If the Dark Brotherhood is so elite...

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How come Lydia has killed no less than 6 assassins in random encounters who have tried to kill me and I'm only level 25 on Legendary? The thief's are a joke as well, but I'd expect more from hired assassins with the Dark Brotherhood's supposed highly selective recruiting process. Be nice if they set up more of an ambush on me and Lydia rather than just run at me with a dagger and a sword.

Not really all that elite of a faction when I don't even fear their attempts on my life and actually look forward to looting the leveled gem that the body of the assassin often has on them.

I'm going to have to guess these are raw recruits who want into the guild and their initiation is to kill the one target the DarkBrotherhood has been unable to kill, which is the Dovahkin. Haven't even had to use my thundering voice on them once, they're such a joke.
 

Morgan

Well-Known Member
The inability of anyone but the PC to use stealth tactics or illusion magic is one of the gaping flaws in the game engine. It would make life much harder, but so so much more interesting.
 

JoeReese

Well-Known Member
Realistically speaking, because fewer people would buy a game in which they get continually owned by the NPCs. They are doing this for money, after all.
 

Daelon DuLac

How do you backstab a Dragon?
Realistically speaking, because fewer people would buy a game in which they get continually owned by the NPCs. They are doing this for money, after all.
I'm playing Dragon Age right now and, getting owned by the NPCs seems about par for the course. You really shouldn't have to go through 3 saves to beat a boss when there are 4 major bada**es in your party (including you)!

IMO Skyrim could have made more of an effort. The only troublesome bosses to me have always been Briarhearts (okay, and Legendary Dragons) - everybody else... meh... (and that includes Miraak, Dragon Priests and most mages).
 

Morgan

Well-Known Member
Realistically speaking, because fewer people would buy a game in which they get continually owned by the NPCs. They are doing this for money, after all.
I'm playing Dragon Age right now and, getting owned by the NPCs seems about par for the course. You really shouldn't have to go through 3 saves to beat a boss when there are 4 major bada**es in your party (including you)!

IMO Skyrim could have made more of an effort. The only troublesome bosses to me have always been Briarhearts (okay, and Legendary Dragons) - everybody else... meh... (and that includes Miraak, Dragon Priests and most mages).

Every now and then I'll encounter a bandit chief who's ridiculously hard and wonder if there's an error in the table for him, eg: "(PC lvl)*3" instead of "(PC lvl)+3". The keep chief in Treva's Watch, for example, is WAY harder than you would expect.

It would be nice if changing the difficulty level actually changed behavior in the AI instead of just manipulating damage levels, kind of like how computer chess games do it. If you set your difficulty to master then NPCS have sneak, illusion, can trigger traps on you, etc, which they won't do at novice. That, of course, comes back to the AI needing to be able to do these things in the first place though.
 
Realistically speaking, because fewer people would buy a game in which they get continually owned by the NPCs. They are doing this for money, after all.
I'm playing Dragon Age right now and, getting owned by the NPCs seems about par for the course. You really shouldn't have to go through 3 saves to beat a boss when there are 4 major bada**es in your party (including you)!

IMO Skyrim could have made more of an effort. The only troublesome bosses to me have always been Briarhearts (okay, and Legendary Dragons) - everybody else... meh... (and that includes Miraak, Dragon Priests and most mages).

Every now and then I'll encounter a bandit chief who's ridiculously hard and wonder if there's an error in the table for him, eg: "(PC lvl)*3" instead of "(PC lvl)+3". The keep chief in Treva's Watch, for example, is WAY harder than you would expect.

It would be nice if changing the difficulty level actually changed behavior in the AI instead of just manipulating damage levels, kind of like how computer chess games do it. If you set your difficulty to master then NPCS have sneak, illusion, can trigger traps on you, etc, which they won't do at novice. That, of course, comes back to the AI needing to be able to do these things in the first place though.


Dude programming AI is like one of, if not, the hardest thing about videogames, my sympathy is with software developers. Human opponents, are almost always smarter, because we're dealing with intelligent animals, strategic thinkers and what not. The human mind, through strategy and crude weapons, have taken down Wooly Mammoths and conquered empires.

Other games I play, like Civ V, they just give AI some "unfair" advantages early on to make it more difficult. AFAIK it could be decades or maybe even more than a century before, for certain complex video games, that they'll have super smart AI. The development just isn't there as it sits now, it'd probably take a budget for what the US military works with to come up with the formulas and software coding for super intelligent AI.

Chess isn't even a proper comparison, because what I know about Chess is there is always a correct move in Chess. That's how computers beat the communists in chess. Next thing we know they'll be beating humans.
 

Wildroses

Well-Known Member
Personally, I always thought Bethesda was subtly addressing this when you first join the Dark Brotherhood, introduce yourself to everyone and choose the option: "It's a pleasure to meet you" with Nazir. Choosing that will have him say something along the lines of: "I'm not getting attached to you until you can prove you can survive more than a few weeks here." Yeah, if the typical players experience is anything to go by, the Brotherhood would have gone through 5-15 assassins before recruiting you. Another bit of proof for the theory Astrid was unfit to lead. "Hmm, I've sent 5-15 assassins with their contracts signed by me after this person and each of them have been killed by them. I think I'll recruit them. Nothing could possibly go wrong!"
 
If I had designed at the bare minimum the initiation into the factions, they should be a lot more involved than taking any newbie with a thundering voice as his only true talent.

I got the ESF Companions mod. NOW that faction feels like the Celebrities of Tamriel they make them out to be. I've got them jacked up with so many prerequisites before I can even gain entry, let alone progress through their questline, they truly do feel like the Seal Team 6 of Skyrim factions. It's how I would have made an initiation into all the guilds, strong prerequisites that require lots of training and gameplay prior to being even allowed into the guild as a kind of apprentice. The Thieves Guild should require adept talents in most of the Thief skills, same as I did with the Companions, and The College of Winterhold, if it's really the Harvard or Yale of Mage Colleges, I wouldn't make it so I can join it at level ONE for Chrissakes.

ANyways if I had designed the Dark Brotherhood, I think I would have made them send out only ONE assassin in the game, when you're above level 40 or 50, and he would be harder than being attacked by 5 cave bears all at the same time. He would be your training and proving grounds prior to the Ebony Warrior (someone I still haven't fought yet) before you could unlock the Aventus Arentino quest that gets your initiation into the Brotherhood, instead of getting that quest at the Sleeping Giant Inn on your very first day of gameplay. ANd a central role in your initiation into the Brotherhood would you have been you being the only assassination target in decades to have killed one of their skilled assassins. He would have had a name, all the other brotherhood members would have known him as one of their best.

For difficulty I would have had him use a prolonged invisibility potion in his attack, as well as very potent poisons on his weapons.

Well enough fantasy, but that's how I would have designed the brotherhood if I had been on Bethesda's team. Not really sure they predicted this game still having such a strong following years after it came out.

Seeing as how Bethesda now charges for ESO accounts which pretty much priced me out of their MMORPG ($240 for first year of gameplay, yea right), if theres a single player Elder Scrols 6, hopefully they'll read this post prior to designing another Dark Brotherhood questline.
 

Kalin of High Rock

Faal Lun Vahdin
I thought the whole point of their storyline was that they we no longer elite. That they had lost their traditions, been led astray by Astrid and were little more than a band of murdering thugs.

So that's why.
 

JoeReese

Well-Known Member
Soooo...a screaming, frontal charge, from no less than 50 yards away, against a heavily armed warrior and their follower, isn't a good assassination tactic?
 

The Phoenician

Shiney, let's be bad guys.
It's made vary clear that the DB is a mere shadow of what it once was. Same with the thieves guild. Of coarse you're going to be able to take out some lowly assassin. Even if you're not playing as the Dragonborn you are likely to become the Listener, who is supposed to be one bad ass mofo.


Sure the random attacks should be a bit more sneaky,but to what point? No matter how you RP your character, the PC was never intended to be just some average schmo.
 

ColleenG

When in doubt, follow the fox.
IMO they're just to predictable. It would have been nice if the combat matrix had been randomized.


That's weird, because IMO they are randomized. There are times I come across a random mage or bandit that KICKS MY A** unexpectedly. For example, I was just in Solstheim, in a mine, and got destroyed by a single shot from some kind of lower level staff of sparks from a simple reever! Wearing dragonbone armor rated around 500! I actually don't chalk it up to randomization though. I chalk it up to outsourcing the coding to someone who doesn't follow or doesn't know the parameters. It seems like I'm getting so can tell if the coding was done by native English speakers or Taiwanese contractors.
 

ColleenG

When in doubt, follow the fox.
How come Lydia has killed no less than 6 assassins in random encounters who have tried to kill me and I'm only level 25 on Legendary? The thief's are a joke as well, but I'd expect more from hired assassins with the Dark Brotherhood's supposed highly selective recruiting process. Be nice if they set up more of an ambush on me and Lydia rather than just run at me with a dagger and a sword.

Not really all that elite of a faction when I don't even fear their attempts on my life and actually look forward to looting the leveled gem that the body of the assassin often has on them.

I'm going to have to guess these are raw recruits who want into the guild and their initiation is to kill the one target the DarkBrotherhood has been unable to kill, which is the Dovahkin. Haven't even had to use my thundering voice on them once, they're such a joke.


I actually think you hit on the answer there. When you first join the DB, they give you those first 3 guys to kill, and then make fun of you because they gave you the easy ones. Same with those assassins. You're a random contract they got that they give to the potential recruit.
 

JoeReese

Well-Known Member
I'll be honest, I've played this game around 1000 hours and never joined the DB.
I did once, and didn't like it. Now I just destroy them every play through. Now that I'm on PC, I don't even kill Grelod anymore, although she apparently
keels over on her own, because the "new lady" still sends out courier mail.
 

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