Something that's bothered me since Morrowind was the lack of dynamics in combat. Oblivion was a bit better about it overall with actual blocking and all, but didn't really fix the problem.

And before I start note that I'm not asking for ES V : Dark Messiah but I'm just saying taking notes wouldn't be a bad thing. I don't recall the name of the book, but in Morrowind there was a book that went into fairly good detail about different types of throat slitting, such as the "Violin" style, or cupping the mouth and yanking back on the head so as not to get blood on yourself.

So...where are these things? In essence Morrowind and Oblivion were both button mashing games and very little could be done out of the blue and out of the box. It'd be nice to be running away from a bandit, turn around and tackle him before he knows what hit him, giving you a chance to gut the bastard where he lays. Or modify certain types of attacks for certain situations - like changing the angle you hold your bow at so as to change how the arrow flies (I'm not really a marksman, though, so I don't know if that would actually change much in real life) or light the farkin' thing on fire and shoot it into a wine barrel to cause a nice distraction.

Just strikes me odd that environment seems to have so very little to do with combat, and that in battle the only skills that matter are blade, block, and your magick arsenal. Skills like stealth seem to have no effect as well upon combat excepting the Oblivion style sneak-strike. Be kinda cool to sneak up behind somebody, put a sack over someone's head and club them to death/obliviousness and hide them away from other eyes. NPC's haven't really reacted to the deaths of their comrades, either, and that's disturbing. Anyone who's played Fallout 3 knows what I mean more so than anyone else. NPCs should use the environments themselves, and not just the player. Having an NPC kick over a stack of barrels on me would definitely put a blight upon my day and make the fight more interesting.

I always assumed that Bethesda had to invest so much time and money into producing a living, breathing world that there were little resources left for making a combat system that can stand up against other games where the main focus is combat. Still, it's a nice idea, interacting with the environment. If magic could alter the environment in the same way Plasmids did in Bioshock, I'd be delighted.

I think to a large extent you're right about the resources, it just seems that if they wanted to nab a larger potion of the market, they could come up with a combat system to at least rival similar games. It would attract a lot more people, anyways.