I very much dislike difficulty sliders. I was upset when I found out there was one in Oblivion, but could understand the neccessity for it with the way scaling turned out. I was even more upset when they patched one into Morrowind.

Here is the thing...

I remember when I first met Divayth Fyr in Morrowind with his full daedric armor and thinking, "Wow this guy must be a serious bad motha." Later I tried to take him on and get that armor for myself. Well as I had suspected, I got pretty much stomped by Divayth. After all, he is one of, if not the MOST powerful wizard in Morrowind. Well I continued on and traveled the lands, becoming stronger and more powerful by the day. Then some time later, I took my second shot at the wizard, and this time managed to defeat him. This whole experience was a lot of fun, and the time it took getting stronger and more powerful to defeat this challenge made it all the more satisfying. I had a similar experience with Umbra.

I was talking with my friend about it and he had a similar story about Divayth Fyr and how gratifying it was to get all his gear.

Now introduce the difficulty slider.....

Too hard? Well just grab that slider bar and turn it down to zero! You may be fighting the greatest challenge in all of Tamriel! No daedric equipment you say? No magic spells ready? Your character is naked? No problem!!! With the wonders of the difficulty slider, you will one-shot your way to success today!

"What's the big deal?" one might ask. "If you don't like it, don't use it."

I don't know how many of you played the game Final Fantasy 7, but not everyone could beat Ruby and Emerald Weapon in that. Sure you and all your friends had beaten the game. But only some of you got your characters strong enough to take them down. Imagine if there was a difficulty slider in that? One way or another, everyone would get to win! Yayyy!!!

It taints the entire sense of achievement in my eyes. This is only my opinion, but I would be very pleased if the difficulty slider was done away with for Elder Scrolls V. I don't really see this happening, unless a lot of other people thought the same way as myself. So I am very curious. How does everyone else feel about this?

I keep the slider at the default setting, but I don't care if someone else wants to change the difficulty. Why should I? "I demand that the console and mods be removed" is just as valid. What I get from your post is that you hate people being able to enjoy the game in different way than you, and that kind of thinking goes against the nature of The Elder Scrolls series. :shrug:

"What's the big deal? If you don't like it, don't use it."

I allways set it a litle bit higher so its a little bit of a challange. But saying that I hated that slider. Changing the difficulty setting on TES should make the enemy smarter or use better weapons, or use better combat tactics and abilitys. Instead it was still just the same old "swing swing block" and changing the slider would just make that take longer.

I wanted the combat to be more challanging and dynamic rather that just taking longer.

I think it is one way to cater to a large spectrum of players without removing things that most people wouldn't want to be removed.

I wish you could delete posts on this forum.

Hold on, wait... there's a difficulty slider? O.o
Never knew that, guess that put's me in the "Play it as if the slider didn't exist" category.
Your orginal post though is why I'm so pro lvl scaling. There are certain fights that should be able to mop the floor with you no matter what lvl you are, especially if you get careless. Static lvls remove any element of risk as all you have to do is come back to it once you get x amount of lvls past it.

I like the default setting a lot. Bethesda nailed it I think. I like that Mudcrabs die in one hit and they do barely any damage to you. Wolves die in 4-6 hits which I think could be a bit more reasonable. Most importantly, you get the right amount of damage done to you.

What I like most about the difficulty slider is you can slide it depending on your character type. If you're a fighter you might want it in the middle so that you can be in fair fights. If you're a civilian you might want to turn the difficulty up to emphasize that you aren't at all skill in combat. If you're roleplaying as a person who would be very powerful, then you can slide it down.

I like the difficulty slider.

Another "Don't care, I act like it doesn't exist" vote. I can't claim to have never touched it- at some point, for some reason I don't even recall, I managed to move it accidentally. Put it right back to its default position before returning to the game and it's never been moved otherwise. :shrug:

I'll admit that whenever I have an escort quest, I move it to very easy because I have a compulsive need to keep friendly NPCs alive.

Other than that, I don't touch it (though I do sometimes raise it).

I feel a very similar way when it comes to friendly NPCs, although the only times I actually consider moving the slider to save said NPCs is for the final quest of the Knights of the Nine.

With Morrowind I actually set their health super high and make them run really fast. I do not like waiting for people with 30 speed.

I also like to eat baby seals.

Do you club 'em yourself? They're always best fresh.

Bah. Eat your seals, but know goblins are much tastier. :liplick:

That reminds me. Goblin warlord+level 40+slider turned up all the way=suicide, but the tastiness is augmented by the sweet victory of successfully killing such a beast.

Normally I wouldn't touch it, as you said, the biggest satisfaction of these games comes from the growth of your character. ...and then I found my character was weaker than the goblins he had no trouble killing before. I don't power level, but I assumed taking strength and endurance as mains with Heavy Armor, Block, and Longblade would be a pretty safe bet for a mindless hack and slash character to succeed.

I guess my problem was that I wasn't enchanting every piece of armor with Fortify Health or Strength 100 pts, and I only had 1 ebony longsword instead of 3 daedric ones enchanted with sigil stone fire damage. I HAD to turn it down to return the game to some semblance of balance.

Powergaming is a conscious choice. If you choose to wait to level for your multiplier, or spam enchantments on armor, weapons, rings, of course the game will be easy. But when you create a mechanic to balance the effects of that style of play, you remove the choice of playing a more muted, realistic character, instead of some fantasy cliche.

Instead, create "high level" areas where even strong characters would struggle...a valley infested with enemies, super monsters. There should be other ways of overcoming these obstacles (such as recruiting a militia of followers) but for those who want to feel like a god, they can powergame to their hearts content and wade hip deep into a situation that would kill a normal lone character, but will present a satisfying challenge to someone who's taken every advantage.

To me, using the slider is no different than putting in a code to make my character into invincible god mode, or on the other end of the spectrum, playing with my eyes closed or tying one hand behind my back to "create my own challenge."

I'd rather just be pitted against the same thing as everyone else in the default game, so I know if what I'm facing is actually difficult or not.

But the thing is, putting in a code to make an invincible god character is in fact a play style. Maybe not one that you personally would find rewarding or enjoyable by any means (nor I either, for the record), but a valid play style nonetheless. In a game that's all about personal choice, about doing what you want, how you want to do it, is such a thing really that out of place?

Challenge and difficulty are entirely subjective concepts in a single player game. A scenario that one person finds challenging, another may find ridiculously easy. And another may find it boring and detracting from the game experience. In a game such as this, everyone else's experience means absolutely nothing. If the slider works for you right at default, then more power to your chosen play style. For me, my game needs a lot more fine tuning than that to meet my challenge level, as well as compensate for what I find fun. The slider is one tool that I use to adjust things, alongside the console, personal restrictions, and mods. More power to my chosen play style, eh?

But it works the other way. If you are feeling like a challenge, you can crank the difficulty all the way up. I honestly don't see why it's a problem.

I miss the option "I put it to 100% at the beginning and then leave it"
(only speaking for morrowind, in oblivion I usually adjust it once, based on the char I play(the more straightforward the guy I play, the higher is the slider put, but again, haven't played oblivion for a long time)

I love the difficulty slider. I especially love to turn it down. There are two main reasons for this.

1. I'm impatient. I like to soak up as much story as possible, as soon as possible. Therefore, I like to get through quests quickly on the first playthrough. So I turn the difficulty down to breeze through it. Then later, I'll turn it up for a proper challenge.

2. Sometimes, I'm not in the mood for a challenge. Sometimes, I just want to stroll through the countryside and take in the sights, and would rather not have to worry about whether a troll is going to come out and take my head off.

Another thing, I must disagree about difficulty sliders ruining the sense of achievement. If I defeat a boss on a lower difficulty, I don't consider it a big deal. But if I defeat it on a higher difficulty, then it is a big deal.

Furthermore, difficulty sliders are good because that way, every type of gamer gets what they want. Having the game be at one set difficulty could not only possibly alienate gamers who aren't familiar with open world rpgs, but also veterans to the genre who might want even more challenge than the game presents.

I want there to be a difficulty slider, but not for enemies to suddenly have 1000000000000 hp. Enemies need to fight more intelligently, and do more damage. That'd be better. Fighting an enemy for 20min is more annoying than difficult.

I increase it to max difficulty just to fight the grey prince in the arena (after doing his quest ofcourse) i just enjoy beating him up for ages with him begging me to kill him, it's satisfying.

other than that, i don't touch the slider.

This. I'm on a console so don't use mods, but I've heard there's one for carrying extra loads and all sorts - would that count as lessening the sense of achievement too? I personally would love to have a PC that would allow me to make use of al the mods, but no chance there I find that while just out traveling, I tend to turn the slider down a bit, and then when I start a quest or enter a cave/ruin etc, I'll turn it up a bit. Best of both worlds!

For once, I agree with Seti. I've always kept it at 0. As a matter of fact, people often put it higher, often to 100, for extra flavour to the game. not exactly fair to remove it for those people.

Personally, I think it should't just determine how much of a mindless tank an enemy is. I think it should determine enemy AI, how well enemies interact with eachother, perhaps the number for enemies, etc.


You could actually probably sell your console, and buy a PC that can handle it. Especially Morrowind. Not getting into bashing here, just a word of advice. Also, check eBay often. I once got a computer that could run Morrowind, and Oblivion with Oldblivion for ￡62. Pretty awesome.