Wrong!

This an open world game...freedom to do what you want, play how you want is the premise

If I have developed enough of an Acrobatic skill to jump into unreachable areas, I have the full right to enjoy the rewards of focusing on acrobatics.

If that means mounting a rock and picking off my enemies, so be it...



Any enemy that wishes to catch me should go and work on their Acrobatics like I did

Edit..or like a previous poster said, the enemy should run out of range of my arrows and force me to come looking for them

There we go problem solved. Kudos to you! :goodjob:

Giants + Dragons that can throw you back with a flap of the wing + Better AI would not let us do so...

heres a thought,
make humanoids that dont have ranged weapons pull up their shields that would cover them completely thus making your attacks useless

and as for animals, make them really evasive (i dotn care if you have to even change their stats for the time im on the rock) so they dodge everything i throw at them

ty hehe

well some games solve such problems in different ways, in wow for example the NPC just becomes immune to damage and goes back to his spawning point, in thief whoever they actually run away if you start sniping them from the shadows instead of standing their getting shot at.

This should mostly be solved by AI, not sure if they will do it though. The best example of this I can think of was a low-level grzzly bear encounter in oblivion that would have killed me had it not been for a large rock neary that I jumped up on and shot the bear from. Believe it or not the bear was able to get up on the rock eventually and knock me off, but I got back on and it got stuck again. For these wild-animal encounters, I think the easiest solution would be to have the animal run away after the first shot. In most cases I would think that this is a realistic senario (though certainly some animals do charge after an attack). The better more permanet solution would be a better path finding method, though for those truly hard-to-reach places, abandoning the fight should work for humanoid foes as well.

Agreed.

Sometimes you'll want to get to a safe place. I don't think Skyrim is going to be a game where your superior to every enemy you come up against. I found myself crawling up a rock countless times in Oblivion to avoid the deathly swipes of ogres and trolls. It's realistic. So I think they should incoporate a function where if the enemy can't reach you for w/e reason and they are being shot by arrows, magic w/e. Then they too would get out of your line of fire. Or, simply get out a bow and shoot you back.

I am of the belief that bows/arrows are a ranged weapon... The benefit of a ranged weapon is that if you can keep something away from you then have a pretty good advantage. The developers should work less on "preventing" the player from doing something and focus on how the game will react. It shouldn't be that difficult to do a pathcheck and see if the player is reachable. If they are not reachable then the mobs AI should tell it to run away... out of range. Maybe hide behind a tree. If its an intelligent/semi-intelligent mob, it should go get help. That's what I want to see. Can you imagine the look on the players face after climbing to get into an impossible reach position, when the goblin he just fired on runs away. He climbs down from his perch only to find that the goblin went and roused the nearby goblin camp and their are now 20 goblins all with bows waiting to greet him. Thats the kind of game I want to play right there.

Haha, me too! Nice comment :thumbsup:

as an archery focused character I used this a lot in oblivion. I never considered it cheating. Perhaps an improved AI would make it more interesting. I like the idea of hacking at the fingers of marauders who are trying to climb up to reach me but i dont think the problem was that game breaking

If every non-player character knows how to use Flare again, you'll never be safe.

Lol at the epic amount of sarcasm in this post

How else am I supposed to kill Umbra?

Most Intelligent enemies should pack ranged weapons. Unintelligent ones should fall victim to your bow if you are in an unreachable spot. The rare intelligent enemies that can't pack a ranged attack for some reason should run once they figure out they can't get to you.

Try that with the Imperial Legion. The arrows from the archers taste like pain.

More easily said than done. But with todays programming we hopefully will see this.

Exploits, when found, should be fixed but not at the expense of removing features. The developer should look at the situation, decide if it really is an exploit, then figure out how to fix it. For this example the NPC should first check to see if he has a ranged ability, if not check for an alternate path, such as climbing the other slope of the hill and jumping down on top, failing that take shelter and wait in ambush. Personally for single player games I would prefer to have an exploit that could not be fixed left in instead the the feature at fault being removed.

Fixing expliots at all cost would eventually lead to a bland, boring game with no features and an AI with two options, easy (where the enemies just sit there) and normal (where to make it challenging for people abusing exploits the AI has so many cheats to help it you cannot beat it without using the exploits.

If a game has any variety at all someone will eventually find a combination that is not balanced for properly, unless of course all variety is removed.

I totally get what OP is trying to say.
I remember killing Umbra on level 2 back in Morrowind only because I've climbed on the rock and he couldn't reach me while I've rained down on him my awesome, epic, legendary and uber gosu rain of... basic fire balls. >.>
Talk about spitting in Umbra's face.
And yes, I should do it and I will do it until they fix stuff like that!
All exploits and abuses should be removed since that is what makes game good!
I don't remember Super Mario or Tetris having exploits or abuses like that even though they were SP games.

DO. NOT. DO IT.

I can't believe how many stupid complaints could be fixed on this board by people simply choosing not to do what it is they're complaining about.

I don't see how this is "abuse".

That's the whole point of having an Acrobat character. To allow you to jump places that non-acrobats can't. So sure acrobatics can be removed as a skill, but that seems to make the game less interesting.

And of course as pointed out enemies can still shoot arrows or hurl spells at your character if you are in place they can't physically get to.

And if you don't want to play an acrobat character, then just don't - problem solved!

It isn't so much the fact that you can do it, it is that the game doesn't react. If enemies would pull out a bow or fire spells or run and hide because they know they can't get to you it isn't fixing and exploit, it is making the game realistic.

"Oh no, he is on the roof with his bow... I only have a sword. Oh well, might as well take 45 arrows to the face and then die. No point in preserving life." <--- Is that the kind of mentally defunct opponent you want to face?

Enemies that shoot back.

Suddenly it's not a very good idea to have climbed that chimney...

If your at a bandit camp and you jump on top of a rock and shoot arrows. The bandits can't do anything to attack (unless they have a bow or magic).

But I think enemies should have some sort of long-range attack-mode. I remember climbing buildings in the Imperial City then blasting everybody away with arrows. Guards had to shoot me down...

What's the point of 'abusing' a singleplayer game... You simply play it whatever way you like.

If you like abusing the game then you should do that.
If you like dressing up like a japanese ladyboy wearing a skyscraqer sword then you should do that (and then kill yourself irl)
The list goes on...

Its worth fixing just from an immersion perspective. Its bad AI, that we know about, so might we might as well think about how we might try and fix it.

Obvious fix. Add a behavioural AI routine that says that if the enemy loses 75% of its hitpoints without inflicting any damage then it runs away. Stops exploits, doubles as a way of showing enemies routing, and generally improves the immersion of the game.