The enormous popularity of combat overhaul and rebalancing mods for Oblivion, such as FCOM/OOO/MMM/Frans/Warcry/Duke Patricks, etc., suggests many people were unhappy with the level scaling and difficulty settings for Oblivion.

The Skyrim dev team is now hard at work testing and tweaking every nook and cranny of the game in an attempt to arrive at the proper balance for combat (as well as other aspects of the game).

If they succeed in making Skyrim exactly the game you've been dreaming of, how would the difficulty settings affect gameplay in your "ideal" version of Skyrim?

• What will "Very Hard," "Hard," "Normal," "Easy" and "Very Easy" mean in this ideal version?
  
• Will these settings impact enemy A.I. and tactics?
  
• Will these settings result in enemies with varying immunities or partial immunities from certain kinds of damage?
  
• Will they affect XP gain?
  
• Damage taken by the player?
  
• How about the type of creatures that spawns in the game?

I wish the game just had a set difficulty that you couldn't change that was hard as hell like From Software's Demon's Souls, but that will never happen, so as long as the hardest difficulty is so damn hard that almost every combat scenario requires multiple attempts, I'll be happy.

I think the difficulty setting for OB was ridiculously dumb. Worst I've ever seen.

If Todd Howard called you on the phone today and said "Strike Out, we need your help! We want to make the difficulty settings for Skyrim better than any game we've ever made. What would you change from the Oblivion difficulty settings?"

How would you answer him?

Probably harder than you think, but they need to re-invent the whole concept of difficulty settings, but Beth got so hounded since Oblivion's level scaling i think they did it good this time around.

Normal should be challenging. Like in Fallout 3 how you still had to fight to survive when it was on normal. Usually low on ammo and caps. IMO, the game loses some of its fun when it loses its challenge.

I have a difficulty level written down for every character in OB. It allows me to have a challenging experience based on character and skill level. I dont think difficulty should effect AI. AI should always be at its highest level.

Interesting - so essentially you had to adjust the settings for each character individually to tailor your experience because of shortcomings with the game?

I left my difficulty setting in Oblivion in the middle (higher than it's original setting) and at low levels I thought the game was pretty difficult since I kept dying over and over, but that might be due to level scaling and my character was a mage with low health... but after I got around level 15 and had spells that would kill enemies in one shot. If anything, I would play Skyrim on the Very Challenging difficulty as descirbed in the poll.

I was OK with default difficulty.
Game got much easier later on, but I had my share of chellenge for first few characters.

Yes, I would also cap every character at either 25 or 30 and sometimes I'd bind 'cursed' items to myself for balance or go out of my way to damage a certain attribute/skill etc. All because of level scaling. I also had a formula for changing the slider to get the sense of progression.

Shadow-Comes-Inside, my witchdoctor you like for example had a difficulty slider at 75%. Even though he was a glass debuffcaster, his poisons, curses and potions were so potent that I had to raise it real high (and this is a character with a 40 in endurance). When I drink four of my JuJu Elixers of the Root Gods, I can take out the whole Arcane University without breaking a sweat.

Easy, change difficulty so it only affect how much damage I take, high difficulty I take more damage, easier and I take less.
Not so I also does more or less damage, that part made combat takes forever in Oblivion at higher difficulty while easy mode without increasing my power would just make the difficulty slider less sensitive.

I want to get hit twice, or even once, and die. That way you really feel the rush of battle and you have to really focus on timing your blocks and swings, because if you're off by a second, you're dead.

yes Duke Patricks combat archery makes this a lot of fun!

you can one-shot enemies with your bow, but enemy archers can also one-shot you, so you have to approach them very carefully, taking cover behind trees and rocks.

Except that its a 1 way street. Otherwise, i'd totally dig this.

I prefer it where easy enemies are easy, tough enemies are tough, and normal enemies can provide enough of a challenge to still be fun. Unfortunately, again, this tends to not really happen alot in RPG's.

I say make "very hard" as hard as possible, as people always complain how a game is too easy.

Although it was the gameplay demo (so, who knows what kind of settings they were using), it appeared that the Skyrim dev team did make use of elements of Duke Patrick's Combat Archery, in the animation for drawing the bow as well as the massive one-shot damage. And he mentioned that was a short bow, so there is a long bow somewhere in the game that does even more damage, but takes a longer time to draw the bow back.

ideally we will be trying to avoid getting one-shotted by enemy archers as well.

holy-----!

what exactly does the JuJu Elixir of the Root Gods contain

After installing FCOM + Duke Patricks, and running Oblivion at around 75% on the difficulty slider I have to agree with you. it makes every combat extremely challenging.

After 350 hours on this playthrough with these mods installed, I have only made it to level 7. I'm thinking if and when I make it to higher level, most likely some of the smaller enemies won't be as challenging, but in my case it means maybe only a few deaths as opposed to dying many times for each encounter.

When I first made it out of the sewers it was tremendously difficult. I had to learn a summon scamp spell just to distract enemies so I could run away. Basically almost every combat during the first level or two was me running like hell to try to escape.

Difficulty Settings are quickly becoming a sore spot for me. Since the 80’s they have been mainly used to up enemy health or increase the damage they deal. In the meantime gamers are also complaining about games losing their depth to cater to more casual gamers. And the difficulty settings needs to fill that gap.

Would be awesome if increasing the difficulty in Skyrim not only buffed enemy health but also quest markers were removed on the compass, and the map had a ‘fog of war’ until you actually journeyed there. Also if increasing the difficulty reintroduced spell creation and other complexities into the game.

It would really be a win win. The Devs could make a deep game and keep that on the highest difficulty setting then streamline it for casual/intro gamers and make that normal or easy.

Great ideas!

What do you think about on the highest difficulty setting, if enemies were to use potions more intelligently, or even steal potions from the player?

This
If AI can be improved so opponents fight as teams, use abilities and items to their full potential, react according to their situation (including running away or surrendering when appropriate) etc it would be very unsatisfying if that was not used at all difficulties, not to mention a waste of developer team if they were actually writing bad AI for lower difficulties
The big problem with previous games is that the enemies were just turned into damage sponges if you increased difficulties
Varying size of mobs would be an alternative in some situations

Nice poll

The thing that I found to be the problem with Oblivion's difficulty settings was:
When you increased the difficulty slider, your damage decreased while the enemies' damage increased.
The problem with this was that you couldn't have one without the other.

What I propose is therefore:
Two difficulty sliders, one that affects your damage (thus making you hit fewer or more times before killing the enemy) and one that affects the enemies' damage (thus making the enemies kill you in fewer or more hits before killing you).

This would allow you to make combats quicker in a very difficult way, or longer in a very difficulty way... or something inbetween in a more dynamic way that either affects your damage or the enemies' damage... or both. That wasn't possible in Oblivion.

This is one of the things that made DA (the first) a great game imo, the boss fights and harder enemies were pretty challenging and required changing tactics, gear, buffs, etc, at least for me.

Of course they ruined this in DA2 with the ability to just kite.

In SR, id like the very hard to be just that, very hard, and most importantly make you think, strategize and use all your abilities. Im not too worried about it though, they are always going to be good mods to fix these. Id like to see more than just enemy health get a upgrade on higher difficulties.

i think that hard modes should be punishingly hard. if you make a mistake. you will pay for it. but not just health and damage based. as much as it could break the game more attentive ai would make the game itself harder. give them better hearing and sight in the dark. making stealth harder. better combat techniques and such other things.

and very easy should be well.. laughably easy.

i will play on the default game settings though.

maybe on my third or fourth playthrough ill bump up the difficulty.