OTHER:


Both will be with the Oblivion style, which is superior.


Luck, weapon skill, etc.... determine HOW MUCH damage you give, also will determine if you can "knock back" an opponent who is blocking.

Also, luck, block, defense, etc...determine HOW MUCH damage your weapon takes when blocking--or if your defense will be "knocked back".

I'm not really seeing the difference, tbh. The player is saying "I want to attempt to attack this opponent", the game checks the character's stats, determines an outcome and plays it out in an animation that takes a second or so to play out. Your angle seems to be anologous to a lockpick mechanic that would consist of: Player wants to pick lock therefore lock is successfully picked; with any other outcome taking power away from the player. If that's the case, then why bother with stats at all?



Surely then it just becomes a case of balancing the stat checks to best take account of this (relatively) constant offset?



If their opponent is a sentient being standing directly in front of them, with a modicum of self-preservation?

I see your point, but skill could affect other things such as the power, speed, or range of the attack. I'm not too excited about the game making me miss when my aim and timing is correct though. That would be kind of like in Fallout where I've too many times aimed directly at a mutant's head with a sniper just to see the bullet inexplicably fly sideways out the barrel and miss by a mile. I don't want them to do this to TES as well, as it just ends up making the combat look less realistic IMO.

I already said this looks fine when you're attacking an opponent in the very first response I made to you. That doesn't make it stop being bad design, because combat is a two-way street - if the opponent can dodge, it puts the player at a huge disadvantage if they can't. That's why this system doesn't work - when the enemies attack the player, there's a random chance that the player character animates independently of player actions or input. This is a very bad thing in a game structured the way that this entire series is.


No. If the problem is that something is random by nature, you can't just balance things to resolve that. "Chance of one in two" or "chance of one in two thousand" makes no difference, you're still dealing with an event that happens on random chance.


That's going to move out of position to avoid the blow? Yes. This still isn't the case in Bethesda's games.

Yeah, because what's up with character skills having any effect, after all TES is an FPS, right? :facepalm:

This is why I hold little hope for the franchise as a whole...

Im all for being able to have control over how I fight and whether or not I hit or miss and block. Stats for a game like this really should come down to the more specific things in combat like how effective your attack is, how fast it is, how strong your block is etc. Where any type of dice roll should come in is the effectivness of each combatent against eachother, so if I block an attack from someone whose skill with that weapon is much higher then my block ability they should have a better chance of stunning me or reducing alot of stamina or just outright breaking my defense and hurting me bad if their skill is that much higher. Of course this would be more complex including skill with the armor as well as the strength of the armor also contributing tourds the effect of the blocked blow. It goes the same way with attacking. Please though, dont take away the player skill in whether or not I hit someone or blocked.

Easier justified in TES. Ever tried your hand at archery? I have, and very rarely did my arrows go right where I aimed them (most hit the target board though!), because the sudden change in muscle load when you release the arrow causes your aim to shift as the arrow leaves the bow. It's something that takes a lot of skill to control. I'd rather have a radius of divergence that decreases as you raise the skill than the ability to hit anything from any distance from level 1.


Ah, I get where you're coming from now, and you're right. Short of just having the opponent swinging and missing loads (which is difficult to justify), I'm not really sure how it could be levelled off in that system. As I said though, it's just an off-the-cuff idea. The devs (well, some of 'em anyway) get paid to implement a system that does work.



True. But it needn't be a continuing trend.

Nowadays games are less and less limited to one genre. Not because they think the genre they were originally in was wrong, but because they can add something to a game without watering down the original genre. In the same way, TES games can have quite some good action, as long as they're limited by their skills.

Instead of wanting dice roll action, the players skills and attributes should be more essential to the effeciveness of the move. For example in Oblivion blade skill only let you do more damage and a new powerattack now and then. Realistically, it would also allow you to have a better flow in your combat, recoiling less from hitting blocks and more effectively chaining moves together. Dodging can be done with every character in oblivion because everyone goes from a standstill to full speed in a fraction of a second. If agility and speed would have some more of an effect on this, you'd actually need an agile character to pull off a dodge based fighting style. In oblivion every block "works" in the way that the attacker always recoils and the damage is always reduced. If the game would allow a strong enough fighter to break through a block from a novice at blocking it would add a lot of credibility and again importance to playing your role.

Just because there's a proper action element in an RPG doesn't mean the RPG element is less present. It just needs to be implemented in a proper way.

I hope that in skyrim everyone can successfully hit someone else with a melee weapon if the opponent does nothing about it, but your options in battle are going to be limited. You can try hitting an opponent with your sword. But if you're a novice at blade, they'll probably see it coming, block your strike and counter flawlessly while you're clumsily recoiling.

I voted Oblivion on both. But however, I think for blocking at least, it should have to be more accurate. Atleast dependent on the shield. In Oblivion, no matter what shield you have (or even if you have a dagger) you can block the attack as long as the attacker is on your screen. I want it to be a little more precise, maybe when you press the guard key, it takes longer for the shield to be all the way up on your character. Also, let's say that the shield covers 1/6th of the left side of the screen, then you would have to move your screen to the right, untill you see the shield block over the attackers weapon. Best way I can think of to describe it right now. That's just my opinion again.

but it stats should make a differance, if you were a novice swordsman and you were attacking a journeyman in block than your chance to hit should be less, besides in Oblivion it seemed like the combat was too simplified and was just attck, block, attack wheras they should develop a dynamic block and attack system.

No. That's just taking focus further from the character and more onto the player. It's a role play game. You're supposed to be taking on the role of your character. Having such reliance on player skill completely undermines that.

I agree. If I'm trying to kick some ass in first person, I don't want my weapon to basically fade through my enemy 75% of the time because my low-level character "missed". That svcks. I understand that Morrowind was a great game, but for all the talk of it being superior in every on these forums, it had a horrid combat system.

They for it right in Oblivion, and now they just need to build upon that.

I'm going to give a longer, more reasoned response. I didn't want to - I've been up for nearly 24 hours already, and writing long essays about game design is generally a bad idea at that point - but I think it's necessary.

The whole idea of relying on stats for hits and misses is more or less perfect for ranged attacks. It's very, very easy to implement there. Skill affects spread, spread intrinsically determines hit-or-miss. Spread also automatically takes distance into account. This is something that works absolutely brilliantly when it's done right. You're relying on player skill, but also taking the stats into account in a way that's significant and still isn't jarring or strange - it makes sense to a player that their accuracy wouldn't be perfect, and it makes sense to a player that it would depend on their level of skill with the weapon they're using. Your player doesn't end up feeling "cheated" when the arrow veers a bit to the left because it's reasonable to expect that to happen in the first place.

The problem is that you can't apply stats and skills to melee combat in the same way, because this sort of reasonable, believable mixture of numbers and events doesn't happen. If you're using stats to roll dodges and misses and not animating them, that's going to have game-breakingly bad results. Morrowind did it, and it did have game-breakingly bad results. Morrowind's combat is almost universally considered to be terrible, and in a lot of cases where people didn't like that game the combat was the breaking point, whether they were fans of action games or RPGs beforehand. Why? Because Morrowind already relies on player skill when you hit someone, and then relies on dice rolls anyways, and handles them in a way that makes absolutely no sense to the player by showing the hit actually connect even when it doesn't count. This worked fine with Daggerfall and Arena - in those games it wasn't really possible to tell if your sword was hitting someone, so it could just play a sound to indicate hits or misses - but in Morrowind you're providing visual feedback indicating a hit and then ignoring that hit, with visual feedback being by far the most important kind you can provide to a player. I won't often say that something in a game is wrong, and it feels weird to say it, but Morrowind's combat is wrong. I don't know of any other way to put it. It's just wrong. The obvious answer seems to be "animate the misses and dodges" but... well, I've gone over that. It's hard to make a miss animation look natural at ranges that close and pretty well impossible to make them feel natural to a player who's had an enemy filling their screen with the aiming cursor dead center on their chest, and dodge animations break down when you start to enforce them on the player.

Of course, the obvious answer is "well, Bethesda's developers are paid to do this sort of thing so they can come up with a better solution". That'd be nice, but... well, Bethesda's employees are still human beings like you and me, and paid or not they're still limited by the bounds of their own creativity and experience. That's not to say that some of them aren't more qualified than most people to be working at something like this, but we're dealing with a problem that's been causing issues for an entire genre for well over a decade (and that's an understatement). Oblivion's approach is probably the best I've seen to the problem (conceptually, not actually - Oblivion's enemies had far too much health and there was no sense of scale between different challenges because of it - you'd hardly notice you weren't doing damage to something until you were already half-dead a lot of the time), but even then you're losing a massive amount of nuances and subtleties - combat turns into a system built entirely around brute force, with multiple combatants bashing each other senselessly without making even the slightest effort to avoid injury (since absolutely everything involved in the stats has to be distilled into a single number that represents nothing but damage done).

Is there a way to blend player and character skill together with this kind of combat? Maybe. I don't know. The only way I can think of that might work is actually having the skills tie into what characters can do in a more interesting way, so that even smaller blocks of advancement (say, five points) lead to significant improvements in their capabilities so that a character with a low level of skill would be limited to that stupid swinging and bashing while a character with a high level of skill would play almost like your standard action slash-em-up, turning a dozen enemies into a thick cloud of red mist within seconds and without effort. This doesn't represent the difference between a poorly-skilled character and a greatly-skilled one in realistic terms - your poorly-skilled character would be a competent swordsman by realistic standards - but in super-realistic ones - a competent swordsman by realistic standards has absolutely no chance against someone who can handle a sword in ways that are literally impossible in real life. Trouble with this being that... well, it's insanely difficult to actually develop, so much so that I'd say it's just about impossible to do in a game with the kind of scope. On top of having to develop everything else in the game (keeping in mind that there's more to them than just combat) and still maintain at least a rough balance between weapons, they'd have to design 10-20 abilities to give the player that actually progress from "meh" to "whoa" on the scale of awesome for each weapon skill, and keep both low-level play (that basic swordsmanship) and high-level play (that slash-em-up) entertaining. That's not in any way practical for them.

So in the end, the developers are more or less stuck having to choose between the player and the player character's stats for this sort of thing, and the unfortunate fact is that giving the player priority makes for a better game overall. Does it make for a better RPG? I don't know. I also don't care - I would rather this be an enjoyable game than that it be a slightly better RPG that plays like trash.

Well said.

I think a better alternative to the random numbers, would be to develop the AI responses in combat. Enemies should be more tactical in how they attack you, how they dodge etc. They should be fast. Heck, some of them should even do backflips and other such feats of acrobatics. This would all add real challenge and variety to fights. It would add to immersion,if you come across the occasional character who happens to be very athletic, and able to dodge well. A simple chance system is crude and adds only artificial challenge at best. I think it makes no sense to add random automated mechanics to a system that involves entirely manual combat, and is absolutely confusing to the player, given that the game encourages such direct, manual combat.

I liked manual blocking in Oblivion to an extent. Fighting just was not fluid the recoiling from block didn't feel very dynamic to me. I felt that thing should of been more percentage chance based like the skill perk for using a shield. I.E. dice rolls/random numbers

like oblivion but a high agility and armor proficiency would enable for auto dodge

Manual blocks, but a hit system similar to Morrowind's but with proper animations.

YES. This is the way to go. Morrowind kinds screwed up with the "I'm standing two feet away, swinging a 5 foot claymore at their face, and I miss" situation.
Oblivion fixed it.

This shouldn't even be an discussion. :facepalm:

You want to be standing back a bit with a weapon that long.


Oblivion fixed nothing, it just shifted the problem elsewhere.

I want manual for both... dice rolls make the fighting more like a math problem then a challenge imo.

You're supposed to be controlling the role of that character. That doesn't mean that the character should overrule you, and it's very easy to take that kind of thinking about reliance on the player http://progressquest.com/. It's also very easy to use the whole "stats are fundamental" concept generally and then apply the term "RPG" to http://maddennfl.easports.com/home.action. Like I said earlier in this thread, you have to be very careful about tightly you couple character stats to the concept of RPGs - even on their most basic level, all role-playing games are dependent on player skill to some extent, and usually to a pretty gigantic extent as far as intellect, problem-solving skills, and decision-making in general are concerned. The original version of D&D had skills like "intelligence" and "wisdom", but they were extremely limited in what they influenced (literally nothing except experience and the number of languages a character could learn), with even spellcasting being quite fully independent of them. There's still a lot of neglect for other kinds of player skill, but... well, it's a bit hard to include a player's ability to swing an axe when you can't actually gauge or use that in the game in any meaningful sort of way.

Basically, RPGs weren't ever really about stats. Stats have become a focus of them as a matter of tradition, but only because their developers have lost focus of the original intent: a way to tell stories, a way to build worlds, and a way to structure "playing pretend" so that it's more interesting and appealing for a mature audience. I think the worst thing to happen to RPGs nowadays is the fact that nearly the entire industry does all of those things better (including, quite frankly, Madden), and this insistence on continuing to rely as much as possible on character stats solely for the sake of tradition and for preserving a false idea of what RPGs were meant to be in the first place does nothing but keep the focus away from changing that.

Either or really, both a fine. My only concern if it starts with the combat system and continues through other parts of the game where actions are not based on the characters skills (as per usual in an RPG) but based on the players skill. For example in Oblivion combat was just block/slash and your skill only changed the damage which was offset by versing level creatures, additionally, it could be said that lock picking too became a game of the player's skill with the mini game whereby your skill only helped if you stuffed up but once you got the hang it of that was seldom. Essentially what I'm trying to say is that we should run away from dice-roll mechanics as they are more true to the RPG genre then a player skill based game, but I accept that player skill based mechanics have their uses.

I want manual block.

Effectiveness based on skills for those who want to hold block key when not attacking. Then also have a timed block where if you time it right you take no damage.

How about keeping Oblivion's style, but weapon skills affects accuracy and the chance of glancing blows instead. As one levels their weapon skill, they become more accurate (smaller target circle, signifying you are not flailing around) and when you do hit someone, it's a blow that matters (min-max damage gap shrinks towards the max damage).

Example, with a skill of 25 in blades, you have a chance of hitting someone from 2.5-10 damage with an iron sword (ignoring damage modifiers, like strength, power attacks, and such), and your targeting circle is fairly big. Once you have a skill level of 50, the damage range shrinks to 5-10, and the targeting circle gets smaller (you are now more precise and accurate). At 100 blade skill, you will do a constant 10 damage for each blow, and you targeting circle is pretty small, reflecting on how accurate you are with a bladed weapon (you'll always hit where you aim).

However, I am ignoring combat perks for this, as there are other ways I'd like to handle perks.

As for blocking, come back later.