Bamm: Have you been training very much on a specific non-combat skill? Enemies will level with you a bit, so if you level to much without actually becoming stronger, you might have a hard time.

Just to elaborate on this point. This is how RPGs are supposed to work: if you follow the main quest-line, the gradient at which the enemy's strength increases will be steeper than your own, and you will be forced to either level (side-quest), or face encounters that are nearly impossible. At all points in the game, there should be this tension created by the fact that while your progression is noticeable (= satisfaction), the enemy's progression is steeper so you are always facing a challenge (= fun), and moreover everything that contributes towards your strength (every position, item advancement etc.) is meaningful.

This is a basic formula used by nearly every single RPG ever made. Why does Skyrim ignore it? Why does it allow you to change the difficulty in-game? WTF were they thinking?

The level scaling in skyrim won't let you complete the whole game at lvl 1.

But the Oblivion's one will.

I thought I read somewhere that when you go to an area, that area is locked to your current level. So if you go away and come back, the monsters would be easy.

My first dragon fight was...meh. Stand in the fire, chop on its face, run back and heal. Although, it was fun to jump off a ledge and hit with a two-handed great axe (ala Reign of Fire style), which turned out to be the final blow.

Which reminds me of Oblivion.

NPC: "Aaaah! Gates to hell have opened near our city! We're all gonna die! Aaah!"
<player walks into city>
NPC: "That silly orc is an awfully precarious fella".

The lack of awareness of what is going on from NPCs destroys the immersion of the game. The lack of proper scalability (which leads to the feeling of both accomplishment and epic-ness) destroys the immersion of the game.

I just completed the main quest line. The game feels like it didn't even get started. I'm still using a weapon I got 1 hour into starting the game, and the same 3 spells I started with. I've not had to buy a single item in the game, and I'm yet to fight an encounter that wasn't trivially easy to win by kiting.

The final boss fight would have been extremely impressive if I hadn't fought the identical dragon fight about 10 times already.

It's almost criminal that a game which has so much attention to detail in some places was so poorly put together as an actual playable RPG.

Admittedly I did enjoy it, but while the quality of the animation and voice acting was exceptional, as an all-round game it was piss-poor. But hey, it was better than I was expecting.

It seems Skyrim contains all the land of the Elder Scrolls myth, including all areas of previous games, although they are not explorable unless noclip is engaged. Personally, I do not like RPGs, but it seems interesting just to explore the huge area.

I'm inclined to start over and follow a walkthrough so I don't get fucked this time.

I'm more or less done with Skyrim. Just bought Arkham City this morning. There goes my imaginary productivity this weekend.

Personally, I was horrified by the interface after spending five minutes trying to get my mouse to do things in the character creation menu (I assumed something was broken, some part of installation must have failed). It took me probably two or three days to get over it and start enjoying the experience. It's still irritating.

That could be a problem in and of itself, depending on where you're sitting.

Leveling beyond enemies as motivation for progress isn't such a compelling mechanic that I miss it. And like James says, it's been the de facto standard for thirty or forty years -- I'd encourage anyone to mix it up. I'm enjoying the game as a story; it's captivating just to explore the lore, the situations that play out, and the capabilities of your avatar. Fighting is a secondary priority that facilitates actual progression through interesting game content. The only reason I'm concerned with leveling at all is because I'm interested in seeing what new spells I can learn, or to reduce time spent grinding on generic thugs in a generic dungeon (so that I can skip ahead to the interesting thugs in the interesting dungeon ).

It's similar to Portal 2 in that respect. My friends hated it because they didn't spend as much time stuck on puzzles as they did in Portal (concerned with the challenge of solving puzzles). Others enjoyed it as a delightful piece of work, despite the hand-holding (concerned with the game content). If you go into Skyrim looking to crack some heads and max out some stats, you probably won't be very happy with it.

I just started my second character a couple days ago and I'm happy to report a couple things:

• The game is still fun to explore and progress through.

• Playing as a different type of character is unique and interesting, something I was longing for in Oblivion and Fallout 3.

Aw, what? There are lots of interesting thugs and dungeons!

Though not by that metric, as I said before.

This probably has something to do with you never 'stopping to smell the roses'. I've been meandering from side quest to side quest and loot is definitely getting more and more interesting, as are the people I'm coming across and the stories I'm becoming involved in.

It's a video game, you invent the 'point'. The one you chose is no fun.

I wouldn't bother, if my main concern was the difficulty of fighting.

Going places and doing things is my kind of progression.

I still don't know what people are talking about with things being too easy. That's definitely not my experience. They're easy adjacent at times because the AI is usually pretty dumb, but some of the people and many of the creatures are actually very difficult to defeat (i.e., I don't have a chance)... Perhaps the main quest line is really easy. For me, I accept every side quest I encounter and have like 20 on the go. I always feel like I should do the side quests before the main quests... The side quests that I'm trying to do are no easy task, at least not for my character.

Exactly. Moving chess pieces randomly around a board is not fun.

Freedom loses its novelty very quickly, and lasting enjoyment really requires boundaries to push against and challenge.

The gameplay is essentially the same as WoW, so I guess I have an unfair advantage in that I used to play WoW arenas competitively. I'd bet money on any half-decent WoW arena player being able to complete any part of the main quest line with the starting items/spells without any real practice. The only difference is that it takes about 1/100th the skill level that WoW does (WoW requires you to lean 30+ keybindings to play a class properly, Skyrim takes learning 2).