I'm personally finding that Quests and Puzzles are far too easy in Skyrim and i guess they were a bit that way in Oblivion too. I'd like them to be a little more cryptic perhaps and require a few more brain cells to be used. What do you all think?

They are certainly really dumb, like they where designed for children, with the puzzles like the rotating pillars, all you gatta do is match the image above it or somewhere very close to it will tell you which picture to rotate to, I mean really it needs to be more well hidden, the answer to the puzzle shouldn't be right above the puzzle itself, the clues should be hidden throughout the dungeon or in a book or on the back of an item kind of like how the claws work.

Ehm can't really pick a poll option.

I want more information, as currently it's just rediculous in Skyrim. I'm not at all a fan of the whole "HERES A MAP MARKER WITH THE EXACT LOCATION HAVE FUN LOL" approach. I'd much rather have the rough directions like in Morrowind.
Unfortunately even if you do turn off all quest markers you wont have enough information to get by in Skyrim.


And yeah... There's like 2 different kinds of puzzles in the entire game. It took me a while to figure them out at first, because I'm a moron, but after completing the first I could do any and all immediately.

I'm in total agreement with you there! I hope lots of people (thousands hopefully!) agree with us so Bethesda take note and implement this in TES VI. If on the other hand thousands vote for the third option then i guess we're outnumbered and will have to concede on this one..... :bowdown: Or worse still, nobody replies meaning this is not a big issue for anyone and Bethesda have it exactly right in terms of balance.

Well, hopefully if they did away with the markers, there might be more information available by asking more NPC's. Or perhaps simply by giving an ingame option when you first hear of a quest "Would you like a map marker placed?" would do the trick also......

I would like to see more difficult puzzles. But they should be logic puzzles and not rely on NPC dialog or journals (since a majority of players zone out and skip right past most dialog and rarely read through looted journals).

IMHO, the best puzzle in the game was the one where you had 4 gates to open and had to use the 4 switches, each of which would open some gates and at the same time closing others. It was the only puzzle in the game that required you to deduce and reason out the solution. Even if it was still pretty easy.

Rift did a really good job with puzzles. Most of which relied on logic. Bethesda could take a lesson from them.

Hehe this poll should be called 'How dumb does Bethesda think its target audience is'. But seriously I dont understand why they dont make them hard - knowing full well people will get more play time out of it and if they are absolutely stuck, will hit google.

I would like to see harder puzzles also. I mean yes this isnt Myst, but still, its nice to spend an hour figuring out that the dragon claw is more than just a key.....

Guys and gals,

Since only 10 people have voted so far, i hope you think it's cool if i add a 4th option to the poll that i should have thought of originally but didn't til Eficus's reply above made me think of it. Thanx. :goodjob:

And actually to me probably sounds like the easiest and most logical solution for all! Bring on the modders and the CK!

I do enjoy the puzzels simply beacuse they break up the regular dungeon diving, but they are far too simple, one i liked had the awsner in a book instead of right next to the pillars, still super easy to solve but nice none the less.
What really buggs me is that someone had this awsome idea that you could inspect items in your inventory for clues and all they did with it was the damn dragon claws which there seems to be a never ending suply of.
Instead of going oooh! It just feels like a chore every time i see one of them.
Like the tresure maps tho, always nice to find those.

And we ..... well most of us 'f a n b o y s' anyway .... knew from the pre-release videos to do that! So why Bethesda didn't make it a bigger part of other quests/puzzles and gameplay is kinda strange......

I enjoy puzzles and riddles It would be nice to see perhaps a few dungeons that incorporate difficult puzzles in the future.

That said I will admit that a few of the puzzles did have me stumped for a bit. One of them was because I needed "candle light" to see the answer to the puzzle, and another was because I was using the wrong spell to activate a key object.

Well first of all, there are no puzzles that I've seen yet. There are occasionally places where you have to match one picture to another, a fiendishly secure locking system if ever there was one. Would definitely stop anyone who was missing enough eyeballs. Every "puzzle" I've seen has been a sort of placeholder, a device just reminiscent enough of puzzles to say to us "insert puzzle here". Kind of like how the novels are all short stories, and we just mentally fill in that these are novels from the characters' point of view.

The quests often tell you to "find" something and then show you exactly where it is, to the point where you don't even have to bother searching the room it's in. Which is...awkward. But I remember Morrowind, and the extremely detailed paper map that was sometimes good enough to find things with, and the valleys that looked just enough like paths to render "take the first turn north" a completely useless direction, and especially I remember a page called Hannah's Wherezit which I always had to turn to if a quest wasn't in a major city. So this compass business is a real step up, at least. As important as exploring is, walking in circles for literally an hour trying to find my objective is not a form of difficulty. Add to that the mountains in Skyrim, which make it take a long time to find the path to my goal even when I know exactly where on the map the place is. (I sure miss levitation.)

I think the best thing would be like in the Oblivion mod Thievery in the Imperial City. That used the compass, but only to point you to the right cell. Then you had to search for things. I also liked the idea someone posted about having a broad circle instead of a specific location marker for places you haven't been to yet. Even though it makes things feel easy, I do think that new places should keep showing up on the compass (maybe randomized?) because it encourages people to explore if they know there's something neat if they'll just take that small detour.

And Skyrim feels...it doesn't expect you to remember anything. By following the quest markers and clicking through all of the very limited dialog options, you can do quests without ever having the least idea what you just even did or why. It doesn't help that the titles are the entire journal entry, so you can't go read the summaries to remind you who asked you to do this and why. Anyway I guess it's convenient for people who are playing half an hour of this at a time over a very long time. But if you do a quest in one sitting or a questline over a day or two, it feels awkward and a little bit insulting. I'm not ever given a chance to think a situation through, and if I have completely the wrong idea about what I'm meant to be doing, that never causes a problem.

extremely disappointing.

Yep... I guess those 2 comments sum it up nicely for me. It's just too easy to 'find' stuff.