Im not here to defend skyrim because im a bit doubtful, as for this thing thou....

Gonna make an example:

Im fighting a bandit - He rushes up to me ( and im expecting it ) so i time my swing to hit him, the impact ( the one that the writer wants ) makes the bandit take two steps back, now he charges again, and again i time my swing. Repeat untill dead. Now for me this would svck so much ass its Indescribable. You could compare that to a turn-based rpg were every hit you make "stuns" your opponent for one turn. Now that would be a dissaster.

So if my hits doesnt always make an impact is for me a good thing.

Well, considering you spend most of your time killing stuff in the TES games, I'd say combat is one of the most important aspects. And it looks to me like they didn't update the combat to 2011 standards, making skyrim look more and more like oblivion 1.5.

I didn't. I saw an idiot who wasn't able to distinguish the "attack" button from the "put away weapon" button. I saw far better hit detection than there was in Oblivion, provided said idiot actually aimed at his opponent rather than just mashing the right trigger like it was going out of style. People are overreacting to this video. We never had any reason to believe the combat would approach the satisfying visceral feel of, say, Chronicles of Riddike, but people judge it too harshly, especially when you consider the poor quality of the video/person playing it.

This really doesn't come at a surprise, I had already made such an observation months ago about creatures not always reacting to blows. Developers never hid it. I don't really have that much of a problem about it, and it's really the only thing that the article mentioned as being negative about Skyrim's combat, besides of the features present in other games. I am quite excited about, for example, the environment interaction during combat mentioned by Dave's hands on.

The fact that it's half-decent is half-decent. Although I rank it myself slightly higher than satisfying. Combat is a very present and important aspect of TES, and I don't think such an excuse could be used to justify a poor combat system. I am satisfied at how the combat seems to be, I didn't really expect much beyond that and I actually got surprised at how the environment takes part on it, but I won't tell you that I'd not be very pleased if we had a more complete combat system.

Luke Skyrimmer gave a few good points earlier. Take a look

Pardon my stupidity, but how does this "staggering" this work? Because if i take a dagger, and the enemy reacts to every hit i do on him (stagger, take a step back, whatever) then the enemy wouldnt have a chance to retaliate eh? o.o

Agreed. Im actually cancelling my pre-order because im getting a massive oblivion feel from this the more I see it.

And indeed, TES not about combat?
Oh i see, so thats why we get to craft weapons, armor and beat pretty much everything to a pulp whenever we want to gain XP or just desire to be vicious since the game allows us to do that.

Half arsed comment tbh, combat is such a major element that "half-decent" to me is equal to borderline terrible for a 2011 release game that has been in the works for so long.
Great graphics, cool. Great story, awesome.
Subpar combat? Suddenly the story and graphics mean 75% less to me.

Will just have to see how it turns out.
I am curious to see the game live, hear some objective opinions and decide from there on if I'll buy it or not.

That guy was an idiot. He was comparing leaked footage of Skyrim's awsome combat system and comparing it to Dark Souls crappy combat system. He had no idea what he was talking about. The combat is not dated. And what does he mean by today's standards. By my standard's, most games and there combat svcks.

exactly

I'll tend to believe the dozens of known gaming sites previewers who throughout the last year had hours of hands-on sessions and all said combat felt great over one guy who bases his opinion on twenty minutes of leaked footage he didn't play himself...

Well in Oblivion enemies do disrupted by attacks. Only occasionally, not every time. And getting more often as I leveled up.
Or has everyone gotten amnesia?

Calm down, your fan boy is showing. Skyrim's combat does look crappy. I say that as someone who has prepaid for the game and will be picking it up at midnight. The simple addition of enemies reacting to your blows subtly would be a vast improvement. Dark Souls is a pretty good game that's also not really in the same vein as Skyrim. I sincerely doubt you've ever even played it anyway.

Yes, they react sometimes, but not all the time. Frankly, I think of them as glancing blows, or hits that do not damage the enemy sufficiently to make them stagger. Seems normal to me.

Also, he's comparing the combat to many 3rd person games. That's fine, but the Witcher & TW2's fancy, twirly style is hardly good. The witchers.'s combat was clumsy as hell at times. Dark Souls combat is slow and methodical. If you like that kind of pace, it's okay... but honestly, I think the combat looks fine. Not to mention it's showing off early combat footage... Character doesn't have many skills to work with. Add some spells, or archery, and I'm golden.

"TES is not about combat!"
Over and over and over I keep hearing people spout the same rhetoric, ok so TES isnt about combat? hmmm lets look at the skills:

Alteration: Magic shields, paralize, spell absorbtion hmmm sounds like things used in combat...
Archery: ummm duh combat?
Alchemy: Making potions, to keep you up and fighting in... yup, combat
Conjuration: summons monsters to combat for you or summon a big ass axe to?.... combat with
Block: Probally used in combat not sure. hmmm
Light Armor: Armor? dont combatants wear that stuff?
Destruction: ......
Heavy Armor: wow two types of armor that can be worn to protect you in combat!
Lockpicking: not combat... unless you get caught then dee dee dee combat
Enchanting: make weapons and armor more effective for....? anyone, anyone?
One-handed: No way weapons are skills used in combat? pssssh
Pickpocket: just like lock picking nothing to do with combat unless you svck at it then you will have combat with gaurds and who evers pocket your hands in
Illusion: Not really used to combat but to try and stay out of combat... does that still count?
Smithing: create weapons and armor!... pssst those are used in combat
Sneak: steathly approach a target and...
Restoration: Heal yourself from combat!
Two-handed: Take combat to a new level of fun!
Speech: yes yes yes! holy hell we found one! this has NOTHING to do with COMBAT!

Sooo hmmm TES has NOTHING to do with combat? so wierd all the skills in this game seem to. Well gusse we might as well look at the story:
The High King of Skyrim has been murdered (think that involves combat ), triggering a civil war among the province's people (combat between a lot of people), the Nords. Many Nords wish to secede from the empire, which has been declining in power since the fall of the Septim Dynasty 200 years earlier, while others believe the empire is still worth preserving. A prophecy foretold by the Elder Scrolls is fully realized by this last event; dragons have returned to the land, and the Nordic god Alduin rises to consume the world (pssst, cant consume the world without a little combat). The player character is the last of the "Dovahkiin" (or "dragonborn"), mortals who are born with the soul of a dragon and can speak their language. (to get the souls to speak the lingo, gona involve combat to kill the dragons... yeah, sad huh?)

Sooo the skills are about combat, the story is about us combating these dragons... yup I agree TES has nothing to do with COMBAT at all!

you are thinking it wrong. most action games show recoil on enemies and it works. the reason is that a staggering character can still block or dodge. the defensive maneuvers a character can pull of are possible while recoiling or staggering. that's how it SHOULD be.
the only recoil that SHOULDNT be interrupted by blocking is when the NPC is being parried.

there is an entire philosophy on how a combat should be built and it makes perfect sense in terms of gameplay and will work many times better than Skyrim's\oblivion's but i dont think u wanna hear it. bottom line is - the SHOULD be recoil with every hit but it shouldnt cause indefinite attack strike from the attacker. recoil\stagger should also apply to the PC. not just the AI.

i HAVE seen the combat from the leaked tutorial and yeah - it looks exactly like oblivion. really bad. but i also agree that there has been very little combat there and it's not representative enough. there have been a time where the PC hit a guard about 4 times and the guard didnt flinch, didnt stagger, didnt recoil... nothing. this may be due to the PC having no stamina. another time there was no reaction to being hit with a 2nd hit but that may be due to the AI staggering already and the second attack didnt cause hit to stagger more. since in the tutorial almost all enemies died in 3 hits or less it was really reall hard to really judge.

but like the man in the article have said - combat doesnt look good. im staying a little optimistic but keeping my expectations low.

i also agree with Zeal Dreamer - TES have a lot more than combat, unlike a lot of action games BUT there is TONS of combat. in a game where u spend dozens of hours in combat , COMBAT SHOULD BE GOOD!! while combat is only about, say, 30% of Skyrim, if u play it for 60 hours than those 20 hours of combat SHOULD BE GOOD! that's as long as Batman:arkham city and it should be good. not "the witcher 2" good, not "assassinc creed" good, not even "the first templar" good. but better than what Bethesda is aspiring to. they are just not aiming high at all, which is a shame.

i raise my hopes to mods.

This is a very opinion based thread, and so I will post my opinion without disagreeing or talking down anyone else's post. >_<

IN MY OPINION - TES, in terms of the amount of content in the game, is not very combat heavy game in comparison to other titles. And hence should not even be compared. Skyrim is an RPG. /end rant

Tbh I don't care what game reviewers who get exclusive previews of an AAA title say. They will always be biased since if they don't write good things about the game when the next title is announced they won't get another exclusive preview of the game.

From all the game footage I've seen, especially in videos where regular players were simply playing the game (cell phone cam videos etc), the combat looked very much like Oblivion's combat. The players 'painted' the enemies with their weapons and the enemies showed no reaction to it until they died, except for the occasional stagger animation like in Oblivion.

Stamina seems to be just as pointless as Fatigue in Oblivion. Most people were fighting with zero stamina and they still had no problems killing groups of bandits. They didn't even need to use a health potion. Even if this was on easy difficulty it shouldn't happen like that.

Enemies still stopped each time they performed a power attack (due to a fixed animation) so it was incredibly easy to avoid their hits by simply taking a step back.

Backwards running still seems to be a viable option to defeat enemies in a cheap way, at least for NPCs that seemed to work.

The sprinting feature seems to be a cheap way to make up for the lack of a 100 athletics/speed possibility. I thought it was a tactical feature that both enemies and the player would use, in the videos it looked more like a 'light speed mode'. No enemies could catch up if the player started sprinting.

Overall I can see very few improvements over Oblivion's combat so far. The only feature that made combat look more 'visceral and brutal' to me were the finishing moves and the shorter fights compared to Oblivion (although that may have been due to easy difficulty settings).

So what is it you do in these RPG TES games that dont involve combat?

I... really liked oblivions combat system. It was pretty much the only gameplay improvement over morrowind. Apart from the way they handled magic, that was lame for pure casters.

Listen to talking NPC's and read ingame books before you head out to ..... :drumroll: engage in combat AGAIN.

Seriously people need to stop convincing themselves TES isnt combat oriented.
Dragons, dungeons, quest objectives, open world dangers and the like -combat is around EVERY Freaking corner.

Wake up from your dreams and see the facts.

It's about the world and what you do there. Im not going to fight so much and that's whats roleplaying is about. You defend yourself if you HAVE to IRL. You don't run around killing people in real life? People seems to forget that.

I'm mainly combat, but I know some people that play through games like this not using combat at all. They spend time working, crafting, doing alchemy, While i myself am usually combat oriented, I really am not worried about the combat. From videos and people I have heard from (reviewers and average people) it wont be like oblivion, it'll be better

Combat looks stiff and not really enjoyable on its own. Then again, Elder Scrolls has never been about combat. The many new combat moves/perks already increase the depth of the combat tenfold.

Skyrim isn't a real action-RPG like Diablo III and such, those games require great combat because it is all about combat. The way I see it, combat is a means to an end. The goal being: completing quests and developing your character. By my definition Skyrim is a real RPG so I'm not buying it for the combat alone.

So I'm okay with disappointing combat, had this game not offered a detailed world, multiple factions, etc then I certainly would not have bought it for the graphics and combat alone.

I don't get attacked by creatures every ten steps in real life. Stop trying to sustain this excuse, it's ludicrous.

Its funny he used a game like batman to show "one of the best combat syle ever", when its just timing your A or B mashing. Granted, its fun!, for a batman game. I would kill myself if skyrim was anything like that, seriously. I think finishers are already an improvement combat wise, if they are not too regular.