Once you become too powerful games like Oblivion (and Skyrim) become boring. There are no challenges left. Exploring is just a chore to get through. But I have a hard time preventing myself from trying to max all my abilities. In spite of the fact that I always enjoy the game more in the beginning when I am weak and I really need to think to overcome challenges. Does anyone else prefer characters that aren't too strong?

Quick answer.

Yep, totally agree with you. Mostly fun the first few levels. Always nice when you get you first enchanted sword and finally can bring down that svcker guard that harazed you earlier.

An RPG is a lot about "getting strong".
It's the job of the developer to provide a good balance!

If you're getting too strong too fast, it's like you mentioned, but if it's too slow, you don't feel the progress.
Also there should always be stronger enemies, so that if you get stronger you still have a challange and a reason to get even more stronger.

That's why we make multiple characters! :yes:

I rather enjoy becoming an ultra-powerful living legend, as long as there are ultra-powerful and legendary challenges for me to overcome.

you never got too powerful in Oblivion though because of the level scaling, Morrowind was a different story, by level 20 you were basically a god

Totally agree with you, the feeling when you start weak and everything is yet to be done is amazing, tough the goal of the game (even if not at 100%) is to get strong and powerful.

But Skyrim is huge and this factor will reduce the perception of becoming powerful, and that's what I think lacks in other RPG games.

I disagree.

I feel its not a good game if I cant be a Demi-God after 200 hours of play.
I like the sense of progression, I like dealing effortlessly with enemies that once gave me trouble.

I'm in the same boat, it ruins it, but it's so much fun being an Uber Man

There you go. I've had a couple of pure mages in Oblivion which became too powerful. If I jump back into their game, I'll have fun for an hour or so, but after that it gets old. But that's why I have more than one character. I've had others in Oblivion who were pretty darn weak! :cold: who lived in the Imperial City for instance, and rarely left. If I chose to go dungeon-diving with some of my other characters, they'd quickly be pwned in no time.

Yeah, and it was terrible.
If you first invested in some fight skills and later increased other skills you actually felt like you'd get weaker by leveling up. That's really the worst case, and I hope it will never be repeated.

Yeah of course ... and after 200 hours, if you are maxed, it totally makes sense to be strong.
But what's not good, if this happens too fast.

Call me a wuss, but if I wanted perpetual punishing difficulty I'd just go back to work in the evenings.

I like to feel challenged, but I also want to know I've progressed by going back previous challenges and laying the smack down with prodigious authority.

How much challenge is too much and how much is too little? That's a really hard equation to balance. Especially when you have such a large and diverse audience as the TES fanbase. I don't envy the devs AT ALL in this balancing act.

Could always gimp yourself or make multiple characters.

I agree. I love the early challenge and pressure that is placed on you, but I love it because I can work towards getting past it. It is the working your way out of that early-mid game zone which is what I like.

Getting bored with the ease of gameplay is my biggest concern as well. I just have to hope max difficulty is challenging and you're eventually met with quests and enemies that are daunting for even a high level character. It should take years of grinding past level 50 for your character to completely outstrip the world around him and become an unbeatable god. It should happen well past the point where you could've completed the majority of the content.

Yeah but Skyrim looks way better than Oblivion and every place is different it will probably be fun to actually dungeon crawl in this one, also I could do just 100 hours of hunting, fishing, working, walking, etc and still spend a whole lot more time doing quests and the MQ. Since I'm using mostly bows and daggers though I doubt I'll be all that epicly butt-stomping even if I increase my main skills for a very long time. I could see one playthrough lasting me 500 hours or more. I will be very surprised if I'm bored for even one minute while I play the first time at least.

Oblivion forced you to use light and heavy armour, if you wanted your speed and endurance up, and the scaling meant you needed it. Now there is no need at all to use both, unless you really must spend forever getting to level 70. Why would you use one handed and two handed?
Anyway, even if all skills are maxed numerically, you will still fall short on perk count towards absolutely mastery of even a third of the skills. Even the most powerful demigod characters will still only be the best at some things. You can get to the very heights of power, and still have loads of unused abilities to try on a new character, not the case at all with all skills and attributes at 100.

I already posted a good solution which will solve this problem.

The problem is that some people wish to become as much as powerful as they can, while other people want to stay weaker since they find game more enjoyable or for RP reasons.
My solution to that problem is a skill freeze option.

The idea is that you can simply freeze progress of skill(s) you chose in order to prevent you from getting better at them as you use them.
Of course, player can freeze and unfreeze skills(s) as he wishes.
This is small feature, but it could improve game massively!

It would open a lot of RP possibilities.

For example, let's say that I wish to RP as jack-of-all-trades, but master of none character.
In that case, I want to be average or just above average in all skills available, but I'm not able to do that since constant use of all skills will eventually lead me to master them all, which is something JOAT character doesn't want.

Other example is in case someone just wishes to stop leveling up all together.
He will simply freeze all the skills and continue to play without worrying about leveling up.

This option could also allow Athletics and Acrobatics to return (this would have to wait until TES 6 of course) since people who simply don't wish to level it up can freeze them and won't need to worry about them at all anymore.
In case they change their minds, they can simply unfreeze them again.

Overall, skill freeze is a small option which would improve gameplay of TES massively in my opinion and I personally don't see any flaws with it or ways to abuse it.
It can only improve whole RPing experience since it's purely optional.

I might even make a thread about this to see what people think of it.

I'll just drop these here:

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=38623
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2876

Isn't that the point of an RPG? to gradually get stronger then start again when you've had enough?

I Don't care for challenges in TES, I like sitting back, relaxing and just enjoying myself, If I wanted to get frustrated I'd play CoD.

Just slide that difficulty slider far right now thats a challenge.

I sorta agree.....but at the same time i dont..if the game gets to easy i turn the difficulty up and its hard again..........................

Easy fix. Throw away that +10 Broadsword of Ultimate Killing Everything in One Hit. Pretend your character got drugged and robbed or something. Go back to using an Iron Shortsword and see how you do.

Finding an Iron Shortsword in Oblivion after you've become a demi-God is harder than the journey to demi-God in the first place.

:celebration: