You're supposed to be controlling the role of that character.
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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.

You have just won this topic. If there was a prize, you'd get it.

I havent voted at all, i dont like polls that concern games which were about 8 years ago, they were using different and less advanced technology

You're viewing it far too narrowly. "Oblivion-style" or "Morrowind-style" needn't mean "exactly as it was in Oblivion" or "exactly as it was in Morrowind". I voted Morrowind-style for the first one, but certainly don't want a return to Morrowind's combat system. Instead, I want an improvement on it that maintains the possibility that not all your attacks will hit, even if your aim as a player is good. But this is coming from someone who went into every FO3 combat system in VATS just to get the stat-based combat out of it.

For the second one I voted Oblivion-style, because I want the ability to manually attempt to block to be used as the base for the blocking system.


95% of Skyrim will be based on past Elder Scrolls games, so you better get used to things based off of Morrowind, Oblivion, and quite possibly Daggerfall and Arena too, as well as games outwith the TES series.

I'd much prefer a system which emphasises character skill over player skill, because it's an RPG. I believe my skill should determine which enemies to hit, whilst dice rolls determine if it's a hit, a miss, or a dodge - using appropriate animations. Block could either be done manually or through skill, both are Ok in my eyes.

As for combat itself, I'd much rather a Daggerfall style - the swing with your mouse determines the swing in-game. However, the game is on consoles now, so unfortunately this can't really happen (unless you use the anolog, but it would be quite difficult I think).

Yes, you're controlling the role of that character, but you still play the role of that character, and what you can do is determined by what the character you have created can do. You control the base and development of the character you play as. That's where stats come into it. They are the base representation of the character you have created and developed.

Pure stat/skill based fighting kinda made it obsolete to do anything other than just stand in front of an enemy and hope you had the advantage... would like to have character movement abilites like roll dodge sidestep ect come into play also to make combat more intense.

I chose both Morrowind style. The chance to hit with each swing is based on two stats, your attack skill and your opponents dodge/block skill, the animation in the fight should reflect this.

If you miss, then the animation should be of your weapon swinging to the side of them and not hitting.
If you hit, but they dodge you should swing your weapon where they were while their dodge animation plays.
If you hit and they block then you should see your weapon hit their shield.

The reason people hated Morrowind combat was because you got almost no feedback. You didnt know if you hit or missed or what happened, leaving you swinging madly infront of the enemy.

I hate it when I swing my sword 20 times and hit an enemy 20 times only for them to be on half health. A swing from a sword should be devistating no matter what your skill, the skill is in making the sword make contact, and since an RPG like The Elder Scrolls bases its skill in the player stats and not in player controller abilities then the hit rate should depend on stats and not player skill.

The changes to Morrowind combat needs to be around player feedback. Show the player whats going on, what exactly is happening in combat needs to be shown so the player feels as though they know whats going on.

Picturing this in my mind, I could totally get behind a system that works like this. Though I don't know how well it would actually play in a real-time kind of system. Turn based (Think VATS.) would work in this way beautifully, but I don't know how well such a combat system would be received in an Elder Scrolls title. There could be riots.

So if such a stat-based hit system, with plenty of visual feedback were somehow artfully executed in real-time, this could be a real winner.

Picturing this in my mind, I could totally get behind a system that works like this. Though I don't know how well it would actually play in a real-time kind of system. Turn based (Think VATS.) would work in this way beautifully, but I don't know how well such a combat system would be received in an Elder Scrolls title. There could be riots.

So if such a stat-based hit system, with plenty of visual feedback were somehow artfully executed in real-time, this could be a real winner.