons to make them less overpowered (while adding other features to weapons such as durability, special bonuses against certain creatures, lower weight, ability to cut through lower class armor, etc.), adding bleeding effects to all sharp weapons and arrows, then making sure magic spell damage is still balanced against all the other changes. Why do I do this? 'Cus I'm an immersion freak, and I love it! :toughninja:

I just hope that if the game does start to get easier, that it takes 40 levels to get there.

It's just as bad when a game gets incredibly easy after a certain point when it was super hard in the beginning. FO;NV did this and it was a bit of a let down.

Oblivion had pretty diverse difficulty points to be honest. SOme enemies go down pretty fast, especially with enchanted weapons, 'but lo, there comes a goblin warlord, better brace myself for another 15 minute slashing fest.' I just hope they tone down the amount of hp enemies have, your own hp too ofcourse, to balance things. I want combat to be really dangerous, and quite realistic.
With a couple of slashes and bashes, your enemy goes down, but you better watch yourself, because the same thing can happen to you. That's the kinda combat I'd like to see.

If they do a Fallout3 style Difficult grade hardpoint system (Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard) I'll be fine and crank that baby up to Very Hard. Fallout 3 in particular, still stays pretty difficult at the Very Hard level in the game, consistently. Especially when the Enclave show up, but it's not so much the "Cheap Hard" as in Oblivion. New Vegas takes it a step further, or took it a step further until they lowered the Damage Threshold of the Big-baddies. Deathclaws, Giant Radscorps in particular.

New Vegas also has an issue where the game is more static than Fallout 3. So aside from a few key locations, you don't run into any really bad critters. Some of that is great, but there definitely should have been some leveled enemies sprinkled occasionally to keep you on your toes a little bit while exploring. Fallout 3 was actually presented a really nice solution, as the Enclave show up at a certain spot in the main quest, it serves as a logical "Rescale" point in the game, allowing them to sprinkled really hard enemies out without coming off like Oblivion's "Now every minotaur is a minotaur lord" crap.

Edit: Wow, I finally got Disciple rank.

You aren't overpowered in Oblivion the leveling system is just broken on a fundamental level. You can end up underpowered easily as well. I'm not sure what's with the random attribute poll but what the heck I voted for the new system. I think attributes were handled horribly in Oblivion. I never want to see +5 multipliers again.

I fully expect Skyrim to be even easier and faster than Oblivion. It'll be a blur of a story with little challenge, designed for 12 year olds to play from start to finish over a three day weekend.

Hard to say but I think it will be a bit difficult for the very first character. Until you find out which build works well and where the good items are.

You can make the game harder with not increasing your health much then levelling up. Raise stamina or magic instead. Learned that in Fallout 3 and Oblivion, keep your endurance low and you will get less health, you get can raise other things more this make you more powerful while the low health make you more vulnerable. In fallout 3 I had 3 in endurance and still ended up tanking for the robot and Clover as the albinos used a long time killing me.

Right, because if the game's default difficulty doesn't make 90% of the game's consumer population rage, then it's for scrubs.

I always play my first game on the easier difficulty settings so I can actually enjoy the story. Things like the tank on the train in Killzone 2 svcked and ruined the game for me.

When I want to rage, I turn the difficulty setting all the way up and videotape myself to lol at how close I came to being the Angry German Kid after I complete the playthough or wash out.