Game Difficulty Discussion

[Razumen]

I enjoy difficult games, games which are challenging but give the player room to learn, grow and adapt to increasingly difficult, but never impossible, odds. How is this possible? For one, it's AI that doesn't cheat, but actively and reactively engages the player, either alone, or as a communicating group. There's obviously more to this, but I'm far too tired to expand on it.

Of course, I don't just like difficulty alone, I like the satisfaction one accrues when beating a hard segment to make it to the next area, see the next awesome cinematic or reveal another key plot point. I'm not one to beat/accomplish something just because it's there.

I'll admit, I don't get it when people I know use cheats/god mode/etc. to beat a game, effectively eliminating any challenge of any kind what so ever. Frankly, if that's your thing, you're better off watching a book or better yet, watch someone else play.

[Brushfire]

The problem with Oblivion is that as you get more powerful or as you finish certain quests, you get good enchanted gear, while they don't scale up the gear found on NPCs nearly as much (i.e. no one will ever be as stacked as you by the time you hit level 40 or 50 or so). Monsters suffer from that even more: all they could really do is increase a monster's health and other stats and maybe make the AI more complicated. It's a tough call: the game wouldn't feel as epic if the best equipment you could get was an unenchanted set of daedric armor and a daedric longsword, but since you can loot all equipment an NPC has when you kill them, if they had enchanted gear on par with yours, you'd get rich *really* quickly.

I agree Kanthos. I bought that Game of the Year Edition for Oblivion and was at level 20 when I completed the Shivering Isles quest. The last boss fight was a joke. I hit him twice with the Supirior Dawnfang and he died. Talk about a let down. On a side note the difficulty was set to normal.