True to form with RPG games, the only thing that makes this game difficult is the huge amount of time investment required to achieve the Platinum trophy.
The overall difficulty of the game will depend on what difficulty setting you choose to play it on, and even though it does suffer horrible spikes in difficulty at certain intervals (usually when fighting dragons or bosses), it still doesn't become a terribly hard game to beat, mainly due to the scaling of equipment, items and powers always working in the favour of the player.
The "Dragonslayer" trophy, awarded for completing the Dragonslayer quest, is the only Gold trophy on offer in this list, and once you've beaten the games final quest in the main storyline, you'll have knocked off about a fifth of the whole list. There are also a bunch of other trophies awarded for progression within the games various side factions, which make up roughly the same fraction of the list as the main quest trophies do.
Most of the other trophies in the list revolve around world exploration and delving into other various side activities.
The "Thu'um Master" trophy, awarded for learning 20 shouts, requires a pretty large amount of dragon slaying and dungeon delving, and since there are only 23 shouts in the whole game, you don't really have much flexibility regarding which shouts you go after. You can learn some shouts through natural quest progression, but you're going to have to go out of your way to clear dungeons in order to get to most of them.
On the subject of dungeons, the "Delver" trophy, awarded for clearing 50 dungeons, won't come with natural progression, despite the fact many of the games quests will take you through dungeons at some point. You'll eventually have to wander off and clear much of them on your own for the sake of clearing enough dungeons for the trophy to be awarded.
Again, it isn't tough in any way, and you can always research the short and easy dungeons if you don't want to prolong the estimated Platinum time, but 50 dungeons is too many to be cleared through natural progression, so it will inevitably pile the hours onto the overall timescale.
The "Master Criminal" trophy, awarded for accumulating a bounty of 1000 gold in all nine holds, is best left until the very end, considering it requires you to go on a mini rampage across Skyrim. As you could imagine, amassing such a big bounty isn't in your best interests during the game, since you could kill off key characters and rack up debt that you may struggle to pay off, so it's best to hold off until you're almost finished with the whole list.
The toughest trophy is the "Master" trophy, awarded for reaching level 50, and the chances are, this will be the last trophy in the game you unlock.
Levelling up in Skyrim is slightly different to how traditional levelling works, with a range of in-game skills requiring levelling up in order to contribute to your overall character level. Each skill can be maxed out to level 100, and each character level progressively requires more and more points as you get further to level 50. The rate at which you level up to begin is actually fairly rapid, but it does slow down considerably later on, and you'll need to diversify in learning skills in order to accumulate enough points to hit level 50.
If you solely focus on a select amount of skills throughout the game, then there's a high chance you'll simply have to grind out the rest at the end of the game, whereas keeping an even balance will stand you in a better stead of hitting level 50 faster. It doesn't help that certain skills take forever to level up in comparison to others, because it limits your opportunities to develop them when you're more inclined to lean toward the faster levelling skills.
If you go through absolutely everything in the game, you can probably hit level 50 quite comfortably, but if you're just beating things in the best interest of the trophy list, you'll probably fall just short unless you consistently maximise a variety of skills throughout the game and change your play-style enough to experiment sufficiently with different skills, weapons and magic. The grinding element shouldn't be too bad though, and casting spells on yourself is the easiest way to grind if you need to.
It is also important to note the "Oblivion Walker" trophy, awarded for collecting 15 Daedric Artifacts, which is actually missable. Daedric Artifacts are powerful weapons, clothing and armour that are awarded through a quest-line where you will have decisions to make that will either award you the artefact or see the game destroy them instead. There are 17 in total, and although there are only a small handful of quests that can end with an outcome resulting in no Artifact, you only have a very small margin of error, and if you make too many incorrect decisions, you'll have to replay the entire game to grab them all again, so be aware.
All in all, there's no doubting that this is a time consuming Platinum, but it never gets to the point of feeling drawn out, and therefore harder than it should be. The overall difficulty is just dependant on what difficulty level you opt to play through the game on, and when you consider the fairly generous amount of progression based trophies included in the list, then it really is just the 150-200 hour timeframe that becomes any sort of barrier to completion.
Notable Trophies -
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| Dragonslayer - Complete "Dragonslayer" Thu'um Master - Learn 20 shouts Delver - Clear 50 dungeons Master - Reach Level 50 Oblivion Walker - Collect 15 Daedric Artifacts |
Master
Reach Level 50
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