LE Making the game harder

[Kunrokh]

Hey,

 

so I've seen many people writing about that the game is simply to easy, and I must agree even when putting it on the hardest difficulty.

If you know where to look, you can get some of the most overpowered items in early levels, and the general challenge is just to low.

 

The game should be more realistic in some ways, and it should just be harder to get the good items.

 

So PLEASE let me know, WHAT DO YOU think would make the game more challenging (fun)?

 

Personally...

 

- One way of adding challenge would be to make save points. So imagine you could only save your game in a an inn. This would stop the nonsense of spamming your quicksaves so you can load 20 seconds before a fight so you can do it over and over again until you win. It would also dramatically force the player to really think about his/her next move.

 

- Another thing that would make the game harder, is to stop the complete madness in letting Gloombound Mine having 16 veins.... seriously?

You go there once and you have enough ebony ore for a full set of daedric armor. Once you find the right merchant, you realize that every second day he sells 2 daedra hearts..... where's the challenge? All you need to do in Skyrim is just knowing where to get it, you don't even have to fight.

So reducing the veins to 1 ebony ore vein in very rare places would make it seem more fair. Daedra hearts shouldn't be sold, they should be gained only from killing.

 

- Blacksmithing is gained by spamming iron daggers, again, where's the challenge. The only challenge is accepting it's going to be boring and still go on with it.

Instead iron daggers should stop giving xp at Blacksmithing level 30 or so. And there you would have to go on to elven armor or whatever would be next for you.

 

- Fights should simply include tougher hits. The mobs dont need more hp, this would just result in players doing the same thing... for a longer time. You need the mobs to much more so the player is forced to make strategic decisions based on the situation.

Edited November 30, 2011 by Kunrokh

[Calexander]

the problem with inns (at least with the pc) is that the game crashes unexpectedly A LOT (for me and i have a top-notch pc. also happens to my friends) so we don't know when we will need to save. obviously if you need to leave to go do something you can just head on over to an inn, but what if you plan on playing more and it jsut crashes?

[Kunrokh]

the problem with inns (at least with the pc) is that the game crashes unexpectedly A LOT (for me and i have a top-notch pc. also happens to my friends) so we don't know when we will need to save. obviously if you need to leave to go do something you can just head on over to an inn, but what if you plan on playing more and it jsut crashes?

 

Well I must admit you have a good point there, I havn't experinced much crashing myself and I've played for 100+ hours now. But if you have a problem with crashing a lot I really udnerstand what you mean.

[KuBaN]

I agree with all points here. I suspect the devs shifted focus away from inns and beds as it was a sort of tedious mechanic in Oblivion, however it would drastically alter the challenge of the game (and finding beds does seem a bit easier in Skyrim regardless). Perhaps expanding the Rested Bonus mechanic...

 

Well Rested: Skill mastery speed +10%. Health, Magicka, and Stamina regeneration +10%.

Awake: Default (Normal skill master speed. Normal regeneration rates.)

Exhausted: Skill mastery speed -15%. Health, Magicka, and Stamina regeneration -50%.

 

Players would become exhausted after spending an amount of time in the Awake state (after the Well-Rested bonus wears off). Food and alcohol could be given a more intuitive and vital role of temporarily removing the Exhausted debuff (bringing you back to the Awake state, and indirectly increasing your skill mastery speed and regen rates).

 

Additionally, I think we need a cap on consumables (those you're literally consuming) such as food and potions. That or give potions the inverse effect of food/alcohol and temporarily Exhaust players once the effects of any Potions wear off.

[Homitu]

I agree that the game can become way too easy once you acquire the right gear setup. Once you max enchanting and smithing, it becomes virtually impossible to die and you can kill almost anything, including the toughest bosses and dragons in less than 6 seconds on master difficulty. Once I reached this point, the game became MUCH less compelling to continue playing; knowing that I had no more character progression to look forward to (even though I still wanted new perks, I knew they couldn't possibly be meaningful because my character was already maximally powerful,) and knowing that every dungeon crawling combat encounter for the rest of the game was going to be face-smashingly boring, I found myself playing the game less and less frequently. So disappointing, especially considering how enthralled I was in the game before reaching that absurd power level.

 

That said, none of your suggestions have anything to do with difficulty to me. They all fall under the category of convenience versus inconvenience. It's convenient to be able to mine that jackpot mine. I'd prefer that over finding the min, then pressing "T" and waiting for months and months for the node to respawn. Sitting there waiting while pressing "T" does not equal fun in my book.

 

I would like smithing and enchanting to be a bit more difficult to level, and to require a greater variety of creations to get there, but again, this has zero effect on the difficulty in my book. It's just a matter of how convenient you want the system to be versus how grindy you would like it. I'm not much of a fan of hardcore grinds even in MMOs, let alone single player RPGs where nobody else gets to experience the fruit of my labor.

 

For me, the only time difficulty comes into play is when discussing combat. I don't know if it's as simple as giving enemies more health/armor/resist and damage because if they scaled perfectly evenly with every offensive and defensive bonus you gained, every upgrade you ever acquire becomes utterly meaningless. I think I just want the game to require me to use a greater variety of abilities to defeat my enemies, instead of just spam clicking to hack away at everything with my sword. Then again, if you're playing any physical class, all you really have are your melee weapon(s) and perhaps a bow (and one shout every 15-300 seconds.) There are no other abilities. So yeah, I'm not entirely sure what the solution would be as far as Skyrim's combat goes. In other games, even physical characters have a variety of abilities that can cause a variety of effects that can be tweaked and improved to better balance the combat.

 

Sorry, this was pretty much an utterly unproductive post.