Probably not.

For myself, I switch back and forth between first and third person constantly, so that's not really the issue. The issue is I'll be damned if a [censored] game is going to tell ME when I'm going to switch cameras. It's its job to do what I want - not the other way around.

Good point. I've forgotten what it's like for games to cater to the player's needs. But before I go any further I'll just wait on confirmation about whether it's optional or not.

If you slam your axe in between the eyes of your opponent, lodging your blade halfway into his skull, precisely what covered your abdomen when you were preparing and executing the strike?

Besides, a central overhead strike is not a finisher - it is in fact a classical starter move when you start out outside reach and thus are safe and get within reach by making a step forward during the attack. It's a starter move because you protect yourself through range in the setup and it if works, you have finished combat with a single strike - but there are plenty of techniques to counter it - much like for most techniques. Since you move your hands in a circle, someone moving them in a straight way - precisely with a stab to the abdomen or chest for example - will finish before you connect. If you even hit true at that point and don't lose your attack, it will at best be a double kill.

There is no such thing as "real life finishers". You "finish" your opponent with standard combat techniques if you know what's good for you.

Agreed with you on many points, especially the "third person is now a viable option" thing. If it wasn't a viable option in the other games, why was it included? :huh:

But yeah, people are going to whine about anything, and while I do think the killcams should be optional, I don't see why this is as huge a deal as everyone makes it out to be. Then again, I will play exclusively in third person now that there's a targeting reticle for it, because playing a character I built from the ground up that then only is a pair of disembodied hands seems a bit freaking silly.

Fancy killing animations don't really impress me enough for to justify taking the game taking control of the wheel for me. It kind of reminds me someone grabbing your keyboard so they can show you some youtube video.

I can't imagine that they wouldn't be optional.

I play a lot of racing games. Most of the more arcade-y ones have 360 cams and jump cams and all that garbage, so they can switch to the cheesy Dukes of Hazzard slo-mo view every time you catch a little air. I haven't played one yet in which they weren't toggleable. At this point, that's just one of the basic things I do before I even play a game - go into the Options menu, set up my controls, play with the UI a bit and toggle the cheese-cams off.

I dont care about that its still going to be AWESOME

I disagree. There are real life "finishers". You typically do them when your opponent is off balance, dizzy, paralyzed, recoiled, or when he's left himself completely open. Am I saying that all finishers are without risk? Of course not. But the level of risk in an attack depends on a number of factors at that particular moment. If your next strike is intended to end the fight, then its a finisher. Real life combat is not just about going block for block, blow for blow. You are trying to kill your opponent. In the midst of lacerating, bruising, and poking holes in each other, there will be moments in which you will attempt to go in for the "final" blow, with the clear intention to end the fight immediately. Its called a finisher.

Doesn't bother me I play in 3rd-person most of the time anyway.

Same, I'm just curious as to why no one has mentioned such an option out of all of the interviews there have been. Surely they knew how many fans that would get irritated without this small knowledge. Most times I buy a game and assume something is one way when in fact it is not, as do other fans. GTA 4 had alot of this...

"Assumptions are the mother of all [censored]-ups."

-Steven Seagal

i could say i hate video games because they have so much squandered potential because so many studios are too lazy and afraid to do anything interesting with the medium, but i really just hate video games. straight up. [censored] em.


oh no i pretended out the ass when i was a kid. i'd go on adventures in the woods with my bros and we'd pretend my back porch was the deck of a ship and that [censored] was awesome. i pretty much learned English through MUDs (believe it or not i actually have a much stronger command of spelling and grammar than my posts might indicate!).

i get the idea of pretending and the importance of imagination and all that stuff, but as i've gotten older i haven't really been able to see the point in keeping that stuff up. i guess when i say i don't "get" it it's less about intellectual understanding and more about empathy. i can't relate with the idea of TES being anything more than a really really big adventure game/dungeon crawler.

also by that i'm not saying HEH GROW UP i'm saying i'm too old and need to stop playing and talking about video games.

THIS IS GETTING TOO DEEP let's go back to complaining about cameras.

People really only treated you differently in Morrowind if you completed the main quest or were a criminal. No real recognition of your skills, actions, affiliations, etc. in the world in general. You were just some outlander for most of the game and the only thing people really commented on was the fact that you were the Nerevarine. In Oblivion they had random annoying BS (YOU LOOK SMART DUR HURRRRR) but for the most part nothing you did was reflected by the game world all that much apart from the newspapers. Hell, people stopped talking about the end of the main quest relatively quickly as well. Fallout 3 was better at this simply because you had that moron on GNR talking about your exploits.

Everybody seems to be ragging on Radiant Story as yet another gimmick, but I really think it has some potential. In a big sandbox game like Skyrim it's difficult to make it seem like what you do really matters, but the inclusion of a system that is designed specifically to change things up and control what you encounter in the world can do a lot for it. The simplest thing I can point to is the fact that they've said that you might be approached for a magic duel if you're an accomplished mage. Presumably this will be based on your statistics and perhaps the amount of magic-related quests/faction things you've done, but what really matters is that it's a consequence of who your character is and what he's done. To me that's a hell of a lot more important in any RPG than having numbers that determine how likely you are to fall down when somebody pimp-slaps you.


Walter White don't take no [censored].


I really don't view it as any different than going into third-person when you're knocked down in Morrowind or Oblivion. Perhaps you despised this feature as well. Personally I never had a problem with it. Only thing that really bugs me is the slow-mo. They should ditch that, as it's far more likely to become annoying than the simple act of smashing a dragon's face in with a big-ass hammer.


But how will we know whether the Duke boys got out of this pickle? How, I ask you, HOW?!?

Haha, well spoken! Fair enough.

And believe me, I'm counting on the whole Radiant Story thing just as much as you are. I really hope it makes a huge difference.

.....Aaron? :toughninja:

If you not you remind me exactly of a friend of mine. :tongue:

However I agree, and your horrible sentence structure didn't fool me. Seems a tad bit lazy though. :shrug:

But like you I've lost a lot of imagination compared to when I was a young one. Not an advlt yet, but It's still almost completely gone. I find videogames to be my last safe-heaven. Anyways, by request, damn this forced third-person camera!!! :swear:

EDIT: I used emoticons like a 10 year-old girl texting... I'll stop that soon enough.

How do you know your opponent left himself open accidentally or rather is inviting an attack to a specific opening in order to get you to open up?

There shouldn't be "moments" in which you go for that final blow, but EVERY blow should go for ending the fight. Because the sooner the fight is over, the sooner you are safe. Playing around for five minutes belongs to cinematic displays. That's one reason why few renfaire etc. fights rarely actually use historical techniques - aside from the actors probably not knowing them, a twenty second fight is not half as entertaining as fooling around for several minutes. But the latter is where your "in the midst of lacerating, bruising and poking holes in each other" stems from. In swordfighting, for example, the larger part of techniques has only one aim: Hitting the enemy in the head, neck or shoulder or running the blade through his chest, i.e. a deadly attack. So your "finisher" will simply be a normal attack. Yes, if you managed to poke through his chest you might want to follow up with another attack just in case he isn't dead instantly - but that will just be a normal attack to his neck or head, one that protects you at the same time as it attacks, because that is why you're doing the whole thing to begin with: You're not sure he's dead or unconscious and fear he might still attack.

Take a look here at this video:
http://youtu.be/Y3DhjFUOG6Y

It shows a wide variety of techniques. The only ones not set up for killing are those which go for disarmament or submission.

Ive played Fallout: New Vegas on the xbox and it had a menu option to turn kill cam off.
I dont know why however, but it did not work.
Every time I or a companion made a 'special' kill I would still get this very annoying slo-mo and a panning camera, even though it was turned off.
Terrible.
Not only because in a multi-opponent fight it would lock me out of the controls while the enemies still kept attacking, also because I found it to be a complete and utter immersion breaker.
Im really not a fan of things that look cool exactly once and then rapidly get annoying to the point of actually being one of the things that make me shelf a game.

Skyrim really better have an option to turn this off. And one that works at that.

All i have to say to this is that users of this forum just [censored] me to tears with the non stop [censored]ing over things that do not matter to any sane person.

I'm not arguing against any of this. I agree that you should always be going for the final blow. I'm just saying that there are moments where you may be more sure of yourself, and that is based upon the factors of the moment (or second, if you will). Of course its risky business because it does leave you more open.

Perhaps you are referring to a more Might and Magic: Dark Messiah or Mount and Blade-esque type of combat, where your next slash or stab could be the finishing move, right? Like say, you're opponent is coming at you with an overhead strike, and you use a stabbing maneuver to skewer your now vulnerable opponent, thus finishing him?

Has there been any screenshots or footage that could suggest that finishing moves are only executed when you've defeated the last enemy in the room? Or is it random?

Personally, I'd hate for them to be too frequent and to be executed whilst there are multiple enemies still alive.
Or we could just hope that we can switch them off.

Edit: Wasn't there footage at e3 that showed a first person finishing move? I'll try to find a link. If that's the case I don't think I would mind.

If thats really true, then I have to admit that it says a lot more about you than the posters in this forum.

:facepalm: not this again

I have yet to se any evidence that you are kicked out of 1st peson into third.
-Any fancy kill animations done in 3rd person happend when the pc did the last hit in 3rd person.
-when killing in 1st person you can do 1st person finishing moves.
-the article poasted here did not realy say anything else than that there is finishing moves.

I belive that this rumor is just feeding itself. Last time the headd line was the same but with a question mark after it, and nothing was confirmed then, not now either.
So untill tod says you will be kicked out of 1st person into 3rd when killing someone, i have no reason to belive so. And the demos where he swiches to third person before delivering the last blow does not count as evidence, it was a vouluntary swich to show of the fancy finishing moves in third person to the press.

You didn't go into third person when knocked down in Morrowind. The camera just lowered to the ground. The only times you go into third person in Morrowind is when you press the key to switch, or when you die (or if you stand still and don't do anything for a couple minutes).

In Oblivion, you're forced into third person quite often... mounting a horse, sitting down or standing up, getting knocked down, paralyzed... And yes, I hated it doing that.

I'm not really worried about forced third person finishers being optional. There most likely will be an option to disable it. I'm concerned that disabling third person "kill cams" will also disable those finishers from tiggering at all. I like the finishers and want to see them, but from a first-person perspective, not third.

i will watch you sleep tonight.


lazy as [censored]. same thing with using caps for emphasis vs. bold or italics or whatever. function over form~


very very this. my major problem with people complaining about TES becoming less of an RPG as time goes on stems largely from the fact that TES has never been a particularly good RPG to begin with - there were numbers and dice rolls but apart from the branching endings in Daggerfall the games have been treated more as a collection of quasilinear stories than any one cohesive entity. you can kill a person but for the most part nobody really ever responds to it unless it's specifically related to a quest state. you can sometimes choose to approach a thing through a number of different ways but for the most part nothing ever ACKNOWLEDGES that. the game world never REACTS to your actions in the way you'd expect a believable world to.

people complain about Radiant Story being like LEVEL SCALING or some dumb [censored] like that because the game can keep track of how long it's been since you've fought a skeleton and then send you to a dungeon with skeletons, but more than that it adds this element of EMERGENT NARRATIVE, which is something that should have been a fundamental aspect of the series since Morrowind, and a light form of choice and consequence that while certainly not as fleshed out as even Fallout 3 is still THERE.

every time you play through Skyrim will be unique, even if you use the exact same character build each time, solely because of the game's newfound ability to remember where you've been and what you've done and respond accordingly - to say nothing of the overhauled creature AI, which brings a whole new level of freshness.

but it's all ruined because finishing moves are [censored] THANKS TODD.

ALSO YOU KNOW somebody should really http://www.twitter.com/#!/dcdeacon/ to maybe spare us future rehashes of this topic by people who stumble across the article.

Never played either game. What I am referring to is the rule from period fencing manuals that every piece, every move, has a countermove. Against a cut from below you can counter with a cut from above - because you connect at shoulder-height, your reach is longer thus you connect first. Against a cut from above, you either cut into it and thrust from there, do a direct thrust while closing the line of attack (or getting out of the way) or do something called a zwerchhau, which protects you and cuts at the head/neck region at the same time. Against a thrust, you can do something called a schielhau, against the aforementioned zwerchhau, you can do a zwerchhau of your own. etc.etc. ad nauseam. There is no such thing as a safe technique and the moment you are sure of yourself is usually the second you die...

The first rule of combat: Don't get hit. So you protect yourself until you're 110% sure that the opponent is not a threat anymore. Such as when either his head or his hands have been disconnected from the rest of his body, you have him in a submission hold etc.

One thing that is funny about the poll is that it has options for "effects me a lot" and "That svcks I'm not buying the game" but none for "makes me wait for someone to publish a mod that removes it before I buy the game"