Vote on the poll on how you think block and how to hit enemies should be. In morrowind your chance to hit was always by your wep. skill and luck, in Oblivion you always hit. WHich way would you like it in skyrim.

I'm thinking manual, and have your skills determine the effectiveness of it.

Chance to hit based on weapon skill and luck. Manual blocking.

People don't like to-hit rolls for attacks. I don't know what, it is supposed to be an RPG...

I'd rather have manual block, with a skill check determining effectiveness.

The only event i would hope a character is able to miss with a melee weapon is if they are drunk, I agree with NoSympathy on skills deciding it effectiveness.

Instead they can add it so the enemy dodges, so the mechanic is still like Tes, but an enemy is able to escape your attacks with a chance.

It should be Oblivion style. Physical combat should be based on actual skill (or rather, just actually coming into contact with an enemy and timing blocks correctly) and not based on an arbitrary number system with no direct full control. Skills should only determine how effective you are with a given weapon.

Well, I'm not so fussed about spells failing, but actual weapons should always hit and deal damage provided they connect. You should always be able to block when desired, and it should be effective if you time it well. I've always thought combat in Oblivion is the single greatest improvement over Morrowind, and one of the biggest, most incredibly stupid flaws of the latter game. Chance has no place in a real-time combat system.

To-hit rolls in a game that already relies on your skill as a player to hit enemies in the first place is redundant, irritating, and frankly doesn't really make much sense at all anymore. Oblivion's solution isn't ideal either (they had to make up for the lack of misses by giving enemies insane amounts of health), but there are better ways to handle this sort of thing than how either of those games do it.

To-block rolls aren't nearly as bad, but it's still extremely jarring when you have direct control of your characters in every circumstance except when they automatically raise a shield without any real rhyme or reason as to when they bother blocking, and (again) it doesn't really make much sense. Again, there are better solutions than what either of the games did - Oblivion's system was too basic and Morrowind's was too detached.

I want to control whether I hit or miss, along with blocking. The effectivness of said things though should be up to my character skills vs the opposit skill for the aponent. So if I have a low blade ability and they just have a low block ability the chances of getting through should be about 50/50 but if their block is high they will have a better chance of making my blade bounce back causing minimal damage if any at all. Also ability with a certain weapon type should govern how fast you recover from a bad hit on the aponents shield.

I think you're missing the point of one of the fundamental concepts of an RPG... If you don't want to play a game with dice rolls and stat checks, don't play an RPG.



I have no problem with game mechanic changes to take advantage of new technology. What I do have a problem with is people wanting to move the game away from the very essence of what an RPG is.

oh look another Morrowind vs. Oblivion thread about what the game should most be like

Actually, it's a thread about how the attack and block mechanics should be implemented, with an over-simplified poll referring to the two previous titles as bases for systems.



Discuss it, or don't reply.

Yes, and it works well with turn-based combat.

With real-time combat it's (as mentioned above) incredibly redundant and illogical. Statistics can easily still play a role in combat. I just think it shouldn't effect chance, as it makes for very bizzare and dull combat.

Due to being in first person and giving the player control over the fighting in real time makes it more of an "Action RPG" I feel dice rolls on combat are fine in a game where fighting is not in real time and you cant control the indavidual attacks. Having no true control over the fighting in a game so centered on the first person perspective makes no sense at all and would piss more people off then not.

Ninjad lol

Oblivion hit & blocking, but make stats count towards what happens when you hit, incorporate Critical Strike/Critical Fail. Have weapon damage be an interval like morrowind.

Added an other option to poll.

RPGs are not, and have never been, about stats. They are about controlling and playing out the role of a character. Not controlling a character that plays a role, but actually entering the role of that character. That is what RPGs have been about since the inception of D&D. Stats exist solely because something was needed to make the "playing pretend" bits more structured and interesting, and in the absence of unbelievably powerful computers the best they could do was simple rules that relied on paper and dice (and if you look at the original versions of D&D, the stats and rules are so simplistic that they're barely even there, with some of the comments from the games' creators actually more or less bashing people who would play them as "numbers" games). Really, claiming that they're fundamental to the very essence of RPGs ignores both the history and the purpose of RPGs to begin with.

RPGs use stats because RPGs have always used stats, not because stats are a fundamental part of their being. They were brought into the genre because of the limitations of the medium they were originally created for (pen and paper), and those limitations no longer apply.

No.

You're right in that it feels "wrong" in a first-person game, and Morrowind's implementation was pretty poor, but Oblivion's was just as bad and saying "well we'll just remove that little RPG mechanic..." is NOT the way to implement new tech.


A simple off-the-cuff approach would be for a to-hit dice roll as you attack, which results in a hit animation if you roll a hit, or a miss/dodge animation if you roll a miss. It gives a fluid real-time combat situation while preserving core RPG principals. For instance, someone with a low blunt weapon skill swinging a warhammer would likely take slow, cumbersome swings which would be difficult to aim and easy to dodge. Just because you're in a first-person real time perspective, doesn't mean you should automatically hit just because you're looking in your enemy's direction.

Well said, rabish.

As for the combat system; once again: When you compare Oblivion's to Morrowind's, Mount & Blade wins

Oblivion's combat system is much better than Morrowind's and I'm pretty sure they will use it in Skyrim.

Nothing about what you've suggested would be nearly as "fluid" as you seem to think. With ranged weapons, it's fairly easy - skill affects spread, spread has an automatic influence on chance to hit. But when you're literally touching someone at the front and you swing your weapon at them, there's absolutely no way to handle a miss animation without it looking clumsy. Dodge animations? Maybe, and those would look fine on the AIs... but not on the player. It leads to the exact same problem that to-block rolls lead to, except far worse: the entire game is built around giving players more or less total control of their character, and for the time it takes for that animation to play out you are taking control from the player for a decently long moment. Even worse, because it's based on stat rolls you're taking the player's control away at random. That is very, very bad design for any kind of game, and doing it just to make sure that the game's an RPG proper would be a pretty major mistake.

I like that idea.

I don't see it as taking control away from the player any more than the attack animations in Oblivion did? It's also not at random, since it's based on the character's skills.

As I said though, that's just an off-the-cuff idea, and I'm sure a team of people working on the game for years could come up with something more robust. I just think the move to Oblivion's always-hit system was crude at best. Do you really think someone with a low blunt weapon skill should always be hitting their opponent with every swing of a warhammer?

I don't like dice-rolls, if I hit someone I don't want to be told I didn't hit them just because I'm an unlucky bastard. So Oblivion-style.

But surely that's just a limitation of the current method of just playing one animation when you attack? I put the same question to you as I put to Rabish: Should a guy with a low blunt weapon skill swinging a warhammer about always hit his opponent?

The power attacks in Oblivion were initiated by the player, so it's really not the same. The game isn't saying "here, I'm going to do this thing for you" and then forcing the player into an animation. The player is initiating an animation that happens to take a second or so to play out. Huge gap there.


Yes, the character's skill, combined with a random dice roll that makes the actual chance of it happening a random occurrence that's influenced by a static number. The fact that the character's skills influence the results doesn't change the fact that the results are random.


If their opponent is a human being standing directly in front of them and not moving, as is generally the case in Oblivion? Er... yes?