In Morrowind your fighting depended upon your weapon skills. Weapons all did the same amount of damage regardless of skill, but what was affected was the player's to-hit chance. If the skill was low the weapon would miss, if the skill was high the weapon would hit. Some people complained however that this led to an unrealistic game, in which you would stab a sword directly into someone's face and still miss.

So for Oblivion the formula was changed. Instead of weapon skill affecting the to-hit chance it was changed to affect damage. All weapons would now damage the enemy they hit regardless of skill. People who prefer RPG mechanics were less pleased with this change as it meant that combat was now dependent upon player skill, meaning if you were incompetant at dodging, blocking, and striking at the right moment you would do poorly, while fans of action games considered it more favourably. The argument that the designers used to claim that 'it's still an RPG' and that weapon skills still actually had a point was that they affected how much damage was done, so if you had a low weapon skill it would be harder to kill enemies.

Here we come to the problem - enchanted weapons.

In Morrowind enchantment was a skill, it affected how much of an item's weapon charge you used, and also your chances of creating an enchanted item if you attempted to do so yourself. In Oblivion enchantment was removed as a skill completely, all weapons ran out of charges at a pre-decided rate based upon the strength of the enchantment, and enchanting was added as a service available from an activator.

The problem that arises from enchanted weapons (with an onhit enchantment) is that if they have an enchantment that does damage such as fire, frost, lighting, or health, then they will always do that exact amount of damage. In Morrowind it wouldn't matter because unless the player's skill was high enough to hit the enemy the enchantment wouldn't have any effect - hence it didn't interfere in the RPG mechanics. In Oblivion however since every weapon will hit all the time it completely throws the damage calculation based upon skill formula out the window and in doing so makes a mockery of the claims that 'it's still an RPG'.

Consider this example:

A player has a sword skill of 100 and a blunt skill of 10. They have in their inventory a plain iron shortsword and an iron mace enchanted with a 20 point fire enchantment. The damage of the iron shortsword caps out at 10, meanwhile due to the player's low blunt score the iron mace only has a damage of 1. However when we add the enchantment in the damage of the mace jumps up to 21. You can see how ridiculous this looks in the table below:

Skill Level Damage
Sword 100 10
Blunt 10 21

Now according to traditional RPG mechanics the player should choose to use the weapon of their highest skill to be the most effective. Yet in Oblivion's case since weapons will always hit all the time the damage provided by an enchantment can negate all of the difference in damage provided by differences in skill levels. If there is no benefit to having a higher weapon skill level then why not just get rid of all the weapon skills entirely?

For TES 5 Bethesda has a choice to make. They can continue with Oblivion's style of combat in which always hitting enchanted weapons ruin the weak RPG combat mechanics the game has, or they can fundamentally change how enchanted weapons work. They could bring back the importance of weapon skills by making the enchantment dependant upon the weapon skill as well - e.g a weapon with a 10 point fire enchantment is split up so that only 1 point of damage is added for every 10 levels. Or they could re-add in the enchantment skill and make the power of enchantments dependant upon that skill. Or they could make the enchantment a weapon to-hit chance, that way the weapon would always hit to please the action crowd, while the enchantment would only hit based upon weapon skill to please the RPG crowd.

There are many different methods that Bethesda could approach to fixing the broken RPG combat found in Oblivion. They could rediscover their RPG roots by making charcter skills more important than player skills. Or we could end up with the same fundamental problem that occured in Oblivion (though I certainly hope not).

I'm pretty sure that this belongs to the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1124472-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-184/ thread.

Maybe it does and if that's the case then the mods will say so. Personally I think it is as much a discussion about the combat systems found in Morrowind, Oblivion, and a potential future elderscrolls game and thus outside the scope of a simple idea and suggestion thread since it references discussion for all three games. In other words people should also discuss which combat system is/was better as well as what they would like to see. I refrained from directly saying in the first post which one I thought was better, although it should be apparent that I obviously preferred the Morrowind system since that more accurately reflects RPG mechanics.

Thanks for your contribution.

It does need its own thread it is a HUGE ishue. It does need to be more balanced I think also it needs to NEVER be leveld combat ether.

Don't like enchanted weapons in a single player game? I suppose you could either just not use them, or you could make a thread to complain about it.

Also, you forgot to account for the limitation of charges on enchanted weapons, which cost a great deal to have refilled by a small number of city-based NPCs, or the use of an apprentice-tier spell (the magicka cost of which is 60, and therefore high for a physical-combat specialized character).

In addition to that, the levelled list system of the game isn't going to give a low level player a 'good' enchanted weapon; 20pt damage enchantments start at level 18 on the default list. A low level player (that is, one who'se stats and skills are low enough that an enchantment might do the majority of their damage rather than just augment it) is only likely to receive a weapon with a 5 or 10 point damage enchantment with around 50 uses at full charge - which can be quickly depleted by frivolous use.

The cost of recharging an elemental weapon is a strong limitation that for a low level character. Gold is not overwhelmingly easy to come by in the early game, and there are many things to buy. So a low to mid level character who relies on melee weapons cannot afford to burn charges by using an enchanted weapon as their primary attack, and will typically save it as their emergency weapon for when they get outnumbered or have to fight a 'boss' level enemy.

If were talking about an Orc, Redgurard, or Nord, who have low starting and potential stats for magicka and casting, and who would therefore see the most benefit from an enchanted weapon, using soul trap and soul gems to keep a weapon charged is also a strong limiting factor. The base spell Soul Trap requires lv 25 in mysticism - a school with nothing else but 'detect life' to offer a low level melee fighter - and 60 pts of magicka to cast which may represent all or even more than all of a low level melee character's available magicka. Then you need a soul and a soul gem. Soul gems are not super common, nor are they cheap to buy at the beginning of the game, and thanks to the levelled lists, a character who might need souls to refill an 'overpowered' enchanted weapon is only going to find creatures with petty or lesser souls - a poor harvest if you want to keep that 5pt shock damage war hammer juiced up. Soul trap and basic soul gems are of course no help at all for a player in a cave full of bandits, cultists, marauders, vampires, or other non-creature classed enemies.

Of course, every system can be exploited, but at a certain point people who use exploits like that might as well open the console and TGM the whole game.

By the point in a character's life where larger souls and soul gems are common, or income exceeds maintenance expenses to the point where paying for recharges is not a major investment, any PC is going to be robust enough that the bonus damage from an enchanted weapon is just a fractional addition to their average DPS, and not the unbalanced extreme scenario you presented of a 1 damage weapon with a 20pt damage enchantment on it.

End of the day, Oblivion's take on enchanted weapons does not break the game and is actually really well balanced to keep weak characters from abusing such weapons, and we are both silly for arguing about something a player can choose to either use or not in a non-competitive single player game.

technicalities aside OP...

I prefer oblivions combat.

no need to anolyse, just about what you find more enjoyable.

I play and enjoy both games..

Well combat and animation is pretty fun in Dark Messiah, and I like the combo combat in gothic 4. So what could we take from those games.

Well I think using enchanted weapons gives players the option to change what they consider to be their main skill. If you start with blade but decide later that you like axes more, but you have a low blunt skill, then the enchantments give you a starting point to be more competitive.
You also have to take into account the base damage of a weapon. If your sword doesn't do enough damage than you probably need to find a better quality sword for your current level.

I guess the thing I want to underline is that this thread, and nearly all like it, are complaining about how other people play the game.

Clearly somebody as disturbed by the imbalance he or she perceives in enchanted weapons as this thread's OP isn't using them in game. Because only a crazy person would complain about something they were doing themselves. So the only remaining option is the less crazy (but still highly questionable) option that the OP is upset with the way he or she imagines that other people are playing a single player, non-competitive action RPG.

The OP of this thread in particular does make some reasonable suggestions about how enchantment could be implemented in a forthcoming game, but that he or she needed to frame it in terms of a problem with how other people hypothetically play an existing game is strange to me.

As for the broader topic of action combat verses stats combat, that has really had the dead horse-ness beaten into, and later, out of it on this forum, but why not have another go'round with it if you like. I think Bethesda has found a combat formula they're happy with, and one which has been well received in the marketplace, although like anything else it has failed to please everybody.

A very good point you have there. Oblivion's combat system is broken in many ways and this is one of them. The only thing I would add is that people always complain how silly and unrealistic Morrowind's combat is, but they seem at peace with the fact that with low skill you can take a warhammer the size of Elminster and his hat and upon hitting a guy square in a face with it you do but a scratch to him. That seems even more ridiculous then the lack of animations in Morrowind. What appears even more annoying to me is that in Oblivion a lack of skill can be outweighted by a quality of a weapon. Actually the quality of your weapon is more important then your skill. The enchantments as you described them only add to this problem. In Morrowind not even the best super duper extra powerful artefact is useless unless you have the skill to use it.
I really wish for Bethesda to rediscover the old RPG mechanics and once more centred the combat (and all other aspects of the game for that metter) around the character and not the player. In combat I think that the player should be responsible for the "big plan", for the tactics and strategy and the character should take care of the actual implementation of those.

The only problem I really perceived with Oblivion's vanilla combat system was that the AI was idiotic at best. Lets be honest, a rogue type character is not going to charge at me while I have a warhammer lifted above my head. A swordfighter is not going to stand rooted in one spot as I consecutively slash him.

Combat in these sorts of games (ie, first-person RPG's) should, at least to me, rely both on player skill and character skill. And in order to do that, you need to make the game an actual challenge for a player. And just increasing the health and damage of your enemies 6x the base while reducing your damage 6x the base is not adding a challenge, but an artificial one that is very easy to get around once you figure it out, and after that, the 'challenge' is moot. But if the AI was able to actually react to what you are doing, and react in such a way that you have to actually pay attention, or otherwise get extremely hurt, in order to defeat your enemies in a face-to-face battle.

lmao at this debate again.
in OB the devs wanted to make combat more exciting, and they did. what they should do, is continue along the lines of keeping it exciting. i will admit that after awhile OB's combat got stale. but its still more exciting then "swing, whoosh, swing, whoosh, swing, clang...dam i finally did some dmg to that cliffracer" that was in morrowind. i also am confident they will make the combat. incredibly exciting this time around. by doing something along the lines of, like OB every swing hits, unless the opponent blocks/dodges(the opponents chance will be based on there skills, and yours). at lower skill youll be slower, giving enemies a better chance to use theyre skills. at higher skill, youll be able to use better special attacks(better than the ones in OB, with better animations). your special attacks chances of succeeding with further be governed by your, and your opponents skills. i think theyll do a great job of keeping the combat exciting, and making it more rpgish.

Personally I think a huge problem is, well, purely HP based systems just don't really work.

You always just end up having to slowly chip away at enemies which either turns into having to hack and hack and hack till your opponent dies. It either turns into monotones clicking over and over again OR you pretty much have a one hit kill nuke.

Really one of the few ways out of this I see is having locational damage and locational effects, and no with LD I don't mean damage modifiers that hitting one area does more HP damage than the other or a head hit is a instant kill (A system I find silly), I mean that damaging one zone has certain effects and inhibitions.

Plus I would remove that weapons just have a arbitrary damage number assigned to them, the damage they do should be based on their weight, swinging speed, length of the weapon, center of balance, build of the weapon (sharp or blunt) and their materials and it's "abilities"


There are a lot more factors playing into this, like when a opponent would be too weakened to fight, how you could beat enemies without killing them (knockouts, being too injured to fight, surrendering...), many of those I just don't see possible with the purely HP based system.
Well, possible maybe, but just not really too well implementable, it would just take a lot more factors. Hitting someone in the face shouldn't make them limp.

Enchantments weren't the problems with Oblivion's melee, lack of variety was. *swingswingblockswingswingblockswingswingblock* (Sorry, off topic, I know)

And Stahlbrand: The problem with your argument that people who don't like a certain optional aspect of a single player game should avoid it is this: when the devs made the game, they were assuming the player would choose to use whatever is *best*. Not using a certain aspect that you hate can unbalance the game so much that it's no longer fun. If a person has a suggestion on how to repair this imbalance, they should voice it. Especially since Beth seems to actually care what the players have to say (although BGS has a tendency to go from one extreme to the other, as in the case of skill-based vs. stat-based combat).

I'm certain they wanted. Whether they succeeded or not is a metter of taste. It is true that the devs should try to make the combat exciting, but again, that kind of requires a definition of "exciting" and as I have said, I do not find hacking at a goblin for 10 minutes without doing any particular damage all that exciting. Sure, we can hope everything will be bright and nice next time, but if do not voice what we think was wrong how can we expect to see a better system. A system, where your oponent AS WELL AS YOU dodge and block based on his/your skills would be very welcomed for me, to be sure

The enchantments are fine. Keeping weapons enchanted a tedious and high maintanence task that I never get into anyway

Also what's wrong with live combat? In Morrowind missing attacks was meant to simulte the opponent dodging and stuff. In Oblivion you can do this manually, which is kind of the point. Going back to a stone age combat system for TES:V would be horrendous

For enchantments, maybe it was some of the mods i had but all the enchantments i tried to do svcked eggs, so for me, if anything i think they should be more powerful.

And sorry about off-topic, but how the hell are you able to get gothic to run on your computer? i can play oblivion on high settings with little to no lag, i got the DEMO for gothic 4 on low settings and it lags, and i got the actual gothic 3 on the lowest settings and its so [censored] laggy, i get like 2 frames a freaking second. Maybe, if you want to reply, you should pm because mods dont like offtopic but since ive already written this....im gonna go ahead and post it, besides i DID adress the main topic so

Im a die hard morrowind fan.....but the combat in it just svcked....sorry

Oblivion's combat was one of the good changes.

Stahlbrand, I don't think you are comprehending the points I made properly.



See - nowhere did I suggest going back to a Morrowind style to-hit chance combat system for the next game in recognition that the Elderscrolls fans who came in with Oblivion and those who didn't like the to-hit chance combat to begin with now make up the majority of the players. In other words all Elderscrolls games from now on will always hit. What I suggested were changes to the enchantment system, which is the part that made oblivion's weapons skills and therefore RPG mechanics obsolete.



Err, no I didn't say that I didn't like enchanted weapons in a single player game. I said I didn't like an enchantment system that broke the game's RPG mechanics since it is like meant to be you know - an RPG. And if I don't make a thread about it which might have the potential to bring about some change (heh chances) then what are the point of these forums?



Did you ever serious run out of charges on an enchanted weapon after a couple of hours into the game? I mean seriously. I almost never had that problem and I suspect you didn't either unless you were deliberately discarding all of the dozens of enchanted weapons that the game threw at you.



It doesn't matter when the player starts getting 20 point damage enchantments. What if the player doesn't improve their blunt skill at all for 20 levels. Then they can end up with the exact same condition that I described in which they could have 100 in their blade skill but end up doing more damage with their blunt weapon.



Again your emphasis on low level charactes. What's with that? The game mechanics are meant to work for all levels of characters. And again with your assumption that the player will only have one enchanted weapon.



It's not a matter of 'exploiting it'. I played the game completely normally and was showered with enchanted weapons. I was also able to do significant damage with blunt weapons despite having a low blunt skill for much of the game based upon the fact that the blunt weapon had an enchantment. In an RPG if my skill with one type of weapon is significantly lower than my skill with another type of weapon then I should be required by the game mechanics to use that type of weapon whenever I wish to do more damage. That is a simple fact that all your points about 'but but players can't use enchantments all the time' has failed to counter. It's not a matter of choice. It's not a matter of 'if you don't like enchanted weapons then don't use them'. It's a matter of designing the game systems during the game development stage to accurately balance the game and make the RPG mechanics not broken.



It doesn't break the game but it does break the RPG combat mechanics. If you want to play an sandbox action game where your weapon skills have no effect then there are a whole heap of GTA games available. I in the meantime would actually like the next Elderscrolls RPG to be a **RPG**.



That's great. I never talked about changing the combat. I talked about changing the enchantment system. Any thoughts on that?



You do realise that this is the exact opposite of what should occur? That if a player makes a poor choice in their skills at the beginning they should find the game difficult later on? That if they choose blade as their primary skill then that is a choice that they have to live with - that it has a consequence that they can't use blunt weapons. You remember those? Consequences to your choices.

As for taking into account the base damage of the weapon that's irrelevant. In Morrowind if you had an super strong axe but a low axe skill it was pointless, because you would rarely hit anything with it. In Oblivion if you had a super strong axe and a low axe skill then it was still a super strong axe, you wouldn't do the whole base damage, but if the enchantment was strong enough it would more than make up for it. In Morrowind if you find Goldbrand but have a low blade skill you may as well not use it. In Oblivion if you find Goldbrand later on in the game but have a low blade skill you can use it with reckless abandon because it will still do significant damage - this is the heart of the problem.



No. It's complaining about a broken game mechanic.

"The OP of this thread in particular does make some reasonable suggestions about how enchantment could be implemented in a forthcoming game, but that he or she needed to frame it in terms of a problem with how other people hypothetically play an existing game is strange to me."

It's not framed in terms of how other people hypothetically play their game. It's framed in terms of what both what I experienced in my play throughs, and in terms of hypothetical game design. You know that the designers do actually need to consider what their systems could potentially lead to? They do actually have to ask themselves "could this system lead to a case where it is more beneficial for you to use a skill that you have a significant deficiency in rather than a skill that you have mastered" no matter how contrite the situation needs to be in order for that condition to be fulfilled. Clearly when they tested Oblivion they either didn't consider this (?) or considered it and dismissed it as not being important enough since most of the players would be action fans who wouldn't give a stuff anyway. Well if by my thread I can even get them to think about redesigning their system then I'll be a happy person even if you do label it 'complaining'. Or is the lesson I should take away is that it is fine to complain about the game being too much of an RPG to get it more like an action game but it's not alright to complain about the lack of RPG mechanics because it was changed into an action game?

"As for the broader topic of action combat verses stats combat, that has really had the dead horse-ness beaten into, and later, out of it on this forum, but why not have another go'round with it if you like. I think Bethesda has found a combat formula they're happy with, and one which has been well received in the marketplace, although like anything else it has failed to please everybody."

Would you actually consider the combat system to be worse if the next game adopted the 'always hit but base damage dependant on skills - while enchantment is to-hit and based upon skills' system I proposed was adopted? Serious question.

"And Stahlbrand: The problem with your argument that people who don't like a certain optional aspect of a single player game should avoid it is this: when the devs made the game, they were assuming the player would choose to use whatever is *best*. Not using a certain aspect that you hate can unbalance the game so much that it's no longer fun. If a person has a suggestion on how to repair this imbalance, they should voice it. Especially since Beth seems to actually care what the players have to say"

Ah...perfect. Couldn't have said it better myself. A person shouldn't deliberately have to gimp themselves or play outside the normal parameters of the game to avoid a broken game mechanic.

@ Pupp. the Gothic 4 demo sux. It also depends on what settings you have it at. Turn Shadows on low, and for both dynamic options set to World Only. Lighting Quality seems to have no effect on FPS. The World Quality changes effects of the textures bump mapping, the High setting turns on Specular Occlusion which adds aot of detail to the world but brings down your FPS alot.

Also the story kinda sux. From the begining you know, the whole game is to get from A to B. Sorta like FFX but without and story in between. You just do side quests to get more XP along the way. The voice work is alot better than the Demo, and Ivy has a new unique face in the game as oposed to the generic face in the demo which you see everywhere.

But the enemy combat isnt that great at all. Monsters have 2 variants per area, a shooter mob and a melee mob. The shooter will constantly shoot at you and the melee will 9/10 do a power attack on you, which cant be blocked or broken by hitting them first, power attacks do ALOT of damage and cant be stopped, fortunately the power attacks are realy slow so you can avoid them if you time your roll right. Just keep running to avoid the melee units which arnt ever as fast as you are, and kill off the shooters first. The mobs take alot to take down on, but you can use various ways to kill them. What I did for my first charcter was a mix of all the skills. I would shoot then with my bow then when they clsoe in I zap them with lightning wich stusn them fro a sec, and while theyre stunned I jump in and whack them with my big sword. If you keep walking backwards and shooting with the bow, the enemys will never hit you as long as you keep moving because they have to stop to attack and their attacks are too slow.

But player combat is rather stream lined and its quick to change between weapons which can be put in the quick bar along with spells and items, and the combat is quite responcive and you can roll or block (useless) away from any attack if your fast enough. The reason I say block is useless is because if u press in any direction while holding block the player will roll in that direction, so you can either stand there and block like an idiot, or roll away out of range of thier attack.

One possibility is to make the enchantments also scale with the player skill. Magic effectiveness in Oblivion is altered depending on what armor your wearing and what skill you have in that armor... so something similar could apply with enchantments. An enchanted sword with a low sword skill means the enchantment does less damage, doesn't last as long, doesn't cover as large of an area, and/or takes more charge. An enchanted piece of armor can be done similarly, too. So say you have a piece of clothing with a 12% Shield, and if you're not skilled in unarmored(!), the actual shielding you get may be closer to 4% or 5%.

One main complain about combat in Morrowind was that you was swinging at the enemy forever until you got lucky and hit, it was changed so you did a little damage if your skill was low, after my opinion with was a minor difference, main change in combat was manual block so you block and strike then the enemy exposes himself and the ease of using magic during a fight. My fighting style in Morrowind against tougher enemies was actually pretty dynamic, go in hit enemy and redraw.

See two weaknesses with Oblivions system; first bring back randomness in damage, boring that all hits do the same damage. Have a critical miss who do no damage, random and skill based but with a hitbox or better physic part so a glancing blow would have higher chance of fail.

Yes a magic weapon is nice at low levels however getting a good one early require powergaming, a sigil stone enchanted weapon would anyway be better than a couple of them and you would enchant a weapon with the skill you was best in.
The physical damage is anyway higher than the magical one except daggers and sometimes at low levels then you skill is low, yes you can make magic weapons with grand soul gems who do real serious damage but they require weakness to magic, they also require soul trap and azura’s star to be practical as they hold few charges so they would only work for a pretty magic focused character.

I'm sure lots of RPGs do that. Hype up a powerful weapon and say "Oh, it svcks now. But it'll get better! Promise!"

...Not.

An enchanted weapon, artifact or not, should remain static.

Personally I hated the Morrowind style system, starting the game and getting killed by a rat was to frustrating. I do understand the problems with Oblivion combat system since (unlike Morrowind) I have never bothered to master weapon skills since I could kill any enemy easily.
What I would prefer is to see the enchantment skill come back but your level in it directly effects the strength of enchanted weapons you could use, If your skill is low you could only use weak enchanted weapons - the Higher skill the better weapons available to you. This way it it adds a new aspect to the combat for the RPG side without returning to the Morrowind system of constant missing.
Just my thoughts

What always confuses me is why people want a game with all of this advanced physics to make the world real... and then claim that because it's an RPG, we need dice rolls, a mechanic that was devised for pen & paper RPGs because a physics model wasn't practical in that medium.

Then the "lack of animations" argument is just as sensible: MY skill with a mace determines YOUR skill at evading it? And this is a "sensible" solution? So it's "less frustrating" for a rat to have the unholy dodging skills of a ninja when you svck at a weapon, but once you get in the 40-50 skill range, your mace is practically a guided missile with a complete disregard for inertia? I don't get it...