You can still make poor choices though. Someone with a good build might turn out an excellent talker/shooter, whereas someone with a less good build going for the same style might wind up with a mediocre talker and a good shooter. It should not be like in Skyrim where some skills(like speech and arguably pickpocketing) are essentially useless, maybe even detrimental if you take level scaling into consideration.

Basically, there's a difference between all skills being useful, and all builds being equally powerful(I think you may have interpreted them to be the same). Under these "perfect game" conditions it would be really hard to make a character that cannot finish the game(a good thing if you ask me) but still possible to create characters that are above par.


concepts in language are really hard to define.

I looked it up in a dictionary and it said Excessive amount of power. Excessive probably in this sense referring to "over the limit". So too powerful for the game to handle? I think this fits stealth and tricrafting on skyrim as it allows you to waltz through the game on any difficulty(or so I hear) without any problems. Which I don't think either players or developers want(if you want to waltz through the game, you use the lower difficulities).

And I know that someone will probably at this point state: So just don't get the overpowered stuff, you don't have to powergame you know. And it's true, you don't. But maybe I like crafting and sneaking and maybe I still like a challenge while doing those things? This is why balance and multiple levels of difficulties exist, so each player can play the system the way (s)he wants and as challenging as (s)he wants.

Of course, this will never happen in skyrim cause you always wind up a battlemagerogue anyway. Unless you're artificially limiting yourself

I don't...quite understand why people who are so averse to potential powergaming still even consider playing elder scrolls games. I mean, the trend is pretty firmly established now, surely?

@ DDL

Nobody can argue that this is something you shouldn't be expecting out of an elder scrolls game, based on past record. So yeah, a player who decides to play Skyrim and who has all the facts is bringing the balance issues upon himself.

I hardly think that "the player could've avoided all these trials and tribulations if he had simpley not played the game" would lead to much interesting discussion, though. I don't think any of us here are truly indignant about the potential for overpowered builds.

But it's not good.

@ Jonas

Yeah see, to me, creating an overpowered build is a little minigame all of its own. If you haven't played Magic: The Gathering, here's a little perspective from that game:

The Magic community has established a name for something called Degenerate Combo's. These are card combinations with stupidly powerful results...typically, they reduce an open game to a won game like flicking a switch. Magic is a game whose gimick is that the rules are written on Trading cards, so obviously these exist.

There are none which are truly overpowered, even if they allow players to make exceptionally powerful degenerate combo's within the system...but they're the closest thing you get in Magic, and they are effectively overpowered against many opponents.

Here's the thing: These decks are not fun to play. They're not fun to play with, not fun to play against, they're just not fun...unless you're making them. Making degenerate combo's in decks can be very rewarding and very entertaining, but the proper response to making one such is playing with it once, getting mad props, and leaving it alone forever onwards.

It's the same deal with breaking the system in RPG's. It's fun the moment that you crack it, and all the time where you labor leading up to the crack, but from that point on it's useless.

Ultimately, the existence of degenerate combo's is a good thing for the players, but a bad thing for anyone exposed to one while playing. From the perspective of the regular gameplay, then, degenerate combo's are bugs, whereas from the deckbuilders perspective, they're features.

I think, in really general terms, that OP builds are a bad thing for RPG's, because you can't just find a combo and leave it alone, you're very likely to ruin the rest of your time playing by comparison to if you hadn't found the combo.

Well I guess that's just another way we differ then - not only do I enjoy finding an overpowered build, I also enjoy playing with it (depending on the game). I consider it my reward for being good at creating a character. I'm not saying everyone should feel that way, but I'm saying you also shouldn't assume that everyone should feel the way you do (ie. playing with OP builds in a singleplayer game is no fun). My only problem is that there's comparatively many very powerful builds in Skyrim, but frankly I don't know if I'd call the one I'm playing OP. Powerful, yes, but not too powerful for the game to handle.

I'm having a really easy time with my stealth build, but I'm not playing on the highest difficulty, and even then I do have to do some saving and loading when I fuck up. What tends to happen is that I try to make a shot that's just too far away, so the trajectory doesn't work out the way I expected, which raises suspicion in the enemies. After a couple of shots, they'll come looking for me and a fight will erupt. Other times I just don't have the damage I thought I did, so my initial sneak attack doesn't kill the enemy I'm shooting, which means he or she comes charging at me. In a full-on fight, I'm not automatically boned because of Skyrim's pretty open levelling system, but I do tend to blow through potions faster than Charlie Sheen goes through coke, and I'd say about a third of the time I fuck up my health management and I go down. So I reload, I take the time to prepare better (potion of Trueshot, some sort of poison on the bow, make sure its enchantment is charged, switch to an Ebony arrow) and then try again.

If I used invisibility more, I could probably approach overpoweredness, but I haven't been levelling Illusion, and my recently acquired invisibility power is kind of limited in usefulness because it's once per day. I save my potions for stealth missions, and I prefer killing people to sneaking past them anyway.

I don't think it's any more overpowered than stealth was in Deus Ex 1.

I'm with Jonas on this: half the fun of achieving a truly OP build is going out and raping faces with it. For me, and particularly in elder scrolls games, I love the initial OMG WUT power curve, where you're often having trouble taking down rats and mudcrabs, but I don't particularly want the struggle to persist throughout the entire game: the ideal for me is essentially beating the powercurve midway through, so I can then go on and kerbstomp the final boss at my leisure, rather than worrying about whether it's doable. Once I know I'm essentially a god amongst mortals, I can start fucking around. I..kinda like to think of it as enabling, rather than limiting, really: I rarely tend to get the time to replay games much, so if I can experience as much content in one playthrough as possible, that's great.

If I find, say..I way to make myself a truly, stupendously destructive mage (like I did in Morrowind, with int potions of +13555 to int and so on), then that simply allows me a safety net: I now know I can beat anything the game throws at me because I can jump across the entire map in one stride, and I have a fireball spell that soultraps and then murders everything in a 50 yard radius. On the one occasion I almost actually died while running around being uber (used the above spell, on about 20 dudes with damage reflect), I was able to quickly neck a healing potion from the same batch as the int potion above, so +500 health a second for three days).

But having established that, it pretty much was just a safety net. I almost never used magic after that, because it was too much fun fucking around finding out what else works. For a time I worked on archery (murdering as many cliff racers as possible), and eventually settled on sneaking around wearing boots of superspeed, 1-hit backstabbing everything with nehrunes razor, coz it was a tiny tiny dagger and it looked fucking hilarious. I probably couldn't get away with shit like that if the game was still potentially a challenge, and it's the fucking around like a loon, after the period of relatively powerlessness*, that really makes the ES games for me.

*this part is also important, mind.

I expected you to feel that way; I know a good portion of the gaming populace will feel that way. Just as you will be perfectly happy to play a game that is far too easy for my preferences, and I will be happy to play one far too punishing for yours. That goes beyond just personal taste however; we value the aspect of difficulty and difficulty balance altogether differently on a personal level. You demand that the curve be not too steep, and then you'll generally be happy if everything else is good. I demand that it is at least a certain amount of steep, but also that the difficulty comes into play in very specific ways.

And look, I'm not trying to make my perspective out to be supperior, or trying to be condescending. I'm the one who can cope with quicktime events and not be bothered by it, as has been the case in all the situations I've encountered it so far. I even apologized for the Human Revolution boss fights, inspite of the fact that the developers have now publicly renounced that decision.

That said, I still think overpowered builds are a fundamental problem when a singleplayer game tries to wire into what I hope you're familiar with, calois' aspect of competition. It's "good" (I have some reservations, but fundamentally it's good) from his parallel gambling aspect (it's a reward for something you couldn't know beforehand, so it fits), but from the aspect of competition, it's a problem.

Also, apologies to people who haven't read calois (I think I heard Jonas say he read it so...)

*Fingers in ears* WHO?! NEVER HEARD OF HIM! LAAALALALALALALALALALALA...

Dude your impossible sometimes:P

if i had to make the same argument without relying on that, admittedly basic, partitioning of fun within games, it would take forever and be less convincing. You know what im on about or not?

I have to say that I agree with Aemer somewhat. Breaking a system can be fun, but playing the broken system gives me almost no enjoyment. Can still work if the non combat bits are good, of course.

@ DDL

I didn't want it to seem like I was discounting your arguments. There can be something exceptionally enjoyable about a gaming experience that doesn't go along the lines of competetive gaming or gambling...it's essentially explorative gaming, figuring stuff out...

What you describe from Morrowind, I'll admit to doing too...more or less, anyway. I clearly did it in Skyrim. And as Jonas and I agree, it belongs in the elder scrolls games, because whether or not it's a problem, it's a concequence of something that's quintessential to these games...and one persons unpreventably sideeffect is another persons feature, clearly.

But what I'm essentially complaining about here is that I have a clear sense of how things are meant to feel in Skyrim...and the way it feels after I'm overpowered is not it. All the things that feel like they should be effective, because they're clever and rely on ingenuity now feel practically useless.

If I'm playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I find a really exceptional build (which I love to do, and have spent countless hours doing), my dungeon master will react to it, and integrate it. I get to feel powerful, sure, but I also get to feel like it's consistent with the world, how it works, and how things are. The encounters will persistently have consequences to something else than my build.

Not all builds can be reacted to, of course, and there's a famous story in my group about a player who figured out how to do sneak attack damage using magic missile type spells. After about a month, they declared him the winner of D&D 3.0, and told him to get a new character.

Figuring out an overpowered build gives essentially the same response, only to myself. I declare myself the winner and move on. I like I figured out how to do something the game couldn't handle, but it completely destroys my feeling of being in the world; I become tentatively aware of the design, and start second guessing everything because it's invariably so jarring. Even if it isn't a bug (since that's called into question), I'm sure you can relate to the feeling of this thing being broken after discovering something overpowered, giving the sense that it's somehow not in order.

The fiction obviously handles it horribly, and it generates internal inconsistencies within the world. It's the crowing piece of ludo-narrative dissonance.

Finally, it breaks the part of the RPG that's probably most essential to it; it's like reaching the level cap: You arbitrarily stop improving.

So yes, sure, there's a quintessentially gamey thing to figuring out an overpowered build. You grab hold of some general notions, you invest yourself in them, and when it pays off, you feel like you made the right decisions and that's rewarding. Exploring the extents of that helps you find out the extent of your godhood, which can also be rewarding. That's something TES games do quite well, especially the last part, since even as you're overpowered, that suddenly makes a number of interesting things happen.

But in this case, as I completed the main quest, and played for the last 10 hours, the dissonance between the game and the story was horrible, and the gameplay was trite. I would bullettime with my bow and plink draugr with arrows. It became trivial and without anything unique. Loot lost meaning, fighting lost meaning, there was only story, and the story here really relies on your part in it (which again, makes no sense in the world, because I'm too powerful for it), and I really don't think that's how it would ideally play out.

Even if you do consider overpowered builds a feature, you must admit that there is a considerable tradeoff to putting them in as a game designer.