Combat and gore do not have to go together. To some of us gore detracts from the game. You can't try and shoehorn your opinion onto everyone else. Well you can try, but it doesn't work. It's fine and dandy that you want it, but you can't expect everyone to agree with you just because it makes sense to yourself. Should NPCs be nvde when you remove their clothing to sell or whatever? Does it "break immersion" that they have undergarments that never come off? I would say no to that as well.

I enjoy fantasy fighting in games. If there was gore I'd be more inclined to try and play a pacifist, something I doubt you can do. I don't mind at all the typical RPG scenario of fighting until hitpoints reach zero and you win. This is the Elder Scrolls and not God of War. Again if people want it fine, I just don't want to have to see it.

Exactly. How do you make being hit with an ax realistic and also balance it as an RPG with skills determining how much damage you do. Realistically one hit with and axe anywhere on the body would do great damage but with RPG elements, that isn't so. It's based on skills and how you have progressed your character. It may take 20 hits with an axe to do moderate damage at low levels and what a mess if they tried to make it look realistic. Actually I think realistic depiction of damage an ax would do would break the game mechanics. We would then have a completely different genre.

This is an RPG first and an action game second. It's not based on realistic combat but rather stat based damage and behind the scenes dice rolls. I want balance and choices and consequences for my actions first and foremost. I want gathering ingredients for a potion to be more important than gushing blood and flying arms. Give me more mushrooms to pick and less blood to let. Let me hit someone with 50 arrows and see them sticking but doing little damage because I'm merely a low level archer. Give me ghosts to crumble to the ground, skeletons to crumple, facial expressions and screaming, a fireball that makes their body fly through the air on fire but save the charred bodies and turn them to ash. TES is not so much about the combat but about the journey, give me a journal I can make notes in about my journey, books to read, paintings to enter other realms, skooma addicts, riddles, puzzles, exploration, people with schedules, people hunting, pretty dresses, disease that bring me to my knees. Give me a living world and if there is time left over to make some over the top realistic combat...put it in FO:4. But I want another TES game not a fantasy shooter with swords.

:talk:

Yea, I only read the first page of this thread before that came into my head as well. I remember hitting targets countless times with swords/axes/maces at low levels and then I think about how I just hit a wolf in the head with a sword 10 times. If we had realistic gore everything would be pretty much one hit one kill if someone didn't block/dodge.

Plus if I even thought this game would have gore like FO3 I would forget about getting it.

I understand that it is opinion based, I just don't understand the mental circumstance that would generate the opinion that combat and gore don't go together. That notion is absurd in its entirety. I understand you may not like gore, but that's just the thing, the graphics as they have been give this nice, comfortable, commercialized, vanilla representation of "combat". I stated in a prior post that you can't make a game 100% realistic because that would basically mean that you kill all enemies in 1 to 3 hits from day 1, and I understand this quite well. You have to draw the line somewhere, but it isn't at making the game totally without gore and blood. We have to accept that "health" isn't really the toughness of our opponent, but an "abstraction". You "didn't" actually hit your opponent with a blow that should be fatal until the blow that is fatal. Health isn't the amount of blood in the body or the rigidity of the skin, its an abstraction in numbers in a menu, and as an abstraction, it is a necessary evil to make it possible to have progression.

That doesn't mean that when the blow that does kill is landed that it shouldn't be represented as a blow that caused fatal harm to your opponent.

I also want more mushrooms to pick, better quests, and everything else. I didn't say to sacrifice all of that either. There really isn't any reason you can't have both... its not like making a character mesh have deformations for limb severing and making setting the decay rate of a blood decal are going to take so many man hours that there will only be 3 alchemy ingredients in the game. That's pretty far-fetch and stretching for a reason.

It really seems to just boil down to the fact that you "don't like gore". Well, catering to this sensibility diminishes the impact and artistic credibility of the game and leaves us with sleeping dead people, instead of dead people.

I play plenty of gory games. I just don't want all of them to be gory. And over the top gore does not fit well in this game. So....that blows that assumption I guess.

......


What?

Wow, I'm kind of impressed with how protracted this argument has become. If I've learnt anything from reading the numerous threads on this topic, it's that I'm no longer sure exactly what one person means when they mention realism or gore, it seems vary quite wildly from person to person.

From my perspective I do not need any form of "gore" in the game, so long as there is some visual cue to indicate a hit (e.g. health bar, flinch/stagger) anything else become superfluous. Realism is slightly important to me in the combat mechanics but not in the visuals. There is a point where the graphical depictions of a hit can go too far and I'll start to think, 'what is this crap'. It cheapens my impression of the game. I can imagine a lot of people will be very much the opposite.

Ah, but I don't see it as a "combat simulation" - it's never gone out of it's way to be "realistic" with it's combat, incorporate real-world styles & give you a many moves (various parries and feints, multiple binds and disarms, ripostes), has never had one-hit Iajutsu-style kills (instead, hitpoints), no realistic injuries (tendon damage, bruising, blood loss, concussions..), etc.

Yes, it's a combat game.... but I don't believe they've ever tried to claim or design it to be a simulation.


(Kind of like.... Ace Combat is an arcade-style flight game. X-Plane is a flight sim.)

Definitely for realistic gore myself. Heads should roll, limbs should be reduced to bloody stumps. Tends to happen when you play with swords.

As someone who doesn't like blood (I'm not interested in watching the beginning of Saving Private Ryan again, for instance. And Braveheart has a number of uncomfortable scenes), I'm always somewhat confused by this seemingly bloodthirsty desire to see such things.


I'll say this - if the game was as some of you describe wanting, I would not buy it. Period. (Eventually, I suppose, there'd be mods to fix it, but....)


Considering that I doubt I'm the only one who would hold such a view. And that the "more blood!" crowd, I think, would still buy a good game that doesn't have excessive gore. It seems an economically poor decision to go the splattery way. (Kind of like Hollywood likes to go PG13 with it's "blockbusters" rather than R - more cash to be had that way. Yeah, they still make R splatter flicks. But it's understood that they probably won't do the same amount of business.)


edit: for the record. I'm male, and was born in the early 70s. And I don't have any particular attachment to excessive profanity, either. :shrug:

Maybe Beth wants to make the game PG-13 like Oblivion, but will fail because of hidden nvde resources? (again) :rolleyes:

I would like to see NPC's I fight getting injured as i'm fighting them, to a certain degree. Would be cool to see a bandit have a few cuts and wounds and actually struggle to keep up towards the end, but nothing that would bother me to much were it not to be included.
However, I would not like to see L4D2's system get implemented. First off, it wouldnt fit with the theme of this game, and second, L4D2's system had it's flaws as well. Strike a group of zombies with an axe and what plays out on your screen as a slash to the chest will blow their head off. This would bother me more than it would add anything had it been implemented.

All I'm really saying is that given the realism in the graphics and physics in what TES has become/is becoming, the amount of "gore" in the game presently is "under the top" by a wide margin. Blood doesn't evaporate before your eyes, and people don't look serene when killed. Yes I play the game, but it does bother me, quite a bit actually, as you might surmise from how active I am in this thread. So its OK for me to be bothered by the fact that a game I might otherwise consider almost perfect is greatly diminished by lack of this feature, but its not OK for you to be bothered by its inclusion? Yeah, that's not biased at all...

What I'm hoping the other side of the argument can provide is a good reason not to have gore that doesn't include "I don't like it". I have stated that its inclusion elevates the impact and aesthetics of one of the game's central aspects to match its graphics. The only argument against it seems to be "It wasn't in the old games" or "I don't like blood" which really are BS arguments.

I just hope the combat feels visceral...also the finishing moves have me quite excited

Yeah, all the opposition to adding to gore are really none arguments. Except for the one with the one with the huge wound and lots of hp not making much sense. All other opposition can be solved with the use of a toggle.

Yeah, the HP vs visible damage argument is not a BS argument, you are right, however, one or the other has to give in the face of trying to make a realistic game. I see nothing wrong with only minor wound appearing for non-fatal strikes and major wounds appearing for fatal strikes, and keep the hp system exactly the way it is. In my mind, that would still be an improvement over never showing wounding at all.

I just don't buy the "artistic impact" argument. Sorry.

Especially if you include a toggle to turn it off. If it's so artistically important, how could you allow it to be changed?


(I've had similar thoughts about profanity-laced music - if it was so important, "artistically", for the singer to include all the profanity, how can they then produce a "clean" version for WalMart? Oh, right.... it's not about art, it's about money.)


If Bethesda was a company like Rockstar, whose reputation is made on controversy and "pushing the envelope", I could see them making a horrific gorefest like some of you seem to want. But they're not, so...... :shrug:

I don't care about it artistically, I care about it realistically. Also, I'm gracious enough to cede the point that, for whatever reason, some would not like to see it. Bioware allowed a toggle, I'm sure that someone else playing with it with blood and gore enabled didn't ruin it for those that disabled it. And if it did, I really couldn't give a crap.

There is little realistic in Tamriel as we know it.

Smash, cut, burn, freeze enemies in Tamriel and they die. Realistic. But they have no wounds, how strange.

Tamriel, the world in which everything dies of a heart attack brought on by low hp.

dude its not Startrek Holo deck

for God's sake give Bethesda a break, I mean do you really want realistic atomic structure also in the game you zoom 100000 times and you need to see the atomic bounds are correct !!!!

so you bash a zombie in the face and it bends back a Milli second before the hit lands, you won't see it because when u are playing you look directly at it.

its movie magic

It's interesting that you pick this topic to flip out on. How about you go to the see through windows thread and rant and rave. A very large part of this game is about combat, whether you like it or not. The progression of games have been about adding realism almost more than anything else. Why, because it's more immersive.

They're adding running water. Why? Because it adds realism.

They're adding wood cutting and mining? Why. Because it adds realism.

And if you have to make your argument about atomic structure, then you really have no argument to make.

Oh wait, I just saw that you're lamenting the fact you don't think the window realism won't be in the game.

Because shooting fireballs from my hands is realistic right? Blood was always on my sword and the ground or even my armor in Oblivion. That's enough. You want damage to show on armor, skin, clothes, the ground, objects as well for realism? I am pretty sure it's a video game in which when I beat things with swords they die. I didn't know I was giving them heart attacks but whatever you say.

But still, how do you make combat seem realistic when at level 1 it takes 50 whacks with an ax to kill someone. Is that realistic? No, it isn't. You would go down with a couple of whacks with an ax. But that is what makes it an RPG. How would you ever make 50 whacks with an ax realistic?

I've already said that that's the only acceptable argument being made in this thread.