Ok, one of the things I hated about Oblivion was the horrible 3rd person combat animations, but then again it was never really meant to be played in 3rd person, so I can live and let live, especially since there were some AWESOME animation improvements made, my favorite being made by Cotyounoyume, who not only added MUCH better animations, but also wrote some script that allowed them to be weapon specific, so you could actually look like you were knife fighting with a knife and not look like you were trying to club some with it.

When I found out that Bethesda was making Skyrim a 3rd person/fps from the ground up, I was sooo excited! I thought to myself 'yeah, better animations, cooler looking combat, maybe even weapon specific animations!' Then I heard that Bethesda 'wanted the player to feel the weight of the weapon' (loose quote from an article) I got even more excited, they were actually making sure to add realism to the 3rd person animations! When I finally got my hands on the game and realized that Bethesda had decided that realistic weapon weights meant that your character would swing even the smallest dagger like some sort of drunken monkey, I was disappointed to say the least. It is immersion breaking to watch your huge muscled nord warrior make a stumbling shuffle and swing what looks to be a 4 lb dagger with the same effort that it would take a man half his size to swing a 12 lb blacksmith's hammer! I wanted to play a game where I could feel like a season warrior, not a clumsy child, hardly even able to lift my own weapon, much less take on a dragon. I am a sword fighting and medieval combat enthusiast in real life, so I do have some knowledge in the area, and to anyone who knows their stuff, the animation in Skyrim makes you look like a [censored] amateur, not a Nordic warrior. The animations in Skyrim make you feel clumsy and unbalanced, where in real life, sword fighting is about flowing from one swing to the next, using your body's mechanics to keep a flow going, not just flailing around.

I realize that Bethesda won't 'patch' this issue, even though they could if they wanted, but I would appreciate it, and I am sure there are many others out there that would as well, that any future elder scroll games would have at least some effort put into the combat animations. Maybe consult an actual sword fighting expert, may be give each weapon type its own animations, and for the first person view, I would suggest looking at games like Dark Messiah and Chivalry, as they have some of the best FPS melee animations imho. And for all that is holy, melee weapons can hit more then one target in a swing! Please make you next game have melee weapon that actually hit what it looks like they hit!

That is the end of my rant, I really hope that someone from the Bethesda company actually reads this and maybe takes it to heart, because if they could nail this one aspect of their future Elder Scroll games down, then they would be the best RPG, hands down.

A huge fan.

I'd love it if they got the animations from Dark Messiah might of Magic in it! (including a bloody KICK option)

That would make Skyrim PERFECT!