id be satisfied with different resistances of light and heavy armor to slashing, piercing and bludgeoning.

EDIT: elemental resistances sound good too

slash, pierce, blunt/crush whichever one they use for maces, i forgot and then also resistances to elements like flame, frost etc.

The problem with oblivion, is that as soon as you found better armor, the enemies already had better weapons, and better skills to match.
Why? Because any armor better than steel and leather was wiped from existence during levels 1-5. Then when you found that better and was all like YEAH! Finally I wont be hit so hard! Oops, sorry, the bandits all have Dwarven weapons now. They will hit you just as hard, if not harder.



So, please bethesda. Level scaling IS a good idea, just take it down a notch.

I much prefer DT to DR, and location based damage just makes sense. Wearing shiny boots doesn't make getting stabbed in the face hurt any less. Having DT over DR would add even more usefulness to stealth builds, since that will be an obvious way to bypass armor when using lighter weapons.

Something along the lines of damage threshold has its advantages, I think. Namely because it avoids a problem with the percentage based armor system, which is that such a system makes armor much more effective against stronger weapons than weaker ones. If you get hit by an attack that does five damage, being able to absorb 25% of damage isn't going to make so much difference, but if they do a lot more damage, then it's going to be noticable. With damage threshold, instead, weak attacks become ineffective againt heavily armored targets, while stronger attacks are much better, which makes more sense. But the main disadvantage of it actually lies in the same place, because it also makes low damage weapons quite ineffective when fighting even lightly armored foes, which while logical, does make weak but fast weapons much less desirable, especially in the late game, which mostly becomes a problem because certain kinds of characters should logically use these weapons. I mean, it will be pretty hard to role-play a dagger wielding assassin if daggers are effectively worthless against armored foes. You could see this in New Vegas too, where automatic weapons become quite worthless due to their lack of damage. But this problem can be offseted by including some ways to bypass or reduce the effectiveness of armor, maybe perks or enchantments, if the game had location based damage, it could also be less of a problem as players could try to aim for vulnerable areas when using weapons with less damage, especially if armor protects only the part of the body you wear it on rather than the whole body, but that can cause other problems that are a subject for another discussion. If such a mechanic were implemented, I'd say creatures with a high defense should also have a certain weak point, like how mirelurks in Fallout 3 had vulnerable faces. The fact that apparently, daggers gain a much higher sneak attack bonus than other types of weapons should also make them more desirable for a stealth character.

Oh, I doubt it'd impact stability or FPS much. How many years ago was Oblivion released? Technology has hugely advanced since then. Computers are a lot more powerful. Quad-Core systems have become the standard, usual RAM has more than doubled, and video cards have become much more powerful. A couple of checks like that would not be a problem to handle at all. Skyrim could have twice the hardware requirements of Oblivion. The armor systems we have currently are completely over-simplified given the powerful machines of today.

@ too many stats for the player to look at: Just don't show any of them to the player. The only stats of a mail shirt would be the name "mail shirt" and the condition of it, such as "new, but missing a few rings". For weapons all the player'd need to know would be "battle axe" with the condition "old and nearly blunt, slightly cracked handle". No more numbers for the player or anything, unless magic is involved perhaps. The player wouldn't have to waste one second comparing item stats - you'd just take whatever you think suits your character and has proven useful in combat. Only works when things behave believably, of course.

Demon's Souls did have a system that had blunt, slash, piercing etc for all weapons, so it would only need to be improved to include locational damage and it would be done, not so much work if you ask me so I'm completely with you on this.

If armor pieces would protect against different types of damage, more variety would be included. Elemental resistance would help to make materials more unique. Damage threshold would help make those weak attacks deal appropiate damage, 0 to heavily armored characters, unless you attack in a way that is their weakness. I wouldn't however want DT to be all armor we have in the game, there should be a mixture of DT and DR.

Speaking of armour protection etc,i have an idea.
Ok...Do you think shock spells should do more damage if the enemy is wearing metal armour?
Do you also think fire should do more damage to enemies,that wear fur or leather armour?
Just an idea

@ OP: After reading your post again,i see you have mentioned this already.
So i'll apologize.....but it's a good idea,the elemental thing :thumbsup:

What a great thread ! Very well written, and on the whole, the majority of replies were also very intelligent...

I believe having no armour should make you quite fast, and thus a lot more swings should miss you; however, should a swing connect, you're likely to be mortally wounded. I agree with the OP in that having no armour should be quite reflectant in how the game treats you should you be struck. I think bleeding damage should be quite a bit higher as a result. With no armour to spare the steel running through your flesh, bleeding should be that thing that lets you know how bad it is to go without armour. If you wear no armour, and get cut in battle, it should bleed profusely, such that your health bar is constantly draining down. You may heal yourself, but there would always be some bleeding, nothing is perfect. But if you wore leather armour, the bleeding aspect would be severely reduced. The idea being that those who wear no armour should bleed to death quite rapidly while those with some protection do not bleed out so rapidly. If you are seriously cut open, your bleeding would not stop draining your health bar unless you used a special "Triage skill" -- field medic ability to patch yourself up. This should take a few seconds to complete during which no spells can be done nor any weapons used .. just block.

What if you have no armour and get hit with a club, instead of a blade?

You should see either the kind of bruise that begins to seriously limit your movement over time ... at first you can still do something but as time progresses, the accumulated bruising begins to slow you down, crippling you more over time. There should be unique effects to your ability to do combat based on the damage you receive, so a bruise limiting movement might slow down your ability to block if your arm was the thing damaged ... (meaning the Block skill should have a speed factor that can be adjusted based on your talents, Perks, and damage done in combat). If your leg was damaged, your movement speed and jumping ability should be severely reduced. If your chest was damaged, it begins to get too hard to lift your sword, or your attacks come much slower than before.

But even as more and better armour IS added, there are still many points of weakness in any armour such as at joint locations, under the arms, knees, neck, and elbows .... and I believe that a spectacularly high attack roll should land some attacks in those weak spots for some damage that isn't reduced by the armor rating like a strike against that armour's hard portions would warrant. This may be in fact how they are doing that, because there was mention of more ability to be surprised in combat under Skyrim's new combat system.

So I do think Bethesda has already addressed a lot of the issues with their previous system to address combat. And they mentioned making combat seem more alive through perks and skills and talents adding a dangerous dimension to battle such that there would no longer always be that feeling of winning through mere attrition, or the whittling down of your opponent over time with no surprises being available to change the course of battle. If your enemy was better than you in Oblivion, the only way you could win after 100 tries with no success would be to reduce your Difficulty bar once you got tired of being clubbed to death like a helpless seal, and then living with the regret of cheating your way through what should have been the most rewarding battles of your life.

As this is an armour thread,i'd thought i'd add something,rather than start a new topic.
Here is a link to a pic,from the OXM UK cover.
While i know it's only cover art,everything he's wearing as been seen in a screenshot of some form,apart from whats on his gauntlets.
http://s1225.photobucket.com/albums/ee394/St-frantic1975/?action=view¤t=SkyrimArmour.jpg
Click the image again to enlarge.

Even the swords have been seen in the screens.
Now in a post ,a while back,i put heavy Armour as a skill under combat as one of the 18.
I also put light Armour as a stealth skill too,in the 18.
But now,i'm not 100% sure thats the case. We may just have Armour...but like i said...i'm not sure.
Now if you look at the picture,you'll see a mix of materials on his Armour.
Thats what made me think it might not be just heavy and light separate.
It also begs the question: "what can we do with armour crafting/smithing wise" ?.
His armour could just be a complete set,but it could also have been basic then added to.
To me the metal pouldron could of been added,but most of all the metal on the gauntlets looks added for sure,as it's tied on.
Anyway,i just thought i'd throw this out there,as this is an armour thread.
It also has relevance to protection too.

@ OP: Great post
I just thought i'd add this in too,hope you don't mind
Didn't think it was worth a separate topic.

I'm not sure about this st Frantic but that may be a scan or at least equivalent of one.
I'd ask a Mod if you can use it, or just remove it then ask first.
As it's against forum rules to post links to such media.

Edit: on topic ( slightly): the armour set up looks good, a bit like the warhammer chaos marauders.

Thanks for the heads up
But it should be fine as the cover is on the official website

I would love more unique and useful armor and weapon types, instead of just the different types being part of a "weakest to strongest"-list.

The cheapest and lowest armors might not be competitive with the high-end ones, but it would be nice with a few armor types to choose from even when you're at the top and have access to them all.
Have one armor not encumber you as much, one armor protecting more against shock damage, one armor not wearing down as fast etc.

The same with weapons. As it is now, Daedric owns everything because it is simply better in everything. I'd rather have another type that competes with Daedric in at least one category.

Well some of use have speculated in different threads if the Light and Heavy armor would be merged into one. Someone actually said that it could be like this:
The way of calculating if the armor pieces you are wearing belongs to the light or heavy armor, is to look at it's total weight. Going too high by having too much iron on (or anything heavier), would cause your current gear to count as heavy armor. Having many light pieces of armor, or only one heavy and the rest clothing, would make it count as light. That just might work, now that crafting is in and we can (possibly?) modify the gear, like adding a piece of iron protection to a leather gauntlet, making it weight more but protect more.


Adding both crippled limbs and bleeding in addition to minor injuries that would not yet be crippling, but possibly lethal sounds like a good idea! However I'm not so sure if the bleeding effect should be outright lethal, it could add an "incurable damage health" effect on us for some time after the wound was taken and then slowly wear of, explained by that our character is dragon born and has faster wound regeneration than normal humans perhaps. The lost health from bleeding effects however shouldn't be regainable untill we rest in a bed, so even if the bleeding wouldn't kill us, it would stop us from venturing further before healing ourselves. Clippled limbs could be of different levels, the Fallout 3 and NV system only had 2 different levels of being crippled: either you are or you are not. That's a bit too simple if you ask me and that would bring in the injuries and bruises you mentioned, making the specific body part that has been injured less effective in combat. Then being hit even further from the injured state, we'd have a grippled limbs, adding a temporary bleeding effect and draining our max HP this way to almost 0. Getting a badly crippled foot would force us to stop and survive the bleeding that follows, only if we would have enough HP would we survive this, this could be shown as a black screen and then either showing us die, or waking us up several hours, possibly a day later, our max HP drained to extremely low conditions and the badly crippled limbs now in a state where even jumping would cause it to become crippled once more.
-----By that I simply wanted to say this:
Getting a crippled limbs should be something the PC would not want to happen, because it is a very good way of getting yourself killed. Meaning that having even leather armor on would significally help your limbs survive in combat, thus making the most useless armor int he game worth using, which is exactly as Skystorm77 said and what I hope that will be in Skyrim: That the worst armor in the game would be significally better than having no armor at all on.

Make a complicated but hghly accurate system involving Damage Threshold, Damage Reduction and anything else that fits. THEN, hide the whole system from the player, so it LOOKS simple, and you don't really need to think about it, but it all works logically. A medieval armorer didn't go comparing stat X with stat Y to see whether to make this part out of one material or another, or thicker or thinner, they did whatever worked for them. We don't need to see all the underlying math and armor stats, just the highly satisfying end result of it.

Simplification leaves us with a dull and boring game. Complexity is difficult and tedious to deal with. Making the compute handle the tedium and complexity, while giving the player the benefits of that complexity, works nicely for everyone but whoever has to program the whole mess.

Armor protection should be locational.

And with the (possible?) crafting and modifying of our own armor we could simply see the effect we are going to create for the armor in text rather than numbers, such as modifying an iron piece onto a leather gauntlet, it could say something like this, (with much more text so it fits the lore and theme and sounds cool etc): "Makes the gauntlet heavier and less durable, but greatly improves it's ability to shield the user from harmful swords." Without including mathematic and procents etc, which would have made it look like something like this: Adds 3 Ib of weight, decreases durability with 15% and adds 3 (DT or DR or a mix of the system that will be used). With this I mean that armors should have text description in them, saying what their strengths and weaknesses are and if you add a modification, it would declare what kind of modification is added, but everything without numbers. That would be great


Indeed it should, but the question remains: How do you want the armor to measure how much damage/elemental resistance they have, in addition to them being locational protection?

Location based (limb or body part hit, what armour piece is covering it, etc would be the best imo.

However the KEY thing here is to have both, advantages and disadvantages to various armours and locations.

For example, Chainmail is better at protecting from slashing then leather, but is countered good by piercing weapons and swords. So say, a long tapered blade is better at fighting vs chain, whereas a saber or cutlass is less so.
Then you have Plate armour, which SHOULD be the best armour in the game, protecting from slashing and piercing (arrows, etc) however it can be weak vs certain magics (IE electricity) and blunt force weapons like maces which were the best to counter plate armour.

Then on top of this you can factor in the weight of armour and how it can impact the characters in tierms of stats/abilities. Chainmail would be the heaviest (As it puts all the weight on your shoulders), Plate would be lighter (puts the weight more evenly throughout your body) but less full range motio and makes noise, Leather and fur, etc would be the lightest and not impact much, better for use at sneaking.

So using this ALL the armours have advantages and disadvantages, are treated MUCH more logically and realistically, while allowing you to play the character you want.

Yeah, the armour system needs to be improved.

Another problem I have, is that one piece of armour is outright better then another. So you change your armour in a straight upgrade path. If you have two choices in front of you, lets say an Leather cuirass and a Glass cuirass. Picking one should not be so cut an dry. There should be advantages and disadvantages to both. Perhaps the leather armour is lighter, less restricting (perhaps not inducing an agility penalty or something similar) but offers less protection, where as the glass would be stronger, break easier, and offer a small agility penalty. Same should hold true for weapons.

That way, you can refine your play style even further rather then strive for all the glass armour or whathaveyou.

Damn beat me to it, that is exactly what I was thinking.

Why yes that does sound like a good idea, but you have to remember that the medieval heavy armor was still an armor that you could move relatively easily in them, so the penalty for having heavy armor on cannot simply be slower movement, because even heavy armor can be done agile with the right design.

The overall impact on your speed when using heavy armor should be noticeale as it was in Oblivion until you reached 75 in heavy armor. However, because of the instant un-equip system, the armors speed limitation didn't have any efect, you could simply take all armor off and travel light until you are in combat and then instantly swap on you heavy armor. My point is, that if we still can instantly un-equip and equip items and armor, then the speed slowing system for heavy armors is not going to be enough to create a balance between the two types of armors. Perhaps wearing heavy armor would cause you to get more fatigued much faster than if you are wearing light armor? Sprinting could cosume 4 times as much stamina than if you had light armor on, attacking could take two times as much stamina and jumping could take three times as much stamina, in addition to heavy armor slowing you down. This would not effect you speed in combat however, as the armors are not supposed to hinder your ability to fight ack, it's supposed to do what it does, protect you against direct and otherwise lethal attacks,

I gladly sacrifice realism for good gameplay. First-person computergame combat are more like puzzles anyway; puzzles based on reflexes, observation, memory, tactics and spatial considerations (probably even more). If the combat has a nice feel to it and offers balanced and varied challenges, it will be fun. It doesn't have to aim for realism to be good.

When it comes to armor mechanics I tend to favor a simple percentage damage reduction. Yes, its crude, but its also fair enough. Since I like to play a game on high difficulty settings, an armor mechanic with variable damage reductions can blow a challenge out of proportion. It might look like a good idea on paper to have different damage types, but when put into practice it becomes a bit meh. The only tactical aspect it could add is by forcing the player to swap gear before each new type of fight, and that is just a boring and tedious task. I like it better when different weapons have different special abilities instead (like knockbacks and swingtimers) but otherwise comparable damages between types.

I know plate armour isn't "that" heavy (you could easily do cartwheels in it if you wished) but it can restrict certain range of motions along with your agility in terms of movement. Where you could say, do parkour in some light leather, that'd be extremely difficult to do with plate armour. Along with having plate actually affect noise, so when you walk around in it there's a noticable difference in sound, which could affect how npc's can hear you and thus for the more sneaky oriented players it would make wearing leather/fur, etc a more viable choice then plate.

I didnt' mean like wearing plate should make you move like a turtle, rather that it'd have more logical affects on agility/skills and other things.

I'd have dfferent disadvantages to different pieces of armour. A helmet could limit your view, gauntlets could penalise lockpicking ability, etc.

About swapping armors between different foes: That could easily be taken away if you limited the amount of armor the PC can carry with him/her and even adding a system that takes time to swap your armor, meaning that if you get assaulted by a bear, you won't have time to change gear. And the percentage system that we had in Oblivion for example, didn't give us any good protection at all if we specialized in light armor and didn't have access to better types of material. A tiny 5 % protection was all that was given, it's neither realistic nor necessary to be bothered to use. The percentage system could be acceptable if they added some stuff suggested before, such as bleeding injuries, crippled limbs, injured limbs and locational damage. Each piece of armor would only protect the specific place they are at, thus meaning that a leather cuirass could, without being out of balance, with a light armor skill of 35 protect the chest up to 10%. It would also protect the limbs incredebully much compared to no armor at all from being injured or crippled and it would also protect the user from starting to bleed from every single hit to the chest. At the same time, the cuirass could absorb a small amount of some type of elemental damage, maybe up to 10% too.


I did realize you didn't mean we'd become turtles, but neither did I mean that we should be able to parkour in plate armor The art of parkour hasn't been in TES yet so I didn't take that as a comparison to what type of movement armors should and shouldn't effect. Like I said, we should be more fatigued when using heavy armor, so we would be able to run shorter distances, swing a sword a fewer times, jump up and down a fewer times etc. But wen it does come to the sword swinging, we would still swing it just as fast as a light armor user, it simply would drain our stamina bar more rapidly.


I don't agree on this one at all, those disadvantages don't sound good at all. What stops the player from taking his gauntlets of when lock picking? Basically nothing, which would mean that the whole penalty to lock picking is useless. I wouldn't want helmets to limit your view because playing with half the screen black would simply cause the beautiful world to go past me without me seing it. This would also become a question about balance between first person and third person, the third person viewers would easily bypass the disadvantage of the helmet, while first person viewer would have to have half screen black.

Agreed!