I've never had any sword training, but I can guarantee that if you stood in front of me, I'd easily cut you in two with a katana, provided you didn't try to parry / block / dodge.

It depend on target, fighting an mud crab you will hit but fail to hit vulnerable parts, against an agile defender most attacks will be misses or blocks. But yes for this to work animations has to be much better and it's very hard to do right.
Would also require some other game mechanisms. You push the enemy up in an corner where he has no opportunity to evade the blows and you get more hits.

Exactly. You wouldn't just move the sword in a vague direction pause, roll a dice, and then see if I fell over. Which is effectively what Morrowinds Combat system IS.

If there are

So if there are no dice roll mechanics in Skyrim, how come when i aim, and shoot an arrow at the bad guys, they sometimes dart off the the left immiadiately. Sometimes without them even knowing I am there. Your argment is invalid. OP makes a good point. How to show that in skyrim however poses an issue.

why does anyone give a [censored]e about "realism"? It's a game designed for fun.

I loved Morrowind to death and it is my favorite TES game although Skryim is so very very close to unseating it. I DO NOT miss Morrowind's combat though. I agree that had there been better animations that would have helped alot but when you constantly see your sword go through someone but no damage is done it gets a bit frustrating. Fortunately once you get to the 40s in a skill you miss much less frequently.

The concept of needing to gain skills before using a sword is what I was taking about, I agree that nerfing the damage you can deal at a low skill level is a better way of doing.

That's a reaction to being hit by an arrow or hearing an arrow hit the wall/ground nearby, though. If an arrow hit the wall next to you I think YOU'D probably move, too.

This.

Morrowind is my first connection with TES. I remember it fonmdly, and loved many things about it. But the Combat was a serious flaw. Likewise dialogue.

The Morrowind system tried to replicate that an opponent would try to parry / block / dodge. It's the animations that couldn't keep up and, even today, it would be a mammoth task to animate the full extent of parrying and dodging that could take place in combat. With Morrowind's mechanics, hits and misses are determined largely by the character's stats which is perfectly traditional for RPGs. It just looks really odd when you are seeing the action up close in real-time, something traditional RPGs don't offer.

Skyrim and Oblivion have an FPS / RPG hybrid method. Whether the character hits is determined by the player, the damage comes from the character's stats. I kind of agree with the OP that Morrowind's mechanics are actually superior for a pure RPG perspective but until animations are sophiscated enough to properly represent dodging and parrying I think Skyrim's approach is better than Morrowinds. It also moves TES more into the Action RPG category which I think a lot of people prefer anyway.

I disagree. Morrowind's mechanics just gave you a better chance at scoring a hit the higher your skill was. But if you boil it down it was nothing more then a game of chance. Which usually just resulted in a lot of frantic mouse-button bashing. And it didn't even take the opponent's skills at being able to avoid being hit into account.

Off course the character's ability to negate dodging, parrying, blocking by enemies, and the character's ability to dodge, parry, block him-/herself, should be dependent on character skill. As should the character's ability to deal damage with weapons. But the dice roll mechanic is way too simplistic for that imho.

This- , If I use a greatsword in real life (they dont weight more than 14 pounds usually) I may be [censored] at swinging it, but most likely i will hit, it is a matter of whether I will do damage or not. Same with maces and what not.

Exactly. And this is something which Morrowind's combat system simply didn't take into consideration.

I've always held a similar opinion. What Morrowind needed was not hit-every-time combat, but simply better animations. You needed to feel how crappy your character was at a low level.

Yep, for example, pick up a small barbell for weights, and try swinging it, the thing weighs around 20 pounds, and you can swin it, and hit almost everything, but without the muscles being trained to do the motions, you will be doing pretty much zero damage to anyone. You would have to be pretty drunk not to hit anything.

Yes I would rather more realistic combat that the CPU randomly calculating hits in the background, if you can't actually hit your opponent it doesn't make sense, how well you do it should be preportionate to your skill which is the case in Skyrim. I actually like the combat in Skyrim, it feels 'weighted' if I am slinging a big mace around it feels like it has cumberance, if I am blocked then suitably I can be counter-attacked, I think Skyrim combat is the closest Bethesda has got to 'Real' combat IMO.

Your assertion that Skyrim's combat is unrealistic relies on the assumption that your character begins at a level of profiency that would have him missing a lot. As you witness with your own eyes, your assumption is incorrect. Your character clearly begins with adequate ability, otherwise he would miss.

Well, with traditional RPG mechanics hitting and missing is a game of chance and the higher your skill level the better your chance of hitting. Morrowind actually did take into account things like your opponents Luck and Agility when determining whether you hit. However, I do concede that there was already an element of FPS in Morrowind's mechanics, Oblivion and Skyrim just took it to a more logical conclusion.

the real problem with morrowinds combat system was that they tried to balance out the good gear by making it weigh a stupid amount. Other than that it was serviceable.

And I honestly think that the FPS side of things (As long as the 'S' stands for 'Swordsman' ) works very well.

Morrowind's mechanics were basic. Very basic. It uses stats to calculate, but doesn't show the user what it's doing. And I don't think more animations honestly could have fixed that. Morrowind was designed to be played in the first person. But it was a fair distance off thinking through what else it had to achieve in order to make the most of that.

I understand what you mean from a realistic standpoint. But from a visual standpoint, Morrowind has one of the ugliest combat systems I've ever seen and uses even uglier mechanics of all of the same style game I have played. All in all though, Morrowind blows away Skyrim for story and lore and overall gameplay. It also had the best magic system, next to Daggerfall in the TES series. I miss levitation.

It does. It's just a shame that the combat, dialogue and meshes have dated so badly. People complain about banol conversations in Skyrim, but seriously the chase-the-hyperlink system of Morrowind really broke immersion for me.

If they bring back spell failure make it work both ways.I do not remember many enemy casters failing in MW and I could have used a few fails by casters in Skyrim(stupid one shot mages curse you)

A valid point, actually.

What you've just shown there is that none of the Elder Scrolls games have represented combat accurately.