PenGun, the problem is that the game's kill cam logic is not the sensible chain that you're thinking:

"The opponent attacked. You did not interrupt or evade or block it, so it connected, so the damage was 'rolled' and reduced by your armor/resistances, and was still enough to reduce your health to 0. Therefore, the kill cam triggers."

If that's how it worked, no one would be taking issue with it.

But the game's ACTUAL kill cam logic seems to be:

"This opponent has decided to attack (but has not yet begun to swing). The hypothetical damage of this attack that he is just now thinking about, IF it was the highest possible value, AND you were to stand there like a dolt and do nothing to interrupt or evade or block it, AND you had no armor/resistances (regardless of your actual armor/resistances) to reduce the damage of this hypothetical hit, is theoretically high enough to kill you. Therefore, the kill cam triggers."

This is not a particularly sensible approach, and people are quite reasonably bothered by it.

Hitpoints and armor rating are lines of defense. Maybe having your shield or weapon up to block matters too. Keeping out of range of the attack is also a line of defense, even if you lose that line of defense at the moment the attack can be made.

The more-likely problem for some players is the disparity between normal damage and critical damage. They want damage to be nice and flat and predictable like Oblivion's, so they can easily gauge how many hits they can take before dying. Make damage like Morrowind's, where an iron warhammer might hit you for 1 point or for 28 points, or for anything in-between, and they don't like it. Make damage even more extreme like dragon's breath in Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights, where an out-of-your-control random check determines if your perfectly-healthy character lives or dies , and it's even worse.

You really think Damage isn't nice and flat in Skyrim?

I said that it is not as nice and flat as Oblivion's, not that it isn't nice and flat. To be fair, it does appear I may have been mistaken in thinking that Skyrim's damage is less nice and flat.

You become immune to that at high level and Draugrs wont use it anymore.

I think 31+ cause the shout disarm levels 30 and lower.

But seriously it could be fixed so easily. Just have whatever hit depletes your health bring you down. Stagger you. Knock you on your back. Set you on fire and make you squirm. It could be different for different types of weapons/magic. THEN have the npc start the execution... it just doesn't make sense for it to automatically kill you because theoretically you would have died anyway. Because it doesn't factor in all of the tools you have at your disposal that you can use to prevent that scenario. Shouts, bashing, sprinting, spells, potions, your own power attacks etc... If you're smart you would interrupt his attack or replenish your health before it lands. Which is easy to do with such slow weapons. It would also make magic and archery death animations possible without breaking combat. If you wanted to make it really cool you could give us the option of tapping the shout or attack button repeatedly and if fast enough it would show us taking him down with us.

That is incorrect. The Kill-Cams does include Armor Rating and Resistance and I am saying this because Ancient Dragons should be able to do a Skill-Move on me at any time if they didn't include those.. You do know Ancient Dragons Max Hit is 600 on Master Difficulty? (I have 500 health)

The point is they are. I think that's what confuses people and leads to all these claims they could have dodged except they're frozen. The game already calculated they hit you and killed you - when you get the finishing animation you're already dead, it's just the game plays you the animation - If it didn't play the animation, you'd take a regular hit and drop down dead, the game having already calculated that hit struck you. It's just you don't see the enemy make that blow until the end of the animation sequence, you see what the game already calculated on a kind of time delay to allow the sequence to play out. It's the fact the game freezes your character in order to play out the animation that deceives people into thinking their character wasn't already regarded as dead by the game before the seqence was played.

Like when you click to attack an enemy, the game calculates you hit them and calculates you kill them. It might then play the animation in response to a kill it's decided has happened.
The enemy 'clicks' to attack you and the same thing happens except you're on the recieving end.
If you saw them hit you before the kill cam, the whole sequence would be pointless - just like you don't hit an enemy then get the kill cam. The kil cam triggers according to what the game decides has definitely happened.

The thing that does my head in about people moaning about this is all it is is the game being able to throw back at you what you pull on opponents all the time. People love to moan the game is too easy, where's the challenge blah blah blah - Bethesda did a really good thing when they didn't make kill cam moves the exclusive domain of the PC. I get kill cam moves against enemies all the time. There is no way I'll clear a dungeon without a bunch of them. I get kil cam moves against me maybe once every few hours, usually through underestimating an opponent - and that will probably be a bandit because they're easy to underestimate (another smart move by Bethesda - no bandits in daedric armour, but some are mean - and why not? They're thugs for a living after all). I would be very surprised if other people don't also experience it as rare, unless they routinely face off against opponents wielding warhammers with low health or something.
It sounds to me like a lot of whining Not fair! I'd have got away! I'd have dodged! How can a bandit kill me!? I play on master because the game is too easy....

The argument is not about if the game is easy or not but about if this is poorly implemented and stupid or not. The game can be as easy or hard as you want it to be, you can change the difficulty or change your character to either make it harder or easier. But no matter what path you take this is still pretty stupid. I am also annoyed when I make those kills on NPC's because in many scenarios another NPC would have been ready to strike me thus negating my killing blow but instead I get a free kill making the game even easier and they can just stand there and watch me like I'm some sort of an immovable object as I slay their comrades.

But as I say this isn't about if it makes the game harder or easier, it's about how silly it is to grasp the controls away from the player when he could have done something to prevent his death and it's about how silly it is to become an unstoppable killing machine when you do start a killing animation. Heck I was once in the path of a draugr's Unrelenting Force when I made one of those kills and it was only after I had killed the current draugr I was fighting that the shout kicked in and I got pushed from where I stood to the other end of the room.

Which is why there should not be killing animations for neither the player nor NPC's if they can't be done better than this or at least once either the player or NPC has already been taken down to 0 health without any animation, but then that would be kinda silly too unless you were able to ignore the health bar and pretend you or the enemy still needed one more hit to die.

And there is this weird notion that the game calculates you hitting an enemy before you hit them...I thought this was 2012, not 02 with Morrowinds Dice roll? and that combat happens in realtime..

I appreciate the risk that comes from having a chance of bad things happening outside of our control, but I think your argument may be misrepresenting the complaints.

I think the players saying they would have dodged would not be averse to their successful dodge being contingent upon their characters' abilities. One of their issues is that -- aside from health and armor -- there is no apparent way for a character to improve his defenses against the high-power instant-kill attacks. For some, the defensive options are too limited to feel satisfying. These players would probably be okay with being unable to evade or mitigate such attacks now, just as long as they have a path to follow that will eventually lead to them being able to evade or mitigate these attacks later. If some higher-level enemies were also granted the ability to evade or mitigate such attacks from the player, these players probably wouldn't mind.

Years ago people dreamt of an Elder Scrolls game having decent combat.

Now we have finally have competent, challenging system and people still aren't happy.

Its so boring though, not as bad as Oblivions but still boring.
I miss chance based combat.

Look - when you perform a killing move, you click your mouse or controller and the game registers your strike - it calculates the blow hits and is fatal - it triggers a killing move.
Sometimes, the same thing happens against you.

What you're alluding to is a perceived lack of defensive moves. Personally I'm fairly happy the way it is. I dodge potentially fatal attacks all the same. Facing an enemy with a two-handed weapon - particularly with the light armour stealth assassin type of character I like - I can judge the swings fairly well. But the game will calculate if the eneny has, as it were, clicked their mouse before I manage that. It feels frustrating to be suddenly frozen, but it's just telling me the game calculated they moved before I did and showed me the animation instead of the strike landing at the precise time it calculated it would have without the animation. getting the animation means the game calculated your attempt to evade failed. That's all it means.

It's not about evading the attack - a kill animation means that attack already happened - it's just cutting to an animation to make the attack look cooler. If you had evaded or blocked, the animation wouldn't happen.

And sure some enemies have ultra high powered attacks. That's no different to being two-shotted by a high level draugr with an ebony bow. I don't usually play tank characters, so faced with high level enemies with two-handed weapons, I try to play on their slower swing time - I rarely get kill animations against me and am dancing round these guys all the time. when I do get a kill animation, it simply means my evasion was too slow and rather than see the strike I failed to evade in real time, the game has calculated I got hit and shows me the animation sequence rather than a regular swing (which I've also got killed by). I just don't see a problem.

Similarly, when I get a kill animation against an enemy, it's after I've clicked to hit them. The game registers I've clicked my mouse, calculates the strike hits, calculates it's fatal and triggers the animation. Once I've clicked the mouse and the enemy already failed to block or move, there's nothing they can do about it. If they had, the animation wouldn't have triggered. If it's a two handed blow, there's a time delay from clicking the mouse to the strike actually connecting - this is because the game registers click, calculates it's a hit and then plays an animation that takes a few seconds to play out rather than the regular swing animation.

What this "path" you're on about is I really don't know. All that's happening is the game may show you an animation to dramatise a fatal strike it's calculated has already been dealt. It just makes a strike it regards as having occurred look sixier.

Dragons. they don't like me.

LOL. Dragon fighting is what I do. A Dragon can reach a long way, behind the pillars at Winterhold college for one, and grab you for the "shake you about then toss you" kill move. They have long necks and if you fight enough of them you will find they use them.

It is the crux of the matter and no it has not been answered. You die and the kill move happens. Real simple.

I have 550 hours in this game. Dragon fighting is a specialty and I have been grabbed and killed many times. I have suffered many kill moves on myself and have inflicted a lot as well. The game appears to be perfectly fair to me.

I fight first person so perhaps you strange "look at my ass" third person players may have a different view but then it's because of your point of view. There is no reason to make the game so it kills you unfairly and they did not.

Amen, brother. Wouldn't be so bad if they could only do it once every 20 or 30 seconds, but the bastidges seem to be able to shout at will, with hardly a cooldown. svcks.

The cool-down of shouts for NPCs is base on the difficulty you play on, I think... Easier it is, longer the cool-down. Harder it is, shorter the cool-down.

This is what I've noticed.

Yes, a perceived lack of defensive moves is what I am referring to. I don't think we're in disagreement, because I was talking about other players' perceptions. It appears to me that the game always shows me when an enemy is ready to make an attack, when an enemy is set to strike. That set forewarns me about a potential attack and gives me a fair chance to attempt either a block or an evasion. Sometimes, my blocking isn't strong enough or my dodging isn't soon enough, or I simply hadn't acted when I had the chance, and a finishing-move animation plays and I die. So far I am enjoying the system. I like it that a seemingly-defeated enemy might turn the tables on me if I am overconfident or careless.

Granting that I haven't misread previous posts, there is a contrary perception that for for attacks dealing greater-than-normal killing damage, there is no indication beforehand that the enemy is set to strike. There is no preparatory animation placing the enemy in a ready stance. One moment the enemy is standing there with his hands in his pockets. The next moment you're watching as his warhammer smashes down on your head in slow motion, and you're dead. There is no set up. There is no invitation to think, "Hmm, he's set to swing his axe; I had better raise my shield." So, any investment you may have placed into blocking, or into moving lightly and quickly, goes to waste, because you cannot know it's time to try blocking and dodging.

I have to say, this thread is stunning. I cannot believe how many players here are unable to grasp the concept behind these kill animations. Is this the fallout from WoW on the RPG community?

The game has already calculated the incoming strike against the player, and determined it is a fatal one. CUE the kill ani.

I've been killed this way when blocking. Most often if some group of enemies has me surrounded and I am unable to stop an incoming Power Attack. The game determines it would hit me for XXX even with my shield up, and that XXX is greater than my health----> CUE the kill ani.

Having played A LOT, I can say it hasn't seemed overly unfair. I get far more "kill anis" FOR me than against me.

As for the uneven damage that makes it harder to predict your survival/tactics? It is probably better this way. Much closer to a realistic combat in that at any given time the fight could be over with a lucky or well-timed hit. Sort of like watching those Ultimate Fighting matches vs. Hollywood "fight scenes". In the UF, even a great fighter can be defeated by a key, lucky (or unlucky), or well-timed strike. Many times matches are over in the 1st or 2nd round. Whereas in the Hollywood choreographed fights, hundreds of blows are traded until the "winner" emerges.

So the unpredictability of damage in Skyrim feels refreshingly honest to me.

Not quite, I've been killcammed from the iron warhammer when I did see it coming. I got attacked and staggered and couldn't move when I saw him about to hit me so I immediately spammed potions until I was at full health (260 at the time) and still died instantly, I would like to see this issue get fixed, really, I like neutronium dragons Idea best.

Which means the game has already calculated that it actually does land the blow. That's the crux of the argument here. Look at it this way, you are fighting an enemy with a two handed weapon, you have Unrelenting Force on cooldown and you're ready to use it as needed. Your enemy slugs his hammer behind him preparing to hit you with it. You then mash the shout button to stagger him so that he won't make the blow he is about to deliver but suddenly your character is frozen and just stands there waiting for the enemy to make his deadly strike.

That's the problem, in real life, and I know I shouldn't bring real life into video games, if you were fighting someone with a big hammer and he started to make a slow arching swing then would you A) Stand there and let him hit you or Do something about it like push him or jump away from the hit ?

It's pretty funny that you should insult WoW players as you make your comment since I'm pretty sure most any WoW player can tell you that you shouldn't "stand in the fire". We are no longer playing the old school turn based games where you have to stand still and let your enemy hit you. We are playing a more modern game where you have the option to move yourself out of harms way. Something I did often in Oblivion yet seem to be unable to do in Skyrim.

That's because the killing animation wouldn't work if you had a chance to evade before it struck. It's a sequence that plays out in a particular way. When the animation kicks in, it's already a done deal. And it's already a done deal because the game already calculated you got hit. You don't see them about to swing because that's a part of the animation. The game calculates they swing and hit you, but you only see that swing as a part of that animation because that's what the animation is about.
In exactly the same way -
You click to make a swing
The game calculates that swing hits and is fatal
Killing animation triggers
You clicked just before you actually see the swing (you really see this with two-handed because it's a more drawn-out animation) - the time delay in clicking and seeing your warhammer actually swing and kill them is to allow the animation to play out - when an enemy does it to you, the game already decided they made a successful swing. In effect, you're already dead - but you are left with an illusion you could have dodged because your character remains frozen for a second for the huge swing to play out. but the fact the animation is running means you already failed to dodge in terms of what the game has calculated - the enemy, as it were, left clicked their mouse slightly before you see them hit you.

that's how I see it anyway. It's comparatively rare any enemy manages to pull this on me, even stronger ones that can and do kill me in the regular way with big warhammers. So the game is, to me, clearly satisfying a bunch of variables before it allows it to happen. And, like I said, if I do it to an enemy the actual blow falls after I clicked to make the blow (only noticeably with things like warhammers as swords are so fast) - so it seems logical the game calculates the enemy did the same.

Whatever the case, it happens so rarely (to me at least) I can't see it as any kind of major issue. I do it to enemies all the time - the fact they occasionally do it back to me is, as far as I'm concerned, simply giving me a taste of my own medicine once in a while.

The moral of the story is if you're fighting a strong enemy with a warhammer, don't give the game a chance to (metaphorically) register the enemy left clicked their mouse, register you're in the way of that blow, register it is fatal and trigger an animation that gives you the illusion you have plenty of time to dodge when as far as the game is concerned you're already dead. I can't stress that enough - when an animation triggers you are already dead in the eyes of the game. You're seeing something that as far as it's concerned already happened.

The issue is, like you say, you don't actually see the blow coming. The game simply calculates it happened. Them's the breaks. You don't see it coming when a dragon grabs you and does its killing move. You perform killing moves all the time and your enemy has no chance to avoid them. So it gets thrown back at you once in a while. So what? Learn to minimise the chances of it happening and accept what you dish out can be dished out back at you if the game calculates certain variables are in place.