This might seem like a weird question to some of you when you read the whole thing.

I, like a lot of you, like to play through a game at least once "legit", but it seems to me like that's indirectly by design quite impossible.

I don't mean that the game is super hard. I don't even think there's a reason to up the difficulty of any TES game over the medium. But what I'm getting it is the AI glitches so often, it's in a lot of times the reason why you win an encounter. It's actually difficult to go through an encounter without the AI of the enemy getting glitched out by itself, giving you more opportunity to take shots that add up to win you the encounter.

When that happens to you, do you stand in place, waiting for them to unglitch? or do you take the opportunity to kill them?

I'm personally at this dungeon with The Sunken One and I'm quite frustrated because I don't want to win the encounter because I potentially beat the mob because it glitched out but on the other hand it happens so often that I actually have a hard time knowing if it glitched or not. This happens in every dungeon and out of dungeons, too, but less.

I just wonder what others think about this because it's really annoying me to try to go out of my way so much and not even be sure if the thing glitched or not in some areas when I did my best to let it unglitch when I was certain it was glitching(this could be stopping to attack because there's a tiny/big rock in it's way or just at random).

All in all I just value the gratification of knowing I beat a game legit and it really svcks when the game doesn't want to let me do it.

What do you mean, exactly, when you speak of "glitching out?" What exactly are the NPCs doing (or not doing)?

I think he means the NPC get stuck on the terrain and are unable to press the attack. I have had that happen in both Oblivion and Skyrim but it doesn't happen often enough for me to be bothered by it. Sometimes it happens to my character where I get momentarily stuck between a table and a barrel or something like that and it takes a second to break free but it never bothered me that much.

In the middle of the fight start walking in place in a seemingly open area, or against some rocks. Or stop moving altogether. Simply letting you hack 'em as you will. But when they are not glitched like that, there is actually some strategy involved. This happens like in 100% of the dungeons, and often enough out of them. When there are multiple mobs, they also block each other. The main thing is that they get stuck in the enviroment and walk in place/stand still.. or like I also mentioned, in a seemingly open area, they just decide to chill in place and let you attack them.

Gee, I wish that happened in my games, maybe it would relieve some of the stress on my characters. That’s just in jest , but I really don’t get what you’re having problems with. Sure, occasionally something glitches and an NPC gets stuck behind a rock for a moment, my character does too, it’s part of the fun of the game, but it’s not on a regular basis. If something odd happens every 20 hours or so, that would be about normal for my game.

When that happens to NPC do you keep attacking it or let it unstuck? The thing is, you may be more focused on content that isn't just dungeons(I kind of like to try to stumble into things, which works great in Elder Scrolls games) and therefor experience this every 20 hours, but if you replay the encounter where it happens, it will likely to happen again and again every time you play that encounter.

Just to randomly give a little praise to the AI: I found it hilarious how I could attempt to lead some goblins that were running after me and I wasn't sure how to take out, to a city, but instead I stumble into a camp in the woods of some mages, they happened to be very motivated to take care of 90% of their groups combined, and from there it was pretty easy to finish the last couple ones off. Just an example of something awesome that was intended to be possible.

So, you're talking about NPCs getting stuck behind rocks and tables and not being able to walk around? Sure, I've seen that. But it doesn't happen in 100% of the dungeons I've been in.

NPCs blocking each other is good, in my opinion. People get in each others way in real life. I think it would be unrealistic if NPCs didn't get in each others way in a video game.

I'll be honest. I have yet to see the video game with good AI. We are many years (and perhaps many generations of consoles) away from AI that can successfully navigate around today's very detailed and cluttered terrain. It will happen someday, I'm sure, but in the meantime I just choose to think of these kinds of things as one of the game's charming little quirks.