What games are you playing and why?

...I don't understand why people are so offended by the combat system. Not an attack, just curiosity. What's so bad about it?

 

It doesn't work. It's a 2D Isometric system implemented into a 3D first-person (or third) environment. A dice-roll/chance system works if you're not controlling the weapon yourself, but if you're stabbing and missing, the system is broken.

Morrowind's combat system is so shockingly poor it's unbelievable.

 

If i remember it right it just felt bad. Nobody would have complained if that would have been a round-based combat, but in a real time combat, sloppy animations like those just feel strange. All they changed up to skyrim is basically the kind of animation feedback you get from hits and that changes feeling of the game a lot. Actually its not a bad system most people mean i think, its the animations to be exact.

 

The combat system in Morrowind may have been not too good, but it's still a good game.
Oblivion's system was easier by far, but it had it's own fair share of oddness.

At the very least, setting the attack and defend bonuses in the console will help you not miss and not be hit.
Except from Skeleton Archers, who have magical powers to hit you.

Also, Althea, there are plenty of mods for the game, enough people enjoyed the game, despite it's very bad combat system.

 

No, I think they balanced combat a lot better in Oblivion. What they did, as far as I can tell, is removed hit chance completely and instead your weapon skills affect how much damage you do, your chance of criticals and other special effects and so on. If you hit someone in the face with a warhammer, whether you've got a Mace skill of 1 or 100, you're going to have a 'hit'.

If you're going to have a hit chance element in that type of combat, you need an animation system (and a combat system) to support that. Morrowind didn't, Oblivion doesn't and nor does Skyrim.

None of which 'fixed' the combat.

 

Well, true, because even with source code manipulation, from the Morrowind Code patch, it can't be fixed.
It's in the engine.
No fan can change that.
The closest is the attack/defend bonus using the console.

I'm simply saying, you shouldn't condemn the game to hell for that.

 

It's not like there aren't ways to make it more normal, like changing the accuracy values of weapons (via making them give a few combat levels) and increasing armour of enemies; sure, a lot of work, but it is possible to do it.
But yeah, combat in the unmodded Morrowind is broken. Not broken enough to make it impossible to enjoy playing the game, but broken nonetheless.

 

You shouldn't have to do that, though. What's the point of an "open world" game like Morrowind if you have to be forced to play a certain way to even have a chance at succeeding in the opening area?

Morrowind does some things right, from what I've played, but the lack of a truly functional combat system is what kills it for me, especially as I pretty much only ever play melée characters. Some people can stomach that, others have tried to fix it. Fine, kudos to them and I wholly support that. But for me? No, I find Morrowind's combat to just not work for me at all and that stops me being able to enjoy the game.

 

I thought Morrowind was great, despite its flaws (and there were flaws). It was innovative, it was big, it was open, it gave you so much freedom, so many different ways of playing -- that's what I loved about it. You also have to look at it as a continuing evolution of a way of doing games that started with Arena, continued with Daggerfall, and so on. These were all huge, open games, none of them perfect. But you can see the striving towards something better with each game (even with the mistakes, each game appeared to at least be, overall, a step in the right direction). And you couldn't have had Skyrim without first having Morrowind and Oblivion to work off of, with all of their imperfections to learn from, and their success to build on.

In any case, and I know this will be considered Blasphemy to those who consider Morrowind to be the Holy Grail, the worst part of Morrowind was the jumping and the skill system with the jumping jumping jumping everywhere all the time jumping. (Did I mention the game encouraged jumping always and everywhere?).

 

Oh, totally. My 'perfect' game would be a mix between Skyrim and Oblivion, to be honest. I enjoyed wandering around Oblivion a lot more than I did Skyrim, and Oblivion didn't have f**king Falmer Ruins all over the place (ARRRRRGHHHH RRAAAAAAGGGGGGEEEEEE).

Oblivion was as ugly as sin at times, and had some questionable design, but when you got down to the world? The geography, the landscape? I think it blows Skyrim out of the water. It had some lovely diversity in the areas you walked in (forests, cities, villages, towns, mountains and so on). Sure, the Oblivion gates totally ruined it fairly early on, but if you ignored the main quest line you could get a lot out of Oblivion.

Skyrim feels almost too big, and not quite as diverse. In a way its move to realism has dulled it - in the same way, almost, that the move to realism dulled GTA IV - and I just never got the same sense of enjoyment from it.

 

I loved that Skyrim feels huge because I love exploring and discovering new things. That said, I do agree that Oblivion was prettier, mostly because it was brighter and more colorful.

I don't know if you ever played Oblivion with the OOO mod (Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul). He had ideas for overhauling all of the Oblivion gates but it never happened, probably because it would have been too huge a project on top of OOO itself. but it's one of those 'what if' type questions I'll always ponder.

 

I didn't, no. I tend to go for minor/cosmetic mods over large overhauls.

 

I've got no problems with Morrowind's combat system. I don't especially like it, but I also don't dislike it. It *is* functional: it does just what it was designed to do. True, it's not fancy, nor does it offer anything interesting in terms of a variety of moves; but there's nothing inherently bad about it in and of itself. It also offers one thing that neither Oblivion nor Skyrim do: a die roll to hit in place of the "always fit" attitude of FPS titles.

That said, I really do wish the developers had put in traps, and the ability to poison weapons, and a more discerning combat AI--which were added in Oblivion. Just my two cents.

And yes, Morrowind is on my drive, though I'm not playing it at the moment. I am playing Crusader Kings II with what little time I have available, and the beta of Fallen Enchantress.

 

It might do what it was designed to do, but that doesn't mean it has good design.

I could build a machine to poke egg yolks with a spoon, but what would be the point?

 

If I poke an egg with a spoon, I accomplish nothing. If I take a potion, cast a spell, ready a sword and shield I've enchanted, and fight against a brute wielding a large axe--and win, or lose--I've advanced the game past a combat, and either been rewarded for my actions or watch as my corpse lies bleeding away its supply of blood type on the ground. That seems to be a reasonable design. Unless of course you mean something else, and I'm misunderstanding you. If you want more combat options then I agree: Oblivion and Skyrim provide these. But what's available in Morrowind to me appears thoroughly adequate.

 

If you attempt to hit a giant dog-sized rat with a longsword (for which you took the skill) as it's nibbling at your kneecaps and you miss whilst seeing your sword go through its model, that is a broken-as-hell combat system and not the result of a correctly-functioning, logical design.

 

I would suggest that is not a broken combat system, but a problem with graphics. And no, I wouldn't expect to hit the rat if I have the agility of a stumbling idiot and just the basic knowledge of the right end of a sword to hold, which is basically what I'd start with. I'd expect to have to develop both my agility and my knowledge of the weapon--two very different things--to be able to deal with that rat. Either that, or carry around a large supply of Rodent Chow.

EDIT: Edited for sense. It is a bad idea to multitask after hernia surgery and the good meds.

 

I don't see how it's a problem with the graphics. The graphics are fine. The problem is that the visual feedback and the combat mechanics don't give a coherent picture, and I would argue that the latter is the problem, not the former.

 

When my character in Game X leans against a wall and you can see portions of him/her sticking out the other side, the issue isn't one of leaning; it's graphics. Or consider Oblivion: when I kill a goblin and it somehow flies 25 feet, the issue isn't combat. It's the physics engine.

So if graphics in Morrowind don't always mirror combat, it would seem to me that graphics are the issue, because the graphics are supposed to show what's going on. So let's assume the graphics were better able to model what is actually occurring in the code. What would still be wrong with the combat mechanics?

 

That's clipping in a non-impacting feature. It's a natural aspect of the way collision detection can work.

A graphics system to truly replicate Morrowind's combat system would be very, very hard to do. You'd need so, so many different animations, complex AI behaviour and so on. It's much simpler and easier to do it how they did in Oblivion/Skyrim.