Oblivion has 32 different tweak options for graphics. This allows PC users to quickly tweak the game to their liking and their machine's abilities. Yet Oblivion has 1 slider for difficulty, which as far as I can tell only adjusts damage and life ratios. Gameplay for me is even more important than graphics. I would like to see a few subcategories for difficulty adjustment.

1) Respawn rate of random beast and NPCs.

2) Population density of random NPCs and monsters-affecting caves and bandit camps groupings

3) NPC and Creature abilities-base attributes and skills, frequency of casting and special powers.

4) Good old fashion damage/health ratio

5) Group tactics-Melee get in your face more while range duck and cover, NPC healing one another and conjurers summoning and running like chickens. Also how far people can call for help or how likely they are to run and get it.

6) NPC AI-down potions, heals self, sneak attacks and fire from cover.

You could play the game on standard settings or set it to little or no respawon like Morrowind for those who don not like seeing bandits back in a cave cleared a couple days before. At the other extreme you could turn up population and respawn while increasing your damage and health thus truing it into a near Diablo like hack and slash.
I don't think 1-4 would take too much to implement. 5 and 6 would require more effort, but I feel having more adjustable difficulty options can allow PC, PS3 or Xbox360 players to personalize the game.
What types of difficulty options would you like to see?

I would love more customization in how difficult the game is. A slider simply doesn't cut it. The game doesn't get more "difficult" because I'm hacking at a troll for 3 minutes instead of 30 seconds. That's one of the biggest issues i had with (vanilla) Oblivion, that towards the end all of the monsters took forever to kill even with a very nicely chanted weapon. But that goes more into the auto-leveling of Oblivion that I didn't enjoy....... So back to topic, and to make a long story short: Any more difficulty options would be an upgrade at this point.

I'd like to see a difficulty slider tied in with persuation and information-gathering. An RPG like this is more than just combat, so it seems odd to make difficulty a measure of only combat survivability. Have higher difficulties make it so fewer people will talk about the area, and of those that do, will need more persuation to get useful information. Make higher difficulty leave fewer clues about nearby enemies. Make factions and NPCs a bit more racially sensitive (eg, Dunmer quest givers being less willing to give quests to an Argonian player, or Imperial Cult-like factions being less welcoming to Elf characters).

I'd actually prefer no difficulty bar at all, like in Demon's Souls. Keeps things interesting. I'd also add two more options to the poll:
-No difficulty bar at all
-Fallout style, preset difficulty as very easy, easy, normal, hard and very hard.

Instead of difficulty sliders, how about even stronger monsters to conquer? Not like in Oblivion how there are "boss monsters" that get stronger. I mean literally a new breed that will always have set statistics. Just for fun, Bethesda should make some dungeons completely ridiculous. It would for the very least create a long term goal for the player to overcome.

Multiple sliders/options to tweak the game please.

Multiple, but in a fashion where you have to keep the sliders balanced at some minimum difficulty. I.e. I can set all sliders to 50%, or I could set one at 75% and one at 25% and keep the same balance. Maybe governing difficulties easy, medium, or hard could dictate where this minimum limit goes, dunno. In terms of how Oblivion plays out, I would according to how I'd like the game to be; tone down respawn significantly (30%), reduce aggressiveness (40%), while increase enemy toughness (70%).

The hard part being figuring out how much slider influences game in such a way that equal amounts of reduction causes similar change in difficulty experience. But the point is, yes to all that "hard core stuff", and then sliders to dictate how difficult they really are. I don't care much for repetitive fighting the same stuff over and over again. Even if repetitive, I'd rather concentrating on surviving the elements and this stuff is made hard. So I want sliders because we all want different things from the game.

RPGs isn't the typical game you play to beat, to get to the finish line. It's an experience, and myself I want it to be a long one - neverending if possible (but we know that won't happen in such a small world).

Maybe it should be set and fixed during character creation? Or that changes to the settings takes a few game days to adjust themselves. Anything to make them non (or rather, less) exploitable. Easy, medium, and hard settings comes on top of all this and should be immediate as it is now.

It needs to be so higher difficulty does not just mean enemies get ridiculously high hp and attack power. I recently got to level 44 on oblivion with full deadric armour and changed the difficulty from normal to the hardest and couldnt believe how poorly implemented it was. Very hard in fallout 3 was managable but oblivion is made for sadists

Personally, I'd prefer it if there were no difficulty sliders or setting right from the get go. I feel the games difficulty should be set in stone. I like games to be a challenge, but one i'll enjoy. It kinda annoys me when I see people sliding it to easy because their finding a quest or w/e too difficult...

Just me though.

After way too many years of JRPGs (and other games) with hard-coded difficulty, I'm going to have to disagree with removing difficulty sliders. I love difficulty sliders and wish I could have had them in all the games I ever played. I stay on Normal until I encounter stupidly ridiculous over-powered monsters who have 100000000000 hit points and the same amount in armor and immunities to everything and regeneration and can one-shot you (Yiazmat from FFXII, you piece of [censored], I'm looking at YOU). Then I switch it to Very Easy, take care of business, preserve my sanity, and carry on with the game.

Actually, Fallout 1 was my first thought when I saw "multiple sliders", since it had two difficulty settings - combat difficulty and puzzle (or something like that) difficulty.



But regardless of how they do it, a more "robust" difficulty system than OB/FO3 would be good. (I say this as someone who played both games just fine on Normal. But I get tired of seeing all the "l33t" folks putting up threads complaining about how trivially difficult Fallout 3 was on "Very Hard". Stuff like that led to the stupidity of Broken Steel's annoying bullet sponge enemies.....)

I really like the idea about multiple sliders. :thumbsup: It allows for customization, and IMO more customization = better game. Especially the option to change how smart the enemies would be in a fight would make it much more interesting than just giving them more/less health and so on.

I just said that he should add that option to the poll, it's rather dumped down atm. And when I said Fallout I meant the Fallout bethesda did, Fo3. I agree to 100% that I do not want to fight sponge bob enemies. No difficulty to choose from at all would solve a lot of problems, but perhaps create a few new ones.

I think the difficulty slider should be normal through very hard.... Because it their is an easy, ill use it if i need to get past an area... So that's why i don't want it easy...

"I like it to be a challenge, but one that I'll enjoy." seems a bit disconnected from "I get annoyed that other people turn the difficulty down because they find it too difficult"

Perhaps they were looking for a challenge that they'd enjoy?



I'm certainly glad that Dragon Age, for example, had a difficulty slider. Due to various things - non-optimal party composition (rogue, rogue, tank, healer. AoE, what's that?), lack of skill, etc - I found "Normal" difficulty on the PC version to be freakin' hard. Made me want to punch kittens. Thank god I could turn it down to Easy. So I only had to reload instant-kill scenarios and boss fights sometimes, not constantly.

Multiple options are always better in my opinion.

This is an extremely bias poll. Take a look at why you needed sliders in the first place

Morrowind: I used the sliders so i could actually hit something as much as possible
Oblivion: I used the sliders because I never bought into that "efficient leveling" bull*** and the enemies quickly got way to hard for my character to contend with

I think the slider is important to account for gaming skill, but one slider is all you really need

I've never really thought of outside of combat, but this option would be nice. If you don't want overly helpful NPCs just turn it down and find the stuff yourself. For those that want more realism, required eating and etc there could be a toggle for that in the difficulty section.


Percisley my feelings. The setting just meant you had to hack for 3min instead of 30.


Sorry about that. The poll is updated.

Mass Effect 2 difficulty adjustment was one of the few that I really enjoyed. More enemies and they would use their powers much more often. Made for incredibly intense/rewarding replay value. I beat it with 6 different toons within 3 weeks. For those that do not want to tweak around a lot have one general one that increases/decreases them all as mentioned by an earlier poster..