Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Sky]

The knockdowns are what ruined Gothic III for me. I could deal with the stupid combat until you missed once, got knocked down by a wolf, and then got repeatedly stunlocked on the ground until you were dead.

Agreed, and they removed that for Risen. I lightly cheated in Gothic 2 but I was pretty blatant in 3 due to the knockdowns, straight Marvin Mode to God. Risen I hardly cheated at all, mostly gold and some LPs to get started.

[Tebonas]

Great, if the camera shakes can't be turned off my motion sickness will kick in and I'll puke all over my keyboard. Elder Scrolls with stunlocks sounds like the puke will be will deserved, though.

[Paelos]

It also depends on the knockdowns. Am I knocking things down or getting knocked down? Is it equal opportunity? Do my skills play into it? Am I getting knocked down more often in the beginning because I don't have these skills?

If it's a matter of skills, and the beginning is our hero getting put on his ass frequently, that will cost them in the reviews.

[Malakili]

Video game fighting is fun precisely because its not realistic the huge majority of the time.  Realistic medieval combat sounds especially bad.

[Paelos]

Yeah we don't play games in fantasy worlds for realism. Developers need to realize that. They also need to realize that absolutely any downtime you put in a combat situation on the player in a single-player game (be it stuns, knockdowns, mezzes, fears, etc) are going to piss them off. It's simply not necessary.

[Typhon]

If they implemented some rage mechanism whereby my character eventually went berserk if he was knocked down (cc'd) too much and I got to rip the head off of the fucker knocking me down (if I managed to survive to that point), then I'd be ok with that as a tradeoff.

[Malakili]

If they implemented some rage mechanism whereby my character eventually went berserk if he was knocked down (cc'd) too much and I got to rip the head off of the fucker knocking me down (if I managed to survive to that point), then I'd be ok with that as a tradeoff.

Its already implemented, its just replace my character with "me" and "the fucker knocking me down" with "my monitor."

Seriously though, it just sounds frustrating, there are few things I hate more (in games) than losing control over my character.

[ajax34i]

If they want us to specialize in one weapon type, they need to make each weapon type its own skill, and add special strikes / attacks that we can activate with the 1-8 quickslots.  You train up a magic school, you have quite a few spells to choose from and use.  By comparison, melee is dull/boring - you just swing, power-swing, and parry/block, and that's it.

And yes, that would make melee kinda like WoW's system.

[Sky]

"Hey guys, we're removing the auto-level content; improving the UI for the pc version; adding some depth and character to the dungeons."

Look, I fixed your fucking franchise, you knobs. Or just go ahead and keep pushing it further down the shitter. Civ V all over again imo.

And fuck WoW's melee system, snatch Rift's soul/melee system.

edit - I would like to thank the recent reminder of Bob & Doug's movie to re-insert hoserisms into my normal vocabulary. Also, my fiancee says fuck you all. Except nicer, without the cursing. More of a look, really. But, you know.

[Sheepherder]

Camera sway, knockdowns, staggers, and all that shit are already in Oblivion.  Also:

For instance, the sword perk increases your chances of landing a critical strike, the axe perk punishes enemies with residual bleeding damage after each blow, and the mace perk ignores armor on your enemies to land more powerful strikes.

I can tell you right now that maces > swords > axes, unless the axe bleed ignores armour, in which case it's maces > axes > swords.

[ajax34i]

What if "punishes" means "chops off limbs"?

[Sheepherder]

Then it would say "punishes enemies by cutting off their motherfucking limbs."

I missed this earlier, but I love how they've decided to add dual-wielding while proclaiming realism.

[rk47]

But...but...what about unarmed? 

[Slyfeind]

I always figured that if the place was inhabited by bandits, they would have gathered up and either be holding or have sold all the valuable shit by the time I got there any way, so it never bothered me.

Yeah this. Something that always eluded me about D&D when I was a wee lad, was the idea that enemies would be using the magic items in their hoard.

[Sheepherder]

Choose one:

a) They were in the process of looting when you showed up.
b) Boss Dragon/Lich/Mummy/Vampire/Gnoll/Orc/Ogre/etc... jealously hoards shit and eats underlings that borrow it.
c) Badicalthon rule #1: always identify, always.  It's your genitalia on the line.

[Lantyssa]

And fuck WoW's melee system, snatch Rift's soul/melee system.

I'm thinking something like Vindictus' combat system, personally.

[Sky]

Well, now. If we're going to get silly and invoke actually good systems, I'd dig up my old secret desire for a monk class based on Oni.

And a spell effect system based on Sacrifice.

[Typhon]

I'm with you on Oni, 100%

I'm actually really liking the spell system from Magicka - demented amounts of fun.

[Sheepherder]

More so than in Oblivion, Skyrim’s new magic system also gives players legitimate benefits to using one attacking spell over the other. Fire deals the highest amount of damage, lighting drains the enemy’s magicka, and frost drains stamina and slows down enemies physically. This gives players more incentive to use particular spells against specific enemies. Why shoot fireballs at a wizard when you can simultaneously drain his heath and magicka with a shock spell? “There’s a gaminess to it that we didn’t really have before,” Howard says.

[KallDrexx]

Revolutionary 

[Hawkbit]

Aside from anything said so far, I love the setting.  I always try to play big burly viking types (nord in oblivion!) and the fact that this is set in pretty much the land of the nords is awesome, for me.  I love the screenshots so far, mountains and snow.  Can't wait.

[Xilren's Twin]

Read that article in my son's Game Informer and at least it sounds like they are trying.   My favorite quote was the one about how they changed the inventory/skills/etc interface and they said "so we asked ourselves, what would Apple do?" 

Glad to see fallout style perks made it in.

[Sky]

While I'm making jabs at Bethesda, enough with the shitty head/face modeling. Go talk to 2k Czech or whoever the hell is doing their face tech. Going from Mafia 2 to F:NV is jarring, Bethesda's faces have been horrible since Morrowind, ffs.

[ajax34i]

Why shoot fireballs at a wizard when you can simultaneously drain his heath and magicka with a shock spell? “There’s a gaminess to it that we didn’t really have before,” Howard says.

Someone should let him know that we either want to kill the wizard fast, in which case we want to damage health fastest way possible, or we want to mess with mana, in which case we need a spell that transfers mana to us, which shock doesn't do.

I always make my own spells anyway, because their spell names are confusing.  I want fireball, fire bolt, and fire touch all sorted under "Damage, Fire", next to "Damage, Frost" and "Damage, Shock," at the beginning of the spellbook.

[Paelos]

Who's not going to chose fire?

This spell does the most damage, this one...

You can stop right there, hoss. All the gamers just checked a box and moved on.

[Ingmar]

Who's not going to chose fire?

This spell does the most damage, this one...

You can stop right there, hoss. All the gamers just checked a box and moved on.

FROST SHOCK

There are plenty of secondary effects that you can put on spells that will make people want to use them. Snares have trivialized way more RPG fights than big damage nukes ever have.

[ajax34i]

Elder Scrolls games let you customize your spell effects, so part of Sheepherder's is that we've been able to drain health and magicka at the same time since Morrowind, and I mean damage the wizard's health so he dies, and at the same time transfer his mana pool to myself, which is much more useful that the Skyrim version of the Shock spell.

I could see Shock being useful if all wizards have an auto-self-rez if you kill them without draining their mana first.  Cause otherwise, dead is dead, mana-drained or not.  Also, Howard isn't mentioning the fact that spells with multiple effects cost a helluva lot more mana to cast than spells with one effect.  So we keep finding valid answers to his rhetorical question of "Why shoot fireballs?"

[Paelos]

This would have had more impact on me if I'd ever played a caster in any Elder Scrolls game.

[NowhereMan]

The only tactic that made sense to me in Morrowind as a caster was getting a levitation spell and lots of summons. Except I never had the patience to actually play a caster long enough for them to get powerful enough for me be able to basically stop playing the game, so I would stop playing.

[Paelos]

I just ran around smashing things with a 2Her while learning healing spells in my own made up class called the Jedi Knight! 

[Sky]

For today's wishlist for an aggregate gaming experience, the stealth aspects should be as good as Thief.

[Job601]

For today's wishlist for an aggregate gaming experience, the stealth aspects should be as good as Thief.

Thief's stealth gameplay was great because of its level design, moreso than its mechanics.   The Elder Scrolls games can't have the kind of detail oriented level design that makes stealth fun because they have too much content.  To some extent this is true of combat, too, and no matter how good their mechanics or how pretty their caves are it won't matter if every dungeon still has five haphazardly placed guys running at you from random directions.

[Ingmar]

That sort of level design philosophy is hard to fit properly into an open world too.

[Sky]

Well, yeah. But the mechanics of the AI, the awareness states (NOT COUNTING THIEF 3), the monologues, etc. The functioning light meter and sound that played off surfaces (even if Garrett wore hard heels for some reason).

Also, it's not my fault that it's Elder Scrolls Vs Sky!

[Sheepherder]

Elder Scrolls games let you customize your spell effects, so part of Sheepherder's is that we've been able to drain health and magicka at the same time since Morrowind, and I mean damage the wizard's health so he dies, and at the same time transfer his mana pool to myself, which is much more useful that the Skyrim version of the Shock spell.

Alchemy is good the way it is, since the best way to train it is to eat zombie and nightshade until it becomes poisonous hundreds of pounds later.  Just like real life.  I eagerly await eating several tons of steel scrap, raw rabid bear meat, and Draugr flesh in TES:V.

I'm somewhat tempted to go into detail about the problems Oblivion has with mechanics, editor functionality, and in-game engine issues.  That might call for it's own threadnaught though, because there's so goddamn much of it.