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[nenjin]

The point is, I can do that with a frenzy staff from Level 1. It has nothing do with how the game is constructed. You call it anti-min/max, and I'd say it's not even the same conversation.

The truth is, Bethesda has never figured how to balance their own game. Morrowind was the last time I felt like the balance was in touch with the actual gameplay. Since Morrowind, people have repeatedly bitched at Bethesda for not getting their own system and how it needs to tick to run like people expect it to. The lack of min/maxing, RPG or not features, whatever.....is a direct result of them saying "Meh, fuck it. We know how to make amazing vistas, let's focus on that."

I mean seriously. How many amateur game designers do we have here? How long would it have taken you to plot out the guts of Skyrim's system on paper? About a day, running on the wealth of information and history of TES? For all the game's achievements, this is not one place where I'll let them slide by. They low-balled the game part of the game and they know it. What saves Skyrim is it takes half the game for you to realize it because the world is so engrossing and the curve a little smoother, as opposed to Oblivion where the fuck up was in your face in the first 5 minutes, when you gained three levels through athletics running to the first dungeon.

[MorleyDev]

Actually I think I was replying to the "urge to min/max from the get-go" statement a few posts back xD Yeah, I agree about there not really being anywhere to go when you hit the ceiling...I guess I'll have to wait for the mods that uncap the levelling

[SHAD0Wdump]

Rozy challenge complete. Killed two giants at level 5(One at a time, I ain't got the stones to be flanked by the bastards).
 Had to pump arrows into them though while running around like a headless chicken and getting them stuck on trees. Felt a bit cheap but slicing these guys just ain't happening.

[Mephisto]

In the official forums, people said there wasn't many choices about quests. Someone said at one point you have to turn into a werewolf whether you want to be or not.

Just like Morrowind, where you are forced to contract Corpus as part of the main quest.

Not quite. To become a werewolf, you literally have to drink its blood. To contract corpus, you have to be somewhere in the vicinity of something that has the disease.

Going by this argument, all Elder Scrolls games are horrible because you have diseases forced upon your character when being attacked by various critters.

[Jay]

Once you hit 100 enchanting, you're at the top of the mountain, enjoy mixing and matching two effects until you realize you've made everything useful and interesting that you possibly can.

100% false.
Level alchemy.  Make potions of enchanting.  Enchant stuff with fortify alchemy.  Repeat.
There is no cap to the effective level of skills.

I have a character that is completely untouchable.  21,000 health, 800% heal rate, 1.5 billion armor, and 4.3 million damage per hit.
All done legitimately through the enchanting/alchemy/smithing trifecta.

EDIT: Granted, that just makes it even easier for people to put out skill cap removers, because the stats aren't set arbitrarily as in Oblivion.
Though they'd need to fix the leveling lists so stuff can actually halfway challenge you when you do stuff like this....

[freeformschooler]

I will say this: I'm going to extend my gameplay of Skyrim by playing again on the hardest difficulty once I hit my head on the ceiling.

Wait, I might do that right now. Hm...

[nenjin]

I have a character that is completely untouchable.  21,000 health, 800% heal rate, 1.5 billion armor, and 4.3 million damage per hit.
All done legitimately through the enchanting/alchemy/smithing trifecta.

K. And what then? I already feel like a god with 65 damage and 225 armor. I'm not, but it wouldn't take much more. So after you've ground and increased the numerical value of armor, damage and the regens....how much fun is it to one-shot everything? Or cast a hard-coded, maximum-level destruction spell whose damage is only affected by potions and enchanting?

As a numbers exercise based solely around gear, sure, there's plenty to do. Bethesda had the foresight to make all those effects cumulative so at least there's some open-ended absurdity. There's just not much to say about it though beyond that you have 1000% something fundamental. So what your stats are that high? They don't ultimately do anything more interesting than they did when they were low. It's not like you have 200% strength which lets you punch guys across Skyrim, or 200% agility so you can leap up cliff faces. There's a lack of context to most of that stuff, as it all relates to combat.

[Frumple]

Icarian flight, maaan. Even if they've stripped out th'awesomejumping from the earlier games, they should have at least one icarian flight scroll in all the games.

Don't, obviously, but still. It'll be a while before I'll be able to play skyrim (or oblivion, really; this comp's pretty crappy, by today's standards), but not being able to make a standing jump on to the top of someone's house is going to be a sad state of affairs.

To say nothing of stuff like that hoptoad spell. How does one travel skyrim on foot if not by jumping over the mountains? Will it be possible to mod a decent acrobatics skill back in the game?

Point being that having tangible results for ridiculous numbers, as nenjin points to, is really, really nice. 4.3 million damage should cause anything it hits to erupt into a .c traveling spray of viscera, demolishing a massive cone-shaped spread of the countryside. There should be entrails shaped holes boring thousands of feet into the distance. But they don't even bounce like getting hit by a giant, apparently

They don't have to, of course, but it's that old point. Used to be I could get my acrobatics score up there and hop on top of buildings. Can't jump over towns any more

[SHAD0Wdump]

And to top the giants, I killed all three of their mammoths, at the same time.(Strung out kills of course, but they were all chasing me)

[Sirian]

My problem with Skyrim right now is that you level up too fast, and you can clearly see the "seams" in the scaling of enemies when you fight a wave of goons that you kill in two hits, and suddenly there's this guy who has a lot more health and munches down your HP. So far it's not as bad as Oblivion, in that i haven't seen any bandits in ebony armor, but they clearly didn't learn their lesson.

For instance, right now i can craft Ebony stuff, but i don't want to ! I'm like "already there ?? but i have barely used my new orcish armor, and i barely used my plate armor before that !". I kept the Companions quests on backburner, but i didn't really do any questing outside of Whiterun yet, and still i've already outgrown the Skysteel weapons and Wolf armor that you unlock at their blacksmith. Maybe i should have refrained from levelling smithing and enchanting, because i feel like i've gained quite a lot of levels from that. I didn't really even try to gain levels in smithing/enchanting, it was more like "Oh neato, a crafting system. Let's make some money crafting and enchanting a bunch of daggers." And suddenly i'm a hero ! In the effort it took to get enough money to buy a couple nice things from merchants, i'm now 10+ levels higher, i'm almost a master blacksmith/enchanter, and the whole world has scaled up, making a portion of the game content that i didn't discover yet, obsolete.

If anything, we need a mod for decoupling non-combat skills from the general level. Or maybe a combat level and a non-combat level, or some other solution so that you still gain perk points for your non-combat skills.

[nenjin]

For instance, right now i can craft Ebony stuff, but i don't want to ! I'm like "already there ?? but i have barely used my new orcish armor, and i barely used my plate armor before that !".

Well, the thing is you can continually improve your low level armor (fine, exquisite, flawless, epic, legendary) several times and how far it can go scales to your skill. So while you can craft ebony now, chances are you can improve your orcish stuff to a level 1.5x to 2x higher than unmodified ebony. So really, you shouldn't even bother making your ebony stuff until you're nearly maxed out improving your orcish. Because you'll need a pretty high blacksmith skill to make epic ebony armor, and your epic orcish armor is what you'll wear to get there.

Maxed out each tier of armor is better than the last, but not by much. The difference between a unmodified glass sword and a flawless elven sword is 2 points of damage. (Before you dump blacksmithing potions and enchants on it to further enhance it.)

It's kind of ironic, but in truth there is almost no difference between the weapons except weight and value. Their damage rating is actually a scale that, with potions and enchanting, means you can basically pick your favorite kind of weapon and just continually improve it or make a new, better version and it will stay competitive with weapons of better materials for a long, long time.

I kinda feel sorry for the people that immediately maxed out blacksmithing. That alone throughs the whole balance of the game off, not just because it levels you up....but it obliterates any sort of weapon progression.

[Duke 2.0]

 Morrowind had some shitty ass design.

 It was a wonderful game I loved to play and had a lot going for it, but I would argue the alchemy, enchanting and leveling systems were just as broken as they are in Skyrim.

 Although I have yet to play the game aside from hearing a bunch of people play it and tell stories on it, so I ultimately can't make a respectable assessment until I do so. So this post will just be a provocative jab at the idea of Morrowind somehow being some magic "They just got it right with that one" concept.

[Dutchling]

So at level 18 I finally decided to go to Solitude. After doing a quest for some shady Argonian dude I somehow get in the room of a general I apparently know. He tells me to speak to someone else who is in the same room but somehow doesn't hear our conversation. Than I speak to her and she said the general told her I survived some place, which is obviously not true as said general only knows it for two seconds and he didn't tell her yet. She suddenly starts babbling about some mission I have to do and that she wouldn't care if I die. I obviously stopped the conversation and walked away, I don't need her..

PLEASE tell me I can find a Stormcloak guy somewhere and start the main quest in a different way >.>

[nenjin]

Although I have yet to play the game aside from hearing a bunch of people play it and tell stories on it, so I ultimately can't make a respectable assessment until I do so. So this post will just be a provocative jab at the idea of Morrowind somehow being some magic "They just got it right with that one" concept.

Morrowind was sloppy, but it was highly flexible. You were screwing with the core nuts of bolts of the game there, and there were a lot of nuts and bolts to choose from. I said it elsewhere, but it made for a sloppy, often redundant, broken mess. But it was fun and it was highly personal. The leveling system was paced for people who like to savor their games. "Just right?" No. More interesting than everything that has come after it? Yes.

Skyrim has way fewer nuts and bolts, that are way more restricted and they don't or aren't allowed to interact with each other in a lot of places. It's a less personal game and again, as I've said before, no one playing Skyrim can do anything novel with the system. (Other than inflate "the big three" of regeneration, damage and armor through multiplication as Jay and others have shown.) Its flexible within the tiny little sphere of options they've left you. It's not a big sloppy mess, it's still fun, but it's not personal and the mechanics certainly aren't memorable.

And the leveling is on par with Fallout 3 and Oblivion, which is to say its way faster paced and intended for people who want to fly through the game to max level, then restart and fly through it on another character. So its still broke, just not in a way that's conducive to hardcore RPGers who want their game to keep making internal sense as they keep playing it.

PLEASE tell me I can find a Stormcloak guy somewhere and start the main quest in a different way >.>

Go to Windhelm. Solitude is the Imperial Stronghold. That's also not the "main quest." That's the Civil War quest.

[Dutchling]

Wait those aren't the same? The game sure makes you think it is.