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Skyrim (analysis)

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Skyrim

Balance Issue

Skyrim is a great game but also, I remember some balance issues on the difficulty through glitches exploit :

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  •  Enchantment - Alchemy - Forge rolling
  •  The sneaky dagger with damage multiply by 30 with special gauntlet.

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But more generally the levelling has a pretty bad balance in the end game.
It looks like it has been made to be played 60 hours maximum.

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After that, fights are no longer challenging the player who can easily beat every enemies.
It’s not a big deal because Skyrim propose good side quests, an interesting lore and a strong RP basis.

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Oblivion was harder than Skyrim and Morrowind was harder than Oblivion.

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Here, Bethesda have choose to take a larger scope of players with a huge pacing ( feeling of progression ) to attract a maximum of people.
 

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Hardest Dragon in Skyrim

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This guy can basically 2 shots the best dragon of the game with his dagger.

The first solution that corrects this problem is the legendary mod add by official creators that allow to reset skills to unlock the level up system.

It was not really effective and add only 10 or 20 additional hours with challenge.

 

So now, modding has try to add some solution to keep the challenge.

The most famous is the survival mode in skyrim that limit the player in a lot of way :

 

  • Weather can hurt you

  • Harder to leveling

  • Craft harder

  • Healing to some affliction ( bleeding, disease, etc )

 

Players try to find some solution to keep fun in end-game but mods have some disadvantage like be hard to install or lock your achievements.

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In the last 30 days, on the first page of the comment on Steam

  • In red, players have spend more than 100 hours on the game and a lot of them have used mods. ( 6 / 9 )

  • In green, players have play less than 60 hours ( 3 / 9 )

 

I think the balance is good if you play on this game like 50 - 60 hours but a lot of people play it more than 100 hours and some players more than 1000 hours !

Solution

To counter this balance issue : 

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  • we can add a cap of damage on bosses

  • allow the game to level up enemies ( linked with the player level )

  • add them better equipments

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That encourage the player to focus skills usage and weapon bonus more effectively.

For example a snow troll is hard at the beginning and must be killed with fire affliction.

With this solution, the fire approach is kept in end-game.

Metro : Last Light

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