It's really sad to see that the NPC's oftentimes don't even react when I hit them. I can be slicing their face off and they just stand there and look at me. Would love to see a patch maybe to make the fights more "lively"

Yeah, even oblivion doesn't have it like this, i noticed this too.

I haven't seen this in any of the streams that aired today. What exactly were you doing at the time?

whipping a sword across one of the graycloak's faces in the beginning dungeon.

You mean you want them to stagger backwards? Like in Witcher 2?

Fixed that for you.

Yeah, these are the minor things that Bethesda always fail at.

With the amount of money they're rolling in, there's seriously no excuse.

It's either loyalty to their staff and not getting better talent in, or just not caring about it. A worse situation would be if people like Todd Howard didn't even notice the little things like that.

Or it is way down on their list of priorities...