Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
The game will soon fix that.
Hey, the combat is consistently great throughout.
Everything else about the game goes straight to shit once you hit Gran Soren, but the combat is awesome.
The game's combat is awesome if you have some method of healing yourself above 50% HP between fights. >
Healing items? The game gives you so many of them that I've been having serious problems with being overencumbered from all the herbs I'm lugging around.
The game gave me like ten and then said "NO SCREW YOU NO HEALING ITEMS FOR YOU >
".
Make sure to take woodland routes instead of the roads, and bear in mind that item mixing can turn most of the useless non-healing herbs you find all over the place into fairly nice healing items.
Taking the woodlands route leads to me dying by dragon. So no, fuck that.
How intrusive a system is partially depends on its complexity and partially depends on game balance. A system closer to Dark Souls with Skyrim's balance would be completely non-intrusive, since you're using most of the same combat functions (with more versatility than vanilla Skyrim provides) but without the level of skill Dark Souls requires.
Again, I'm not saying the Dark Souls system or balance should be transplanted into Skyrim. But if you want a system to be engaging, you typically need players to stop and think about it for a bit and put at least a bit of effort into getting a bit more out of it. Otherwise you find yourself at square one, with all of Skyrim's initial combat problems -- combat will fail to provide engagement. There has to be some kind of strategic or tactical reasoning process on the part of the player for them to be engaged, otherwise it's just a matter of character build and how quickly they can click.
But again: Skyrim is full to the brim with combat. It's certainly true that it's less combat-oriented than Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, Dragon's Dogma and other comparable games, but the player must necessarily go through a certain amount of combat to get anything done in the game. Fail to up the ante on combat with system modifications, though, and the modifications will make no difference. For the combat to be better and more engaging, it must necessarily be more versatile and must necessarily be more difficult -- if only a little, and only at certain times. As it stands, one of the biggest issues with Skyrim's combat is that it has no handle on combat resources such as HP, stamina and time, so any improvement would have to introduce those as more substantial considerations -- and therefore, the game would necessarily have to be more difficult to justify using the new system elegance.
That's true, and there's a variety of ways the differences of requirement could be implemented. But for my money, Skyrim's combat is already based on many of the same mechanics as Dark Souls' combat, just done much worse. So (as I keep saying), a game like Dark Souls works as a fantastic blueprint because it's a successful, widely-enjoyed example of the same or similar mechanics handled with much more elegance and deliberance. That's not to say (once again) that the systems ought to be transplanted, but instead that Dark Souls takes many of the same concepts that exist in Skyrim's combat and gives us better examples of their implementation, so it provides us with a strong starting point when it comes to improving Skyrim.
Okay, to be more specific: take woodlands routes, watch the horizion at every angle like a paranoid hawk on caffiene pills, and save a lot.
Okay. Look.
Ask yourself, why?
See why Skyrim is full of combat, and you'll see why people are arguing about this with you.
Fundamentally, because Skyrim is an extension of a very old kind of RPG and in those kinds of games there are goblins and stuff just because. It's window dressing, I get that, but so is everything else in Skyrim.
Incorrect! Try again.
My bad -- it's the game's most fundamental and central system. Thinking back, one of the most core appeals of Skyrim is building a character to overcome the obstacles ahead of you (after all, what's a TES game without adventuring?), and almost every skill progression tree deals primarily with combat. Even most of the non-combat ones, like smithing and enchanting, are means for a player to establish more advantages when fighting inevitably happens.
If combat is the most common obstacle and almost the entirely of the game's character progression system deals with it (as do most meaningful items), then I think it's fair to say that combat is the most central aspect of Skyrim that isn't the environment itself -- which is a very good reason to ensure it has significantly more depth and versatility.
Still missing the point! Why?
Because you're choosing to be snarky over using plain English.
Also incorrect! But a fair point nonetheless, although I was hoping you'd actually figure it out yourself, because track record here indicates that now that I'm explaining myself I'm going to be dismissed once again.
The combat in Skyrim boils down to two simple points; it provides the players with a form of engagement (which is what we've been discussing), and it's a form of padding to increase the game's length.
But Nova! you say, surely that can't be true! That would be silly, there's so much focus on the combat!
Well, it is. Skyrim's ultimate focus is on the world around you; that's why they painstakingly build it up to the extent they do, with so many books, notes, NPC dialogue options, varied skewed versions of history, and so on. The point of any given Elder Scrolls game is to explore the world around you; this includes the physical world itself (with all the various forts and the reasons they're built in the locations they are, the various cities, and so on), the setting of the world (explored through NPC interactions and books), and the implications of each game (both the implications of events on the setting, and the implications on the meta-setting that includes thematics affecting the world and how game mechanics have changed).
However, while that makes for an interesting intellectual exercise, it doesn't make for a particularly interesting game. So, Bethesda went and tried to introduce some engagement for the player. These are the actual game mechanics- of which combat is one, but it is not the only one (movement is another, as is interacting with the environment).
That still doesn't make for a game they can sell, however. So, they needed two things: They needed something to pad out the length of the game (and thus, keep people playing the game- and thereby interested in their product), and they needed something to engage the player.
This is where the combat steps in. It is not an end goal in and of itself; it is there to give players something to focus on, and it is there to pad out the length of the game.
Thus, focusing on combat has to focus on two issues: One, does this system of combat provide the player with engagement; and Two, does this system of combat significantly affect the length of the game?
Moving Skyrim's combat system to something that requires a lot more thought into it pads out the length of the game- but, given the sheer length and openness of the game, this will result in a player running into length fatigue. "Another fight? Really?"
As it stands, Skyrim's combat doesn't do that. For the most part, it's easy enough that most players don't run a significant risk of dying, which allows them to proceed through the content they wish to proceed through.
It would certainly be possible to remake Skyrim into a game which can actually utilize a more Dark Souls-esque system of combat involving stamina management and so on, but it would involve fundamentally reorganizing the game so that the player does not run into that length fatigue. That would result in a game with the trapping of Skyrim, but without the feel of the game, which would very much ruin the point that I was making.
I said that it was window dressing just a few posts up. But now I'm pretty much convinced the game is built around it because everything to do with character progression (and therefore player expression, which is what TES games do well in design theory terms) has to do with getting additional combat advantages. Bethesda have even been removing traversal mechanics and skill progressions as the games go forward.
And, yep, I knew it. Whatever.
I'm not quite seeing how lockpicking, pickpocketing, speech, or Illusion magic is a combat advantage.
I get that you're frustrated, but I asked for your point, so I thought you might boil it down to a simple statement for my benefit. You gave me a large post, so I read through it and quoted the part where you explain what role the combat actually has. You said that it's there to pad out the game and give the players something to focus on (although I'm not entirely sure what that means), which I took to mean that it was supposed to provide temporary shallow engagement between focal points of the environment.
Which is pretty much what I said with the words "window dressing", but you snarkily refused that interpretation and I reviewed my position and changed my opinion. I'm not exactly sure where you're coming from any longer, especially since you began all this by talking about how the Skyrim combat system could use more engagement.
Alright, not everything. But if that's the non combat list, here's the combat list:
And Illusion supports sneak, so it counts. And I've probably missed stuff, too. So skill paths that are useful in combat outnumber non combat skill paths by at least 2:1. The bias is obvious.
Right. Fine.
"Making the players have to put a significant amount of their effort towards combat will cause the players to become frustrated with the game due to the amount of combat in the game. Therefore, the focus should not be on making the players put more effort in, but on making the encounters fun more than significant."
There.
Effort is a result of perceived complexity and difficulty, so how complex and unwieldy a system is will always be a result of the method used to teach it. Difficulty is also more a factor of balance than a factor of system. So none of the mechanical considerations I brought up would make Skyrim inherently more difficult and only very slightly more complex, if only by technicality.
Oh, so it's like this guy.
Skyrim's combat is extremely mechanical, while Dark Souls revolves around player skill. You have been discussing methods to turn the combat towards relying on player skill; I have been discussing methods to provide engagement without turning the game significantly away from being mechanical.
Short post again.
Then you're asking the impossible. A system that relies so purely on mathematical relationships will always lose engagement some time after the average difficulty curve is exceeded.
Not really. But hey, what the fuck do I know.
Could you elaborate? If a system (such as Skyrim's) is based on having "better numbers", for lack of a better term, then engagement will always trail off a while after the player exceeds the average "numbers" of the game's enemies. At that point, there's less engagement because exceeding an enemy's effectiveness is no longer a task but rote clicking, which is the problem Skyrim has right now.
As much as I love dota, going to have to give up on it for now.
The system of numbers runs primarily behind the scenes. This is particularly so when you don't actually know how your numbers stack up against the enemy; all you know is "more is better".
"Face the target and click" is certainly a very real problem with the system as it currently stands, but the actual numerical damage isn't- it's represented not by "I have 69 health and they deal 17 damage a hit, and they have 200 health and I deal 40 a hit", but instead by how relatively fast health bars go down.
Increasing the numerical damage is represented by how much each hit takes off their health bar. It thereby becomes less a problem of "People are chasing up every skerrick of damage they can get" and more "We need to balance health bars better".
The system I originally elaborated on was not intended to "fix" this, but rather to present several methods wherein one could avoid or completely reduce damage taken. The solutions I offered up were not based around fixing the elements of the damage system, but instead providing an alternate means, offering up the players other solutions they could use to end engagements quickly; maneuvering to avoid damage, blocking, and flanking opponents.
To provide an example, right now, I am playing through Wolfskull Cave, the first quest in the Queen Potema quest line. When I first entered the room, I was facing an Apprentice Necromancer and an Adept Necromancer. I killed the Apprentice Necromancer, but he was alerted to my presence, and so other nearby mobs were drawn in- including a Conjurer, another Necromancer, and a Draugr Scourge. Being dressed in unimproved Elven Armour with only a Superior Steel Sword in my hand, I was in trouble, because I was taking upwards of ten hits per enemy to kill them (thirty-six for the Storm Atronach, I counted just so I could quote this). (I eventually did win through abuse of Restoration magic and hiding where the summoned Frost Atronach couldn't reach me, but it was tedious.)
With the system I proposed, I could have avoided that through maneuvering around opponents, giving me some slight breathing room, and abusing Lightning magic on the enemy mages to give me breathing space. I couldn't do that in the vanilla game due to a variety of reasons (including not being able to get away from the Draugr Scourge).
The system itself is not fundamentally broken, although it will always remain boring due to the inherent nature of the only form of engagement being clicking. Adding in a single other option- avoiding damage- provides players with many more options without significantly lengthening the encounters.
Speaking of Elder Scrolls, some people on another forum were discussing this series, and while I haven't played it before, I read the discussion about the role of food in RPGs, and came up with this idea:
You have some sort of natural slow HP regeneration. Eating food preserves or enhances that regeneration rate, while also healing you. Magical healing heals you but does not enhance and may even slow that natural regeneration.
This way, we can incorporate food without further complicating the game and making it clunkier with the addition of things like stamina, physical stamina, hunger, or other meters.
What do y'all think of this, as a general idea for RPGs?