I wouldn't include Ren's or similar cosmetic mods in the nvde mod category, personally, but YMMV.

Number of Dloads (non-unique) from several sites:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
OOO: 189K PES
OOO: 378K gamefront (should include tesnexus numbers)
MMM: 178K PES
Fran's: 297K PES
OWC: 106K www.worldofelderscrolls.de

For OOO & MMM @ PES, I summed the different download options because they're "competing" alternatives, and I assumed it's rare for someone to download a 400MB .7z and then re-download it as an exe.

I'd bet that there's greater spread of downloads for these mods (they're big, and a lot of official links go to megaupload, 4shared, etc), but there's also a lot of "shared" downloads (I use all 4 mods above).

Anyway, as you said, the data is hard to interpret. I don't think the Nexus numbers show an accurate picture of these mods for Oblivion--I don't know of any popular FO alternatives, but I think you're right and I misjudged the numbers.

(Great, another blow to my faith in humanity. thanks.)

:(

As someone who downloaded OOO and various realism tweaks for Oblivion and FO3 I appreciate the desire to make the game harder. I understand though that those options need to be selectable, optional aspects that can be included or not as desired in the game experience.

The truth though is that we are not 'average'. These games sold something like 10 million total copies and likely less than 1 million people wanted that degree of difficulty. Of those people who did, how many used other mods to balance out that difficulty by making themselves tougher?

I want Skyrim to be wildly, ridiculously successful so that more game designers add the open ended feel that ES games do best. I want it to appeal to as many people as possible because it is a product I enjoy and I want it to dominate in the marketplace. The idea that making a game appeal to the casual game is a bad thing is shortsighted and self-defeating. The cost of producing a modern blockbuster is, literally, 100 times that of some of the classic RPGs from 10 to 15 years ago. Lets take that 1 million users number as an example - nobody is going to spend $12 million dollars to produce a game that's going to sell 1 million copies if they can make a game that's going to sell 10 million copies instead. Back in the days of games costing less than $1 million to produce a million copies was a decent target.

We're all here on the forums because we are dedicated enough to the idea of this game and to the experiences we had on prior Bethesda games to invest our time on the topic, what, seven months before it comes out? How geeky is that? We certainly all want the game to be successful and Bethesda to decide that they should continue expanding on and producing Elder Scrolls titles until I'm too old to play. This means that the LAST thing you want is to reduce the market audience of the game. You want to include and interest more people in the game, not less. What is probably a better idea is saying that you want the tools to modify difficulty easy and friendly to use. If not completely finished and tested for release as toggles in the full game at least easily manageable in the modding toolset.

Just don't lose sight of the fact that we represent >10% of the games consumers and that realistically the last thing we want is to alienate the money the other 90% of the audience, they're paying the bulk of the money that's bringing us one of the few games that can even be modded to provide what we do want and enjoy. The list of blockbuster games that can even be modded into a sufficiently challenging experience is getting shorter every year.

Oh, I'd never thought about OOO/FCOM/whatever type harder, I was thinking "cranking up the difficulty slider" type harder. Durrr. I r slow. Er anyway, I agree with the various "sides" in that case in that I preferred Oblivion with this sort of mod, but I can also see why others would be less enamoured with the prospect. I think FNV got scaling rather nicely balanced: FO3 went slightly too far in that the number of monster radlobsters and droids mooching about the landscape at higher levels could get a bit too tricky, but FNV was good. So that, I guess.

I must admit, that I also hope that Skyrim is more challenging than Oblivion. But I don't think that turning up the difficulty slider seems to be the answer.

I played both Morrowind and Oblivion both at their most difficult settings, because I like the "challenge" of a game, in general.

The problem is that when the Difficulty slider is at a higher level, it takes 'more' to defeat the enemies--more swings of a sword, more arrows shot, more spells, etc. This in turn causes the character's skill levels to rise faster, and therefore the character becomes more powerful, making the game "easier", at least in this respect.

I'm not sure what the solution is. I don't know what "things" within the game are adjusted by the Difficulty slider.

At my current level of 18 (PC, vanilla), so far there isn't anything that poses a challenge to me. (Maybe the only challenging area has been the big battle in Bruma, but that is only a challenge, because my allies all die too easy, not me...) I feel that with having had the Difficulty slider on 100% the whole game, my character rose in skill levels alot faster, and so I am more powerful than where I would have been had I played the game on Normal difficulty.

If the answer lies within the Difficulty slider's settings, it must somehow take into account the character's rising in skill levels faster due to tougher battles.

Also, as a side note, maybe the Difficulty slider could/should affect non-combat things, like stealth situations, luck-based situations, etc.

I agree with this. And I don't know how to expand on what the slider functions as, unless we took the 1-axis slider and added a second axis for more fine tuning in other gameplay mechanics. More than one slider might be the key. And the addition of a hardcoe/tamagotchi mode.

lol

Seems like the real issue is not that the game should be harder on the default difficulty but that the difficulty slider should not just add more hp (it shiuldnt do this at all imo) and increase enemy damage.

There are so many things in a game this huge that can be taken advantage of to make the game harder (through the difficulty slider of course; this should be optional after all)

Things like:
Increased enemy damage
Increase AI difficulty
Lower gold drops and high level loot drops
Increased item costs
Add more difficult fixed spawns/increased amount of enemies spawned
More perceptive enemies (they detect you easier when sneaking)
Bleeding effect so you get continuous damage when hit for a short period of time
Harder pickpocketing/lockpicking
Potions heal over time
Etc.

Not all these ideas are mine some were already posted but if Bethesda used even just a few ideas and scrapped the whole give enemies more hp thing it would be wayy better I think. Not to mention if they added some sort of survival mode on top of that, this way people who want a challenging game don't have to play on PC for mods to do what the game doesn't by default.

I think they should kind of perfect what New Vegas did with the hardcoe mode or whatever it was.
You can still have the difficulty slider, which will change how much damage you receive and whatnot, but also hardcoe mode (or whatever it was) will make it so that you need to eat, potions don't heal automatically, and you might actually need to think a bit before engaging in combat, and will need to prepare for the wilderness.

default setting on games are way to easy these days. i realize that they are catering to a larger audience now and many of those people svck......at games, but regular gamers shouldnt be penalized for their incompetence. they should have to move their sliders down to "easy" or "simpleton" mode.

oblivions difficutly slider was horrible since all it did was increase health dramatically and make already tedious fights even longer. fallout 3 had a better mechanic but it was still ridiculously easy even on hard and very hard mode with mods like FWE and MMM that further increased difficulty. just say no to designing games around people that svck.

I vaguely recall that the original Fallout had two difficulty settings - one for combat, one for puzzles/skill tests (or something like that....)




The rampaging elitism of this statement is pretty offensive. :shakehead:

I agree, I think the range based scaling method used in FO3 works best for open world rpgs and Skyrim will have that.



You are a wise man.

If you really want to make skyrim harder well. You just take male libido drugs and then the real challenge begins,you might be harder then skyrim at first but the real challenge is trying to not hit alt tab and riding the firefox to pormo town.

The games fine as is I know it is. Video games is not the place for a challenge try medicine, I hear curing cancer is something of a challenge. :stare:

Just to add my $0.02 on the OP's topic, if you think the game's too easy, there's a difficulty slider to solve that exact problem. Not every gamer out there is in it for the combat. Many are what some might call "casual gamers". They aren't playing the game for maximum points/damage and unlimited loot. They're in it for something else and the combat is just a means to get to their stuff. Someone took this into account when they created the difficulty slider and the only question was, "do we default to insanely difficult, laughably easy or something between?" They went with the lower end of the in-between, but allowed you the freedom to change that. It strikes me as odd to complain about something that could be fixed with a simple in-game setting adjustment. I suppose someone else will be griping about the default resolution (yeah, we set it at 640x480 just to mess with you).

nah lol not that hard. i did it on the highest difficulty but only after doing my perfect character (100 in all attributes and in all skills)

(on xbox 360)

I found default difficulty hard in Oblivion.
Mainly its because I didn't abuse the level system(I picked the skills I wanted).
I favoured a stealth/warrior combination, Oblivion expects you to be pure.
and Lastly I did NOT have the patience for level scaling. I got bored of endlessly left clicking and right clicking a regular intervals, that I'd lose focus and get my ass handed to me.

Fallout 3 on the other hand was pretty easy. In the mix between its level scaling fixes and me making the ideal character. Yeah I kicked ass, until MMM Increased spawns and ghoul rampage.

I don't know what you're talking about, gaming started as a challenge-oriented activity, and challenge has always been integral to the experience. If that still wasn't true, online multiplayer games would not be as popular as they are.


I have to admit, I read a little while ago, someone suggesting lowering the amount of gold acquired from drops while on higher difficulties, and I rather like that. Difficulty definitely has to expand beyond just combat. Honestly though, without being a focus tester for Bethesda, it's hard to really suggest what difficulty the direction should go in.

well i dont know about making skyrim harder in a sence that enemies take more damage and you do less, but the type of hardness that i would like to see is smart Ai, for example i dont think that 20 hits in the skull with a sword is very realistic, so therefore maybe the ai could be more agile, learn to block better, etc.

Cause that's precisely what the difficulty slider is for, maybe?

I think the difficulty is only in the HP given and received which isn't necessarily challenging, just annoying (For me anyway)

I'd like more challenging bosses. It's one of the great things in jRPGs. 10 minute battles, the boss immune to default tactics and able to render you helpless in one strike. I usually had to try 3-4 times just to get one win. Jyggalag was a joke, even compared to some of the very early jRPG bosses (except maybe Garland). That should change in my opinion.

The other thing I miss from jrpgs is the puzzles. There arent all that many. And the ones that are there are easy enough for a four-year old. It was harder to solve the puzzles in Zelda 3 than oblivion. Not just the quest marker -- but that basicly there was only one switch and it was basicly always nearby. Z3 required you to reset every switch, or have them in a given position. Sometimes the trigger needed a weight on it. It wasn't simply searching for the switch but solving the entire problem which might have several steps. Adding the ability to destroy environments to reveal secrets is also a good thing.

Yeah, but that's just the whole "difficulty slider didn't work well" part. The person you were quoting was still correct - the purpose of the various "difficulty settings" in games is for people to alter a game's challenge if the default isn't to their liking.




Many of those bosses work better in games where you have a whole party - so that you have a way to recover from the "insta-kill" strikes. And really long boss battles are annoying in many games - they just get so tedious. Especially annoying when they have "one-hit kill" things that are either luck-based or only have single counters that must be perfectly timed/readied. Luckily, most JRPGs let you level grind, get the "infinity+1 sword", and utterly overpower them, if they're too annoying to fight the first time. (which, if you think about it, is another way to "alter the difficulty" - if you find the fight too hard at your current power/skill, go gain a few levels & improve your equipment, to decrease the difficulty of the fight. )

(disclaimer - I don't tend to play the solo&action JRPGs. So, never played any Zelda. I go more for the turn-based, party games like the final fantasies, dragon quests, xenosagas......)




What did you think of the puzzles in Knights of the Nine?

If you choose not to turn up the difficulty then that's your problem. Why should I have to deal with a more difficult game because one person is too lazy to drag a slider? No.

This is ridiculous.

The only thing that ever kills me in Oblivion is the Ogres. But in Morrowind, everything has had a go at killing me, even the rats.

Very Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTWVery Hard hardcoe No HUD FTW

Skyrim should be harder although I hope they don't make it too ridiculously hard.