Randomness is not a good source of variation. The only problem with Oblivion's combat system is that it's too simple. You hit something in the head, foot or chest and do exactly the same damage. You hit them from the back, side or front and (as long as they aren't blocking) do exactly the same damage. You use demoralize and the enemy runs away, but manages to use its armour with the same effectiveness as it did when anticipating the hits. In historical combat, armour was most useful against people who were unskilled, or when you were able to block skilled people from targetting weaknesses in your armour. If somebody stabbed your armpit, it didn't matter how impressively solid your plate armour was, you'd just bleed to death with one useless arm. If somebody managed to stab your chest directly (i.e. not a glancing blow), your best leather or chain armour would be useless. Oblivion's system, where skill increases damage, simulates this (better than Morrowind, but still poorly). Funnily enough, in terms of simulating realistic combat, the D&D system of AC and THAC0 was actually the best (though it doesn't differentiate between the ability of different armours to tolerate different weapon types) - if you didn't roll high enough to pierce the armour, your attack did nothing. In both Oblivion and Morrowind, armour is simply a static reduction on the amount of damage done. That makes sense for crushing blows, but doesn't for slicing. If you want the very best simulation of combat out there, see Dwarf Fortress. It's not an FPS, but combat uses rough physical simulation (e.g. dispersion of forces over an area, tensile, shearing and torsion resistance, etc.). In Dwarf Fortress, you can't kill jelly-type enemies with a blunt weapon, at all. There are similarly extreme cases for piercing weapons, slicing weapons and wrestling.

In the TES universe, the two categories of armour (ignoring Morrowind's medium armour) are differentiated mainly on how you are meant to 'receive' attacks; heavy armour can take attacks as normal, but light armour is supposed to make every blow glance. In real life, light armour was worn under heavy armour (with medium armour possibly in between). Why? Because plate mail could protect you from blades and arrows, but a heavy warhammer or mace would still break your bones. Similarly, padded armour would protect you fairly well from crushing attacks, but do nothing against a blade. Oblivion, being a fantasy game, skipped all of that in favour of a dumbed down, FPS approach. But Morrowind was significantly worse; it had all the failings they kept with Oblivion, with extras thrown in.

Blocking was random. Hitting was random. Spell success was random. Every hit was either a chop, slash or thrust. The only difference between them was how much damage they would do. The attacks were dull, with none of the other effects which occur in real combat. At least in Oblivion you can attempt to disarm people, or knock them down.

Now there's an idea - a mod that lets you wear layers of armour, and calculates hit damage according to the DR of each armour - and, of course, to the location of each hit.

Ironically, it seems Bethesda has implemented that last thing already - in Fallout 3. I guess all we need to do now is port Oblivion to Fallout 3's engine. :laugh:

Strangely enough when I first played Oblivion I thought the combat was fine, but then after playing a few different games I realized how weird it was

It is a fantasy RPG and not a historical combat sim so there is some leniance but I think there were still some things that could've been improved

Like has already been mentioned the slashing, crushing and piercing system has been adopted by many other games, and it works very well. Slashing relates mainly to swords and all of their counterparts. It works well against most opponents, but if you slash an opponent in heavy armour it will do next to nothing, as you can't slash through plate mail. Crushing relates to axes, maces, hammers, ect. It is less effective against layers of padded cloth and chainmail as they diffuse the force, but it will still do damage, and it will also damage heavily armoured opponents. Piercing related to weapons such as spears, pikes, picks, ect. A thrusting attack with a blade is also considered a piercing attack. These can damage heavily armoured opponents, as the concentrated force of the piercing attacks either finds weak spots or pierces through the armour

Now you might be asking why anyone would use anything other than piercing weapons, and it's because slashing weapons, such as swords, have the advantage of being the most balanced and weildy. Large hammers and axes are usually quite unweildy, and polearms such as spears and pikes are only really effective if you perform a perfect thrust, which takes proper positioning and timing

The combat in itself is a bit funny too. Looks up historical sword fighting reenactment videos. Rarely will you see the combos you see in Oblivion. It's about trading single heavy attacks coupled with effective shieldwork. You don't stand infront of you opponent with your shield for to your side, swinging wildly. You drop your shield for the split second you swing and immediately bring it back up again. You also use the angles of your body to get the most effective blow. One of the most commont tactics I've seen is bringing the weapon over your shoulder and behind your head before bringing it down for maximum possible impact in close combat. Games like Mount & Blade utilize systems such as this. Stuff such as weapon type, armor type, speed, chamber time, gemoetary, footwork and even how the player moves during the swing (turning the camera into the swing will results in a heavier blow but you can lose composure) are taken into account

Anyway I rambled on a bit too much there. I don't claim to be a historical combat expert, I got most of my knowledge from documentaries, reading stuff online and a previous thread about combat where there was somebody claiming to be a veteran medieval swordsman reenactor

Yeah the limb damage in fallout 3 is great - well once you reduce the chances for dismemberment it is. it is great to see your character limp with an injured leg or not able to aim well with an injured arm and there are of course mods that make those things more so.

But I don't think that could be ported well into Oblivion and as far as porting Oblivion into fallout engine - that is going to be TES5.

I agree with Random Specification that Randomness is not a good source of variation (just had to spell all that out). The whole thing that is frustrating about Morrowind combat is that it teases you into thinking you the player have more influence than you actually do - you click away and try to aim - you get into it, but for what? A dice roll. That is what made NWN better at full character/rpg influence. With NWN you could decide what to attack with next but other than filling up the attack queue it was all your character and the dice rolls that mattered. It had the effect of watching your character. With morrowind it teases you into an illusion that you the player matter that much.

It is just not fun to play. I maintain that it was not the intention of the developers to make some purist rpg game and that what many think of as those elements are actually the developers making due and cutting corners ... what Oblivion is and more recently fallout is what I'm certain they would like to have done with combat back then but were unable.

Wait wait wait, but Fallout 3 actually brought back a chance of hitting. And as far as I know, it's there for close combat as well, the only problem being that the chance is always pretty high.

By the way, are we now officially arguing over my mod, Attack Failure Chance? Because it is currently the only Morrowind Combat system for Oblivion I'm aware of, and if this was a MW vs. OB combat thread it'd be in the wrong forum, so... I'll just assume that, and take things to a personal level.

First off, "randomness" is a pretty bad word, if you ask me. It implies that the system is "random" and not thought-out, when that is clearly not the case. There are different reasons for choosing a system like that, and they're not random.
Also one problem with these discussions is that always someone comes along and says "In the middle ages, it worked like this!!! [...]" and then gives us an example of his idea what a combat system should look like, more often than not being ridiculously complex and well, yeah, I guess pretty realistic. The thing is that we're not talking about making more complex combat systems, we're talking about a different type of combat system at around the same complexity level as the vanilla system. That's a huge difference. If you want to talk about creating complex systems, you're in the wrong thread.

So, we want to make combat more realistic, but we don't want it to be more complex (if you say "yes we do" now, I repeat, you're in the wrong thread).
We don't want to deal the same amount of damage all the time, because that's boring. We want something like locational damage, only, not locational damage because that's too complex. We want boni for placing a hit into the weak spot of our enemy, only we don't actually want the player to do that, because it would turn the game into something like a first person shooter.
And hey, we want to make the character's combat skills more important, only without unbalancing the game.
What do we do? Well, a system that varies the damage you do based on a probability which is represented by your skill sounds like a pretty good idea! It solves all our problems: It is just as simple as Oblivion's combat, so no complex mumbojumbo. It simulates making good strikes, and making bad strikes (in a more complex game, the former could mean "crippling someone" - here it simply means making more damage). It is highly dependent on character skill, but the player still has full control over many things that can't be controlled by the skill system. (Oblivion doesn't have a "Tactics" skill.)
Our system could vary the damage maybe by 10%, just to give you the feeling that not everything is static; or, it could vary the damage by 100%, making you either hit with full force, or not at all (Morrowind); or it could choose something in between (Attack Failure Chance, which maybe varies damage by 80-90%).

Nobody ever said that a chance-to-hit system is realistic, because it isn't; but something that you just can't argue with is that it will make the game feel more realistic if done right, because something like making a good or a bad strike isn't in Oblivion's system at all. The chance-to-hit system, however unrealistic, represents realistic stuff much better than Oblivion's system.

In Attack Failure Chance, by the way, Power Attacks and Sneak Attacks still work as usual, because I think that those are actually pretty neat ways to implement new combat tactics; the trade-off of a Power Attack is that you're slow, but you make a strong and aimed blow, the trade-off of a Sneak Attack is that you have to stay hidden, but you aim even more precise. They shouldn't be subject of a chance-to-hit system.

Personally, I think AFC is a great mod in concept - but for the fact that it supposedly only applies to the player. If only...

You assume that plate mails don't have padding underneath; I don't know why you would assume that. Seems to me that you would expect that there is padding and chain under there, you just can't see it what with the plates on top. Of course, plenty of mod-added armors do allow you to see that there's no padding, but that's not really what's under discussion.

I think a locational damage system wouldn't work as well for an Elder Scrolls game as it does for Fallout. At least not unless you implement something round-based like VATS. I just installed Locational Damage by TalkieToaster. Try to hit a certain part of an NPC with a sword in close combat. It's more or less impossible. You and your enemy move too fast. You don't even have a gun where you click the mouse button and one frame later the bullet hits the target. You have a sword where it takes a certain time between clicking the mouse button and actually hitting the target. There is a reason why locational damage wasn't implemented for melee weapons in Fallout. It would probably work pretty well for sneak attacks with bows and magic, but for melee combat it is more or less useless.



I disagree. The Morrowind system (and your mod) adds luck to the equation and that's all it really does in my opinion. Oblivion replaces the luck portion of the combat system with (1st person shooter as some may say) player reflexes. It's not more realistic either. If I can clearly see that my character hit somebody's unprotected head and I 'roll' low damage only (or like in MW no damage at all) then it feels just as unrealistic as Oblivion's system where you hit if you can see that you hit but the amount of damage done is based on your skill.

Without your mod I will always do the same damage, which is governed by my skill and only my skill. With your mod (or in Morrowind) I will do damage appropriate for my skill plus a luck factor. If I'm lucky I might do much more damage than my skill would normally allow me to do, if I have bad luck I do much less damage. So my skill stat actually becomes less important. I can win against an Ogre at a low level if I'm very lucky and I can lose a fight against a wolf at a high level if I'm completely out of luck. That doesn't improve the gameplay for me, it's just a random chance. Maybe it's more exciting for some people if they don't know whether they can kill that level 1 goblin with their level 10 character because they might have bad luck, but it's not what I'm looking for. I want to defeat enemies either due to my in-game skill value or due to my skills as a player (my reflexes, eye-hand coordination, tactics). But not because I was lucky.

Welp, guys. I was just asking for a mod that applied Morrowind combat to Oblivion. Simply because other people think that this idea would not be fun is completely and totally irrelevant, the only fact that really matters is whether or not a mod like this exists.

This is not a Morrowind vs Oblivion thread. This is a mod request thread.

Fearabbit, your mod looks pretty good but as far as I can tell, it has two serious flaws.

A. There is no chance to miss (there is no chance the player won't do any damage at all)
B. It only applies to the player (enemies ignore the rules your mod defines)

Maybe I'm wrong and read the description poorly?

No. The mod I hoped exist would work nothing like that, and of course, oblivion's combat AI doesn't even work like that to begin with. The mod would not disable blocking, but it would take it out of the player's control. There would be less moving around, but spell casters would have a tendency to back-pedal.

i think a lot of good points have been raised in this thread, however i think it's pretty safe to say that oblivion has the better combat system if a few mods are used...


I think something should be clarified here. While many people have raised the question about locational damage, i believe that beth did its job without adding that in. Oblivion is a rpg game, not a fps game. Having different damage dealt over different body parts has never been a focus in rpg games. Good news is that uv and deadly reflex fixes this up, adding to that critical damage and new animations such as beheading opponent, puncturing their lung etc.

Next thing is the chance based hit, well, deadly reflex again fixes this. Enemies are constantly dodging attacks from you. Half of my arrows are just dodged, it's pretty much a chance based hit, but with justfiable dodging by the opponent. And staggering occurs quite frequently in oblivion, if anyone has low block skill a standing power attack will almost certainly stagger them.

Blocking is again fixed by dr, no more passive blocking, with dr holding down block button makes blocking almost useless.

Adding to this, if an overhaul is used like OOO, combat becomes much more deadly, so reflexes and coordination is definitely needed..

Also from dr..the shield bashing feature, it really gives diversity to combat. Uv allows kicking actions and new double weapon attack.

So really, i think most of the issues are addressed if you just install those mods...it certainly made me love oblivion combat now

No, those are the two flaws of the mod. Although I wouldn't call the former a flaw, but an improvement, but yeah, it's not an exact MW combat system recreation.

Phitt: Okay, what you're saying is that if the player is lucky, he might not need a high skill. What I'm saying is that... well, I'm a scientist, and to me there's no such thing as luck, only probability, and my mod is a tribute to probability. My personal thinking is that affecting a probability that starts at 0% and goes up to 100% is a pretty important role, but I don't think I could convince someone who says that all a player has to be is a very lucky guy, and he need not train his skills.

And therein lies the problem for most combat mods (for Morrowind or Oblivion). It's very easy to implement a new system for the player, but adding the feature in for NPCs and creatures is a very daunting task.

Case and point, there was a mod for Morrowind created sometime back that made it so the player always hit if the sword was shown making contact with the enemy NPC (though the hit radius was made much smaller than vanilla so it could be a bit more realistic). It worked for NPCs as well, but creatures were left out of the system because the only way they could be put in would break the system that was already put in place.

As for locational damage, I would love to see this implemented, but Phitt raises a good point in saying that it's more or less impossible to hit a certain part of the body between the enemy and yourself constantly moving, and the amount of delay between clicking the mouse button and the sword making contact. It was even the same instance in Fallout 3, as it was almost impossible to hit an enemy's arm or leg outside of VATS, as they were too busy strafing around in order to get a clear shot. Not to mention there was still a slight delay between clicking mouse button and contact.


I'm sorry, but you're going to have to expect these types of responses with a thread like this. Especially with your saying that Oblivion has a bad system. I personally don't mind Oblivion's system, and both systems have their ups and downs. I'd honestly love to see a mix of the two, but not really to the point where we have a hit and miss system exactly like Morrowind's. Maybe something a little more, and I hate to use this term, realistic.

Everybody has their opinion on things, and they should be able to state their opinions on them.

At least be happy that the responses here weren't as harsh as that Morrowind thread that Psymon linked us to on the first page. If anything, this thread is more of an intellectual discussion on how somethings work with both systems and some don't. And this is usually how great mods are born.


And this is why I love and fully recommend Deadly Reflex for someone who plays Oblivion. :tops: It's the closest that we'll ever get to a mix of the two systems.

i disagree with the locational damage thing, how many times when you're in melee that both you and your opponent is moving at a fast speed? At most you would be walking, if not standing still, and lets not forget bow and arrows. A headshot is very probable from a bow.

Whether you call it probability or luck - the result is the same. I'm not saying the player doesn't need to train his skills. Just like with all statistics there is an arithmetic average. If I fight 100 enemies I'll probably get close to that value and the average damage I do is the same as in Oblivion. But in a single fight there will be huge variances. Since in RPGs it's a fight to the death (or to load or not to reload) a single fight matters. That is what I was talking about. I see an enemy who is clearly much weaker than I am and I attack him. With Morrowind's system the result is unpredictable - it is luck (or probability) based. It could take one hundred hits to kill the enemy or only two hits - there are no guarantees, no matter how high or low my skill is. You can't control a value that is chosen randomly and that is why the outcome of the battle is governed by luck (or, as you might say, probability that deviates from the arithmetic average). And that is also why I never won in the lottery (so far ).

I am not saying I don't have them, but an RPG where reflexes and coordination to me is less interesting than one that relies more on character skill.

Role Playing Games are at least for me all about becoming another person, a person that I watch grow and learn throughout the course of the game. If the game is doing it's job right, I forget I am playing a game at all, or at least nearly. As a person in the real world, I am actually quite good at reflex based video games as I am sure many of us are. The problem is, where I might be physically good at using a controller for simulated sword play, my character when he is first starting out should svck with his sword. He should be clumsy, he should miss a lot, he shouldn't have the skill and reflexes to block an attack precisely as it comes. In oblivion, I simply do not get that feeling at all. I don't feel like I am another person any more than I feel like I am Master Chief when I play Halo.

Maybe most people like playing a badass sword-master from the get-go, but I would prefer to play a clumsy, powerless main character that grows out of his ineptness through necessity throughout his adventure. This is the kind of thing Morrowind's combat was best for.

And with pen and paper and polyhedral dice you can do that. But video games have a long and rich history of being about player skill. It is not even a question of Console gamers versus PC gamers - most video game are based on player skill.

And yeah I guess with Fallout 3 there is chance to miss, but there it makes more sense when fighting with guns plus I don't use VATS and do use FWE which can remove a lot of that.

We do have a resident medieval combat expert here: Duke Patrick and his combat archery mod does have locational damage. Other mods he has made increase AI and make NPCs dodge and angle to get better blows.

I have to suggestions though for Enzo:
Marskman's challenge - has chances arrows will miss and when they do they fly off and miss the target. Player skill is involved but perhaps the ini could remove some of that.
Kuertee Attribute and Skill Based damage - again not affecting chance to hit but damage is brought more in line with character stats.
(no links from me till nexus is clear)

But most of the blocking mods I've seen only increase the oblivion system and that seems key to making it more morrowindish.

There is also a long and rich history of computer roleplaying games that whose combat is based on character stats. Think of classic roleplaying games like the Gold Box series, the Baldur's Gate series, the Icewind Dale series, Planescape Torment, the Neverwinter Nights series, etc, etc. This is a significant lineage. It is the lineage that many of us think of when we think of cRPGs.

Point taken - The only one of those I played was NWN (the first one) which was I thought more rpg about the combat than Morrowind by far. As soon as I played Oblivion I never wanted to play NWN again. And I played the heck out of it with mods.

If we had to choose between combat systems of equal complexity, I would probably choose the D&D system. In Morrowind, skill only affects chance to hit, and armour only affects damage received. In Oblivion, skill and armour only affect damage. In D&D, skill and armour both affect chance to hit. That's the most realistic of the three.

I guess it's just a semantic difference, but a "miss" is pretty difficult to do against an opponent who is standing still. Even the clumsiest swordsman is capable of swinging at a large target. That target could easily move away, block the attack, or take the attack so that it didn't hurt at all, but an outright miss would be unlikely. Zero damage, whether you call it a miss or not, still 'feels' like a miss. Without a visual response showing you that the target has countered your attack somehow, it seems arbitrary. As a player though, if you don't mind that, go for it.

True, I kind of did forget about that possibility. In that case, heavy armour would be superior in all ways (except mobility) to light armour. Light armour would still be substantially more vulnerable to edged weapons than blunt ones however. Except the armour progression ending with glass doesn't fit the same mould as leather/padded armour, but oh well.

---

Somebody else commented about how locational damage is difficult, given how fast the actors can move in combat. It's true, but in my vision of the ideal combat system locational damage is implemented along with "locational aiming". If you point at the head, your character tries to attack the head rather than swinging at a point in space where the head used to be. Momentum would only start to matter once the swing proper did, and it would be then that enemy movement could screw things up. The problem I guess is that the character's skill in predicting where the target will be directly contradicts with the player being in full control, so in my ideal system the player would only really control tactical decisions (where to aim, what type of attack to do, and the 'goal' of the attack - e.g. knocking the target off balance, disarming them, going in for the kill). The character might fail in the execution of more ambitious goals, and so the player would have to play within those limits. A tactically minded player would be better off than a hack 'n' slash one. My reasoning for this is that a mouse is totally inadequate for describing an attack anyway (not enough degrees of freedom), and so you might as well do that part for them.

A man can dream. If I ever get off my backside and code one of my dreams, they might even happen.