November 18, 2011
Skyrim, and breaking Elder Scrolls games
The original Morrowind was fairly easy to break. There were several pieces of near-max-level gear lying around where enterprising low-level characters could sneak up and take them. You could also custom-craft spells, which were assigned costs based on their power... and their duration. So even a middling-good magic user could cast a spell that would raise their Intelligence 50 points for, say, two seconds. Pretty worthless, except... crafting takes place in a menu and not in real time. So you cast the spell, and suddenly you're whipping up much more effective potions. But the real game-breaker was when you would do that, then make a few potions of Fortify Intelligence... then down them all at once. Then you do it again. Then you do it again. Eventually your intelligence stat was ridiculous, and you could then make the potions you were really wanting... which would make a level 1 wimp able to one-shot the end bosses, at least for a minute or so.
Oblivion was a little more streamlined, in that you couldn't endlessly stack potion bonuses, and you couldn't make tiny-duration-huge-magnitude spells. The most broken thing I encountered in that was the dreaded homemade demon-slaying lightning bazooka - a staff enchanted with a whopping lightning attack and a soul trap spell. Shoot monster, monster dies, monster's soul gets sucked into handy-dandy Azura's Star (a reusable soul gem), monster's soul gets used as mana battery... so long as you're just fighting monsters, you've got a doom-broom with infinite ammo. You had to have some decent skills to get it built in the first place, though.
Skyrim's even more limited in many respects - a lot of the game-breaking stats aren't even there to modify anymore. But it turns out that there's good synergy between the three crafting skills, Smithing, Alchemy, and Enchanting. Having a higher alchemy skill lets you make better potions, while a higher enchanting skill lets you make items with stronger enchantments. You can make potions of Fortify Alchemy or Fortify Enchanting... and you can enchant equipment with the same stats. Furthermore, leveling Alchemy is just a matter of hammering away at making potions. Enchanting is a little more difficult as you need filled soul gems, but you can always level off of junk (you find lots of petty soul gems in your travels). Smithing isn't really hard to level up either - there are lots of places to mine iron ore, or you can just buy it, or you can just hunt deer and make stuff out of the resulting leather.
So a character can focus almost wholly on crafting and get those skills up quite high. Then you make your best alchemy-bonus gear and potions, and then use them to make your best enchanting-bonus gear and potions. The goal is an extremely good set of smithing-bonus gear and potions. You can then bang out the best possible gear that you can create and improve it as high as possible - which, if you overdo it enough, will get you to the highest possible damage reduction even against warhammer-wielding enemies with the maximum armor-ignoring ability. A little scary...
You can't really do that as a low-level character in Skyrim - especially because getting the necessary skill in enchanting, smithing, and alchemy will level you up a few times all by itself. But even so, with some effort you can get far enough in front of the game's difficulty curve that you can trivialize it - we're talking one-shotting dragons here.
I'm not playing anything like that - my smithing, alchemy, and enchanting are in the comfortable mid-50s, on a level 36 character (so about 3/4 of the way up to the soft level cap, or half the theoretical I-leveled-everything-to-max value, not that I could possibly be arsed to work on my pickpocketing or light armor...) Still, it's a fun intellectual exercise, and a good example of a positive feedback loop.
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Oblivion was a little more streamlined, in that you couldn't endlessly stack potion bonuses, and you couldn't make tiny-duration-huge-magnitude spells. The most broken thing I encountered in that was the dreaded homemade demon-slaying lightning bazooka - a staff enchanted with a whopping lightning attack and a soul trap spell. Shoot monster, monster dies, monster's soul gets sucked into handy-dandy Azura's Star (a reusable soul gem), monster's soul gets used as mana battery... so long as you're just fighting monsters, you've got a doom-broom with infinite ammo. You had to have some decent skills to get it built in the first place, though.
Skyrim's even more limited in many respects - a lot of the game-breaking stats aren't even there to modify anymore. But it turns out that there's good synergy between the three crafting skills, Smithing, Alchemy, and Enchanting. Having a higher alchemy skill lets you make better potions, while a higher enchanting skill lets you make items with stronger enchantments. You can make potions of Fortify Alchemy or Fortify Enchanting... and you can enchant equipment with the same stats. Furthermore, leveling Alchemy is just a matter of hammering away at making potions. Enchanting is a little more difficult as you need filled soul gems, but you can always level off of junk (you find lots of petty soul gems in your travels). Smithing isn't really hard to level up either - there are lots of places to mine iron ore, or you can just buy it, or you can just hunt deer and make stuff out of the resulting leather.
So a character can focus almost wholly on crafting and get those skills up quite high. Then you make your best alchemy-bonus gear and potions, and then use them to make your best enchanting-bonus gear and potions. The goal is an extremely good set of smithing-bonus gear and potions. You can then bang out the best possible gear that you can create and improve it as high as possible - which, if you overdo it enough, will get you to the highest possible damage reduction even against warhammer-wielding enemies with the maximum armor-ignoring ability. A little scary...
You can't really do that as a low-level character in Skyrim - especially because getting the necessary skill in enchanting, smithing, and alchemy will level you up a few times all by itself. But even so, with some effort you can get far enough in front of the game's difficulty curve that you can trivialize it - we're talking one-shotting dragons here.
I'm not playing anything like that - my smithing, alchemy, and enchanting are in the comfortable mid-50s, on a level 36 character (so about 3/4 of the way up to the soft level cap, or half the theoretical I-leveled-everything-to-max value, not that I could possibly be arsed to work on my pickpocketing or light armor...) Still, it's a fun intellectual exercise, and a good example of a positive feedback loop.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at
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One way you could break Oblivion was in leveling up your magic skills with the spell-creation tower in one of the add-ons. As you may recall, the more you cast a spell, the more xp you got in whatever discipline it was in. Using the (free!) Tower, it was trivially easy to create a spell that had a one second duration and used all three disciplines... a spell that damaged you for 1hp, healed you for 1hp, and created a ball of light, thus earning you xp in all three skills.
I have a pleasant memory of Christmas Eve night three years ago, sticking a chopstick into my keyboard, thus locking the "cast spell" key down, while I wrapped presents. I only had to stop twice to rebuild my manapool over the course of two hours. I didn't quite earn enough to max my wizarding skills, but it was close enough.
I never finished that game... there was no point after that. There was nigh-on nothing I couldn't one-shot kill, either with my bow+sneak bonus or just by magicking it to death. The worst of the daedric beasties was a mere speedbump.
I have a pleasant memory of Christmas Eve night three years ago, sticking a chopstick into my keyboard, thus locking the "cast spell" key down, while I wrapped presents. I only had to stop twice to rebuild my manapool over the course of two hours. I didn't quite earn enough to max my wizarding skills, but it was close enough.
I never finished that game... there was no point after that. There was nigh-on nothing I couldn't one-shot kill, either with my bow+sneak bonus or just by magicking it to death. The worst of the daedric beasties was a mere speedbump.
Posted by: Wonderduck at November 20, 2011 11:31 PM (2YMZG)
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