Cavalry

[beardie]

Actually, not really, since you can pretty much pin a time period for Oblivion and The Lord of the Rings through simple deduction. Lets see: They commonly use swords, and bows. They have Counts, Countesses and the like. There are Armies. Bandits are relatively common. They have Priests, Monks, and whatever else like them. They have a Capital and other, lesser towns. What is it? Bumpdadabuuuuuump: The Middle Ages! Unless of course i'm wrong, and they never used weapons while on horses in the Middle Ages, or these things don't come close to adding up to the middle ages, or both, then take a mallet to my head, and explain it to me!

 

 

You are quite right, but there is a ˝subtle˝ difference beetwen Oblivion and Lord of the Rings: in LOTR, have you ever heard of Counts and Countesses(besides Eomer)? Have you heard of priests and monks? No, because there is(to quote): ˝a power that does not sleep˝, so it was a perilous time, (just like in Oblivion), but do we have magic in Middle-Earth? Of course not, unless you are counting the Elves of Lothlorien, Rivendell, and Grey Havens, but they were islands of magic, and in Oblivion you could cast any spell anywhere(if you were a Master in all schools of magic, and were not silenced). So how do you expect to have priests when you cannot cast any kind of magic, and there were no gods which the monks could worship(Valars not included). So how can you expect to compare Oblivion with Middle-Earth when there is almost no similarity between these two worlds.

[Switch]

Hmm. This discussion has really been done a lot of times. I guess I'll leave it open for now, so long as it doesn't degenerate into "omg beth sux i want mounted combat" type stuff. ;)

 

Anyways, this belongs in Modifications. Moving...

[WarKirby3333]

Has anyone tried organising a petition to Bethesda for mounted combat? If we can show them that enough people want it they will surely do it for the profit.

 

I'll be the first to sign.

 

WarKirby

[GBHis]

Ya it doesnt make much sense to give a horse armor if it does not help him in battle :huh:

Ya, the magic fits quite well into the given period. Good realism.

The sword totally suck. At that time, they had halberds and axes, not swords. Common lore. :)

Oblivion is a fantasy game. Where is Tamriel today..?

[lyth]

Tamriel? It's just on the far side of Atlantis. Fourth door on the left. Looks like a big Oblivion Gate. You can't miss it. Just be careful you don't enter the door that looks like a big fiery eye just across from it or you'll be dropped right in the middle of some big fight over a ring of invisibility.

 

On that note, does anyone else think the Oblivion gates look like big fiery eyes?

 

Back on topic, axes and maces were more common horseback weapons as swords tended to be less effective against armoured cavalry. Claymores, flamberges, halberds & other polearms, etc which were more effective against horses were all unmounted weapons. Lances worked well against both, but it's a shame to destroy an expensive horse if you didn't have to.

 

To me, a bigger problem than the lack of mounted combat (I just try to keep in mind that the horses are kind of like expensive boots of blinding speed) is that the horses get killed constantly. If a bandit sees you, and you jump off your horse to fight him instead of having the sense to ride away, I'd think he'd kill you and try capturing the horse rather than killing the horse then trying to kill you. Doesn't make sense to me.

 

Then again, nor does deciding that you aren't going to feature mounted combat (among other features) in a game because it requires coding it into the engine. Most development teams include coders. Where are Bethesdas..?

 

@Warkirby - Actually, I think there was a petition requesting mounted combat that got quite a few signatures before the game was out. It might have been a different feature, though, but whatever it was, it still wasn't included.

[GBHis]

Oblivion gates look very much like the eye of Sauron (from LOTR)

 

Actually, I found some mesh/game variable deep inside the CS named something with "Mordor." I thought. "Ehm". This should be "Oblivion," right?

[batesmotel34]

...

Back on topic, axes and maces were more common horseback weapons as swords tended to be less effective against armoured cavalry. Claymores, flamberges, halberds & other polearms, etc which were more effective against horses were all unmounted weapons. Lances worked well against both, but it's a shame to destroy an expensive horse if you didn't have to.

 

To me, a bigger problem than the lack of mounted combat (I just try to keep in mind that the horses are kind of like expensive boots of blinding speed) is that the horses get killed constantly. If a bandit sees you, and you jump off your horse to fight him instead of having the sense to ride away, I'd think he'd kill you and try capturing the horse rather than killing the horse then trying to kill you. Doesn't make sense to me.

 

Then again, nor does deciding that you aren't going to feature mounted combat (among other features) in a game because it requires coding it into the engine. Most development teams include coders. Where are Bethesdas..?

....

Axes and maces are more effective against heavily armored opponents whether mounted or dismounted and came into favor in Medieval Western Europe as plate armor came into use. They seem to have always been more popular in Eastern Europe and the Mid East as a matter of taste rather than purely of effectiveness.

 

Two handed weapons that require lots of space/room to use are some what less practical on horseback than on foot. That's more the reason why the weapons you list were primarily used on foot in Europe although various forms of halberd/poleaxe/naginata/etc were used by mounted troops in China and Japan for example.

 

The best remedy I've found to horse mortality in game is horse armor which doubles the horses hit points. This seems to do enough to greatly improve their survivability.

 

Every project I've worked on as a software engineer has had to make decisions about what would and what would not be included in a new release. There are always more things that it would be nice to include but there is always an attendant cost in time, money and resources that is incurred to add them. My impression about mounted combat from what Bethesda people have said at various points is that it was decided to leave it out as they honed the current melee system and realized that it wasn't pratically extensible to handle mounted combat with the model they used. Unlike Daggerfall where combat was relatively abstract and mounted combat was just like foot combat except you could move faster and saw a horse's head in your view, that level of handling mounted combat would feel completely wrong in the context of Oblivion. In the end I think they probably did make the right decision in leaving mounted combat out of Oblivion rather than doing it badly. On the other hand they certainly could have found a bettter interface to handle transition from being attacked while mounted and needing to dismount to be able to actually fight back, as well as changing NPC/monster AI to first attack the player who is the real threat to them rather than concentrating on the horse.

[sacredstick]

yeah, whats the point in dismounting to fight and then losing the advantage of horseback, come on bethesda its common sense!

[lyth]

Axes and maces are more effective against heavily armored opponents whether mounted or dismounted and came into favor in Medieval Western Europe as plate armor came into use. They seem to have always been more popular in Eastern Europe and the Mid East as a matter of taste rather than purely of effectiveness.

 

Two handed weapons that require lots of space/room to use are some what less practical on horseback than on foot. That's more the reason why the weapons you list were primarily used on foot in Europe although various forms of halberd/poleaxe/naginata/etc were used by mounted troops in China and Japan for example.

 

The best remedy I've found to horse mortality in game is horse armor which doubles the horses hit points. This seems to do enough to greatly improve their survivability.

 

Every project I've worked on as a software engineer has had to make decisions about what would and what would not be included in a new release. There are always more things that it would be nice to include but there is always an attendant cost in time, money and resources that is incurred to add them. My impression about mounted combat from what Bethesda people have said at various points is that it was decided to leave it out as they honed the current melee system and realized that it wasn't pratically extensible to handle mounted combat with the model they used. Unlike Daggerfall where combat was relatively abstract and mounted combat was just like foot combat except you could move faster and saw a horse's head in your view, that level of handling mounted combat would feel completely wrong in the context of Oblivion. In the end I think they probably did make the right decision in leaving mounted combat out of Oblivion rather than doing it badly. On the other hand they certainly could have found a bettter interface to handle transition from being attacked while mounted and needing to dismount to be able to actually fight back, as well as changing NPC/monster AI to first attack the player who is the real threat to them rather than concentrating on the horse.

 

 

Very well stated Bates and much my point. In spite of my query about Bethesda's coders (which was partially facetious), I agree that in terms of the combat system they were refining, the designers probably did make the right choice. However, the implementation of choices they did make is oftimes lacking as with the example above. (Resulting in the high death rate of horses.) Other examples such as the levelled lists, the vampire shemale syndrome, numerous script and design errors revealed in the CS, etc give me an impression that there was too little devotion to the refinement and quality control that was stated as the reason for not including features. After spending much time going through the scripts looking for bugs in efforts to create a fix-pack, I'm rather disappointed with the quality of what I'm facing. In that, my query is not so facetious. Fortunately, a lot of the minor issues are possible for modders to patch in the CS.

 

As far as weapons in the middle-east however, one of the more well-chosen weapons was the scimitar, which was quite effective against unarmoured and lightly armoured opponents due to the long cutting edge. This is also why later cavalry (dragoons, in particular) begin wielding sabres. With the disappearance of heavy armour, axes and maces were less suited to the task, as I'm sure you know.

 

Actually, I found some mesh/game variable deep inside the CS named something with "Mordor." I thought. "Ehm". This should be "Oblivion," right?

 

*g* That's amusing.