YMMV when that threshold is met. Going beyond the obvious changes that need to be made (Attributes, Parrying, dodging), anything more then that is when you start losing me.

I disagree with the first assessment. To me, exploration and getting involved in the world should be the primary focus of the game. Combat is just one aspect of that. My characters all fought (I can't think of a single one that didn't engage in an occasional combat), but it's NOT the main point, and a few of my characters only rarely resorted to violence. To me, combat is a way of "resolving encounters", where dialog is a different way, and using stealth to avoid the encounters completely is yet another approach. Each of these have (and strongly deserve) their places in the game, without heavily overshadowing the others.

The second assessment is what I consider "truth". The game SHOULD be as simulation-like as possible, within the constraints of technology and budget, in ALL of its aspects. That includes combat, but doesn't mean that the other aspects get a pass just because combat is done well. I'd just as much prefer more interactive dialog, or a better economy, as I would better combat. Each of those aspects would affect ALL of my characters, just to a greater or lesser extent from one to the next.

Looking into combat in more detail, a mix of character and player involvement is an essential. If it's purely based on player reactions and skills, then your character is basically irrelevant, and there's no visible difference in combat between a veteran blademaster and a clumsy merchant except for how many points of damage they subtract from the opponent, which makes for a miserable RP experience. At that point, you have a FPS game. The character needs to act to the best of the CHARACTER's limited or vast abilities, not according to the PLAYER's; the player merely determines what actions are attempted. If I wanted a FPS game, I'd buy one. I play RPGs because I want RPGs, and turning that RPG into a better FPS adds very little for me, and removes a lot more in exchange.

Regardless of what it SHOULD be (and i don't disagree with you. The reliance on the kick-in-the-door violent approach is a general flaw with the franchise, and the vast majority of RPG's in general) TES has always been a combat-first gameplay system. Developing it isn't turning the game into a combat simulator, because that's predominantly how it's always been designed.

Yes, I'll second this. I have no problem with improving the experience. I'd like to see the on-screen animation more smoothly follow the initiated action, including a visible portrayal of actions like parrying.

But it's perfectly adequate, in my estimation, for the initiation of that "parry" to exist as a simple click of the right mouse button. In other words, the "cinematics" can interpret my mouse-click as a block, a parry, or a left-hand weapon, depending on what's in that hand, and apply the effect.

But more to the point, a big part of the context of that action is my character's skill, and that's where the result of the player input should differ from a "simulation."

And I repeat: Nonsense. TES has never been even remotely a simulator.

I'm beginning to think that we're coming from different understandings of the word "simulation." To quote Wikipedia...

My understanding of the word, in the context of video games, comes from my experience with Flight Simulators. A true flight simulator, like X-Plane, attempts to faithfully reproduce every aspect of an environment. Every control on the simulated aircraft is meant to function exactly like its real-world counterpart. If you move a control a certain way, the aircraft will respond in a consistent way, regardless of whether the "pilot" is a novice or a veteran.

There is no place for "character skill" in that, because your ability to control the process is entirely dependent on your "player skill."

Going by that understanding of the term, a true "combat simulator" would require complete player control over force and direction of weapon movement, in addition to character movement. You'd need up/down and side-to-side control of each hand, as well as simultaneous control of movement in space. You'd need backhand and forehand movement. A parry of a chop is different from a parry of a slash.

There's never been anything like this in TES. The nearest game I've played to a "combat simulator" is Mount and Blade, and even that is a gross simplification of "simulation."

As usual, Wikipedia has a rather nonsense definition of complex concepts. Simulations, whatever form they take, are designed to represent the most accurate depiction possible of the situation they are simulating. It's not necessary real-world (we have run numerous what-if simulations with super computers that include tweaking the fundamental laws of physics to see how things change and there are numerous simulator games set in fictional, particularly science fiction games that don't follow real-world processes). It's an attempt to represent the laws, processes and interaction of the intended mechanism.

The key is about trying to represent combat as honestly as possible, according to Tamriel's rules. There's still plenty of room in that criteria for Character Skill, randing from attack speed to particular manoeuvres, Damage output and defensive efficiency.

Well, I obviously didn't quote all of the Wikipedia article.

I have no argument with anything you said here. If this is your understanding of "Simulation," then, as I suspected, our disagreement was more over the meaning of words, rather than of the substance of the matter.

TES does indeed give us a "representation" of combat (if a poor one at times), and I agree that this allows for character skill. And I believe I suggested above that I'd like to see a better "visible portrayal of actions."

I've never been "happy" with any TES game's combat systems. Arena and Daggerfall's "mouse movement as a swing" combat drove me nuts. Morrowind's was better for me, but as the OP pointed out, it could easily become a clickie spam-fest. Carpel Tunnel anyone? I did not get far with Oblivion, so can not say much on that and Skyrim totally lost the character skill part of the combat. I do not consider "moar damage" as character skill. When "missing" is missing form the combat, combat gets boring for me.

My thoughts, exactly!

Maybe for you it is a combat simulator. For me, far from this. Blade and Soul is a combat simulator. TES has never, for me, simulated combat in the least.

You and I don't often agree, but I wanted to pop in and say I do agree with what you have said in this thread, including points about TES having a historical emphasis on combat and that combat should be improved and realism should be one of the goals of an immersive combat system.

I quoted the above portion and this issue of "character v player skill" and making "to hit" determinations based on character skill rather than player skill because you and I have discussed this issue before and I was arguing for "to hit" determinations to be based on character skill. I have since played Requiem and now believe there may be other ways to adequately portray character skill as meaningful. When they shifted away from character skill determining "to hit" in Oblivion and Skyrim I don't think they did a sufficient job of making character skill still matter. The way Bethesda limited character skill to determining damage allows any player with sufficient skill at manipulating a controller (or rodent) to prevail against just about any high level opponent just by slowly chipping away at it.

Requiem opened my eyes to possibilities of making character skill meaningful again without making "to hit" determinations based on character skill. Ways to do that include, but are not necessarily limited to, making stamina really matter again (by requiring warriors to make significant investments in stamina as they level if they want to succeed in combat because of drastically increasing the effect stamina has on damage of normal attacks, and by making low stamina affect both movement speed and chance to be disarmed), of having some enemies like trolls regenerate so fast that you cannot chip away at them, you need to overwhelm them with DPS (or fire), by reducing your ability to use certain weapons to the point of them being absolutely useless unless you have taken one or two of the basic perks in the weapon, etc. I do now believe that there are other ways of achieving a good balance between player and character skill even if "to hit" is determined solely by player skill.

However, I don't expect Bethesda to ever really implement anything like this because they want their games to be easy for anyone with no video game experience to pick up with little to no instruction and succeed. So, I don't expect too much in the way of combat improvements from them. In all likelihood we will still need mods for that.

I'd want the combat system to be like Oblivion's UVIII mod.

NPCs can dodge and land critical hits. There's locational damage. You can make explosive potions. Throwing weapons are back and better than ever. There's countless things you can try, with different options for different builds.

Skyrim's combat system seems like Angry Birds in comparison.

I'm not asking for TES to become a combat simulator, I just don't think that it should be baseball with swords.

Now I've got a mental image of David Ortiz, with an enormous greatsword, slicing a fastball in half.

Hahaha.

Nyarlathotep's skittering skivvies... I don't know whether this is cause for celebration, or a sign of the end.

Anyway, I don't think ease of approach is really the problem. Natural and fluid mechanics are relatively easy to pick up by their nature, even if there are a lot of complexities in the background (which, if you take a deeper interest in can lead to greater efficiency). No, as i look at how mechanics as a whole have progressed through the series, i can't help but get the sense that TES suffers from a lack of perspective and outside influence.

Consider Condemned; Criminal Origins. It has, arguably, the best melee combat ever in a video game. From the block and parry system, to the AI, to the hit-detection, melee combat in Condemned was visceral and varied. It came out 6 months before Oblivion, and has had no impact either on Oblivion's combat, or Skyrims. Similar games with well received combat, such as Dark Messiah and Dead Island, have had no noticeable influence on TES's combat.

And it's these basic mechanics that are, in my mind, exceptionally important. Variables and influences can be tweaked, but we are inherently dependant on the mechanical processes that are built into the design. We can't easily add an extra kick option, or a parry mechanic, or the ability to grab a ledge. Basic processes like parrying, which has been in video games at least since 2004 (Halo 2) and are in remarkably basic games like Minecraft still aren't part of the overall mechanics of TES games.

The question is, why? Many of these things, from climbing (we've seen the gamut from situational like in Dead island and Thief, to full on parkour in Mirrors Edge and Dying Light) to world interaction (the Source engine's 'mobile static' objects) to supply based economic tracking (4x games have been doing it since the 90s) to combat, there is a huge wealth of inspirations in gaming to draw from. But TES doesn't seem to do that. They seem to take the previous game and try to shift it to meet how they feel it should work, but don't consider outside solutions or inspirations. It's almost like they don't PLAY games.

The worst part is, Combat is probably the easiest to solve. We have great examples of combat systems from other games, and they could literally pick and choose elements they like, recreate them, link them to skill modifiers and create a deep, interesting, easy to pick up but difficult to master combat system for TES that could remain largely untouched for some time (barring any major change in technology) and thus grant more time and resources to expand other systems. But they don't.

Don't get me wrong, i don't think TES should ONLY be about combat. The day it becomes that we have some serious issues to contend with. But combat is the easiest system to make good, and as such a major element in the game it really SHOULD be good, rather than a bare-bones mechanic of cavemen smacking each-other with clubs.

Here's the thing about combat; it needs to have a form of soft realism. Not too much, or its just a frustrating mess that isn't fun or fluid to play, but enough that it doesn't shatter willing suspension of disbelief. Personally I think Skyrim was...closeish to that marker, compared to Morrowinds and Oblivions stiff form of melee fighting, but didn't have enough stuff within it to actually make that fact matter.

As for the balance between player and character gameplay, I think its important that we're presented with a particularly strange enemy that might require a different method to dispatch it. Either its the way it moves, it has a very specific chink in the proverbial armor, or the abilities it might use to cripple our character. That's important to have in order to engage the player in that fashion, to present a enemy or a large group of them and figure out how to go about it. Whether or not our character can preform a certain action is another matter entirely.

I would just appreciate if the moves were more realistic, it really isn't that hard to animate the combat moves in a realistic way.

And i'm on the opposite end. I don't care if the animations are crap, so long as the mechanics behind them allow for dynamic and interesting gameplay.

I have a friend who argued with me on movements, he was so determined to show me that he knew about combat. I fought with him and he was swinging a sword like it was a baseball bat. Then it happened, he turned around to do some epic move, then I thrusted the sword into his back as hard as I could. He doesn't believe in movie combat anymore.

That...really has nothing to do with anything here. I mean, sure, movements that look "real" are all well and good, but if they don't flow and feel like your character is acting responsively, the whole thing goes down the tubes.

Sure, I'm for some movements being a bit more constrained, but I also like beating dragons to death with my fists and wrestling them off mountain tops. TES is a pretty over the top series as is.

It would be nice if the moves were real and the attacks were done by moving the mouse like in daggerfall.

Theres a limit to how 'real' you can make moves. No punch is going to have the power to hurt someone in full plate, and Power Attacks are only ever realistically useful as killing strokes (and even then, not exactly recommended). Real fighting motions are short, quick and surprisingly reserved and... frankly... Look really silly on screen. Authentic fights look like little more than 2 grown men waving metal sticks around. There are also mechanical with using a Daggerfall-like control scheme, particularly when looking at consoles (the lack of a time delay and the weird angle caused by Dead island's anologue being examples). The lack of adjustment and responsibility with in-game combat further complicates the ability to totally simulate realistic movesets.

You can't go too far in one direction or another.