I think the argument my friend had, was to give them animation to dodge (I guess kind of a 'svck in your stomach jump back dodge animation'), or dodge left or right animations that play automatically based on skill. (dice rolls)

I like that OK too, but seems like they've already commited to taking it to where you actually press a dodge button to dodge, so I'm fully in support of it. I think the combat in TES is the best swordplay FPS there is. Well, he hates it.

I don't think that the concept of abandoning such a thing would be viable at all in a modern game, either.

I miss my sword strikes rather often. General swinging I hit, yeah, but the power attacks I seem to lunch forward and past my enemies a lot.

2 people standing in front of one another swinging sticks around, you are going to hit very often. But when one tries to do a more powerful hit, its not guaranteed to hit due to the pweron moving out of the way or you miscalculated the path of the swing. But again, general swinging isnt very difficult to land a hit. This isn't a martial art, so there are little precision movements going on here

Doesnt mean its good.

I didn't say it was good.

Targeting and timing matter in Morrowind, particularly in ranged attacks, and all attacks are ranged. Weapon damage varies by weapon type and by whether you are standing still, moving forward, moving backwards, or moving sideways. If a target is not in the vicinity of your crosshairs when your attack enters that vicinity, you miss. You can actively dodge in ways to reduce the chance of enemies getting chances to hit you. You can just spam too, but when fighting something stronger than you are, there are better ways to win.

In Skyrim, were random hit rolls inserted between your attack and your target, the things you do now to affect the fight would still be things you needed to do.

In theory, yes. But in reality as long as you had your ebemy standing directly in front of you it didn't much matter where you targetted with blades, axes or hammers. There was never any real sense of impact. Just a vague 'poking' animation as the game number-crunched in the background. And half the time that animation even poked your weapon physically THROUGH the target, yet still recorded a miss.

I concede that archery was different, but one handed and two handed attacks really were more of a case of spam and hope.

This kind of game mechanic was out-dated and unacceptable in 2002, to be honest. It's even more so 10 years later.

Agreed, it should have been locked on first sight to be homest.

For any general shooter (or stabber) yes; but if it's an RPG; certainly if it's one with a named PC with skills (like weapon proficiencies), then its what I would prefer over anything like we saw in Oblivion or Fallout 3. Why have weapon proficiency if not to rely on it as the PC's ability with the weapon? Why settle for attenuated aim?
And why (specifically) do you believe the Morrowind mechanics can be outdated? They work just as they always did, and perform the same function ~and the later RPGs don't.

*Or is it just preference towards different mechanics with different design intentions? Outdated (to me) means there is a better way available for the exact same action or technology, but Morrowind and Skyrim are not two attempts at the same thing; (are they)? The first game puts emphasis on the PC's abilities, where as the second puts emphasis on the player's abilities.
The OP's point (mentioned) is that his PC should not always hit; that this is unrealistic. Consider the same [100 hour] player playing two PCs. The first is the typical viking/merlin, while the other is a shop keeper. In Oblivion or Skyrim the player's reflexes are what dictate both the warriors and the shop keeper's accuracy. I don't find this realistic at all. However in Morrowind, the player's reflex and aim do not alter the PC's inherent abilities; (as it should be IMO). In Morrowind the combat reticule is simply to indicate the PC's target ~no different from the mouse in Baldur's Gate in that respect. The button push simply indicates what action to take; "Attack them (to the best of your ability)". IMO these mechanics more realistically reflect a PC's ability to defend themselves in combat ~or to overcome their opponents.
*They don't all behave and fight like they're possesed or something.

The exectations of modern gaming are far higher than they were 10 years ago. If you create a game with a free roaming environment, where you can jump, run, and do a dozen other actions in 'real-time' (As opposed to giving your character commands and letting them go off and do them) then it has to be applied across the board. RPG or no. That doesn't make it a special case.

If you opt for a specific aethetic and set of game systems which are designed to place the user as a participant, and not a spectator, in the game then expecting them to suddenly break out of that and what what is effectively not really much more than an automated fight sequence at its heart, that goes completely a odds with everything eklse you've chosen.

The reason TES evolved in Oblivion and Skyrim, into a system of active combat, as opposed to generated combat, is because it best matches the spirit of their game.

To try and reintroduce a system where you order the game to attack but let it decided as to whether or not you hit your target, even wjhen it shows you connecting with it, is just not an acceptable concept. It wasn't really acceptable for Morrowind at the time. A lot of people weren't happy with it even then. But I think a sense of nostalgia for the game often lets folks overlook the flaws.

But going back to that kind of system now would be a huge step backwards in my opinion. I suspect that if this thread had a simple two option poll for this - in favour or not - there wouldn't even be this much discussion.

As has been stated plenty in the above thread.

You can hardly call Skyrim player skill based. Learning to click two buttons for whack and block/stun and aiming the cross-hair really doesn't involve any skill at all. And certainly, the exact same player skill was just as important in Morrowind.


Morrowind had hit/miss dice roll mechanics. It had very little to do with character skill, except that the higher your skill the bigger the chance was that you'd score a hit. In reality it was just a game of chance with no feedback whats however apart from a message box that said "miss".

The hit/miss dice roll mechanic doesn't improve gameplay. It just makes people click more frantically.

I could agree with you if you said that there should be variation in damage dealt. Then I'd be all for it, even if it involved a dice roll. Same as that in Skyrim (yes, Skyrim) death blows and critical hits are actually governed by a dice roll, coupled with skill level and perks to determine your success rate at those. But there should always be a base damage level determined by character skill, not chance.

So.... Trying to hit a huge dwemer centurion for 5mins+ and missing each time even though it's bigger then you and hard to miss is realistic?...

Yeaaaaah no.

Morrowinds combat was plain awful, the end.

Seconded.

agreed 100%

and i miss my attacks in skyrim also

my main character was a pure mage
ive just made a sword an board character and i am crap at it.
i quite often miss my attacks
but im sure with more practice ill get better and so will my ingame stats

this to me is as realistic as you can get

i find sword combat in skyrim quite enjoyable
dice mechanics are not good ways to represent combat in action games

What Morrowinds combat lacked (in the context of realism, and playing a role in an RPG) was more potent visual feedback from missing - dodging, counterattacks, heavier use of blocking, actual missed swings, etc. Nothing much more, imo. The system otherwise worked well enough for what it tired to do (an RPG gameplay in first person and realtime events).

The thing is, sure, you could add animations into it, to cover those bases. But you still wouldn't feel like you were actually fighting. Just requesting an action and receiving one of several pre-generated responses. It would still feel automated, and ultimately unrewarding.

There is a multitude of reasons why it was dropped. It's an immersion breaker to me. Just doesn't fit in with the game.

That has everything to do with it... It's the foundation of it. The PC's training and ability with the weapon
overcome the probability that they will miss. ~Ideally... that probability changes depending on circumstance. In a game for older hardware it may just be assault their armor class (which represents the opponent's overall defense ~including armor); but in a modern 3d gameworld, the engine could also take into account the roughness of terrain, whether it's wet, whether a blunt weapon has a reduced effect on heavy leather armor (or thrust blades a greater effect)... Even magical or environmental effects can be represented and affect the PC's ability ~like unnatural "Fear" aura, or poison effects ~(anythings better than screen blur IMO )

Damage variation depicts weapon effect in the abstract... In this case modern games really can abandon variable damage for impact force and weapon damage type. If the weapon strikes the opponent with weak force or deflects away from armor, then the game can use that as a base for damages ~and be appropriate to what the player sees on the screen.

Accuracy though is different. If one PC is a highly skilled swordsmen (or swords-woman), that PC should attack not with higher damage than a brute with the sledgehammer, but with higher accuracy and technique; and have accurate strikes cause strategic effects as well as damage bonuses in some instance. The novice swordsman may be stronger than the expert ~and might do greater damage if they hit ~under the physics model (mentioned above) they could hit by luck alone and do serious injury... but generally the expert would be hard to impossible to hit. Under the current system, they do less damage with the same weapon ~In Fallout 3 they do less damage with the same gun!

IMO a game that executes a standard attack swing irrespective of the PCs ability with the weapon is not as realistic as Morrowind's version of the same exact thing ~because Morrowind at least takes the PC into account. For Skyrim to match Morrowind in my thinking, the PC would have to have different attack animations for each milestone in their weapon skill such that with low skill they attack like an amateur... and the game should abandon the hit-harder model, for evaluated damage (based on the actual hit).

I don't much like morrowinds combat, there's the obvious flaws of no visual representation of missing, but even if it had worked it's a broken system.

Sure I would, because I would undertstand the context that the character is doing the fighting -- I didn't mind the lack of animation feedback at all when I played the game. And on the contrary, when I actually did score a hit, I felt much more rewarded than I would've if I was always scoring a hit. I needed to take the possibility of a miss into account when in fights, and once my PC got better, I felt it much better than I do now with the current system.

There are of course commercial reasons to not have that kind of system anymore, but in my opinion not valid enough to not even consider some sort of middle way.

Again, Morrowind suffered from trying to be too many things at once, an action-oriented first person adventure and a skill-oriented third person role playing system. Basically Morrowind would have made much more sense if I simply pointed to an enemy and clicked to instruct my character to attack that enemy, and then the mechanics worked out the rest until I told my character to do something else.

you're assuming that we are starting untrained, there is nothing in the begining of the game to suggest we're newbies. To me we look like experienced "whatever" caught up in events not of our own making. That being the case it makes total sense that we don't have to start from scratch. Besides look at the young Nords they spend all their time fighting. Icouldnt imagine a nord or any other advlt person living in a world with monsters not knowing how to use a sword.

The low starting skills (and statistics) heavily suggest that the start is for an untrained (for what ever reason) character. Otherwise the skills would not be low at the start, no?

To implent a realistic combat system is a little beyond what Skyrim's engine could ever handle.

Well, to each their own, I Suppose. Personally I only feel satisfaction from the game reacting to my own actions, not queuing them up and letting the game make a call on it.




It's not a commercial decision. It's simply a game design decision. The old system is legacy from a much older system of roleplay. Morrowind in particular was an evolution from automation to a more responsive kind of RPG. It outgrew the old combat mechanic, and we now have a systen far more in keepin with what was intended.

Going back wouldn't be doing anybody a favour.




Exactly. It's a turn-based mechanic being applied to an action-oriented game. The two do not match. But Morrowind got praised for its action elements and more active immersion. So they kept those elements and did away with the elements which didn't fit.

Combat now matches the rest of the game properly, in Oblivion and Skyrim, as opposed to being a clashing element.

Well for starters, it should use stamina if you miss with a weapon, since you would rotate much further than you would if you connected.

I don't know, I'm sort of thinking out loud, but it seems like it might improve the gameplay and strategy, at least.

Well, I agree, to a certain extent.
Skill should dictate your accuracy and speed of movement, not the ammount of damage you inflict.

Tieing up Skill with ammount of damage inflicted in, say, archery is fundamentally wrong.
A seasoned archer will draw his faster, will aim and shoot fastr and his accuracy will be far greater than that of a novice.
The damage he inflicts per arrow shot though will roughly be the ame as that of a novice.