One of the main complaints we've seen in Skyrim is the issue that Master is not difficult enough. That our maxed out sneak backstab one shots dragons, or our master smithing made armour that defeats anything a monster can possibly throw at you.

Considering this, I find myself tempted by the arguments that, you can walk through the game, because the game lets you be exactly what you aimed to be. Powerful in respect to the challenges presented.

In the evolution of gaming as I have watched it develop, started with the simple concept that death equalled failure. If you could not beat the boss, you died, and in Ninja Gaiden, Mega Man, Streets of Rage, this is an unavoidable fact. The game is designed to punish you for failure, and we are fooled by this concept that death equals difficulty. and having to retread paths already walked as our due punishment for not being good enough, is our due, and our reward is to face those challenges.

As games evolve, and we see quick save, and numerous other measures that remove the punishments inflicted, we have to consider that frustration is the core to our gaming experience is not the true definition. Whilst some games retain this core value, difficulty is often measured by other, less intrusive punishments for our failure.

Sonic the Hedgehog was never a particularly challenging game, but still had this core concept of limited lives to enforce the longevity of a game in terms of its difficulty, instead opting to offer optional challenges that the player inflicts on themselves to challenge. We challenged each other to fastest times, collecting all the gems, 100% on coins.. where did we go wrong and ask Sonic to inflict "Master Super Difficulty".

With the addition of complexity to a game like Skyrim, we forget this important lesson that its the optional challenges that stood true gamers from those that feel that completing the game is a measure of their worth, and the challenge of the game. Its sheer modern laziness that demands the developer hands us the challenge, and we must overcome it. Yet so much of gaming history demanded that true "elite" worth was based upon the optional challenges the gamer imposed on themselves.

To finally land on my point. Skyrim is not defined in its physical difficulty on the hardest setting, but rather in the restrictions, you the player optionally choose to make the game difficult. With a massive optional world its easy to lose sight that these options are there to entirely down to player choice, rather than a set of developer imposed restrictions such as difficulty level to hold your hand and tell you, "Well Done".

I am surely, not alone in being a long term gamer who recognises that there is rarely any great value in completing a game, but often in the manner in which it was completed.

So if it means, playing the game as a paladin, who would refuse to wear daedric armour, or to save the world as a coward who refuses to kill a living thing, or to fight without swords, or to do so as a merchant with skills far removed from fights, have a greater badge of honour upon completion than to sit with "Master" difficulty and design optimal damage per second.. you missed the point.

Skyrim gave you a world, and its not even a balanced world, but it gave you the freedom to define your difficulty through actions, and to dismiss this as "artificial restriction" loses the point that this is a game for playing roles. To artificially hold your hand and tell you what a challenge is, defeats the reasoning behind the whole concept.

Step outside the box, do something special, choose a way of playing that deserves respect, because beating a questline on hard difficulty.. not that special. Do it with Conan bearing a two handed sword, too stupid to learn enchanting, and refusal to wear armour even thou, even in Conans world its perfectly available. I'll listen and applaud.

Stop asking developers to spoon feed you your challenge and define it yourself. It worked for the rest of the series.. why demand spoon feeding now? Hasn't spoonfeeding done enough to damage the series credibility?

I used to play on Master, until I took a sweetroll to the knee.

Completely, 100%, totally agreed. Best post of the night, and it explains to me why i found myself having as much fun challenging myself on my character as i used to have playing the same levels of super mario bros. on the NES over and over and over.

more simply put, beth didnt design their game expecting ppl to exploit the most efficient elements in the whole game in damage output wise. they expect ppl to be able to play the game in ANY build in adept. it only seems fair to me that after fiddling with 3 or at least 2 crafting skills the game fails to become 'difficult' even on master cause if it is indeed fairly challenging i bet those that just didnt choose to craft wont be able to finish their game.

and mind you, ive played with with 2 crafting skills w/o intentinally levelling them. theres plenty of challenge even on expert or adept.

Hopefully, my point is that Bethseda probably know fine well people exploited Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion, and they simply do not care, because they absolutely intended for players to make gods if they choose to do so. Based upon the points raised, that its always been up to us to define difficulty through our actions as players, not an artificially induced difficulty level. The fact barely any real thought was put into difficulty levels or its effect based upon the potential for damage per second abuse is proof enough of this.

I love your thought process on this subject. I have been in the 'well it is unbalanced but only if you make it so camp' from the beginning. I feel as though any character I play will only master one crafting skill, as IMO no one character is meant to be a master of multiple crafts. There are people out there however that wanted to master all three crafting skills, and then overlap them with one another to make the ultimate weapons/armor/enchants. By doing this they, the players chose to be a superior being to all creatures/men/mer in Skyrim. I do sympathize with those who genuinely feel the game is a little to easy, but I believe you have presented a great arguement on this subject, one of the best I have seen on these forums. Congrats to the OP on an eloquent and on point discussion topic.

There have been some well thought out posts in other topics, but I must confess I'm a little disappointed that my points aren't countered here. Unless a post is deliberately insulting on these forums, you can't get a discussion going!

Personal choice.

/thread.

you want difficulty?! be a destruction mage or try playing the game only using a shield as said its an rpg ment to be played your way if you want to be a dike and go around badass at lvl 6 its up to you homie dont wanna restart my game back at helgen cuz i ran outta lives :intergalactic:

Well, I can't be the only one who finds it odd that the advice on master involves the following skills:

Sneak
Smithing
Enchanting
Alchmeny
Illusion
Conjuration
Above average equipment
Companions


Except it's to NOT use them.


Perhaps it's not 'wrong' but in all my life, the harder/hardest settings typically demanded the use of all available tools. That this is not the case and the opposite is recommended is foreign, alien and frankly downrigh weird to me.


Edit: OP you mentioned ninja gaiden - I know and loved that game and the second one: If that was so easy you were told to only go through the game on Master Ninja using shuriken, wouldn't you feel something just wasn't right there?

NG2...That's actually one of the last 'hard' games I played.


Edit 2: To be truthful, I think we could probably safely remove all difficulty levels and kick it to novice only since all, and I do mean all, complaints about it being too easy result in "just don't use x,y or z or limit yourself/make it harder on yourself". At least then, there would be no misinterpretation of the nature of the game: The challenge is making one for yourself, not the other way around. The stall would be set out and people would have less grounds to complain.

"It's been broken all these years so why bother fixing it now"? How commendable.

This is not "spoon-feeding". It's making a difficulty system that works. Difficulty in Skyrim doesn't work for many reasons. You say - challenge yourself, don't use X, play only with Y. Why would I? Both X and Y are in the game, they require next to no metagaming to acquire. Who put them there? Why, Bethesda. Then who should fix it?

I guess TES fans are so used to community fixing all the flaws Bethesda puts in their games that they don't even consider the possibility of a developer making a game that works.

I feel EXACTLY the same way man.

tldr - tie one hand behind your back and don't use half of the skills in the game that are common practice in other, well balanced rpgs, if you want challenge.

I really don't get this. If you want to play a godlike character, simply set the difficulty slider lower. Instead, your posts reads as if you want to play the game on Master and still walk through it easily. Why? Enlighten me.

i actually agree there theres alot of people who dont have to worry about things things like this due to mods but there are alot of people who dont have acess to those same mods and want the game fixed by the ones who should be fixing it that said patience is the gold road......its also the road sheogorath makes people insane buy but hey yknow what i mean :intergalactic:

I agree with Cerddor that Skyrim is an imperfect game that strives to give players as many choices as possible and that players need to take responsibility for those choices. However, the flaw is that this argument is too mature for many of the audience that Skyrim attracts. The dedicated RPGers who love and appreciate games like Skyrim acknowledge the game has its flaws (every game does), but that the game is not defined by these flaws. There is much more to Skyrim that works then what doesn't work. These are the gamers who understand the role-playing aspect of the game and use the open world and character design / level process to get the most entertainment out of their game as possible.

damn you :bowdown: argument should be over after this but will continue for reasons you just pointed out

It's disgusting is what it is. The sheer amount of nonsense, these "fans" of the series like to feed each other, and spew at those of us that actually want a well thought out and at least, somewhat balanced game, beyond simply a cookie cutter themepark ride that is impossible to lose. They are enablers, their apathy towards real issues hurts the rest of the playerbase by allowing the developers to recreate the same or even greater flaws over and over again without being rightly criticized for it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: All games, singleplayer or otherwise need a basic level of balance.

Players should always be trying their best to get through a game, using the best gear, best spells etc. Inventing self handicaps for challenge is ridiculous, and basically lets developers get away with making poorly balanced games. A game developer should design content like they are playing chess against the players who utilize their content while making players earn what they get, instead of just handing everything over without any kind of resistance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA303Ct0MIs

So the games most difficult setting is too easy when you use the best gear possible? Ok, make armor less powerful. I'm all in for that.

I started the game as heavy smither and some in enchanting, and the game was at times challening on master. But it took until lvl 30+ until it became that easy.

I rerolled.

Now Im playing 75% on Adept and 25% on Expert. The game is very challenging at often makes Dark Souls look like a cake walk.
Thats my choice, cause I am using only restoration for heals, but no other magic. Im using no enchanting, no alchemy and a mediocre skill in smithing for RP reasons.

Its two different games.

You can play this game and have an extreme challenge at times. Or you can play the game on Master and one shoot anything infront of you.
The last, where people complains, is your fault cause you abuse mechanics, that yes is there, but the development team cant adjust a game difficulty based on that people are using all secondary skills.
The game balance on Adept is made for people with no secondary skills. And its hard as such. Sometimes very hard. On Expert, it takes a huge leap forward in difficulty.

Im having a blast myself and the game is very challenging 90% of the time. Cause I made it challenging. But honestly, I have all skilsl like everyone else, Im just not using enchanting, alchemy and max smithing, and no magic but restoration.

love this game, but the difficulty is a joke. im pretty good at games in general. but im 70 or so hr's in on master from the start. and i might as well be god mode. just from being a hybrid class. mostly 1h, bow, then magic. I have yet to craft or smith anything , which i hear you can over power yourself there also. Oblivion had a much harder lv of difficultly you could set it too. but skyrim dosent have this. Still enjoying the game but WAY to easy for my taste.

TBH I feel like Skyrim was dumbed down for a broader audience ($$$). They talked about making it feel like Morrowind but how could it when most of the things that made morrowind what it was is gone. I hate alteration, what happened to the everlasting fun of bound armor and weapons? I hate how they took out endurance and acrobatics, I thought it was cool you could actually work on those things like in real life. Weapons could deteriorate also. It's not just the difficulty setting, it's how the game has changed completely from even oblivion.Skyrim has a ton of content but in its attempt to make the world more personal to you the quests feel more linear, it was kind of like Dragon Age Origins how you ride into a new town and there's automatically dialogue leading to a quest, in Morrowind it seemed more real.

There have always been ways to exploit things, but never this easily, I mean when I was abusing smithing I just thought that's what you were supposed to do, since it was so easy and blatant, not realizing I was taking a lot of the fun out of the game. Don't get me wrong, I think Skyrim is great but I can't help but feel the team either took one step forward and two steps back or just decided to give the majority of fans whatever they wanted, even if it meant something kind of gay, or a novelty (possibly dragons?).

I agree.

However, I have yet to see a compelling discussion from those opposed to making the hardest setting actually be hard, citing why not. It appears more around 'fear' of creating a 'powergaming' culture or similar, which seems a bit off since there are difficulty settings in the first place. So....As I said above, at this point we'd be as well as doing away with the difficulty settings - RP'ers wouldn't notice/care or make rules around themselves to bend it to fit and there would be no such illusions of a 'hard' setting.


I have seen no good reason or debate (there may be one, I'm not omnipotent) around why master (and master alone) should not be brutally difficult. Why should the hardest difficulty be anything but 'inaccessible' to many? The 'hardest' setting being anything but that is a contradiction of the highest order.

eh i guess it all depends on preference to difficulty really i dont mind a good challenge and some deaths to the npc but as the first battle field bad company says at the difficulty selection screen easy: the game practically plays itself , veteran: for the skillfully gifted and masochists this is why i usually stikk to expert or normal it all depends on how you handle getting yo butt whupped we all handle that different some people just dont want to throw there controllers at the wall that sort of thing some want to match there skill against the cpu and succeed and some just want anol rapage

EDIT: as i said it depends who you are and how you prefer things for me -playing on master difficulty in alot of cases means multiple quick deaths every five seconds im sure some people have experienced this for others its one hit kills on everything in your path the games weird like that

Yeah. Maybe its just my age but I'm old school. I remember many games where the hardest setting was just not happening. Ever. It was a genuine feat to complete things on hard.

These days in the "achievement" age, hard has morphed a speedbump to a set of 'gamer points' that all should be able to access. Perhaps I'm a dinosaur and that's just the way it is going. Still doesn't explain why almost all arguments about making master hard are from role players/immersion enthusiasts though.

It's not that the difficulty isn't high enough. It's just that the skills are simply unbalanced. Some are generally too weak like Destruction and Alteration while some are ridiculously strong like Enchanting, Alchemy and Smithing.