Well, keeping more than one or two guys in front of you can be tricky, for sure. I do a lot of backpedaling and shield-bashing to try to keep them in line. I also usually have a companion to keeps one of them busy, if I’m lucky.
When I’m squared off with a guy or two, I’ll keep my shield up and use shield-bash to interrupt power attacks, and if I run out of stamina I’ll dodge back-and-forth to avoid attacks. Shouting and re-positioning while they’re staggered helps, too.
Maybe it’s the controller, I don’t know. I just know that I never feel like I’m just wildly flailing and out of control, or can’t keep enemies in my “sights.” I’ve been very satisfied with melee combat in general.
There are a couple of simple mechanical things the interface could do to help. For me, it would be exceptionally useful if they’d give me some kind of target lock-on (I’m having a hard time coming up with third person melee games that don’t do that at this point where you’re not just attacking the entire universe all the time, a la God of War). It would also help a lot if there were some sort of visual indication of your effective hit box for the attack you’re readying. Maybe a couple of lines demarcating the lateral edges of the attack that turn red when you’re in Z-axis range. The visual and tactile feedback from contact combat is also pretty unsatisfying. I know when I’ve hit somebody with a sneaky arrow because I get two thirds of a rimshot and a prompt. Once they’ve seen me, I’ve got to watch the life bar to see it go down. Swinging a weapon in closer range, I’ve seen the life bar go down on several different occasions without so much as nudging the animation the target is in. There’s also some pretty poor feedback as to how much effect you’re having with your block. I assume I’m accomplishing something when a dude takes a swing at me and he doesn’t just bounce off (because I’ve seen Block level up on those occasions), but I’ve got very little indication as to how much, and I don’t have any good indication of what part of my total body my block is actually covering (i.e. is this guy who’s a little off to my right getting a clear shot?).
All of those things feel clunky when you compare them to a game designed to implement good hand to hand combat, like Dark Souls for example. I’ve never played a Condemned game (first is on the backlog stack), but apparently Monolith managed some improvement over the traditionally janky first person melee model that Bethesda isn’t capturing here.
I thought if you didn’t get that little shield-raise and weapon-bounce, you didn’t block. That’s been my experience, in terms of the amount of damage I’ve taken.
I don’t know if you get anything or not, which is part of what’s so mildly irritating about close range combat for me. Because I know I’ve gotten a big Block Leveled Up with two thirds of a different rimshot when I had my shield up and a dude was quite definitely not bouncing his weapon off of it, but I don’t know whether that was just a delayed reaction to a prior block or if I was getting some marginal effect or if it was an animation bug or what.
On the plus side, I’m now feeling very, very confident about going hard at Archery and spells with all those perks that I had sitting around, so that’s a good outcome.
Teiman
5025
The tiny touch that impressed me of the game is that npc’s react to the stuff you drop to the floor. It make all the npcs of games before skyrim look blind, including the recent deus ex…
Skipper
5026
Speaking of, there are a few long threads on reddit talking about things that transpire in game, and one involved a fight that broke out between NPC’s when a player dropped something on the floor. This game has a ton of little details that create a powerful experience. I’m positive that I’m missing tons of them, but the ones I do catch really drive home the extra effort put in to the game.
TimJames
5027
Only Tom knows the answer to those questions, but I think we can guess at the stealth. It’s still the same nearly-blind enemies that become completely blind at higher skill levels.
At least they took some baby steps: the slightly opening eye gives you some feedback, and enemies now have at least some reaction when an arrow zips by. I don’t think I expected even that level of improvement. So I’m pleasantly surprised while Tom might still be cranky about it.
It’s not like we’re even dealing with different eras in computer games since Oblivion is only 5 years old.
I doubt Tom feels the same way. I think he wants all that stuff fixed since it’s been 5 years with lots of other better examples. That’s valid.
Giaddon
5028
Genuinely curious: what are they? I consider myself pretty aware of the gaming scene, but I’ve definitely missed the other, better examples of open-world RPGs that let me play mage, thief, archer, soldier, hunter, blacksmith, etc.
It’s inconsistent to say that Oblivion deserves a 90 (the Metacritic score) and then give Skyrim a 70 when the very (generic) reasons cited as negatives were unchanged or improved. It’s not like we’re even dealing with different eras in computer games since Oblivion is only 5 years old.
If he feels other games have progressed further in the intervening 5 years, and Bethesda isn’t keeping up with the Joneses, then it’s a reasonable point.
TimJames
5030
I think fans of the Souls games were pretty vocal about it. I haven’t played those.
Really though, Tom’s the one that needs to provide those examples. I’m only playing devil’s advocate to try to understand where he’s coming from.
Only Tom knows the answer to those questions, but I think we can guess at the stealth. It’s still the same nearly-blind enemies that become completely blind at higher skill levels.
My dream is for the stealth side of an Elder Scrolls game to basically just play like Thief. That level of control, that focus on different levels of light, sounds, NPC AI states (oblivious/cautious/wary/aggressive, etc.). Don’t know how difficult that would be to implement given the enormous scope of the game and development resource constraints, but it would be pretty fantastic.
I don’t think Tom is saying there are other open-world RPGs that do everything better than Bethesda, but he might argue that specific elements have been done better elsewhere (story/dialogue in Dragon Age/Mass Effect, action melee in Dark Souls, open-world city environment in Saints Row or Just Cause 2 or GTA IV or whichever of the Grand Theft grandchildren floated your particular boat), etc. Skyrim is very much a “more than the sum of its parts” experience and I think he acknowledges that. A 7 is, after all, a positive review, particularly from a critic who explicitly repudiates the 7-9 scale.
I’ll stop talking for him now…
Quaro
5033
Games which combine elements and systems together are definitely harder to make than games that focus on one. You can easily find better stealth games, better combat games, etc, but none of them are trying to do anything close to as much as Skyrim.
MattKeil
5034
Except for where it’s completely indefensible. Since Tom doesn’t even try to defend it, I suppose maybe he agrees.
Skyrim is far beyond what I thought it would be. Bethesda has made some tremendous leaps over Oblivion and Fallout 3, which is especially impressive considering they still managed to make it work on the 360. Many of the remaining issues with the Elder Scrolls series will require the next generation of console hardware to solve.
Sure, it doesn’t have the stealth gameplay of something like Thief, but it’s doing far more than Thief. Traditionally, open world games have had breadth at the expense of gameplay depth. I suggest that Skyrim is a large step in the direction of depth without losing any of the breadth, and for that it deserves praise. If someone wants to bash it for not living up to some theoretical game in their head, that’s their prerogative, but I’m not going to take it seriously unless some examples of games that are doing it better are provided. Tom doesn’t seem to have any, so I just assume he’s being contrarian about the popular game of the moment, as per usual.
Giaddon
5035
I’m not worried about Tom’s score, just that I might have missed some totally amazing game(s)! But it sounds like what you (Gordon Cameron) are saying that Tom is saying is that it’s not as good as the totally hypothetical super-game that combines
story/dialogue in Dragon Age/Mass Effect, action melee in Dark Souls, open-world city environment in Saints Row or Just Cause 2 or GTA IV
Which is true, I guess, but since no game has done that (that I know of!?) I won’t sweat it.
Although my ideal game would combine the story/dialogue/atmosphere of Vampire: Bloodlines, the combat of Dark Messiah, the stealth of Thief, the magic of Skyrim (I love the magic system) and the environments of Skyrim’s countryside blended with Assassin’s Creed’s cities. That would be awesome. Throw some Deus Ex: Human Revolution in there somewhere.
Telefrog
5036
Exactly. This is what’s important to me. I value the diverse range of player choice and the emergent gameplay that can happen in a Bethesda open-worlder. Other people get annoyed by the still clunky combat or the binary stealth mechanic or the way radiant AI still bones things up sometimes. I can see that point of view, but I don’t care when I’m on hour 500 of play.
Aeon221
5037
I agreed with him about the Illusion magic stuff. You have all these great abilities that just work, and then this whole tree dedicated to seriously arbitrary stuff that you have no way of knowing in an organic fashion.
Think about it. What level is a giant? A mammoth? A bandit? Do you have any way to know? Of course not! That information isn’t there because, functionally, those creatures aren’t leveled. They just exist as a sort of organic thing.
And yet there’s these stupid level gates on Illusion spells that immediately turned me off from exploring a magical school that SHOULD be really cool. I can’t use a spell that might have zero effect based on something I have no way of knowing! If Bethsoft really wanted to make it so that Illusion wouldn’t work on everything, they should have just made it do damage and briefly stun the target rather than failing entirely and wasting magicka.
Skyrim is a great experience. Running around and interacting with stuff in a very natural way feels perfect. But crafting or Illusion or stealth, those things don’t work so well. Crafting makes you a godlike monster, Illusion is totally non-functional based on arbitrary stuff, and stealth can devolve into absurd stuff like the AI not seeing you directly in front of them. They shatter an otherwise compelling experience because they treat it as a game.
kerzain
5038
In essence, all it would take to make Skyrim a good game would be to:
A) Fully integrate all the major gameplay elements of the game Thief into the rogue skills.
B) Fully integrate the entire combat system from either Dark Souls, or M&B (and for hand to hand, just lift everything from Street Fighter IV).
C) Fully integrate the spell system from Magika, or Bioshock.
D) Fully integrate and expand on the spell creation system from Morrowind.
E) Get a graphics engine that can render scenes as beautiful and detailed as The Witcher 2. One that can still render many, many square miles of terrain without any significant hit to performance. In fact, create two completely different game engines to benefit PC gamers who don’t want to be held back by the absurd constraints of six year old console tech.
F) Get a sound track with catchier tunes that never let up, no matter what type of ambiance the environment might be otherwise capable of providing.
And finally, stopping allowing players to just pick and choose quests. Just put them in a linear story and hold their hand all the way through to the end. Too much open world just starts to feel aimless and plodding.
It’s all been done before, dunno why Bethesda continues to be so lazy and uninspired.
Pogo
5039
Yeah, it does have a lot of these braindead obvious oversights that makes me wonder if they just fired all their designers after the code was done, and then took another 2 years to add details to the world and dungeons.
There is no handwaving it away aside from “oh well, I have the choice to not play like that.”
RepoMan
5040
Personally I rate Skyrim an 11 on the 7-10 point scale. I mean, it’s just sucked me in like literally no other game before. Fallout 3 comes closest, I played that for 100 hours, but Skyrim is flat out a better game on all fronts that I care about.
All the clunkinesses don’t matter to me because I am in it for discovery, and every damn corner in this game has something that is interesting and cool to me. Others are finding the dungeons cookie-cutter? Sure, I can see how they might feel that way, but they’re not experiencing the immersion and level of detail that I am. Others are finding the interface unusably broken? Sure, I can see their concerns and how they might not be able to get over those issues, but I have a hotkey flow that is letting me pretty much forget about it and lose myself in the world.
And that world, after reading many books and paying attention to many details (like the loo off in a corner in a bandit cave, or the bears that run scared when you kill their spriggan mommies), is just the most fully realized fantasy space ever created. That’s Bethesda’s most significant artistic achievement with this game, and that’s why I personally consider Skyrim the best game ever made.
Bethesda improved so many things over Oblivion and Fallout 3 that I am confident they will continue to improve for ES6. Maybe not to the point of getting Arkham City’s combat system, but enough to make me stand out in the cold at midnight again, for sure.
Your mileage will vary.
