Many of Oblivion's swords were pretty well done, IMHO: I thought it was nice that they not only resisted including too many of the stale old fantasy clichés but seemed to have researched them reasonably well. The steel longsword in particular looks very authentic, although I agree that the elven variety looks bizarre and not very attractive: what was presumably meant to be a leafblade, normally a very slender-looking thing, came out looking like it really needs to go on a diet.

Weapons looking unrealistic in a video game?! A FANTASY GAME EVEN?!?! *cough*http://www.wowhead.com/item=19019*cough*

I won't. TES has always attempted to at least seem realistic. Warhammers have been flat out stupid for too long now. Hopefully Skyrim fixes that. The old designs totally went against the grain.

http://thefencingsword.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Original-Buster-Sword-Held-By-Cloud-Strife.jpg

Weapons in TES have been extremely realistic in that regard. Yeah, big whoop, Warhammers are huge compared to what they look like in real life, it's still not unrealistically big though. I mean yeah, if you make a petite Bosmer woman wielding it, then that's your own fault for making it unrealistic. Put it on a Nord or an Orc and it fits perfectly.

I found the size and texture of weapons in Oblivion to be fine. :shrug:

Of course they will look better in Skyrim, it's been years since the last elder scrolls release. So to continue to judge something over 5 years old compared to, oh I don't know, todays standards, seems to be unfitting.

Personally, I think the graphics are as good as they are going to get. Graphics are always made to look unrealistically good whenever they only release a few. I've followed plenty of games before in the past... I've heard what you said plenty whenever the first screens were announced, but the graphics almost always stay around the same quality. Or, in the case of Halo reach, slightly decline.

Until they finally decide to bring back polearms I don't mind some oversized weapons. TES games aren't really that realistic anyway honestly.

Exactly. Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:War_hammer2.jpg doesn't look nearly as badass as http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Shivering:Nerveshatter.

The genuine article does look like something you'd find in the household toolbox, but I think the TES-flavoured variety really takes it a bit too far in the other direction: they typically look like a telegraph pole with a small car stuck on the end of it...

I find realistic weapons to be far more enjoyable than something that an eight year old could come up with off the top of their sugar-rushed head.

I'm still trying to figure out what all the talk about realistic weapons is about in a game which contains glass swords weapons and weapons made from materials unknown to this world. There is nothing realistic about this fantasy world.

Its a fantasy game.

Nothing? I quite like the way that they keep a lot of stuff grounded in reality; if it's too way out the whole suspension of disbelief is rather harder to maintain. Most of the weapons are pretty good in that regard, but a few are a bit over the top.

What would svck more? Getting smacked with a ball-peen hammer or a car on a stick? You also feel like more of a badass swinging it like a baws! It all comes down to what Bethesda wants the weapons to look like. If someone doesn't want to buy the game because the weapons look inaccurate to real life in a fantasy setting then they're just dumb.

You're mixing up real with realistic/realism. A design doesn't have to be 100% real to be realistic or believable. Its the difference between a powered exoskeleton outfitted with ceramic armor plating and Gurren Lagann. One of those things is believable, the other is just far out there.

So far, the weapon designs have always looked like real weapons, or at least had the shape of realistic weapons. But weight, from what we've seen, is the same in TES as in real life. Warhammers, as show in Morrowind and Oblivion, are just totally ridiculous, whether you look at them from a real-world view or an in-world view. They're straight up stupid, and I really don't understand why it seems like folks are defending them. They're terrible looking weapons.


Leverage is a far more powerful and useful force than pure mass.

The weapons, besides the hammers, are fine. I'd like if the warhammers looked more like sledgehammers. Unrealistic for battle, but realistic enough for human use.

However, yes, the textures on many objects do have a plastic-y sheen, which is my biggest gripe. It has mostly to due with light levels and reflection, and I do wish they'd step back, realize how goofy it looks, and change it. Especially for Skyrim, which should be dark, gritty, and "real."

Hit someone with a real war hammer, "OW! My shoulder!", hit someone with an ES war hammer, "OW! My everything!"

You wouldn't hit them with it because you couldn't live it. Leverage is a [censored] like that. Trying holding a sledge hammer by the bottom of the handle and then swing it. You'll definitely feel the power....rippling through your wrist as the hammer limply slumps towards the ground in a pitiful arc of failure and damage wrist joints.

Now imagine that the hammer head was twice the size of a sledge hammers. That's what its like to hold the current TES warhammers.

i hope that some of the devs play mount and blade warband. now that is how weapons should look and behave. i never understood the fascination with ginormous glowy weapons that some people have. maybe its because i watch alot of history channel and took history classes that you find out how deadly real world weapons were. its probably cause im also not 9 years old anymore as well. im glad that they are going for a more low, dark fantasy setting instead of that high fantasy crap.

as Orzon stated. its been shown that after a certain point you actually lose force when the hammer gets over a certain size. remember its speed and mass put together and its the square of speed that is the critical part of the calculation. you can have a huge warhammer but since its travelling at a much slower speed that means less force on the target. add on the fact that if your warhammer is huge like that its spreading its force over a larger area meaning less pressuer. the best warhammers have small hammer heads and lighter weight. maximum force on the target. this same principle is why bullets have significantly more power than much larger arrows.

Part of the problem is, I think, that for anyone who isn't a medieval weapons buff (who knows what one looks like), a real warhammer? Kind of silly looking and unimpressive. Since I doubt they wanted that reaction from their audience, they went with something more bulky & sledgehammer-like. (Yeah, they might have gone overboard a bit, but......)


So, what looks "realistic"/believable to the random viewer, isn't realistic to a scholar of old weapons.


...certainly, nothing in the TES games is remotely as "out there" as the weapons from WoW, or Final Fantasy, or Monster Hunter.


(Heh. Looking at the pictures of the default weapons on the wiki, I'm reminded of the larger issue with Oblivion weapons... the weight. Those huge warhammers don't seem so unwieldy when you think about the fact that your average fighter can easily swing around a 20-40lb one-handed sword. I really hope they come up with a better way to restrict/"balance" the weapons in Skyrim than to give them such high weights.)

There's good youtube videos of a guy who made replicas of the swords from Final Fantasy. In one he gets a bodybuilder looking guy to swing it (after what I assume was a satirical conversation about a doctors warning concerning his spine). Anyways. The guys gets in about one good swing (basically starting with the tip on the ground, and making a 170 degree arc) before he gets too tired. The rest of the time he holds it at a 90 degree angle, and uses his all his strength to guide the blade to it's target as it falls, and even so the blade often turns to the side as soon as the edge hits the target (an upright wooden palatte).

Even the good strikes only make it through a single board. It's only after the first few are broken, and the blade is allowed to fall farther down before he gets any real damage out of it.

So, even if you didn't move out of the way, and even if the guy could keep it steady enough to hit you, the blade might just glance off you, or at least do less damage than a regular sword. And after that, the guys so winded, you could knock him down with a feather duster.

I think I just assumed those numbers to be arbitrary units of how much trouble something was to carry rather than its actual weight; I'm not sure whether or not I'm correct, but certainly the idea of a sword weighing 10 or 20 times as much as a real one is a bit perplexing. I don't recall seeing the units equating to pounds in any official literature, however, so hopefully my idea isn't totally off the mark.

Your point about the likes of warhammers' appearance being tailored to appeal to a wider audience is well made, and it's often easy to forget that just because I might know what one looks like, not everybody does; and not everybody who's seen the real-world version thinks they look all that impressive anyway, which if I'm honest would include me as well!


Edit: bad grammar. <_<

I always divided by 5. That made decent weights. They've never been stated to be in any weight units. Remember that these are "encumbrance" units, so I always assumed it was a representation of not their weight, but their weight combined with their form factor and difficult in transporting them. Moving around even one suit of armor, without wearing it, would be ridiculously difficult.

Oblivion's swords were oversized? I have no clue how anyone could possibly think that.

I have swung sledges like that for decent effect. Not as much force as swinging it correctly mind you, but when splitting logs I start the wedge like that. The main issue was the rest of the handle got in the way. Still yes the oblivion hammers are over sized. I don't want them to change it though. Ever since I started playing fantasy games way back over 30 years ago the art depicted hammers as bad ass big things. When I got older and learned what a real war-hammer looked like I was disappointed. Not in the art depiction, but in how lame reality was in comparison.