Scow2 said:
1. I've never had depth problems, so meh.
2. I've not had any problem with hitboxes... The "One attack, one target" thing is effective - you don't have enough power behind the swing to hit more than one foe without that one special perk. Doesn't bother me.
3.I'm glad the game isn't so horrible about Stunlocking opponents, and the only enemies that I've had problems with a lack of Hitstun against were Bears and Dragons. Other enemies generally do react to the impact.
4. I'm glad that combat doesn't lock your movement in Skyrim. There are still plenty of opportunities to dodge attacks, but it's not as easy or stupid as it is in other games (Such as Dark Soul's Rollolspam. Seriously, I hate excessive combat rolling in games. It looks retarded)
1) That's probably because there's no need to judge depth in skyrim. Most of the melee combat is about running in close and trading blows until they die.
2) Yeah but let's say you swing your weapon and your animation shows a wide arc, but you aim to the side of your enemy. Even then it doesn't hit. It's not efficient, if the game wants to convey the idea of you not being able to hit more than 1 enemy at a time they would add more animations to show you.
3) Really? Generally there's no way to ensure that i can get in without getting hit. In good combat games you wait for an opening and then go in and punish them. This adds a lot of strategy to the game. In Skyrim i can never do this because even if the enemy misses a big attack by the time I'm ready to counterattack them they've recovered and are ready to hit me back. Even if i did a shield bash (which stunned everything), they would recover before i could swing my sword.
4) Tell me how were you able to dodge? The only thing i could do to avoid getting hit is weaving in and out of the enemy's range hoping to not get hit. This was especially difficult with enemies with 2h weapons, and most of it was based on luck. It wasn't hard, it was just mostly about luck.
And I'm glad you brought up dark souls. By mentioning roll spamming I'm betting you haven't actually played it, or you didn't play it for very long.
In that game rolling is pretty much reserved for giant enemies because it takes you too far away from smaller enemies. Generally you stepped around the smaller enemies and only used the roll to escape, and the way the environment was designed you risked falling off a ledge. Against large enemies roll spamming was a great way of getting yourself killed because it drained all your stamina quickly. You had to time your rolls specifically, because rolls gave you a very brief period of invincibility that you could use to dive through enemy attacks.
The game also had a lot more variety in its attacks too. I mentioned that in skyrim you could pretty much replace all weapons with short ranged lasers, but dark souls is much different. The game has about 17 different types of weapons, each with 7 unique attacks with different ranges, speeds, stun rates, poise attacks, and hitboxes, and every weapon in the 17 categories had 1 special unique attack. Now that game has weighty combat.
I'm not saying skyrim is a bad game btw. It's a great game. The combat is just bad. I don't think the combat is bad because they didn't know how to make good combat either, i think it's bad because of technical limitations. Good combat requires a tight engine and a lot of processing power, something that the developers decided was less important than other parts of the game (like the environment or modability). If they spent less time and memory on other things and worked on combat you would have something like dark souls.