As you might recall in Oblivion you could only use heavy attacks and standard flurry attacks. The heavy attacks usually had a special ability if you had trained your swordmanship, still every single fight was basicaly a button mash fest until the person with the biggest healthbar was victorious. Blocking was almost completely useless as you still took quite a lot of damage while only stunning you enemy for a second.

Okay so most of you might've read the article on game informer about how bethesda will improve their combat style in Skyrim. Has anyone ever played 'Might and Magic - Dark Messiah'? It's not the best game i've ever played but i've never played a more fun first person medieval singleplayer game. You could kick opponents, and cut of their heads and limbs if you did a critical strike while hitting a certain bodypart. Personally i'm hoping Bethesda makes combat AT LEAST as fun as Dark Messiah's combat was. I must've played Dark Messiah like 6 times even though it doesn't have any freedom to roam around or particularly beautiful graphics. If they could implement a combat system similar or better than Dark Messiah's it'd be a dream come true .

If you don't know the Dark Messiah game i reccomend you look it up on youtibe or something, it doesn't give you the same feeling as playing it yourself ofcourse but it'll give you an idea of what i mean.

What bothered me about oblivion, especially because the monsters level up together with you, was that fights didn't have any strategy to them. All you did was click your mouse a few dozen of times until the enemy dropped. The stronger you got the more times you had to hit the enemy before he died which when you were quite a high level became ridiculous. I'd prefer a combat system where the enemies learn to block and dodge your attacks more effectively but have a realistic ammount of health so that you have to use some strategy to take them down. Bigger monsters like ogres usually are quite stupid so they won't block and dodge your attacks like soldiers or goblins do so those monsters should have a large health pool, but if you manage to block and dodge their attacks you should have the ability to strike a weakspot on them that damages them a lot making fights last no longer than four or five strikes. It's the strategy required behind your attacks that will make the fights last long enough.

Remember when fighting goblins in oblivion? They must've had like a billion healthpoints as with maxed stats and on easy difficulty i still had to hit one about 10 times before he died...

After my first playthrough on oblivion i didn't notice a lot of the things the game lacks, but when i played it again (only played it twice + mods and shivering isles etc. ofcourse ) i got extremely bored of the way combat happens. All i did was basically cheat my character to max stats, put the difficulty to easiest so monsters would die in one or two hits and just plow through the combat in the game because combat was extremely boring...

I'm not sure if everyone will agree that the combat in oblivion had no challange to it and was completely boring, but nevertheless i'm sure you'll agree that they need to make combat way more strategic while reducing enemie's healthpools. If you want a higher difficulty just make it so that enemies block/dodge faster and perhaps attack you in larger groups, but don't just increase their health bar and damage so that you can hit them 30 times but still won't die.

Please read up on the new combat system. Oh, and Beth/ZeniMax bought Arkane Studios, so I'm sure they are well aware of Dark Messiah.

Where can i read up on that new combat system? I've read everything game informer wrote and i've looked around on the internet here and there. If it's the article from game informer that you're talking about, then yes i've read it. But in my opinion it really doesn't state clearly enough what the new combat system will look like. It gives us a few ideas of what we might expect, but it's still very much possible that combat will still become a mindless task. Unless we're talking about a different article ofcourse.

I don't think there has been released more details since the combat update at Game Informer's website.

hmm... thought so, well in any case it doesn't give away enough info to remove the possibility of having a lame combat system again. If anyone knows anymore info about it or wants to add whatever they're afraid of that might happen to the combat system please post .

Yeah, as game developers I think that Bethesda are well aware of Dark Messiah and Mount&Blade, if their technology and gameplay formulae allows it, I'm sure all those features will be added.

I hope Bethesda looks closely at Dark Messiah might and magic for the combat and magic.

I want to kick some monsters into spikes.

My memory of combat in Dark Messiah is a little rusty but I think I remember finding it somewhat tedious, can't say why though. The kicking was cool initially.