Review Bloodmoon roughed up at Games Xtreme

Tags: Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon

<A href="http://www.morrowind.com">Morrowind: Bloodmoon</a> takes a beating from the guys over at <A href="http://www.gamesxtreme.com/">Games Xtreme</a> in <a href="http://www.gamesxtreme.com/review/271.shtml">this review</a>, which basically says it's <i>too little, too late</i>. The reviewer scored it a <b>60%</b> saying it could have been more and could have been more different than <a href="http://www.morrowind.com">Morrowind</a>, which he burned out on a while ago. Here's a clip:
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<blockquote>The bottom line with the game is this: if you liked Morrowind and want more of the same, Bloodmoon will be perfect for you. It's more or less exactly like Morrowind, which I suppose is to be expected from an expansion. If you feel you were more or less done with Morrowind and have no real desire to keep playing in the same vein, you should probably look elsewhere. This expansion doesn't offer much besides more places to explore, more quests to complete, and more monsters to fight. Good for some people, not so good for others. You decide which category you fall into.</blockquote>
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<i>More monsters to fight</i> doesn't really appeal to me since I didn't really enjoy the combat in the game to begin with.
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Spotted this at <a href="http://bluesnews.com">Blue's News</A>.

 

This guy's obviously just in it for the combat.

He doesn't seem to have any appreciation for the vastness of the world and all of its content that made the game engrossing for me and just about everyone who likes it. Tsk. They should stop getting counterstrike addicts to review RPGs.

 

Well, you have to admit, the combat in the game, especially the melee, really sucks. One of the main reasons I don't like first person CRPGs is mainly because the combat in all of them is really, really lousy.

 

I can't concieve of how melee combat in the first person can possibly work. When you think about FPS's, the analogue of moving the mouse to aim and pressing fire is a reasonable abstraction of aiming and firing a gun. Doing the same thing with a sword and a shield doesn't work nearly as well.

 

I agree the melee wasn't too much fun, but I rather enjoyed ranged; once I got my skills in ranged pumped up and acrobatics I could usually snipe beasties and bad guys before they got close enough for any prolonged melee. If I couldn't I usually snuck by, which is also quite cool once you get good at it. I did like the way char skill was implemented - while not perfect it was nice that your char's skills determined the outcome of combat more than player skill.
More tedious to me than melee was the plethora of generic crypts, tombs etc. Combat to me was never what kept me engaged - exploration did.
I find myself playing MW for a while, then taking a break then going back. The next Elder Scroll game will hopefully improve on MW - if they can keep the immersion/huge world to explore and beef up NPCs and perhaps make the dungoens more distinct - wow.

 

Well, how's this for an intuitive melee interface? Left hand moves using the keyboard, right hand stabs/slashes.

 

I think the way Gothic II handles melee combat is pretty slick. Since aiming is a no brainer in melee combat it presents a solid timing challenge. It reminds me of wooden sword fights with my brother back in the day, where you'd actually feint, look for openings, lunge, at least until one of you decides the quickest way to end the battle is to attack the knuckles wrapped around your enemies sword.