Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

My Amazon delivery date's moved to Monday. Cloth map be damned. Cancel!

first person melee combat is a tall order, design-wise. i don't know if it's possible to do right.

that is true but they could still do a hell of a lot better.

i would hate this: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/11/09/you-can-play-skyrim-forever.aspx

re melee combat, what the hell i'm just gonna put these here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWISsk0cy74

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTVC25hYJaY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv-Vut0xb9Y

what we know about this kind of fighting is that it was really fluid, even in armor, much more like wrestling with a tool in your hand than swatting at each other.

hmm, i am skeptical. i am pretty sure melee combat is all about standing still and hitting the right trigger over and over until someone is dead. this looks like something else.

first person melee combat is a tall order, design-wise. i don't know if it's possible to do right.― goole

I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to do just that.

A fancy dodge system could help but making melee combat as intuitive as the dodge/block system in Super Punch Out doesn't seem so realistic since Punch Out assumes standing in one place and all the enemies are humans capable of having a smart dodge/block AI.

Then I thoght about having some sort of combo attack system but I've never seen this in a First Person game.

I don't really have any more ideas. One thing I've heard that makes melee combat more fun in Oblivion is having a mod that sends hordes of enemies all at once. I'm sure that would be more fun but it doesn't have much to do with melee mechanics.

If any of you have good ideas I'd like to hear them

the solution is to stop making games where first person is the default view

What was the name of that Source engine game from a couple of years ago which was all based around first person melee combat? Didn't play that far into it but I seem to remember it having some nice ideas.

Ah, Zeno Clash. Might give it another go.

kinda feel like the solution to the first person melee combat problem lies somewhere down the kinect road.

first person perspective is an abomination imo and should be abolished. certainly it has no business in any kind of RPG. and there have been some 3rd person action RPGs that have done combat really well in recent times.

mordy rise of nightmares or whatever says no

kinect noooooo

please remember when hoping for kinect solutions that we are all fat and awful at moving our bodies

is kinect the thing you have to stand up for? because...

really the only controllerless advance that will work for your average gamer will be something like the thing that stephen hawking uses to communicate

next step past kinect is xbox live/psn sending someone to your house to larp with you

maybe a kinect sensor that reads body heat and redness and sends a paramedic to your address

pretty sure that comes with amazon prime already

the combat in witcher is p good imo, rewards improvement and thought w/o being too counterintuitive or inhuman

Utterly irritating "deliberatly dressed like dork" hipster dude on the tram this morning, holding forth VERY LOUDLY abt what was pretty obviously this game, he used the phrase "powned" out loud at one point, He was wearing a trucker hat, hipster glasses and an LA Lakers shirt thing. I mean... urerrghrr,rreighetkr.

Witcher is one of the coolest-looking games. Can't wait for the console version.

he used the phrase "powned" out loud at one point,

indefensible

first person perspective is an abomination imo and should be abolished. certainly it has no business in any kind of RPG. and there have been some 3rd person action RPGs that have done combat really well in recent times

Most action rpg's are 3rd person and many of them are good. But 1st person has some very strong merits. I love that I can look out of the eyes of my character. It makes me feel like I'm there. Everything is more scenic when you have this viewpoint. Conversely, 3rd person makes you look towards the ground a lot more often because it's easier to attack enemies from more of an overhead viewpoint. And Enemies aren't in your face - I like that about 1st person. Enemies will surprise you more often when you aren't in 3rd person.

Now back to improving 1st person melee mechanics. Maybe kinnect is the future for first person. However I did come up with some conceptual ideas that could work. Implementing them to fit the game would be a whole different matter.

For instance, what if you had an enemy flash different colors. When he is red that means use an upwards weapon swing to connect. When he is blue you have to use a sideways swing. Don't attack when he is black. This kind of 1st person melee is an abstract idea right now but it's a start at adding some arcade-style fun where there isn't any at the moment. And frankly I rarely switch up weapon swing direction even if there may already be some spotty reasons to do so. (Also, I rarely used the block button when I played Oblivion).

If things were more arcade-like and intuitive (with FP melee) I would have more fun and feel like I'm using some skilled button combos rather than simple button mashing against enemies that aren't too high above your level

until they develop a technology that gives you peripheral vision, "1st person perspective" is predicated on the protagonist having some kind of sight disorder.

How much harder would this game be to play in 3pp? I remember thinking that 3pp looked wonky in Oblivion.

it was hilariously bad, but apparently decent in skyrim

doing realist-ish melee combat is probably best done w/ a locked 3rd kind of POV like gears of war. you need to be able to be aware of what the whole body of your character is doing, especially if there's a defense mechanic

plus peripheral vision, yeah

plus half the fun of rpgs is cool gear, why not see it?

Don't attack when he is black.

cosign this tho

hahahaaaa

I was reading lorax's post above on zing and there were multiple paragraphs before I saw who wrote it but I instantly knew it was lorax <3

Roberto Spiralli otm. strip everything away from a first person shooter, and it is chasing an object with a reticle and clicking the mouse button furiously when they overlap. But at least in a shooter you get to enjoy the illusion of the projectile going toward the target, leading the target based on the speed of the projectile, etc. With melee you don't even get to see much of your character's body moving, and there's no sense of depth or physics. So it's like some guy who has no depth perception fighting with a cardboard box on his head. The real thing that kills me about FPS games is how much it limits your movement. I want to play a multiplayer map with a Just Cause, Prototype, or InFamous type game.

Grand theft auto 4 multiplayer is this^

I haven't actually tried that. No word of mouth of it being fun from any of my friends, either. Any good?

the gametypes were p uninvolving and hence nobody plays it iirc

would love a city-wide capture the flag mode for Just Cause 2

The idea of a never ending adventure sandbox is simultaneously enthralling and terrifying.

I have a friend who says he wants to be put on life support and play Skyrim forever

ok
for no reason at all i feel like i might justify buying this tomorrow. despite not liking oblivion at all.
hmmm

i'm in the oblivion-sucked camp but the something awful people (who are the whiniest bitchiest gamers on the internet) seem to be having a good time. my pre-order should arrive before i get home from work tonight.

i think arena, the first elder scrolls game, could be remade into something awesome. as i remember one could wander across the entire continent of tamriel. the landscape and most towns and settlements were randomly generated and really repetitive but the vastness was fucking nuts, especially in 1994. a remake with decent graphics and 21st century complexity, like a minecraft that doesn't look like a bag of assholes mixed with all this procedural quest-generation stuff mixed with the fact that arena was SUPER FUCKING HARD, would be killer. i was 13 with all the hyperfocus a 13 year old can bring to a video game and i often got killed during the quasi-tutorial dungeon. shit was real.

and by oblivion sucked i mean i still put like 100 hours into it.

took the day off and will be running down the stairs at regular intervals to see if the game is amazonged to my front door yet

last exercise for a while i assume

would answer that zing but am out of breath

i think arena, the first elder scrolls game, could be remade into something awesome

remake daggerfall imho. same scope but such a better game and story.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/11/11/in-skyrim-bucket-head-the-perfect-crime.aspx

LOL

perusing wikia, the character system looks... intersting

no attributes? perks?