I'm pretty sure turning the difficulty slider up in Oblivion and FO 3 just give the enemy more HP... that doesn't sound like it would be harder, just more tedious and make the fights last even longer than they already do.

Well, I agree that the difficutly setting should actually change more than just HP and damage.
Although, I'd like the default difficulty setting to not be too hard. Don't get me wrong, I love chanllenges. But there's just times when it's too much, or doesn't fit the genre.

And before you ask me, I finished Devil May Cry 4 on Dante Must Die mode, AND did a no-damage run.
But I just feel that this kind of challenge doesn't fit TES. If anything, in TES it's not the ennemies I'd want to be harder, but the dungeons themselves

As everyone has said, use that difficulty slider, it's what it's there for. "Normal" is for your average gamer, then you can push it up or down depending on if you're above or below average. You clearly have no problems at Normal so push it up. The game is designed to be played at all difficulties, so using the "normal is how it's supposed to be" argument really won't get you anywhere. Some people aren't as good as you, some people are better (game wise). Developers have to account for a wide audience or people won't play, then units don't sell, which all leads to less profit to make the next game.

I agree, and to be honest, I don't think the difficulty slider solved things at all. The game shouldn't become more difficult because people hurt you more, and take more damage, it should become harder by limiting your items and equipment.

I think the best way to achieve this in Skyrim would be a much deeper economy system. If done right it would take a huge ammount of effort to accumulate the massive piles of gold you could get in a few hours playing Oblivion and Fallout and by doing so making you work harder - and take longer - to aquire the more powerful equipment. It would make the ammount of gold you find randomly be reduced, so you can't get rich for exploring a ruin a few metres from a town and shopkeepers paying different ammounts for different things would stop people from coming back from a dungeon crawl, visit the local blacksmith, and effectively bankrupt him by selling him a pile of armour he already has.

Another thing worth doing would be to limit the ammount and/or the effectiveness of potions, considering they're somewhat common, especially since you start the game with a minor heal spell and can use that to clear off some of the smaller injuries without using potions creating a stockpile that means you never have to worry about dying.

That's not to say that I don't want to see powerful enemies, quite the opposite in fact. But I don't think that making everyone universally stronger is the answer to making the game more diffcult while maintaining a sense of immersion and progression and I think that some kind of alternative avenues should be looked at by the devs.

Id agree that Oblivion was far too easy... and not just because of the difficulty setting. Just to name a few:

1. Quest markers - This was the biggest "hand-holding" feature in Oblivion and should never have been added without a way to turn it off. These markers removed any sense of being lost, exploring, or sense of accomplishment from finding and objective. Sure, you could ignore them or use a mod to disable them... but since the game was built around them the NPCs never give you directions or tell you where to go in the conversations. So if you turned the markers off with a mod, you would have absolutely no idea where to do (believe me, I've tried). Bethesda really needs to change this in Skyrim, and at the very least make it an option because the game as a whole is simply to easy when you have a "Win Marker" telling you how to play the game.

2. Healing while waiting - (Note - Fixed in Fallout 3) I was not a fan of this, and almost never used it myself, but whats the point of having healing potions/spells when you could simply back peddle after each battle and heal 100% by waiting an hour? Its one thing to let you heal when you sleep, but letting you heal while waiting is just dumb.... at least on higher difficulty settings.

3. Dungeon design - Far too many of the Oblivion dungeons were very strait forwards. All you had to do was follow them strait to the end and win the quest. There were some that had puzzles, but they were few and far between. Since Skyrim has more people working on the dungeons this time around I hope they have more variety, as well as offering more exploration and challenge. Dungeons should be confusing labrinths... not strait paths to the loot.

4. Fast Travel - Yes, you can opt to not use fast travel but must the same as Quest Markers, the game is built around it. Its all or nothing with fast travel, as there is no way to travel the world without it. There should be striders to allow travel between main cities, mark/recall spells, and perhaps some other form of limited, or "realistic" fast travel when the game is being played on hard. Allowing me to click on the map and go anywhere at any time is NOT hard, and not something Id expect from a challenging RPG.

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Those are just a handful of the non-combat difficulty related issues I feel made Oblivion much to easy. Sure, if you want harder combat you can crank to difficulty but that just affects the difficulty of combat... the game itself still has many watered down, "hand holding" features clearly aimed at casual gamers that cannot be turned off. That would be fine if there was a way to play the game without them, and thats what Bethesda should do. The BEST thing they could do would be add a hardcoe mode that disables fast travel, removes quest markers, and makes other changes to allow players to enjoy Skyrim as a difficult, challenging game out of the box.

You know, in years of playing Oblivion, I've never noticed this? Probably because I don't believe I've ever used the "wait" command outside a town (i.e, already at full health). That was pretty much the only place where you needed to (wait for a quest NPC, wait for a shop to open, etc.)




Fast travel has nothing to do with "difficulty". Since you have to have walked a path already (and cleared all the monsters along it) to activate a new travel point, all you're doing by using FT is saving time (and, apparently, "breaking immersion"). There is no difficulty in spending a bunch of extra minutes walking back and forth through terrain that's completely empty of threats.

Blatant forced time-wasters are an MMO/subscription game "difficulty" - they force you to give the game co more $$$. They add no difficulty to a single player game - having to spend an extra 15-30 minutes walking back and forth from a dungeon isn't hard - it's just time.

I just got goosebumps reading this.

And not the cool kind when something is awesome, but the kind you get when you feel so embarrassed for somebody that you become itchy and uncomfortable.

i kinda like it when only masters are a challenge, but in the very beginning it can not be to easy to defeat an apprentice. qause you need to kinda feel your character get stronger. and i wouldend change to much about the healing engine except when fast traveling it would be weird you gain health. traveling should be a quest on its own. Fast travel options should be like in morrowind. a ship or magic teleportals in mages guilds or some kind of huge flying animal., maybe a tamed dragon?

I disagree. Read my above post and other's post's. I'll stick by what i say,and that is....there is more in favour in making or having an easier game. There are so many examples. If i put the slider up i'm getting enemies with buckets of extra HP.It needs more to it than that. I also, be it oblivion or fallout, play assassin classes/types,and if done right,the games are too easy. Are you going to turn round and say don't play stealth assassin types too?. It does need looking at in my view. Where is the fun for me if the game is too easy. As we progress through a game it becomes easier,we find exploits,or super weapons,or work out enemy tactics etc,many reasons for making it easier. Yeah i want to feel progression and power,but i still want a challenge and a challenge to get to that stage.

Well, I'm sorry to tell you that, but rarely do assasins have a challenging fight. It's either stay in shadows, or run for your life.

If anything I'd like a deeper stealth system when you can hide again after being discovered.
And before you ask, NO, I don't want to be completely unable to one-hit people if I assassinate them.

It should be difficult in the beginning and become easier as you level without ever becoming so easy you can knock off the end boss with a slap or two. That said, it's a real balancing act to get it perfect and that is probably why we will always want to tweak it to our liking with modes if we play on PC. But I must give Bethesda credit for trying very hard to find just the right balance to make most pretty happy with the results.

Personally I thought MW became too easy too quickly and Oblivion overdid the correction of that with too much leveled scaling. I did find FO:3 about right and FO:NV just a bit too little on the leveling. But with each game, it's closer. And yes, I know Bethesda did not make FO:NV.

That aside, I am satisfied that this time around it will be somewhere between MW and Oblivion in this respect.

At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Yes! The sliders don't work as intended. They might work for making things easier, but they become tedium sliders rather than difficulty sliders when raising the settings. Fights become a chore, but no tension is added. "Hard" should mean fast, furious, and deadly combat, and it should at least occasionally force you to be careful and do some planning.



I love your mods, and did a full NV replay with ART on VH/H. I don't consider myself a power gamer, but I find the games a lot more fun when I'm forced to pay attention and think. Your attention to detail is greatly appreciated, and ART will be one of the essentials when I play again after a few DLCs have come out.

Anyway, when you factor in that FCOM is one of the most complicated mod installs, and that it has nearly 100,000 unique downloads, and then consider that many people are playing MMM, OOO, and similar mods as standalones (for simplicity), and THEN consider that many people are unable to or intimidated by installing mods, the numbers are staggering. Mods that greatly increase difficulty are about as popular as nudity mods, and that should be a big, giant wake up call to BGS. But it seems to be a message they're not open to hearing.

That's fine with me, though, as long as they provide a good base and don't "streamline" the internal stats into idiocy.

In their defense, they've got a huge, diverse fan base, and that makes it impossible to please everyone. Reading posts on the forum: some people want a TES Diablo clone, some want TES-CoD, some want TES-Sims, some want a cosplay outfit and posing sandbox. I've seen posters who talk about gameplay depth as meaning "more colors in spell effects". There's no way to balance for this amount of diversity.

Well with that you were playing "normal" and most of the time I play a game on "normal" difficulty, I blow through it too. However, Oblivion was a step into the more difficult from Morrowind. The game would be much more challenging if they would limit how many potions you can drink it a time frame and how many heals you can put on yourself in a time frame or increasing the magicka cost substantially. That was the real issue with Oblivion and Morrowind, too much healing even without people exploiting. Daggerfall and Arena were much harder because of the limitation on healing but then you would get people using drain health exploits and being invincible.

Skyrim's combat system seems to be a leap even further than Oblivion took from Morrowind (thank god it jumped away from Morrowind's), let's just hope it's not a heal fest this time around. I've modded limitations to healing and the game is much more challenging and fun when you are actually in danger of dying from lack of health instead of some random trap or accidentally jumping too far off a cliff because your in a hurry :tongue:

No, absolutely not: there's a lot more to these games than the difficulty, and protracted combat and so on isn't something that I find at all appealing. There are games where even the "easy" setting can be prohibitively difficult, e.g. Ego Draconis, and it is rather off-putting.

Edit: that said, I did make the rifles etc in FO3 much more deadly, but it kind of balanced out and made it more realistic rather than just being outright harder.

Dude its called turning up the difficulty.

I thought Daggerfall was too hard, but Oblivion was too easy. Morrowind was perfect.

I'm not totally sure about making Skyrim harder than Oblivion. I still remember all these flames forum suffered from the frustrated players who couldn't face the chellenge at higher levels.
I think it's fair to say Oblivion was reasonably chellenging. It's just that the game does allow experienced players to take more chellenges more easily.
Anyways, for the maximum profit on Beth's side, I think Oblivion difficulty was just right.

The difficulty slider in Oblivion was terrible, so let's not say "Turn the difficulty up", It didn't make the game harder, just more tedious, giving the enemy 99% damage resistance.


Fallout 3's difficulty scale was much better, and I don't think for one second that "Normal" is the default choice, "Hard" is where you find the most balance between Player-Enemy in terms of damage taken/received with Very Hard Scaling a bit higher than maybe a Straight up fighter (Soldier) type character can actually handle fairly.

However, in Fallout 3, the abanduance of resources was still something that made the game, even on the highest difficulty, pretty laughable. You can stimpac your way through fisticuffs with a Behemoth maybe 2hours in the game, New Vegas introduced "hardcoe" mode, which really fixed the resource abundance issue in ways that should be optional, even to the difficulty. Let's ignore the Eating/Sleeping/Drinking for a moment, and focus on what really changed.

Giving the Ammo weight really made the abundance of ammo more a liability than a boon. Making you carefully pick your weapon loadout, and place your shots on target effectively did more for the difficulty than the slider ever did. Obviously though, aside from Arrows, there's no Ammo in Skyrim, so kind of a moot point.

However, the next biggest chance, was the Stimpac abuse fix in hardcoe. Instead of instantly granting all the Stim's HP, it was heal over time, with additional does increasing the duration. This was the single largest change that turned New Vegas into a "Difficult" endeavor, but actually putting dire circumstances on the player. Really, no matter what level you were, a swarm of Cazadores or Nightstalkers were always a threat, because you could just dope yourself up to invincibility.


So making Skyrim Harder? First of all, at higher difficulties, enemies shouldn't have significantly higher damage resistance than normal. They should however, inflict greater damage, making multi-opponent encounters much more dangerous.

Alchemic Burden. Limit the healing effect of alchemic potions to one at a time, not only will this make the game harder, but increase the allure of Restoration, which would remain un-affected.

But still, if you want a challenge then just kick the slider up...

For me it's more a "Boredom Slider"...more difficulty only means more hack & slash until the enemy falls dead.

We have no way of knowing how difficult Skyrim will be yet. If I were to venture a guess though, I should imagine the Dragons and bosses will be the only difficult challenges we will face.

My view on this is that the default difficulty is basically for everyone, that is, mostly including newcomers to the TES world. For experienced TES players, that is, players that have played through at least two of the games, putting the slider halfway up should be normal for them. When I play Morrowind and Oblivion now I do that and I intend to step into Skyrim with that difficulty.

Putting the slider all the way up is just plain crazy. I've tried it, but it's totally impossible. Playing like that adds like 500 hours to the game

Without the silly level scaling, Skyrim would be a "tad" different anyways. I hope it's not going to be too difficult.

Not trying to be rude or confrontational. Just wanted to check out this claim.


Just perusing the Nexus (feel free to point out any link errors, some of these are hosted atypically)....

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12249 131k downloads, 53k unique
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14442 97k dl, 29k un (hard to tell with this one, they seem to have different versions on different pages, plus older ones are gone)
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3063 99k dl, 27k un (again, a bit odd, since it has mirror links, and isn't actually hosted there. sigh.)

HG Eyecandy Body 1.3M dl, 332k un
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4431 757k dl, 266 un
Exnem nvde body 658k dl, 287 un
high endorsed unprintable mod :blush2: 175k dl, 55k un


Fallout 3 Nexus
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3211 429k dl, 117k un
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2761 369k dl, 72k un
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=7565 15k dl, 5k un
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4448 246k dl, 51k un
http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4968 364k dl, 60k un (closest I could find to FCOM, but it serves multiple different combos)

Type 3 female body 1.2M dl, 194k un
Breeze male body 267k dl, 60k un
high endorsed unprintable mod :blush2: 564k dl, 128k un

I like playing games. That doesn't mean I'm any good at them. Enjoyability for as many people as possible is what Beth is aiming for. And getting your ass handed to you repeatedly is not all that enjoyable.

And on the subject of difficulty increasing mods. Is there any comparison between number of unique downloads and games sold? Because I think the number of games sold would greatly overshadow the times mods have been downloaded. A lot of people probably don't mod the game to begin with and those that do are probably going to mod it in a variety of ways.