But in context there are.

It would be most realistic if it was like Skyrim but the enemies actively dodged more. That's about the best thing I could think of for both sides of this argument.

I would love it if they actively dodged. To do it though, they would either have to implement a predictive physics anolysis to decide what animation is appropriate, or use a dice based system that results in comparable values to either play a doge animation, or one for a weapon impact.

Now you are going from swinging a sword and "missing" to having your hit being blocked by your opponents defense. Are we talking about blocking or missing?

really? so if you picked up a sword and started sparring with an expert swordsman you would always hit him, never ever miss, but only cause scratches while he would one shot you because he will of course hit you and he has an insane damage bonus.

not realistic at all. Morrowind is more real but with no dodge mechanics it seemed bad but it reality if your terrible with a sword and you enemy moves you will miss often.

It really isn't at all but if you want to believe so go for it.

The attribute system is way more realistic... If you know how to fight with a blunt weapon...fighting with an axe isn't the same thing.

I don't see the problem, there are now visual representations of missing/dodging/blocking in Skyrim, dice rolls were only anologues for that, and you will miss frequently enough.

The software is catching up, and people are still hung up on old anologues.

That's all.

I like the idea of failing spells, based on the skill level needed for the spell, and the skill level of your character. This was in Dungeon Master, and it's great for throwing you a curveball. Makes using your most powerful spells a risky gamble. Makes the game exciting and less predictable, forces you to adapt if your important spell misfires against a tough opponent.

Misfiring still consumes the magicka, and gives you a small amount of expeirience -- hey, you may have failed, but you are learning. You learn from mistakes. So you may level up while failing to cast, then your chance of a succesful cast just went up.


However, the Morrowind swordplay is just not working for me. I already lost friends over this in a nasty, insulting argument, so I'm not going to argue about it further. I just think it's an outdated mechanic, unless there was an actual animation for "missing" that looked convincing.

I have to hit a rat 10 times with my sword. Lucky for me I understand pathing.

Yeah Morrowind has wonderful combat.

I still miss sometimes. FACEPALM. I think it skyrim could take a page out of the Fallout book. At first, you can barely hold a gun straight, and your melee attacks are a little unsteady. By the time you are maxed out you are rock steady. This is easier to do with missile attacks vs. melee however. The number crunch is too much like final fantasy for my tastes.

Hah, Take Morrowinds combat + Cliff-racers = Tedious frustrating combat

Dice roll mechanics are the best mechanics for a role playing game where you try to separate player skills from character skills. There is no such thing as unrealistic dice rolls, there are only deep and shallow implementation of it. It is fairly easy, and have been done with countless dice RPGs, to hook up countless numbers to the dice system.

What is really bizarre is that with the added computing power of the CPU versus hand written calculations and table lookups in a dice RPG, the complexity of the calculations have actually dropped (seemingly at least). Now, the actual formula may be more complex, but it doesn't appear to take an equal amount of factors into account.

But failure to visualize the hit system is where most computer RPGs tend to fail miserably, simply because there is unimaginable amounts of work to be done rather than simply imagining a description of it like we do in dice RPGs. I look at Slash Critical Strike table from Rolemaster's Arms Law (rule book), which have 5 different tables (for one type of attack) which all lists 20 different effects. That's 100 different effects by one weapon and one attack type! Then you got critical lists for Crush, (Slash), Puncture, plus special ones for 13 other very special attacks. Add in a bunch of modifier factors, and the fact there are unique lists for each type of weapon, and the system grows completely out of manageable scope wrt having to create computer content for it. But realistic? Hell yes!

Btw, Arms Law is a book of 118 pages with just system description, rules, and tables. It is one of 4 books required to play the basic game (depending on edition, kinda messy there), which you can easily expand to 20 books if so desired. THAT is the concept of ROLEPLAYING: Completely free within a vast variety of options the game rules and the game master defines for you. And THAT is why computer RPGs will always fail miserably, because you cannot define a wide enough scope, and then hope to maintain balance within it. Some people tend to powerplay also in dice RPGs, and game masters tend to hate them and try everything to kill them off

Comclusion: Dice rolls is by far the best method, but it needs to much visualized content to make it work, that it is simply no feasible to create it. Morrowind was extremely simplistic in its complexity, yet it failed miserably due lacking content to support the (hidden) dice rolls, and thus there were many complaints on how things didn't make sense. That's why we now have an action adventure game instead of (what I call) a true RPG. Sure, we can try to role play in it, but the system is far too limited to allow us full freedom. Anyone we want? Sure. Anything we want? Limited. Anyhow we want to do it? Big fail.

Agreed. I enjoyed it when I was playing MW way back when but I have progressed into a modern gamer. I love all the new controls it makes the games easier for me.

Try fencing once. Against a highly skilled opponent. Can your number of hits be expressed in a chance percentage? Yes it can! But due lack of content backing it up and lack of players ability to abstract what's happening, we get the simple deal.

Try archery. Can you hit a small target 20 meters away consistently? I bet you can't. Can a trained archer? Much more likely. Add ability to lead a moving target, which now is solely a player skill (not sure about that magnetism feature). On a computer, all you need to do is not move your mouse, which isn't exactly a hard thing to do. The aim even stays over several shots, ridiculous for an inexperienced archer.

Sorry, but MW actually had it right, it just lacked the content to show off the results in a graphical enough view to be accepted by the modern gamers. However, combat has now improved quite a bit wrt being action based, in that I get the impression that early in the game before my skills go up, the enemy seems to be able to block off a lot more of my swings, which means I have to play smarter and use power attacks to make something work, draining my precious stamina.

So, although I prefer the highly descriptive "old timers" game, I can live with what we have now as long as there is some kind of mechanic preventing all my blows to land, even if it's nowhere near as varied anymore.

The only thing lacking then is the concept of weapon and damage handling. FONV had a decent system to handling, in which you could pick up anything you wanted, but suffered penalties if you didn't meet the requirements for handling it (requires stats, which could go far deeper even than FONV). But this doesn't work well with meelee, since misses have to be visualized. It'd work wonders if skill mostly handled chance to hit and any perks, and attributes provided secondary basis of weapon handling/damage. The only drawback with this, apart from complexity of code, is that it is hard to notice the improvements since it happens so gradually over such a long time. Action gamers today want instant gratification, and they have proven themselves over and over in these forums.

Playing on the console tends to skew me to love the hack and slash. A range of damage is cool though. The old Everquest/baldurs gate ps2 games did that pretty well.

take morrowind combat + cliff racers + todays technical capabilities = realistic rpg that looks great with proper animations for misses/dodges/strikes/stagger/swipe etc.

it comes down to a very simple point: you either want a character-based die roll system or you want player-oriented real-time combat.

able to miss and zero damage (character stat) or ALWAYS hit (or player error) but with less damage given. btw, player error also occurs in the former.

for me, the former (with today's graphics/animations/capabilities) is more realistic with depth and a blast. it just needs to be fine-tuned and given today's graphical technology.

at the time and not having internet access I never knew there so much wrong with Morrowind's combat system. Ignoring the animation I'd swing and miss and say ooops and swing again. Funny thing is the more swung that sword, my hit/miss ratio tended to go up! I never knew that I should have 100% hit at the beginning. Wow, didn't know what I was missing. Rats, cliff-racers or mudcrabs; what's the difference?

I initially decided not to reply to this troll thread, but the geekyness of the large amount of replies were too horrible to ignore..

Nothing realistic about Morrowind's combat. But there is little realism to the combat in Skyrim as well.

But I will agree that Skyrim has more realistic combat than Morrowind. Morrowind uses the old PnP dice system. It's far from realistic, as some more intelligent fellow pointed out.

Skyrim lacks two skills in order to make combat more or less realistic. Dodge and Parry. If the opponent had a chance to trigger a dodge-move upon being attacked, this would have added another layer to the combat. As for now it is pointless clicking until the enemy dies.

Contrary to the naive fellows here, it's quite easy to implement four dodge animations. One for each power attack direction. Even a simple side/backstep would do.

It would not be hard to implement a sword lock either. DMMM has a very good system, close to this.

Hell, even Jedi Knight 2 and Die by the Sword had sword/weapon collision.

Having to switch to a shorter weapon in a narrow corridor, because your two-handed axe kept scraping the walls, that would have been realistic and cool.

I also have to address the simpleton, (and the brainless zombies that threw themselves on the bandwagon), who claimed you don't do 'damage' when you hit someone with a blade, if you lack real life skill with it..

I haven't chopped a lot of wood, but I am sure that if I ram my woodcutter's axe in your side, you will have trouble standing on your feet afterwards, and definately will not survive without hospital treatment.

Two combatants that stand perfectly erect all the time with no dodging or feinting isn't real either. The number crunches allows the game to take into account dodge skill which really doesn't exist in this game except backing out of melee range as they swing over and over, tricking the AI the same way a big brother tricks you into flinching during a game of slaps.

Try using a battle axe on a crap system that has a single digit frame rate. You'll miss plenty. The same effect applies (to lesser amounts) on better systems.

Its not that the regularity you hit tagets who are in range with is unrealistic, its just that its far to easy to close with somebody & keep them in reach, and they do almost nothing to evade your reach.

You want realistic combat? Well then, you don't ever just swing your sword at a guy in heavy armor; you grapple him, slam the crossbar in his face, trip him, then double hand the point into a chink in his armor and work it in slow and hard. All while he tries to do the same.
You wanna try figuring out what combo of mouse and key command let you do that? Or animating it?

The dev that suggests that Morrowind style combat be brought back should be fired....out of a cannon....into the sun.

If I try to shoot an NPC while undetected but when they are facing me, they almost always dodge my arrows. It is more frequent because of my mods I think. The predictable nature isn't hard to implement in a computer game environment.

My problem with chance systems is this:

When warriors are fighting, it is a case of many things, skill, tactics, determination, heroism and such. But at the commanders level, it is all statistics. Are we at the level of the hero or at the level of commander? This is obviously coming from the war simulations heritage.

I mean why the crude approximation? It is so crude, it is not fun, nor realistic. Chance is a margin of error, a small contributor and maybe nothing when the skill is high enough. The statistics don't mean anything for the performer and we are at the level of the performer in this game. But our skill systems are capable of simulating the combat without relying on dice but still produce the same statistics from far distance, we just need to focus on actual mechanics.

Always hit, I find it stupid. I imagine damage sponges immediately. What is more fun?

Hitting someone again and again for two minutes, watching a bar deplete.
Or just hitting for real. Once. Fatal.

The idea is both fights can have the same duration depending on your character's skill.

In the mod I use, the chance of blocking is increased to %60. In theory, this is good.

In reality, the statistics fail.

Sometimes I can hack and slash, sometimes they start to block again and again. It is not consistent, it is a random chance. Lowering the approximation, adding reaction times with a margin of error can possibly fix this. It is still better though.

Pickpocketing is the same, even with 90% chance people are not happy. Determination is an overrider but it is not in the game, instead people load a previous save. Choice must have a meaning. Give people something so they can back of before failure. Realtime pickpocketing would be nice, use ultra slow motion if necessary. The duration can be player's window for performing the task which is based on character skill. Two bars progressing, item timer and pickpocketing timer. You keep an eye on both and hope for item timer winning the race and you leave before pickpocketing timer ends. I get excited just from writing this. Skill > Chance.

Statistics are an observation from outside of the actual mechanics . That's the correct way. Otherwise, crude approximation is crude.

http://youtu.be/Q6Jlc44_98Y

I watch these every week and I weep for Bethesda. I WEEP!

Er, dice rolls are 'Character skill based'.

%chance is a must to have true realism. There are simply too many factors that exist in real life and many of which are complete wild cards (variables) for which a "dice roll" is necessary to obtain a proper outcome.

Sure, I can pick up a stick and hit you with it. No formal training. If you let me. If I try and take a swing at you, you could block, parry, or dodge. But which one will you do? If you are fighting a sword and board npc, they can effectively do one of the three (just because you have shield doesn't mean you can't use your weapon to stop an attack). So already, you have room here for a chance of occurrence. It could be set up based on your weapon skill vs their block, parry, and dodge skills. Now, the game doesn't have a skill for parry and dodge so there is something that could be added.

The equation itself would be a bit complex since it would have to work with the full range of 1 to 100 in each skill involved but basically at the top end (all skills being 100) it would leave you with a 50% chance to hit. With regards to the the 50% chance to miss, it could be broken down into 25% chance to block, a 15% chance to parry and a 10% chance to dodge. If the npc were to have a second weapon instead of a shield, then you end up with a 40% to miss (15% x 2 + 10%). The npc traded off defense for more offense. If they went with a 2H, then you now have 25% to miss. Which would mean that the damage of weapons would have to be such that a 2H > two 1H's. Armor can then have an effect on things like dodge. If you are wearing no armor, you get the full benefit from dodge but if you were to start equipping light armor pieces, the effectiveness of your dodge would go down (perhaps down by 20% when fully equipped resulting in a 8% instead of 10%). Then if you put on heavy, it would drop by as much as another 20% for a maximum drop of 40% when equipped in all heavy armor (so your dodge is 6% instead of 10%). You trade off your ability to dodge (among other things like weapon swing speed, and spell effectiveness) for more damage mitigation.

So with all skills involved being 100 (or really just the same so all could be 50) resulting in a 50%, the two extremes would be you with a weapon skill of 100 vs their dodge skill of 1, block of 1 and parry of 1 giving you a 99% to hit, and your weapon skill at 1 vs their 100's resulting in a 99% chance to miss. Of course, increases in a skill is based on more than just what level its currently at but also at what the skills of your opponent is at too.

Then there is you and a companion attacking one enemy. The defenses would then be divided up. Each one can only work vs one opponent, therefore, your companion could have a 35% to miss (vs the npc's block and dodge) while you have a 15% to miss (vs the npc's parry).

As far as the player goes, there simply isn't enough buttons to assign to cover it all so the player could be subject to the same. Ideally the player would have control over all these things but realistically it just isn't mechanically feasible so the game is designed to do it for you based on your character's skill.

The real problem was animation. As stated, from the moment you begin to attack (or have an attack against you), the game need to calculate the path of the weapon. The game would then have to make all necessary calculations to determine the outcome (if you hit or miss), and find out how you miss if you do so. Then the computer would have to come up with the appropriate animation (the thing that Morrowind lacked that people really have a gripe over). All done before your, or the enemies, weapon takes the pecalculated path. But to be honest, if there are only z number of paths for weapons to take because there are only x number of weapons and y ways to swing them, then the game really only needs to know x and y. x being the weapon you have equipped and y being the attack (standing power, forward normal, sideways power, etc.) and the computer would have no problem determining the predicted path (z) for which the game will have an npc animation paired up with each possible z.

Of course skill would also work as it does now with the higher the skill the more damage you can do or the more armor a shield provides etc.