I consider myself to be a completionist when it comes to gaming, and as such, I play all my games on the hardest difficulty almost exclusively. I'm sure many others on the site feel the same and have played Skyrim exclusively on Master and Legendary difficulty.
But as time went on I found that these difficulties often get very boring. I mean, all it does is increase enemy damage while cutting the players in half. I just stand there knowing I'm going to win a fight, but knowing it is going to take five minutes because the enemy has so much health.
So my questions to you are this:
What difficulty do you play the game on and why?
What do you think of player induced difficulty restrictions such as Dead is Dead or Adept+ (playing the game on adept difficulty but with no investment in the health stat)?
Do you like the way Skyrim's difficulty settings work and if not, what would you change?
With Skyrim, a lot of the difficulty is set by the player, and I'm not just talking about the difficulty setting in the options menu. The choices you make for your character will greatly influence how difficult your playthrough will be. For example, a character that uses all three crafting skills will have an easier time on Legendary than one that doesn't. Therefore, there is no set in stone "ideal" difficulty; it depends on how strong the character you make is.
I don't like playing on Master/Legendary for its own sake; enemies can absorb way too much damage on those difficulties unless you have a high damage output yourself. That's what makes restrictions like Adept+ interesting; they get around the "damage sponge" problem while still providing a challenge in their own right. I prefer 0 AR builds for that kind of thing though.
I prefer a playstyle where a mistake is equally deadly to both sides. Skyrim's weakness there is mostly in defense, and partly in detection. The game allows you to be a tank because it doesn't provide you with a lot of ways to avoid incoming damage. You can't outright block an attack, only some of the damage. You can rarely dodge a close ranged attack (particularly if you want to be in range to counter). So to make up for it, they let you be able to take a few hits that you can't dodge. Master and Legendary generally just drag things out, for me. Being vulnerable enough to die in one hit is only one part of making an interesting combat experience. Being in an immersive fight is more interesting, so I tend to stick with Adept.
Legendary. I just feel, even though it may feel tedious at first, it sets a challenge knowing it is the hardest setting.
Dead is dead is great, have done it multiple times. Adept+ I have never heard of, but sounds fun!
NO. It would obviously mean more work on Bethesda's part, but make some enemies exclusive to difficulties or at least make some qualifiers different. I would also not necessarily use the damage out/in as the gauge of difficulty but rather quantity of enemies and added dangers such as traps are more frequent, bandits show up more to rob you, bosses are trickier with more help, etc.
I just feel difficulty should not be number swaps with game data. Having difficulty drastically change what you experience and see would be so cool. Even MORE replayability.
Skyrim difficulty doesn't really make it "more difficult", it just makes the game more unfair to the player with health and damage handicaps. It would be more difficult if it increased the number of enemies, or gave them more spells, or increased their line of sight (against stealth), or gave them potions.
I still play the game on expert though, just because enemies can only use 1% of the spells and items that are in the game. Have you ever seen a mage cast an alteration spell besides oakflesh or any of the illusion spells? Or any of the thief-archetype abilities? They can't even use any poisons except for falmer and spiders who use the same poison. Playing this game on Adept is just way too easy, but on Master it's way too annoying. For me, Expert difficulty all the way.
Also, about DiD, I play the game as if I were playing DiD, keeping my character alive for as long as possible. But if I happen to die, I keep playing. It doesn't make sense to me to start all over again. I did get into DiD once, and I realized it just became a loophole similar to playing Flappy Bird: you get atticted to trying over and over again and see how far you can go each time. Don't wanna be anywhere near that stuff.
This is a video game, and each character I play is like a story I write. Dying once doesn't mean I have to erase all the story and start from scratch, it's just like deleting a paragraph and rewriting it from there. Also, a game in which I don't die at all is a game that is too easy for me.
In those situations I think shield / mace works great. The shield allows you to fend off some of the enemy's massive damage and interrupt him, and because rushing the enemy with several, quick blows tends to leave you defenceless, you might as well just bash him with a few mace hits and even stagger him more than with a sword.
I play on Adept with my mods, as even on adept getting killed by 2-3 blows happens quite a lot .. or happened, now that I've gotten heavy armor up I can take ~twice the damage, more if they are low level npcs.
Without mods I played on expert, seemed like a nice balance to me.
I bumped my original character up to Legendary difficulty right when I got the patch for it. It just seemed necessary, seeing as how I'd beaten every major questline at the time. After that I started off on Master for every new character build I've tried, just because it makes the game a lot more challenging and fun. Dead is Dead is enjoyable to play as well. I've tried it out on some occasions, but I always end up arguing with myself about how my latest death was just "a glitch" or "unfair" . I've never done Adept+ or heard of it, but it does seem like a fun way to play for those who don't want the damage dealt reduction/damage taken increase to change.
Simple fix. Difficulty should change the number of enemies that spawn, that would be awesome. On legendary you would feel so epic, plowing through hordes of enemies, like a true hero against an insurmountable evil.
Personally I generally roll on expert, it keeps enemy damage low enough to not be exceptionally frustrating/constant healing potions and hard enough to really require some thought, though I do change it around depending on the build.
I always play on Expert for the aforementioned scaling problems. If foes would get smarter by going to master, I would change but alas. I use a lot of mods from Frostfall to Deadly Dragons etc to make the game harder without going the normal difficulty slider route and making the game much more enjoyable at the same time. I also always roleplay my characters without intentionally gimping them. So expert is alright for me.
Honestly, I didn't enjoy Skyrim's warrior archtype with melee combat until I installed mods for enemy AI and better enemy scaling. I uninstalled them all the other day and was stunned that so many enemies just seem to stand there, waiting for a beating. They don't block or go at you aggressively. They don't flank or surround you, unless by accident, and they all turn into massive damage sponges if you just notch it up to Master/Legendary. The difficulty needs to be smarter and more tactical, not simply adding another three hundred AR to all the enemies while making your own basically worthless.