Facing the reality, I'll never be pleased with the combat in Skyri

[HideInLight]

Lack of skills, time and motivation, plenty of ideas how to improve but those ideas will just disappear. Everytime I fire up another game, they just do things better, systems feel more refined and the feel of it is just overall better.

 

No matter what you do in Skyrim it will always be a war of stats, stats that aren't reallty accessable and with it's effectiveness dependant on artificial difficulty scaling.

You won't get awesome fluined visceral feeling of Batman Arkham City, or the unreal fast paced action of DmC. What about having the weapon actually react to the environment like in Dark Souls, where hitting the wall feels like hitting a damn wall?

 

I could say lets create a system, where weapon does for example 24 pure dmg + 24 Physical Where the Physical gets reduced by armor rating and the pure dmg only gets reduced by block. That may improve things number wise, but still it just won't "Feel" as good as it does in other game.

Edited April 6, 2013 by HideInLight

[BlackCompany]

Ahh the same painful reality I stumbled onto recently. I love exploring the big, open world. Building my character and experiencing my own unique stories.

 

And then there's the combat.

 

Apparently, Bethesda decided it was perfectly ok to that the activity that comprises 90% of their game receive 10% of their development time. Again. This is the reason why Skyrim is the last Bethesda-Developed game I will ever buy. Their combat was horrible in Oblivion and I let it slide. Ditto for Fallout 3, which featured the WORST AI of any shooter, ever. And now we have Skyrim. Same systems, same engine. Same mistakes.

 

I have given Bethesda a pass 3 times. With CDProjekt more and more focused on open world games - and the same for Ubisoft and others now - I see Bethesda as going from the one to beat in the open world race, to falling deservedly into last place.

[ArtMurder]

Try out Duke Patricks mod. This really makes skyrim feel like a totally different game, and much more realistic.

 

I personally feel games like DmC to be extremely boring. Just because you kill 900 enemies in 2 minutes doesn't make the game fun.

 

Also, that's generally how RPGs work. RPGs are built on stats, there is no way to get around that, and if you don't like games based on stats, then maybe skyrim isn't the best game for you? Games like Skyrim are a 'war on stats' for a reason, because stats simulate skill, RPG games are a progression of skill, if you want to be good at something you have to get BETTER at it, not just farm money/gold to buy a powerful new sword that does 500% more damage.

 

Also, I have to totally disagree with BlackCompany's post, Skyrim is much better then oblivion, which had some of the dullest, poorly made combat Bethesda has ever shelled out (still a good game though) I honestly feel Skyrim was a step back in the right direction, where your character build actually MATTERS. In oblivion, no matter what you did your character ended up being the fabled 'warrior-mage-thief' PURE magic builds were basically unplayable, and your choice in weapon had no effect on gameplay. Even in vanilla skyrim, your choose of weapons and magic has a huge effect on your game play. You can play through as a pure mage and fight your battles intelligently, you can play as a brute idiot and get the biggest sword and hardest armor you can find and run head first into the enemy flailing and slashing, or you can trick and evade the enemy, and even make them fight amongst themselves. It's not near the level of depth you saw in morrowind, but overall, Skyrim has the best vanilla combat of any TES or Fallout game release in my opinion, since Morrowinds was very slow and finicky. The fact is, EVERY game could have more effort put into it, but companies don't have the luxury of spending as much time as they want on a game, fans like to forget this kind of thing. Especially since Bethesda has a lot of other games to work on, including TESO.

 

Compare skyrim to some of the other most popular games the past few years. The new Halo, the same Call of Duty game again renumbered for your pretend pleasure, whatever Mario game nintendo spat out, borderlands 2 the same contentless game with 16 billion more guns, final fantasy 66-96.000938 and a half or whatever pointlessly confusing number they are on, and the exact same Assassin's creed.. again. With the only exception being Bioshock Infinite Most games now-a-days suck, badly, and are pointless carbon copies of the first game in the series. Skyrim was much better and much different then Oblivion, and is in my opinion one of the best games ever made, up there with morrowind, the first bioshock, L4D2, and SotC. Yes, it could have been a lot better, but every game could be better, and bethesda is very much still the 'to-beat' when it comes to open world games, and nothing has changed that. The only other decent open world games recently released NOT by bethesda are SR3, the new infamous, and, well that's about it for the decent ones. And the company behind SR3 recently went under and is being sold off piece by piece, so they are not the 'to-beat' company for anything.

 

The fact is Skyrim was much, much more successful then Oblivion, just look at the difference between the Skyrim nexus and the Oblivion nexus if you don't believe me, the most endorsed skyrim file has TEN TIMES as many endorsements as the most endorsed Oblivion file, keeping in mind that Oblivion has been out for what, 4 times as long as Skyrim? Not to mention Bethesda made what half a billion dollars off Skyrim? I don't know about you, but I would consider half a billion dollars a pretty good success. Considering, THQ, the makers of SR3 aren't the only company going belly up right now. If skyrim HAD actually gone belly up, Bethesda might not be doing as well as it is now.

[Honorgirl]

@ArtMurder

 

I agree completely with your post. Could Skyrim have been better? Sure, but so can pretty much every game out there. Skyrim is an improvement on oblivion and many ways (except perhaps maybe that Oblivion had spell crafting and skyrim sadly did not) and I still after 1300 hours of playing the game, thoroughly enjoy it.

[BrotherBob]

RPG games are a progression of skill, if you want to be good at something you have to get BETTER at it, not just farm money/gold to buy a powerful new sword that does 500% more damage.

When I read this, I thought of Dark Souls; you "buy" stats and better weapons with souls (the currency). I can't tell you how many hours I spent grinding for souls. Some RPG's don't require that you continually use a skill to get better at it.