Skyrim Dragonslaying: Such an Anti-Climax (So Far)

Skyrim is still my current favorite digital world vacation spot when I'm not writing about digital worlds, but after killing my sixth dragon with hardly any effort, this is pretty much my reaction:

Seriously, it took a few arrows and my foul breath to bring this one down. But that's par for the course. For a story which revolves around the return of dragons, and an ultimate goal "to defeat Alduin, a Dragon god who is prophesied to destroy the world", shouldn't these things be far harder to kill than a random snow tiger that hops out of the forest? Far as I can tell, the designers have level-scaled dragons -- meaning, adjust the strength of a given dragon so that it's proportionate to the player's ability level. And after 80 hours or so of playing time, they're level-scaled far too equally, making what should be a high point of the game into a resource-gathering task with a lot of gratuitous flash. Maybe this changes later in the story arc, but so far, I have to say it's a serious design mistake to an otherwise groundbreaking game.

Comments

[Rin Tae]

This might depend on the dragon. I have killed around 20 by now ;D and while some indeed are easy, another fights still have the epic feel and danger of the first few ones.

I have only half the playing hours however.

It could be better of course but even so the game is awsome ^_^ .. even with all it's little or big problems and this long lsit of thigns I am sure the developers should have made better

P.S.

Only the true fans complain and scream about such things ;P

[Emperor Norton]

The PvP Sucks in Skyrim

[Ezra]

You're probably on the medium 'Adept' difficulty. There's two more beyond that, Expert and Master.

If you want more of a challenge, bump it up. I went up to Master once and an Ancient Dragon ate through my Daedric Armor in a single breath with shield up.

[Hamlet Au]

Thanks, will try adjusting difficulty. The weird thing is, even on my current setting, a lot of other monsters are WAY harder to kill. Ice trolls usually take 3-5 tries, the boss battle in any dungeon is also about that difficult. The dragons are far easier by contrast.

[Zaphod]

Reminds me of this pair of screenshots from the game (warning: gratiutous use of the F-word, in relation to Skyrim's "murder bears")

http://i.imgur.com/FFvuT.jpg

[Pathfinder]

Yeah, after you get the hang of it, dragons are easy to kill.

But wait until you start running into dragon *priests*.

But I have said too much already, norok dovahkiin...

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I've got about 10 dragons under my belt so far, but a dragon fight is still dicy for me. If they were tougher, I'd need to sink a lot fewer perks into crafting and a lot more into ranged combat.

And that might be the point. A serious challenge for a straight combat build would be impossible for a character that's more generalized... and the leveling system makes it easy to spread your perks thin.

[Iris Ophelia]

To be fair, your character was literally BORN for the purpose of killing dragons. He has unique gifts that make him uniquely suited to killing dragon-- not trolls, not giants, not freaky zombie priests. So the fact that dragons get to be a bit mundane has never bothered me.

[Hamlet Au]

That's a good point, but I still think it should be fairly challenging, as opposed to easy. Especially because your dragon-born skills aren't usually what brings them down -- for me, just my stupid bow is generally enough.

[foneco zuzu]

Again im pretty sure sooner some will release a free mod that will not only make the combat system much better (all previous Bethesda titles had amazing modders that reworked thew combat in order to make it much more realistic!)
What will be amazing is when new creatures will be added to the game by those modders:)

[Simondo Nebestanka]

I've taken down 20-25 and I can say some were far easier than I expected. I thought uh-oh, are they all going to be easy now (much as you have described), however some since the easier ones have been very tough, and I didn't change any settings (I think I'm on 'adept'). I think it's a good thing, you never quite know what you're up against.
Though I guess one thing with dragons is they have a fairly consistent mode of attack, whereas other foes are far more unpredictable and will also send their 'minions' at you as part of their attack.

[drache klinge]

elder dragons.... even on adept difficulty they will rock your face off... (unless you use dragon rend).

most epic fight to date: Lydia had just died, i was on top a mountain, no companion, by my self... two elder dragons one frost one fire.... fight was so epic i left lydia dead and didnt reload the save just to honor the fight.

[Jesrad]

You want the DeadlyDragons mod. It makes it so dragons can live up to their reputation and faceroll Giants, instead of the opposite - especially in its Hard version (which I love and am not plannign to deinstall anytime soon).