Well... That's the snag. The game would likely disable clothing change if an enemy is actively attacking you; but this does not account well for an enemy that cannot reach you and can do nothing to stop you from changing armor.

There may actually be some concern (by some) that such animations depict benefit from drug use.

However animation of 'consumables' use is something I'd like to see implemented; others have... even in first person.

That's granted, and it would require an altogether different mechanic than the current "crouch and sneak behind somebody, click them, and time freezes and a pickpocket menu of their items pops up". It would require some work and a completely different mechanic, but it could be done.


Hadn't thought about underwater chests, but you could make the air-limit bar visible even while lockpicking, so the player would know if he was getting close to drowning and needed to just stop picking the lock and surface. Then they could get a breath and go back for another try. As others have said, real-time lockpicking would add back in that time-based element of risk, where you have to get the lock open before somebody sees you.


Why so? For one thing, I don't think warriors should be able to spam unlimited health potions even if they hotkey them. It's not just the menu-freezing-time aspect that needs to change, but also the silly exploits that the system allows, and spamming potions in the middle of a hand-to-hand fight against multiple enemies is one of them. Actually, in the sort of thing I'm thinking of, mages might well have it easier than characters dependent upon potions. Mages could change one hand to a Fast Heal spell, cast the spell, then change it back to their flame spell or whatever, while a warrior or thief that needs to use potions for healing would realistically only be able to have one or two on their belt - assuming they're small vials, anyway, and not large bottles - which would limit their ability to self-heal in combat compared to the mage.


But Skyrim isn't a strategy game, it's got action combat, and TES has had action combat since the start, as far as I know. It's a real-time game with real-time combat, not turn-based combat where you can stop and think things over. It isn't Civilization, after all.

Yup. As I said earlier, it would admittedly require a completely different mechanic, so I'm fairly sure this change will not and probably cannot be made with Skyrim, even by the developers, but it would be better than the "crouch, click, and look through a menu of their stuff while time is frozen" mechanic.


lol

I've seen somebody else say that, but I'm not patient enough to wait real-time if I've gotta wait two in-game hours. I do use the wait function.


Yeah, it's something I've had to make myself stop doing, since I used to have sneak boots and regular heavy boots, and switched as the situation required, until I just decided it was a little dumb. I probably ought to ditch the archery gauntlets as well, particularly since I rarely use my bow.

Ah. Good. Thankyew verruh much.


Hmm. I can see that. I still prefer the idea of non-time-freezing menus and a somewhat lengthy animation for changing armor, but you do have a point - some of the animations I'm sure were a pain to do, especially having to take into account people wearing different gear. I think shields disappear when you sit down or cook, if I remember right.

So yeah, that might be an option to have combat disable changing clothes/armor. Oblivion didn't let you repair armor while enemies were near, even if they didn't know you were around, and both Oblivion and Skyrim disable waiting with enemies around.

That's true. Part of me thinks that non-time-freezing menus would help some peoples' immersion, but then that might well be a fairly small portion of the game's audience, and real-time animations for activities would do the same thing in terms of preventing silly exploits like changing armor when an enemy running at you from twelve feet away, and spamming health potions.


Well, they do this sort of thing with waiting, and I think that the enemy doesn't have to be aware of your presence for waiting to be disabled, but they do need to be somewhat in your general area. I don't think seeing a dragon a quarter mile away would trigger this.


So the inventory menu would freeze time when you're looking for the book, but time restarts while you're reading? Possible.


lol

True enough.


Well, like I say, if it worked like the "you can't wait while enemies are near" thing, they would have to be near you, but I don't know about if they were near but didn't know you were around.

Not so much a pain to do... its a pain to endure. That kind of thing would get very tedious after the tenth time and the novelty wears off.

In practice... I think anyone hiding in the shadows would not be able to change out of their "plate & chain" armor without being noticed by EVERYTHING nearby.

Which hypothetical animation were you talking about? Changing armor? Hopefully people arent' changing armor every five minutes. Simple ones like putting on a helmet could be as fast as the unsheathing a weapon animation, but of course the ones like putting on a full suit of armor would have to be fairly long, to make people understand it isn't feasible to do in combat.

Now, I admit I see your point in one sense. I hate having to watch the mining animation every time I mine ore...but it does make sure I can't just turn around in the middle of combat, grab some ore as a zero-time event, then turn around and leave.

I did mean armor changing, and I really meant that when you add up how many armor and clothing swaps are made over the entire game sessions and multiple PCs... It would get reeeellly old really quick; and would take another unwanted step in the direction of pure simulator; (and arguably... its not actually fun).

Minor animations that confer immediate benefit (like first person potion drinking) would IMO be a good addition to the game; while giving the PC a non-offensive action during combat ~that risks getting injury for the benefit of the effect.

DNF did it.
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/DukeSODA.gif *(445kb)

Perhaps, but then it doesn't have to be as long as actually changing clothes or especially as long as putting on a suit of armor would take. It only needs to be long enough to prevent it being done mid-combat or just when the enemy's rushing you.

There are other methods, though.

Changing into plate will take about 45 minutes; even @ 10x speed that's still too long, and anything less would (I really think) look silly, and be derided by most players that post in forums.

The game detects combat already; it shouldn't be too hard to refuse clothing changes during a fight, and that by itself would be enough realism for me. As I think and try to envision it, I begin to wonder how silly would it appear when he's changing clothes with arrows stuck in his back, face, and knees.

In Oblivion, you could not use repair hammers or do alchemy if there were enemies nearby, regardless of whether they knew where you were. They could implement something like that for armor changes pretty easily but it would not discern between situations where it would be "realistic" to change armor even though there are enemies nearby. Might be difficult to program something like that.

lol

Yeah, I wasn't envisioning anything NEARLY that lengthy; I figured more like twenty seconds would suffice to prevent people doing it at the beginning of or in the middle of a fight.


Yeah, that probably would suffice, to be honest.


lol

How does a healing potion even deal with an arrow to the knee? Does it make the arrow pop out, or does it just heal the flesh around the arrow, so that if you pull it out you're just re-injuring yourself?

Yeah, the whole steal plate thing is a bit unrealistic from the get go. You pretty much need assistance to put that stuff on and it is so heavy that you cannot climb on a horse without a block and tackle to lift you in the air. The whole notion that you can climb mountains and swim rivers in plate armor is pretty hysterical when you think about it.

You mean like when you're on a catwalk ten feet in the air in a room with enemies, and you're prevented from doing stuff even though they can't reach you? That could be a problem, but there are likely ways to program around those sorts of things.

And all of this does bring up a good point; the animations and "you can't do that in combat" messages would only be necessary in combat, or at least near it. There's no point in making the player watch an animation like changing clothes or drinking potions if they aren't in combat. The only real need would be to prevent silly, implausible things being done in combat.

But then I still like the idea of non-time-freezing menus, for some reason.

That's actually a bit of a myth. Even full plate armor is reasonably light; if it weren't, you'd be useless in combat. There were a few attempts to produce bulletproof suits of armor that became heavy to an impractical degree, but the modern concept of people wearing armor so heavy that they couldn't mount horses or get up if they fell down is a myth.

That said, I can see how it would be awkward to swim in, and I likely wouldn't want to try it, but one thing Rangers learn in the Army is how to ditch their gear and swim with their rifle in hand if they fall into water. Not that you could ditch the briastplate of a suit of plate armor, but depending on how heavy the stuff was, you might be able to (clumsily) swim to a near shore.

Really? Cause I know I read that in books when I was younger and played D&D (first edition). Maybe I read it in the DM's Guide, but I swear I remember reading that in some legitimite book on historical armor. Do you have any source material you can cite for that? Not that I don't believe you, but it is an interesting topic and if I have been carrying around an urban myth in my head all these years I'd like to learn more.

Well, here's one source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_did_a_Medieval_knight%27s_armour_weigh

I know that's a horrible source, but I don't know of any primary sources to cite offhand. As I say, there likely were attempts to create full suits of bulletproof armor that would have been impractically heavy, but I expect they were quickly abandoned.

45 pounds isn't very bad, though. Soldiers in the U.S. Army wear that into combat, and often up to 70 pounds if they're unlucky, and the weight of that would all be on their shoulders and waists. 45 pounds distributed over the whole body would be relatively light. That said, I wouldn't want to have to swim far with 45 pounds of metal on me.

I think you said it perfectly. The problem the OP was having was the hotkey difference between console and pc which would make it unfair but this would fix that in my opinion.
+2

Well, part of me still thinks the time-freezing-menus are not perfect in terms of immersion, but in terms of preventing certain actions in combat - spamming potions, changing armor, etc. - this would do the trick.

Although as Gizmo said, some people aren't likely to enjoy any animations that wound up being lengthy - an armor-changing or clothes-changing animation in particular could get lengthy - and might find it a bit annoying. Although, as I said, perhaps the animations would only be triggered in-combat. Out of combat, the time taken for these actions might not be important, and they could revert to zero-time actions.

Although, now that I think about it, it might also be an effective way to slow down grinding some skills, most esoecially smithing, enchanting and alchemy, if there were animations associated with performing these things each time you performed them. After all, sure, time isn't frozen while you're forging a suit of armor, but if you go to the forge with a ton of raw materials, you can sit there and churn out a dozen suits of armor, helmets, gauntlets and boots in the time it takes you to hit the mouse forty-eight times. Twelve full suits of armor, potentially worth the cost of the most expensive houses in the game, all from about ten seconds worth of button clicking. So perhaps if there were an animation for these things, they'd be less attractive things to grind.

Hell, imagine if it took like thirty seconds to forge a suit of armor Nobody'd spam that, right?

Yeah, 45 pounds would be heavy but I used to ride horses when I was a kid and you could definately climb on a horse by yourself with a 45 pound pack on your back if you were in decent physical condition, especially if it was evenly distributed. I did some Googling on my own and found the wikipedia site on plate armor and they described some fluted plate armor designed for fighting but did not say how much it weighed.

They also discussed some jousting armor designed specifically for jousting tournaments that weighed upwards of 100 pounds. At that weight you would probably need assistance to get on a horse. I suspect that the notion that you needed a block and tackle to get on a horse and couldn't get up when you fell down probably came from the jousting armor that was only used in trounaments, rather than the fluted plate that was used in battle.

EDIT: Hey, that link you posted has a great story about a French knight climbing a castle wall in plate armor using two daggers wedged into cracks. That would be a great Skyrim feature!

100 pounds would definitely svck. You could probably get on a horse in 100 pound armor if you were a knight that could afford to eat plenty of meat and stay in shape, but even then it wouldn't be fun. You'd also be particularly awkward if you were on foot if you were wearing 100 pounds. 60 pounds can wear on you over time if the weight is all on your shoulders and waist, although it probably wouldn't be all that bad if you had it distributed around the body.

BTW thanks for posting. Here I had been believing what I had been taught about the immense weight of plate armor all these years. You learn something new every day.

Hey, no problem. I remember hearing that too.

Anybody else have any opinions on this? Menus that don't freeze time, maybe animations to make changing armor and spamming potions in the middle of combat infeasible, or maybe just have it detect combat and now allow you to change clothes or armor or drink more than one or two potions in combat, just like the game won't let you wait while enemies are around.

Having sunk many hours into a game (Draken: The Ancient Gates) that operated under a system of menus that did not freeze time and had animations for things like drinking potion, I rather enjoyed that system, even though it made things much harder. But Draken is a much simpler game than Skyrim. There were only about eight different types of spells in the game and maybe five or six different types of potions. With all the complexity of SKyrim's inventory, it might not be as viable to keep time running while you are in your inventory, especially for spell casters.

I really do like the idea of an animation while you do things like drink potions and change armor. They had that in Draken as well, at least for drinking potions, and it made it much more realistic to have to hide or run around dodging sword blows and spells while you tried to down a potion. Many times when my health was almost gone, I downed a full health potion only to get hit in the process and end up about where I started healthwise. That system completely prevents spamming potions as you have to drink them one at a time. It would also force people to use potions when it makes more sense in a battle, say durign the brief pause when you have just dropped one enemy and the other has not yet reached you, instead of waiting until you health is super low and an opponent is about to land a hit, only to pause the action mid swing to quaff four or five potions in the split second before the sword blow lands.

Such a system would also prevent people from changing armor mid battle because you would be vulnerable during the animation, although you could probably change things like rings and amulets because you could run around or dodge behind a piller while you did those types of activities, like you could while you down a potion.

On the other hand, this type of improvement to the game is fairly low on my priority list because it is fairly easy to self impose rules on yourself not to spam potions or change armor in the middle of a battle to preserve immersion. There are a lot of other things I would rather see fixed first. The most important of which for me would be more instructions from the game world (ala Morrowind) so you could complete quests without ever having to turn on the quest arrow.

But I am glad we had this discussion because I woke up this morning with a new found love for plate armor!