Dan Vavra presents: "100 reasons, why I hate Skyrim."

Hand maid you say?

 

I guess I knew what he was thinking about.

 

The best combat in first person RPGs would have to be Wizardry combat and that's "pretty good" whereas Daggerfall and the other Elder Scrolls games would be more like painful or perhaps tolerable. Can't really remember non-party first person RPGs that had enjoyable combat though if Deus Ex and SS2 count then they had combat that could be said to okay.

There are more differences. Morrowind has many quests that have multiple ways to solve them for example. And there is more variation in the quests and more of a sense of progression (that has nothing to do with the ranks.)

For example in Daggerfall Mages Guild when you reach the 5th rank out of 10 (rep 40) you will not get new types of quests and instead will repeatedly do the same quests in a slightly different way. And there are only about 10 different quest types whereas in Morrowind you have some thirty or so different quests which will not repeat. And yes, at the end you can become the master (and even there you have two different ways to do it)

Morrowind can also expel you from guilds by the way (though there are ways to get back in.)

 

Yes, handmaiden dungeon would be welcome too.

 

Actually no. I when confronted by enemy NPCs in melee the foolproof tactics trumping any sort of numerical advantage is running backwards while waving your mouse left and right, you know you have a problem. Even Morrowind had better combat although swinging in the direction of mouse movement was a good idea.

Also, +to-hit on materials was a horrid idea.

Advancing to mastery is bad idea (especially when it lacks consequences), but there were mutually exclusive organizations in Morrowind (great houses) and even Skyrim (civil war).

Additionally Daggerfall had mostly really bad quests a significant majority of which sent you dungeons for horribly contrived reasons:
-ohai we need some mummy wrappings
-great, I'll see local alchemist right away, or go to the local dungeon I know that is full of mummies!
-nono, we need particular bit of mummy wrappings, it's somewhere in dungeon of horrid doom and will be laying in a closet or in the middle of corridor for no discernible reason
-wait what.

Morrowind's quests might not have been particularly innovative, but they often intermeshed in interesting manner, allowed alternate solutions when it was logical for them and were generally pretty flexible. Even such little things as having to account for player having fulfilled the conditions beforehand because objectives were not spwaned on demand helped.

Being able to get kicked out for stuff like failing quests was awesome, though.

for this part.

 

Daggerfall's combat is quite very elegant, full of behind-the-scenes intricacies and it's actually (in my opinion) fun as opposed to most other first person "action" combat (to weed out static combat like Wizardry). MW's combat, in comparison, while built upon the correct RP fundamentals, is inaptly implemented. You know something is wrong when you miss a fucking mudcrab constantly for 50 swings. It's not pulling acrobatics on you FFS. There is a lot of factors behind TH in Daggerfall. It's pretty wooden and flawed in MW.

Therefore, exploits of DF combat > shortcomings of MW combat.

Furthermore, it would be far simpler to fix the exploits in DF combat than to improve the combat mechanics in MW.

I think TH per materials is meant it to represent how easier it's to control a weapon with improved (and lighter) materials. But yes, it wasn't a particularly good implementation on its own but it isn't terrible either, considering it's both a TH and damage bonus. As far as the traditional linear damage scaling in RPGs goes, I think it's still a good system.

It was a particular mummy used in a magical experiment gone wrong, of course you need that particular mummy!



All true. Still I liked DF questing much better. A lot of things felt so bland and effortless in MW.

 

This problem gets overblown way too much. The only time you'll really miss enemies with any great frequency is at the beginning of the game.

 

All TES had completely broken combat. Only challenge in them was mazes in first two.

 

Yeah, even if you put all the combat skills as miscellaneous and deliberately choose low agility, common enemies aren't that hard to hit.

 

Unless you are out of fatigue.

 

Not any more than Morrowind's. I would even argue that less so - stagger, range, weapon attack rate, blocking, and knockdown (not KO!) were all exclusive to MW. I also don't think DF had nonlinear damage reduction as part of its armor system. It had an elegant control scheme, but no more than that. Ok, it had damage multiplier for whacking skeletons with a maul.

Except some were actually heavier. Morrowind is the closest the series came to actual interesting material system, and the furthest it departed from + notation of D&D.

Different quest template. I'm not speaking of hunting down escaped whatever.

...while out of fatigue and swinging a weapon you're totally unfamiliar with.

Anyway, I would overhaul such system with auto-hitting in melee unless target dodges or otherwise defends itself (blocks, parries) depending on its ability to do so. If hit is registered then all that's left is aftermath - does damage get through and how much, what other effects occur (for example strike fails to damage the target, but knocks it down) and so on.

BTW: This reminds of some dude talking about his first adventure in Morrowind when he was a spoiled brat - after getting a weapon (no armour, I think) and running around SN like headless chicken (exhausting his fatigue) he decided to attack some random villager (Eldafire, possibly) on this small plank bridge over about knee-deep water. He missed, then got punched in the face, fell into the water and drowned before he could get back up.

What an n'wah.

 

That shit happend to me... was kinda cool.

 

Combat doesn't work in any TES game, because it's half reaction based and half rpg based. You either go top down and rpg based where your experience of combat is abstract enough for a hit to be a glancing blow or one through the head, making it all skill/stat based. Or you go skill based and do something that only now a fucking indie dev figured out in Chivalry: Medieval Warfare.

Eh, maybe a hybrid could work. I envision something like Chivalry, where the combat difficulty is increased the lower your skills are. Basically the combat is skill based, but you get gimped in lower levels, and it's real easy to move around and stab people in the face with a maxed out skill.

 

RPG and skill mixes ok. Hit roll = skill, damage roll = char.

Combat system is not working in TES, because RPG system is not working in TES.

 

There's Gothic's option where as your character learns how to wield a weapon, he actually used the weapon better. It works really well, but you have to find someway to tell the AAA playing retards it gets better if your character is better at it (Start the game as a different character who is already good?).

 

^include a temporary item that gives you very little to no attack but a hefty skill % boost that they can test around a bit, and then have it taken away and/or become obsolete?

 

Finding a magic item of proficiency, which boosts you up to a fixed amount rather than adding to your skills, could work.

 

This.

If you're using detailed, in-your-face presentation along with direct control action scheme, direct to-hit rolls become too coarse abstraction, but that doesn't mean that skill influence on hitting target should be abolished.

Speed, recovery from attack, penetration penalty, precision, consequences of misses, parries and blocking, effectiveness of your own parries, etc.
We can parametrize animations today, we can have multiple animations depending on skill (and then parametrize them to smooth stuff out).

Scaling damage is just asking for trouble, because it's overreliant on the shittiness that is HP and forces bloat.

 

Skyim completely aside, bitching about massive open world games having glitches and one broken quest for every hundred others is retarded. These kinds of games will never, ever launch bug free, nor should we really expect them to.

 

I don't know, I am not sure if level scaling has to be a problem, if it is done right.

Wizardry 6 and Daggerfall were level scaled. In both loot and enemies.

But rather than have goblins with bloated hit points and rock hard armour at high levels, those games simply had a list of enemies corresponding to each level and simply picked an enemy from that list. Daggerfall started sending fire daedra towards you after level 10, but the fire daedra did not become stronger with level. Moreover, simply having higher hit points and attack damage didn't help against higher level enemies, whose specialty was in changing the rules of the game completely rather than being stronger. Ancient vampires used invisibility, paralysis, and poison attacks on the player, and the player had to find a way to save himself from ancient vampires using resistance to paralysis,.etc.

 

Those enemies didn't need the scaling however, and they weren't good because of it. Handmade content always beats generated randomization bullshit. Unless, we are talking about a game like Titan Quest. Where everything is hand made, but enemies are placed with the spraycan tool.

 

There's nothing wrong with wanting the whole world open at level one, otherwise we end up with MMO zone funnels which are fucking horrible.

The problem is you can still have dangerous high level areas within a complete open world. Skyrim actually improved on this from Oblivion, as most of the higher elevation areas were guarded by relatively high level sabercats and trolls, which stopped a level one character from fully exploring them. It was still a little too scaled, but it was much better than Oblivion in this way. I would take the Skyrim compromise over a zone system any day.

 

Bump and

Pretty much this.

Shit, I'm starting to miss VoTS.