so I quote from the Gamerevolution preview:

"Anyway, the bandit leader had a lot of health, but being a simple melee guy, it was easy to play fireball tag with him by constantly back-peddling around the room and blasting him. The poor guy couldn't swing his axe fast enough to hit me before I already had moved out of range. With the bandit lord dead, I began to ride back to Riverwood but got distracted by a bigger town, Whiterun."


I had hoped that this kind of stuff had been taken out of the game :/

Well it's AI, what can you do?

-Mr. Maric

Fireball explodes pushing them back a little iirc... making it easiest to back out of range.

I don't care.


:yaoming:

Sounds like it was a bit of strafe as well.

I think they nerfed backpedalling, but didn't make it completely non-viable. Supposedly it's possible to trip when backing up fast though so there are some balance chances there.

In the end just don't use the tactic. Done and ... done.

Funny. I've read other previews that said the opposite. Guess it's subjective.

What did you expect? Them to lock you in place as soon as a battle starts? It makes sense that you can run around, they can't really avoid it. If you can't move, you can't run away. How else are they going to avoid backpedaling?

Seriously, its an exploit, and if you remove it how would you possibly do it without eliminating the ability to run away?

The only thing I would possibly do is not allow you to sprint while in battle. Still, that kind of eliminates the ability to run away..

In Oblivion and FO, the power attacks made the NPCs stop in their tracks and execute their attack, unless they did a charge attack, in which they would be going directly forward without chance to turn

Many things were revealed by the Quakecon leaked footage and this was one of them. People blindly ignored it though (like the passive health regeneration).

I don't remember ever "Back-pedaling" in Oblivion. I always had a shield...
Man, no blocking with dual-swords is going to be rough! But thats a totally different story.

To my knowledge, they only nerfed the backwards movement speed. If you're in a small room and running backwards in a circle, the angles and items in the room would add to the ability to escape attacks.

They made backpedaling slower didn't they?

Sounds like it was strafing rather than back peddling. "back-peddling around the room" - only so far around the room you can go before you are out of it. However, side-stepping/strafing lets you go around and around.

Oh, I guess you could do this too just make it slower when walking backwards. I would hope they did this.

I've never understood the problem with backpeddling and fighting. Doesn't pretty much every modern game allow you to move around during a fight? Just because you're moving in one direction the entire time doesn't make it an exploit.

Well, it is kind of an exploit. The AI doesn't really understand what your doing so they just keep chasing you the same way. Therefore, its easier to kill them since they never learn how to create an offense against it. Your exploiting the intelligence of the AI, therefore its an exploit.

? I've never had an AI problem while backpeddling, they've always managed to keep chasing me, throwing spells/shooting arrows or wielding axes at my head

And again I point to other popular games, especially FPS's. Backpeddling while shooting is often the only way to stay alive during a firefight.

I'm going to guess the NPC is wielding a giant 2H axe, which maybe he can't run and swing at the same time - you know, plant your feet and swing kind of a deal. So the NPC stops to take a swing and that gives the player enough time to get out of range.

Works for me.

If they just have a sword, they are just going to repeatedly swing at you, missing pretty much every time if you can backpedal. Your exploiting the AI, how can you not see that? I'm not saying your cheating, your exploiting. There is a difference.

Plus, you can't really compare the combat in an FPS to the combat in an RPG. They are, most of the time, completely different.

Yeah, this seems like it was just one particular encounter. I'm betting the PC had light armor, and the bandit had heavy for one thing. Beth said a while ago that the movement speeds for wearing each type would feel very different, hence they took out medium armor. They wanted you to be well protected but slow, OR not very well protected but agile, and not be able to pick the middle road.

Also, like others have said, the fireball spell stalls the enemy when it hits, espceically (or maybe only) when it's charged up, but you can see in the E3 demo Todd hits that troll in the face with a fireball and it stops in his tracks for a second.

Honestly, if you couldn't do this at least some of the time, or at least with certain enemy types, the game would be REALLY freaking hard for a pure mage character with nothing but robes and spells.

Well the only way to fully stop this from happening is to make enemies much faster than players and making player speed locked into a set base, you can't expect a mage or archer to not want to back pedal lol

Ahh, I see you don't like long held traditions ehh? Any way nothing beats a good back pedaling.

its an RPG, if a mage cant kite, what good is he?

they said backpeddling is SLOWER than OB. in OB you could backpeddle as fast as you could run forward.

I just hope there's no more "stuck in the ground" attacks like in OB.

I don't want to need this again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wK9dc_O3pM