So, I always see two sides to this one which has me perplexed, seriously perplexed. There are entire threads where people seem to claim the game is way too hard, unbalanced, dunamic levelled mobs are too much of a challenge and other whole threads where people bost that the game is too easy on Master difficulty.

So I wonder if maybe people seem to think that when they crank their difficulty up to master, the game is somehow supposed to still be balanced? Is not the point of master difficulty supposed to challenge the player to the absolute worst possible limit, where you basically need to step on the "exploit line" to succeed?

I just want to say for the record, I love master difficulty, playing a Sword/Destro, heavy armoured Dark elf blacksmith is great. Dragons feel like fighting dragons as I need to plan epically not to die (I am currently level 20). if some bear or mountain lion catches me from behind im totally screwed and not being in Daedric gear/fully enchanted has left me crying in corners, but I love it. I love the fact that the game is actually challenging at times to survive and their are mobs where I reload and go, NOPE! maybe tomorrow. So how can this game be "too hard, yet too easy" or "too unbalanced yet I can tear everythings head off"

It is just confusing to see that there seems to be no real collective agreement on game balance and difficulty. Is the game really unbalanced, or maybe you someones difficulty slider set to maximum and them expecting "balance" at the highest level difficulty?

It's just a matter of perception. Some players expect to be an epic hero when they play this game. They are naturally perturbed when a bandit's arrow puts a big, fat hole in their expectations. Other people expect to play a more or less realistically limited person. These are the people who find the game too easy.

In my case, I play on Master because I like challenging myself in a world where a single sword stroke from a lowly bandit can end my career if I'm lazy and careless. This doesn't seem 'too hard' to me, because that's what I want. For people who think they're playing Thor, this kind of scenario is completely unthinkable.

you are mistaken the word "balance". a balance game doesn't mean everybody has to agree about the game's difficulty.

and i dont hear people crying about master being too hard. its those people who seek for challenge from the game are complaining about master being too easy, and i believe they are legit to say so. Whether you care or not is another matter.

Single player game, it really shouldn't matter what other gamers think, they have zero impact on your game.

Some Players are gonna abuse the tools given to them and create a god like toon..................

it is what it is

Haven't tried master, so I wouldn't know. I play on expert.

i enjoy it from time to time. after all you character routinely goes around oneshotting people with archery or stealth skills. and since the only difference between your charact and the npcs is the shouts it makes sense that they should be able to get the drop on you from time to time. besides if you play right it wont happen to begin with. first lesson i learned on master is when i see a mage with a lightning bolt i get the hell out of the way.

People play differently and get different results. Also, some people are old hands with TES or similar games, so they have better intuition about character builds. Some people also pay more attention to the action-oriented elements of the game.

My complaint (and many others), is that even on master, you have to plan character gimping so that there's challenge. It's very possible to accidentally overpower your character. Conjuration is too powerful for a warrior type. Any combination of crafting skills is too powerful. A combination of any weapon skill with any crafting skill is almost too powerful. Some people try to counter that "exploits" aren't possible unless people work at it, but that's clearly not true in Skyrim.

Another common complaint are the available difficulty settings, which seem to be "Very Easy" - "Easy" - "Mild Challenge" - "Somewhat Difficult if You Very Carefully Avoid Half of the Perks in the Game".

BGS generally leaves game balance to modders, and that makes some people unhappy. I'm obviously in that camp, because combat is a very frequent occurrence in the game, and I'd like it be more involved than "vaguely wave your sword at the enemy until it dies". Many people who play TES games aren't playing for that, though, they're playing for the world experience (which, IMO, is amazing). I personally just wish that people who don't care about the combat elements could at least admit that it's less than stellar (and not jump on anybody who points that out).

People who want to be some hero god have adept, apprentice, and novice difficulty settings to play on. Those of us who want a challenge only have master and expert, and both are inadequate.

Hmm... I'm probably just stating the obvious here, but I've noticed (I'm only level 6) that if you go around killing everything in sight, you level up that much faster, because you use it all the time. Now, if you're like me and only kill when attacked, it kinda changes the whole thing, because you level much slower and probably have more challenges. I'm also playing a warrior, so I can't speak for how it is to play a mage, but again, it's just something I've just recently noticed

Edit: Let me put this in a different way:

- We have people who play on different difficulty levels
- We have people who are not very good at melee combat
- We have people who kill everything in sight (level faster because they use their weapons more often)
- We have people who are excellent at melee combat
- We have people who only kill when attacked

So mix them all up and you can see how we end up with mixed reports -- some saying the game is easy, others saying it's hard, etc. I'm not a game developer, so I can't comment on if Bethesda could have done better or not.

There's somethings that can never be balanced the skill an ingenuity of the actual players for example.

I play on normal (the middle one, not sure what it is called, the default one)
At times, I find the game sometimes is really easy, and others it is handing my butt to me,
But I am happy; it is a good game, with some really interesting quests and characters and I want to play those quests and see what the world has to offer me, not how hard I can make it for myself

I think master is too easy. Tho I too have daedric armor that is enchanted to resist almost all magic and has an armor rating of over 600.

Depends what level you are, all mobs are in the world in the 40's so if you were lvl 81 you're likely to be the games equivalent of a demi-god.

That's true, but it is also a flaw in and of itself. Why allow the player to double the max level of any enemy in the game as thought it wasn't easy enough? Do they plan for us to not get challenged until DLC comes out with higher level enemies? I mean really, what were they thinking?

What Bethesda did with "difficulty" is increasing the time it takes to kill your opponent and decreasing the time needed for you to die (in short, enemy health increases, your health decreases). While it's certainly a difficulty by itself, they could've make it so there are more opponents to fight (or use different tactics) instead of simply tinkering with health, thereby actually giving you a truly different experience instead of kiting and spamming projectiles or improve your weapons to keep dealing damage

90% of the people that claim master is easy are people with Smithing and Enchanting. Its not hard to be unkillable sitting at 600+ armor with enchants that give you loads of resistance while using a legendary weapon and gear with plus damage enchants.

They could definitely do better, but doing a really good job takes a lot of work, because it's a complicated world. If you're curious look at tesnexus and check out mods like FCOM, Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, Martigen's Monster Mod, or Francesco's (yes, too much work unless you're really interested). Duke Patrick did some amazing combat and archery mods, too (he actually wrote a book about medieval combat).

These mods did amazing things for Oblivion, and fixed most of the big complaints about it. But they also required teams of obsessed volunteers who spent years "getting them right". Expecting that from BGS is obviously ridiculous, but they could put a little effort into it. With every game they put out, when you look at the stats in the Creation Kit/GECKO/whatever, it looks like they gave a drunk student a case of beer in return for punching some numbers in. OTOH, it's a good way to svck people into modding, because you see so much that could be improved...

I mean if you want a challenge spread ur skills around. I've built my two toons to be versatile and find the game to be challenging. there were times i was on beast mode but id just spend my skill points somewhere else when i saw my one handed sword skill (for example) was where it needed to be. As opposed to staying bound to that tree because im stuck on being a "noble dual wielding elf blah blah blah". Hence my thief ended up becoming moderately versed in illusion destro n conjuring. Also ditch the heavy tank gear maybe, or put more points into mana or stamina... if you want to rely on ur skills build urself to do so.

Well said.

I would have liked to see, skills that need exploring, scavenging and a fair amount of effort to be raised.

Now, iinstead of making an effort to raise the crafting skills, you make an effort to keep them at bay if you don't want to "break" the game. As stupid as it gets.

That is so very close to becoming a sig. So very close.

All that really needs to done is to slow down skill leveling. Right now skills level too fast and it's easy to outlevel even the Master setting. Slow down skills and it takes away the so-called exploits. It also makes the game more difficult on all of the settings.

Here's an example.

If it now takes 5 hits from a 2H sword to go from level 1 to level 2, changing it from 5 to 25 slows the skill down. It takes longers to level up and everything is harder to kill. And I guarantee you nobody will be crying that Master is too easy. Skyrim will be a dangerous place as even the lowly rabbit and fox have a chance of hurting you. Not to mention deer and wolves.

Level 21, had to drink quite a lot of healing potions while fighting a lonely thief who tried to rob me. Just as it should be!

I thought playing on Adept with my first character was a little weak until a certain member of the NPC population jumped up and owned me with two or three little thermonuclear charges he seemed to throw around like confetti. I now play on Master with my thief so the sneaking is the sneakiest and the guards are the deadliest, and Apprentice on my warrior so I can smite foes by brushing the dust off their shoulders.

Players that claim the game is too easy on master are either power-gaming or happened to develop one of those builds which is simply overpowered, such as a sneak archer or illusionist mage.

I get one shots deaths and more often two shot deaths almost one enemy per location on Adept as a sneak. My characters really weak I basically have to avoid fights incase there is an npc that can do that to me.