HijacK: Talking about retro consoles, it will take me forever to collect for them. I haven't even started, but I'm already feeling the pressure just by looking at the amount of PS1 games out there that interest me. Ridiculous! Ah well, why should I complain? I have a ton of potential games to play.
HijacK: I don't agree with this. While it is true the games are stupid easy on lower difficulties, whenever I hear someone complaining about the lack of difficulty, I have just one reply to them: Raise the difficulty bar. Go to the maximum if you have to. I tried playing Oblivion on the maximum difficulty level. No..... Unless I am feeling suicidal or something, I'm good with half a bar at normal.

CarrionCrow: You have every right to be. I really, really, really don't like Bethesda. You really, really, really don't like Ubisoft.
Nothing wrong with either position, unless we're supposed to argue over which company ultimately sucks the most. -laughs-

gunsynd: I agree with both views in as:Set bar at hardest and you will get slaughtered,get mods to make game harder as in money,weapons and the one I loved was very slow leveling.Then the game is still hard and not boring.Skyrim Tweaked with mods can be very interesting and hard without touching the bar.

HijacK: Mods are very interesting, but I am not particularly very fond of them. I haven't used mods in a game yet, outside of World of Warcraft addons, but if I am to ever use mods in games like Skyrim, it will be either graphical/visual ones, ones that stay true to the lore, and/or ones that have something interesting to add gameplay wise, but balanced.

HijacK: I see your point. Lack of time combined with too many releases can definitely cut someone's will to play, but if the lack of difficulty is cutting your enjoyment short, I would advise raising the difficulty bar at least a little, only if it is to get more bang for your buck. I myself used to be one of the people who would play games only on easy, rarely on normal, until one day when I realized I simply don't enjoy easy games. I like challenges. Adventures. Maybe not hardship, but something to challenge me, to give me reason to enjoy the powers I acquire and skills I develop, and since then I've started games only on difficulties beginning with hard, only starting on normal for games I know they may be too painful to play in case I lack the skill and knowledge. Last year I bought Persona 4 Golden for PS Vita. Right from the start I began playing on Hard. I want to say, the game was very punishing in the beginning, but the increased enjoyment I obtained from climbing the power level int he game and becoming almighty was worth the effort. A similar story happened to me with Ys: Memories of Celceta.

In the end I suppose it depends on the amount of time one is wiling to put in a game. There are games that myself as well don't want to put a lot of time in.

gunsynd: Well now I've got Fallout 3,will check it out and see if it will run in the couple of days(maybe).
If it runs and is too easy I'll raise the bar or get mods to make it more interesting..

CarrionCrow: Offhand, I'd suggest a difficulty mod, a weapons mod, a level cap remover mod, and an inventory management improvement mod.

But like I said a few minutes ago, you can't mod the story. And it's...not good. At all.

CarrionCrow: I definitely see your point. I think that even more than it just being a matter of difficulty, I wasn't having a lot of fun with them in general.
The gameplay, the inventory (dear gods, the neverending inventory management), the lackluster stories.
I'm all for a well-implemented difficulty spike (another reason why I tend to avoid doing it - I want the game to get better at killing me, requiring me to develop more skill, rather than it being enemies with four times the damage and hit points. That isn't any kind of skill. That's just math and laziness on the developer's part.), but more than a few of the things that were bugging me when I really think about it couldn't have been fixed by playing on hard.
I would have just gotten frustrated for different reasons.

CarrionCrow: Offhand, I'd suggest a difficulty mod, a weapons mod, a level cap remover mod, and an inventory management improvement mod.

But like I said a few minutes ago, you can't mod the story. And it's...not good. At all.

gunsynd: Stories in games are not good compared to say Betrayal at Krondor,and I think the older games have a better story to them..

HijacK: Interesting. Personally, I found the story rather interesting. The individual story segments were simplistic at times and uninspired, with some exceptions of course (I'm mainly looking at the Nightingale story), but I liked how the game was split in basically 2 main stories that offer 2 different threats that revolve around different objectives. Given that the way the stories overlapped each other wasn't fully developed and sometimes the game was struggling to make the world feel as desperate as should have, I rather enjoyed some. I totally see why you didn't like it though. The scale of the game is huge, yet so little time is spent on those stories. In a way, they feel minuscule, or at least not important enough.

Talking about Bethesda games, if only published ones count, I do recommend Dishonored. Fantastic game. Definitely my GOTY for 2012, at least from what I've played out of the 2012 releases.

HijacK: Wasn't level cap removed with the expansions?

HijacK: Depends on the genre I suppose, and on what the dev is focusing on.

CarrionCrow: That one is on my list of games to play, hoping it's a good experience.

No, in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, they increased the level cap with each chunk of DLC, but they never removed it.
With Fallout 3 it was 30 if you bought the Broken Steel DLC, 20 if you didn't.
For New Vegas, each DLC item you bought raised it by 5, with a total max of 50.

CarrionCrow: That one is on my list of games to play, hoping it's a good experience.

No, in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, they increased the level cap with each chunk of DLC, but they never removed it.
With Fallout 3 it was 30 if you bought the Broken Steel DLC, 20 if you didn't.
For New Vegas, each DLC item you bought raised it by 5, with a total max of 50.

HijacK: Oh, never mind! I thought we were still talking about Skyrim.

HijacK: Oh, never mind! I thought we were still talking about Skyrim.