Before starting, two useful clarifications:

1. Yesterday I played Morrowind for the first time in my life so this post is not biased by nostalgia.
2. I'm also a casual player who likes combo-based combat a la 'Gof of War' or 'Devil May Cry' so no, even though I'm gonna talk favorably of Morrowind in this post I'm far from wanting to turn Skyrim into a diceroll-based RPG where character skill is practically all that matters.

Now on the post itself:

When it comes to combat, there is only one thing that is deal breaker for me: opponents not reacting when getting hit. This gives the impression that your hits carry no strenght at all and makes combat look bad and feel dull. Unfortunately, both Skyrim and even more so Oblivion suffer from this, the clearest example being 'normal attacks' which will never ever cause a physical reaction on your opponents.

Since in Skyrim is like this and in Oblivion was like this, I thought that this was a general issue with TES games. I was wrong. To my surprise, in Morrowind is not like this! In Morrowind, when you hit an opponent he always reacts by showing a small recoil. And man, it feels good! This feature, as awesome as it is, needs balance though since if any attack causes recoil, and while recoiling enemies can neither attack nor defend, then one could very easily win any fight just by hitting first and keep swinging until everybody is dead. Morrowind's way of balancing these recoils is to make opponents harder to hit. This means: your attacks can miss and the probability of missing depends on how high your weapon skill is and how much fatigue do you have when hitting. This is simple, elegant and it even makes sense. The only flaw of Morrowind was that opponent's didn't have a dodging animation. This make missing an attack difficult to swallow because, come on!, if the opponent is right in front of me without moving, how come my hits are missing? Add a dodging animation though, and the system would have been very very nice.

And a 2n thing Morrowind did well was adding mutliple damage figures for each weapon. Indeed, weapons in Morrowind have slashing damage, chop damage and thrusting damage. Depending on which move you perform (a slash, a chop or a thrust) one of this damage figures will be applied. Since different enemies were vulnerable to different types of attacks this mechanic made for a very interesting experience. For some reason though, in Oblivion and Skyrim all this disappeared.

So:

TL:DR/ what I'm proposing:

In Skyrim every hit should cause a physical reaction but, to compensate, opponents should be harder to hit (they can dodge your attacks).
Weapons in Skyrim should have different damage types (chop, slash, thrust damage). Each opponent should be specially weak to one of those.
Morrowind did both things above but for some reason next TES games forgot about them instead of improving on them. IMO, this is a mistake.

I'd say that's not as much part of the "combat system" as it's part of how damage is calculated.

Anything that adds depth is good.

Combat was one of the few things wrong with Morrowind.


And this, but I don't agree that anything that adds depth is good--adding things does not necessarily make a game better, and in this case, I'm not sure if it would. Sure, it would make arrows, axes, swords, fists, maces and shields more or less effective damage-dealers in certain situations, but I don't think we need that; they already have their niches.

Nearly all the combat mods do this already. Why is this a post?

Cutting instead of fixing/improving is the modern way of thinking, and it seems it sells.
Because not everyone is using mods and there's no other plausible way one can tell the people@Bethesda how one feels about their game.

I think it would be a nice addition. In oblivion, you needed magical weapons or silver weapons to hurt ghosts. Now, you don't. Any weapon kills ghosts. The added depth the silver weapon requirement had in oblivion made the game much better IMO.
Edit: Besides, we already have this in terms of magic. Frost trolls are weak to fire, but resistant to frost. This added depth isn't a bad thing. Sure, the spells already have their niches as well with the special effects, but the resistance and weakness to them adds much more to the game than just the niches of their own. In much the same way normal weapon damage could be made more in-depth.

Because not everyone plays Skyrim on PC.

Also wanted to add to the discussion was the lose of fatigue. In skyrim u have no fatigue its ok ur just waiting for one more point to power atk. Morrowind u ran outta fatigue, the next hit could knotch u on ur ass to catch a breather while opponetz wailed on ya. In skyrim im an energizer dragonborn, I never ever run outta energy, I can swing and run my lil ass off in a fight and never need a breather, wereas in morrowind just like a fight in real life u had to pace urself or ud wear urself out in the middle of a fight.

The reason why it was removed because it was really easy to stunlock characters, including you.

I agree in all aspects, Bethesda has simplified things too much and while the combat is fun, it is too arcade'ish and requires little to no tactics. As clunky and ugly as it was at the surface, I prefer Morrowind's combat which is kinda sad after all these years.

Combat never required any tactics.

Only difference now is that you're not praying to land a hit every time you press the mouse button. Also you actually have to dodge and block.

While I liked the fact that my hitting in Morrowind was based on my characters skills, and damage based on his attributes, it did seem odd when you did miss (which is often at low level) and you weapon just keeps passing right through the enemy. I also kept the attack setting to always use best attack. I assumed my PC knew how to use the weapon he was welding, so why should I have to be careful to always move my mouse the right way?

I don't like the way Oblivion fixed this, by letting you hit the target, but doing very little damage at low levels.

I think Skyrim is a pretty good balance of the two.

I also don't understand the OP comment about enemies in Skyrim not reacting to blows in combat. They do, just not every hit. They definitely react to critical hits and power attacks. But if you expect the NPC's to react to every hit then you would have to expect your PC to react to blows also. All it would take is two bandits hitting on you and you would be dead because you would never be able to react to strike back. More realistic maybe, but not very fun. This is why what the OP is proposing just wouldn't work IMO. Whether I am in 1st person or 3rd person, if I'm getting all banged around I won't be hitting anybody.

Also, if you want the enemies to react, try bashing them with a shield. Man that's fun.

According to your previous post this stopped being a problem at some right? (when your weapon skill was high enough I'd assume). Personally I believe that the possibility of missing a hit added to combat. It was not believable because a dodging animation was missing but the idea was good and it forced you to manage your fatigue. The problem was perhaps that with a high enough skill missing was almost impossible and then combats become a stun-locking fest as you said. That's allo bad but could be easily solved by making skill relatively less important and fatigue relatively more important when it comes to decide if your hit will land or not.

In any case I agree that Skyrim's combat is better in some (many?) aspects. The ability to block and bash whenever you want is a must for me (since I play defensive characters). Still, I believe it's sad that I have to rely on mods to get features that make combat involving such as timed blocking or timed warding. In fact, looking at Skyrim's combat in perspective now I have the impression that some good ideas from past titles were carelessly disregarded while others where copy-pasted without any significant improvements.

As always mods are the solution but, damn, perhaps some things should be in the vanilla game from the start...

Yep, that's why I said 'with a dodgin animation it could have been a very nice system.

Personal preference I guess but I think having the best attack feature turned OFF made combat much more fun.

Agreed.


Enemies in skyrim only react to: bashes (100% of the time), powerattacks (50% of the time unless you take certain reward that makes it 75%) and guard breaking via powerattack (100% of the time). They never react to normal attacks.
It seems your concern with 'reaction to every hit' is stun-locking. The ability to move out of the way -even when staggered- would solve this problem. Kingdoms of Amalur does this. And it works quite well.

Wait... Morrowind's combat system?

No thanks.

Could you please recommend a good combat mod that does this? Anyone? Thanks.

This frequently happens in TES games. They'll get something right, or almost right, and in the next game instead of improving on what they had they will reinvent the wheel, except that the new wheel turns out to be a bit square on one side. Just wait till you get to the next game, and the wheel has become a triangle. That's what most of us old-timers are moaning about, not change per se, but all those triangles out there. If you are set on reinventing the wheel, you had best be sure you have something better to replace it.

you can't always just "improve" things.

True, but if you don't have a better replacement, best to stick with the old.

I can improve your car. Have this unicycle. No more gas troubles!

they can but old things become to complex or dull and need something sparkly and bling to appeal the fanbase!!

If its not broken don't fix it but combat in TES has never been the strong point in any part including MW and Skyrim are sub par combat systems although Morrowind combat system overall including Oblivion (with magic specifically) has more meat. Any addition that adds some actual consequences/reaction would be great till then Skyrim abandoned most aspects and replaced it with pretty dual wielding and sparkly hands!!

Opponents in Skyrim reacts by making sounds when your using normal attacks which works very good IMO. You can use a shield on them or a torch for that matter to get a realistic reaction from them. Or a power attack.

If you were to have a reaction every time you get hit it would be about who is able to hit first and then press the attack button repeatedly to win. That would be far to easy and dull. The way the combat system is set up now means that the opponents has a chance to give you a challenge, since they don't get stunned or knocked on their bum every time you hit them.

This is a big, big reason why I didn't like the combat system in Morrowind.


A dodging animation would get very old, very fast. You would need a whole bunch of dodging animations to keep that from feeling 'cheap' or just plain. A better solution would be to improve enemy movements. Get them to move more, side to side, take a few steps back and prepare to lanch an attack or defend with a shield. Stuff like that would feel more real to me rather than a dodging animation.



This to me makes no sense. If I slash a guy he should magically take less damage because he has some sort of protection against slash-attacks?
If I thrust my sword at a guy, why would he take less damage than if I had slashed him? That just doesn't make any sense to me.

That's just my two dimes on the subject.

If your opponent is wearing heavy armor, piercing attacks would definitely be more effective than slashing attacks. Always have been.

Likewise, if your enemy is agile and/or flexible, slashing attacks would probably be more effective than piercing attacks.

Also, different blade types (in real life) are used differently. A sabre is a slashing weapon, while a rapier or stiletto is obviously intended to be thrust. Morrowind made an attempt to reflect this realistically, by matching different weapons' best damage ratings to their best attacks. The game does a pretty good job of it, too; the Halberd, which is a kind of combination spear and pole-axe, does both chopping and thrusting damage, for instance.

Then you would have to start calculate where you hit the enemy as most armors in Skyrim does not cover the whole body.
An enemy with fur armor would be equally hurt if I stabbed him to death or cut off his arm/neck. Way to many factors here for may taste.
This is all my opinion though.

I had these thoughts too. It's not as if enemies (and our characters) never get stunned, drop weapons, lose their balance, etc.