Not true, I was disarmed by a Draugr shout at level 39, happened yesterday and I was like.... rage.

I am minded of Ganz's line toward the end of 48 Hours, where he says, "I don't believe it! I've been shot!" Maybe players do have opportunities to not just stand there and be hit, but are failing to act in time. Maybe players are in various stages of denial over their own failures, as is Ganz. Maybe players hold false opinions of theirs and their character's capabilities.

If a player did manage to interfere with an enemy's finisher, it would be impossible for him to know it, because there would be nothing to show him that it had happened. It would look as if he interrupted just another ordinary attack. So how do these players know that they can't interrupt finishers? They don't know and they can't know.

You can interrupt other attacks, so what is the rationale for saying that finishers are different?

You probably should have shouted sooner. Why wait? He was ready to swing, and then he swung. Maybe you had time to do something when you saw him prepare his attack, but you failed to mash your button before he swung. If realism is to be considered, maybe it should be considered that taking a deep breath and bellowing a controlled, well-formed shout might not happen as quickly as mashing a button or swinging a hammer (despite the slowness of a computer animation).

One way to look at this - that video posted a few pages ago, where the player dodges every single attack against him? I noticed that he was at full health. I can only assume that, given the system used, had he been at a low amount of health, he would have been stopped in his tracks and had his head bashed in with a killcam.

It's not all whining or player failings you know. An objective anolysis of the game mechanics would be nice...

I do believe the kill animation is caluclated by damage over health and.... chance base. When the damage could 1 hit kill you, there are chances to activate or not. Therefore someone i do believe is actually experienced some last sec evasion successfully, which is by chance the kill move is "true" but it is not triggered. So when he/she faced the similar situation but got a big kill move in face, they just can't accept it.

You know why they are called kill animations? Because they are special animations, as in, they look different, as in, I can tell the difference. So if the camera moves away and I can see the bandit swinging his hammer in slowmo, then I know the game prevented me from interrupting the attack.

A Fus or Feim does not take longer than swinging a large weapon, neither does rolling away or releasing the fireball I was already casting.

for realz?
you miss shooting an arrow right in the head of someone, seeing the arrow hit and no damage?

Morrowind's chance based system was much more realistic. The game should, of course, reflect misses by playing appropriate animations.

What's the big deal? If you face a situation like that, you start again from your last save. If you're smart, you have a lot of them.
I think these unpredictable things make the game more fun. If you go through the entire game always feeling like "I can handle all of this" it would definitely be less exciting for me.

Wow! gotta admit I've never heard that stance before. As still a frequent Morrowind player got to disagree 100% but it would be more tolerable with appropiate animations at least. Later combat system are actually what makes Morrowind hard to go back to despite its obvious unique virtues. If I could have the Morrowind world in its full glory with the combat though. I would never look back

Im using the npc immersion mod and got some adventurer come into my house wake me up to say, cover yourself up you should be ashamed, or something like that lol. I was like wth are you doing in my house??

You guys know that finishers ignore armour? They will kill you just as easy with fur armour as with Daedric.

There is a difference in making a game harder by making it more challenging and making it more annoying, and finishers fall into the second category.

I didn't say the system is better for a game, just that it's more realisitic from an RPG perspective.

If you hit someone with a sword, the damage you deal depends only on your strength, the sharpness of the blade and the opponent's armor. Assuming that you are at least able to hold the sword correctly, you skill is entirely irrelevant.
Where skill matters is whether you hit at all. Your oppenent will not just stand there, so you have to find a weakness in his defense, maybe feint the direction, be quick and aim precisely. If you could control all these things with your mouse, there would be no need for weapon skills in the game. But the game isn't this complex, so all these things are modeled into a single chance value determined by your ingame skill.

Imagine the other way (every strike hits, damage depends on skill) in reality. Would be weird, wouldn't it?
I'm afraid if you want to discuss this further we need a new thread.

If you do something that prevents a kill animation from happening, then how do you know you prevented a kill animation from happening? You can't know, because nothing exists to tell you that a kill animation is about to happen.

What do the animations preceding kill animations look like? I think they may look like normal attacks (or power attacks?) about to happen. If you don't want to risk a fatal hit, then move away, or try to knock your opponent off balance, or raise your shield. As you and others have said, if you wait for the kill animation to start, you are waiting too long. Anticipation may save you.

You say a Fus or a Feim takes less time, but what does your character say? The kill animation shows an extraordinary attack in slow motion, so you really can't judge how fast it is. In any case, your ability to react to the kill animation is irrelevant. Your chance to act is before the kill animation begins, not after. The game has already determined that your opponent hit you. Hopefully it calculated the hit fairly. Hopefully you had ample warning that a potential attack was pending.

I personally hate Morrowind's chance based system... Seriously, you miss 5 million times in a row and you are fighting a Scrib... That is seriously messed up.. I hope that never comes back...

You still don't get the main point: the animation begins to early. If it wasn't for the animation, I would have had more time to do something. But Skyrim decides that I would just stand there anyway and freezes the controls. It would be ok if I could interrupt the animation.

I am not waiting to long. At any other point in the fight it is a perfectly valid tactic to wait for the opponent to attack and, then, to interrupt him. The fact that the attack could potentially kill me should not affect my possibilites to evade or interrupt, but in with a kill animation, it does.

It didn't. That's what this thread complains about.

Ayup. If you could have potentially interrupted the attack, then you should be given that chance BEFORE the AI's killcam kicks in. If that means no AI killcams against player chars with a potential to interrupt their attacks, then so be it.

I don't see the problem. The bandit would have killed you with a normal or critical strike and the game registrated the kill so it activated the killing animation for variety. Things like this make me at least more careful at low health since the one who have almost killed me already can putll of a move that prevents me from healing(which works both ways. I have executed enemies at the same time as they have had a healing effect activate and they still died).

Maybe try being a two handed melee character on master, it is like Scorpion from Mortal Combat dragging you in with his grapple and wasting you. There is no escape and the chances of it happening are very very high, I eventually rage quit from master difficulty and turned it down a notch.
Most people don't suffer it as they tend to be stealth archers when playing in master.

Ah, the stealth archer build. Even without the benefit of 100% chameleon enchantments it still manages to be the most OP setup in the game.

I think I get the main point. I just don't believe it. I don't believe that the animation begins too early. The fight is already over when the animation plays, so it doesn't matter that Skyrim freezes the controls, so there is no point in even mentioning it.

What I would like to know is what happens just before the animation plays. How is a hit determined? What factors into your defense? A couple people say the hit determination ignores blocking, but they don't say how they know it, so why take their word for it? Maybe the hit determination is fair.

If an NPC is coming at me with his weapon cocked back, I can surmise that an attack is pending. There is a chance that the coming attack will be an extraordinary and devastating attack that can't be avoided, so do I choose to give my enemy a chance to make it, or do I act? It's a gamble. If I put my shield up just before a finisher animation appears, why wouldn't the game take my shield into account and perhaps abort the finisher? A quote in the game manual says, "Battle is about the offense, about catching your foe early and never relenting." Maybe it's right.

In condemning Skyrim's handling of NPCs' finishers, nothing has been said of anticipating attacks. There is only talk of waiting for an attack to start and then reacting to it. That sounds like a bad practice. In real life, in sports for instance, you often have to anticipate your opponent's move, because if you wait until he starts his move, you miss your chance to counter it.

As an actual swordsman and martial artist I disagree. Knowing how to strike and your skill makes an enormous difference in how much damage you do and how much force you apply. a smaller well trianed fighter can hit harder than a poorly trained larger man. Obviously in extreme differnces in stregth this isn't true but skill does make a huge differnce in striking power. But you right we digress.