Sort of, yeah. It’s just that it feels so awkward and so gear-determined that melee feels kind of clunky. I have like 1200 hours across all the different Skyrim versions, so I must have tolerated it well enough, but melee never felt totally good. Better than magic, though.
Except it is exceptionally worse than Souls. I never really enjoyed the combat of Dragon’s Dogma. It includes button mash in a bad way. Also the difficulty of Dark Souls continues to be overwrought. I’m not advocating for the hard encounter setups, just the systems. It’s all about patience, and threat management. This melds well with RPG systems generally.
Have you played any Conan Exiles? Is Souls combat like this? I feel its like this, but haven’t played a Souls game since the first one came out on PS3 many, many many years ago.
I roped my brother into some Conan action. His chief complaint was that it obviously riffed on Souls style combat but felt very imprecise and consequently less enjoyable. I’ve not played any Souls stuff but given some of the issues I had around using daggers effectively in Conan I can see the argument.
I can’t believe games still get released these days with melee target combat locking which sees the player thrashing the empty air between a giant’s legs. See Palace of the Witch Queen for example. Too bad they didn’t extend the nudity to those dudes.
I am surprised no one has mentioned Kingdom Come : Deliverance. The melee combat in that game is very skill-based, requiring a combination of timing and placement to score hits or make blocks, with the added complexity of needing to use different attacks for different types of weapons (and dependent on the armor your opponent is wearing) and being able to chain specific attacks to create a special effect, like beating an opponents guard to one side then stabbing center-mass for greater damage. All of that is then further influenced by your skill levels and weapon/armor quality.
I thought the system was very well thought out and detailed, but also difficult to master. I never was able to “git gud” to where I could handle more than one well armed/armored opponent at once, or two or three lightly armed/armored opponents. At times the difficulty of the combat in Kingdom Come : Deliverance nearly turned me away from continuing the game, so I’m not sure I’d want such brutal and complex combat in a more open world game. Maybe I’m just a combat cretin, but I actually liked Skyrim combat, and a similar system with perhaps a little more complexity would be fine by me.
Heck yes.
There-are-dozens-of-us.gif
And the ability to really DASH everywhere. The mobility was key to the combat. Not sure if every class would get access to something like that although it would help.
This criticism reminded me of two of my favorite “combat” mods. The first was called Living Takes Time and blocked access to the inventory, spell, and loot menus during combat. I can’t remember the name of the second, but it required the player to unequip a weapon before equipping a new one or drinking a potion, otherwise they’d drop their weapon.
Coupled with the lackluster favorites menu, those two mods introduced enough restrictions to make planning for combat interesting.
I never thought I’d see the day when somebody would argue that when it came to Skyrim combat mechanics, less is more.
Heh, I think Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s combat system was very good. But so damn hard, I felt like a moron most of the time, flailing around ineffectually.
My ideal here is that there is zero player skill/coordination involved in combat success. I don’t play RPGs to use my (nonexistent) reflexes, man :-/
I definitely get that. One reason why I love turn-based stuff. But I love first-person open-world RPGs too, and well, you kind of have to have some physical skill-based combat in those, or it gets really frustrating. One day someone will perfect the method for making everyone happy in this type of game…and then the world will end.
That may have been a roundabout way of saying “I’m really sad this series is moving to a subgenre I’m functionally incapable of playing/enjoying,” hah.
I feel that way about games with vehicle controls that require a gamepad…
As someone defending Bethesda’s melee upthread, I have been remiss to not point out that the whole discussion was taking place in my head with regards to how it controls using a controller. It didn’t occur to me that some people might still be playing Bethesda games on mouse and keyboard until @KevinC’s comments in another thread about how shooters are designed more with controllers in mind these days and guns are better differentiated and feel more satisfying using a controller. Similarly, I have found first person melee systems in general feel much more weighted and solid when you have a vibrating controller in your hands with fingers pressing triggers with a lot of movement and travel on your fingers, as opposed to the slight travel on your finger when click a mouse button.
I did try Oblivion with a mouse and keyboard once, and I don’t know how people can stand it.
Hey, that’s a good point, I played Skyrim with KBM. I should try the melee with a gamepad and see how it feels to me in comparison.
Alternatively - press the riposte button (Q on PC) when the green shield comes up and win any fight with any gear.
This is because the game uses it’s own targetting systems against you, forcing you to lock on to whoever hit you last and ignore all other foes. So you’re constantly mashing the “target unlock” button to try to keep the enemies on your frontal cone. It’s always a mess, and it doesn’t need to be.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s nuts that this thread is almost at 100 posts based only on a CGI teaser?
Obsidian open world RPG in the Pillars of Eternity world? Considering Bethesda is not going to give us the next open world fantasy RPG and this seems like a much bigger project than the Outer Worlds, it seems like a good time to rehash all the things we wish Skyrim and its successor could be. That’s a lengthy discussion. :)
A lengthy discussion that equally fruitfully could have been had at any point since Skyrim’s release, and often was.