An opinion you're probably all alone with?

[Taevyr]

Well, that's palpably incorrect. You clearly get both for the same action.

In Skyrim, it will often happen that an arrow fired dead on target will miss because the target moved unexpectedly. (I'm not talking about the infamous "ninja dodge" effect, but simply - movement, that turns out to be exceptionally well timed from the target's point of view.) It's particularly frustrating when the shot triggers a killcam, showing that even the game itself thought that was a perfect shot.

And Skyrim has good enough graphics and animation that you can see what happens. What it doesn't have, however, is any attempt to simulate the sheer difficulty of aiming a shot on target. You focus your convenient crosshairs, hold the shot for as long as you want, then let fly.

....

The act of aiming the weapon does no more than designate the target. Whether you actually hit it or not is a whole different question. There are games that try much harder to simulate the physical difficulties (Kingdom Come: Deliverance springs to mind), but the trouble with this approach is that player skill rapidly starts to upstage character skill. On the whole, I think a weighted die roll is a pretty good way to capture all of this stuff, which also accounts for why tabletop games have pretty much always worked this way.

Ok, that Skyrim example is rather ridiculous: You're essentially equating missing a shot due to the enemy actually moving out of the way, to missing a shot because, while you did shoot the guy in the head, the dice gods said "actually no". It doesn't matter that the first evasion can be seen as equally random as the second: if the player's "challenge" to hit is the actual hitting, the least you should get is a clear result from said hit, even if it's paltry. If the player's challenge is to roll high enough to hit, then you shouldn't be expected to aim well as that's an implied part of said roll.

Think of tabletop: when you give your players a puzzle or riddle, and they manage to solve it by literally solving it, do you then ask them to do an intelligence/skill check to make certain they actually solved it? Because that's essentially the same thing. You can either have a skill-based challenge (hit the thing) or a number-based challenge (roll high enough to hit the thing), but both is ridiculous. And before anyone mentions it: yes, "skill-based" hardly requires real skill in TES as it's just "swing in the general direction", but that's more a point against the extremely shallow "combat system" rather than a reason to implement double challenges. The equivalent of that would be having your players solve "2+2=?" and then demanding a decently challenging INT check to see if they actually got it.

Bottom line: yes, dice rolls are far better to properly convey the difficulty, but it doesn't quite work if you want to let the player actually hit them themselves and they should just improve the combat system, as combining them is ludicrous and kills immersion.

[factotum]

Probably the worst example of "roll to hit" in a game I ever saw was in Baldur's Gate. It used D&D roll mechanics (well, duh) but played like a real-time combat game--which was fine, most of the time. However, on one memorable occasion an enemy shot an arrow at one of my party members, and because arrows moved oddly slowly I thought I'd try to get out of the way, which I did. I ran that character all the way to the edge of the map, but because the "to hit" roll had already determined the arrow had hit him, it did--even though it had to chase after him like a guided missile in order to do that!

To my mind that's the worst thing about that sort of thing, because there's a disconnect between what the game graphics tell you should be happening and what actually does. You can swing a sword at a creature in Morrowind and simply not hit it, even though the onscreen representation is of a sharp piece of metal passing through them. Change up the animations a bit so you fumble the blade or somehow else missed and it would be better.

[Zevox]

You do realise you're making "stone soup" when you say "it's well suited, but you have to follow all these points: 1. 2. 3. 4. ...."

No, I have absolutely no idea what that comparison is supposed to mean. If you're trying to make the "you have to ignore parts of the game therefore its not the real way to play" argument, that's just gatekeeping based on absolutely nothing. The game provides many ways to play. The competitive setup is one of them. And all of them are equally valid ways to play.

It would be like arguing that Street Fighter 6 isn't going to be suited to competitive play because it has the "Extreme Mode" it's been announced to include, which basically seems to have Smash Brothers-like stage hazards in it. That'd be silly, all that means is that that option is in the game for reasons other than competitive play. Just like the options that competitive play doesn't use in Smash Brothers.

I'm aware my take is unpopular, that's why I said it here.

The thing is, it's not even a take - what you're saying is just factually incorrect, not a matter of opinion. An opinion would be that you don't like the competitive gameplay style or have no interest in playing/watching it; that's totally fair. Whether the game is suited to it is a matter of facts, not opinion, though, and it's simply true that it is, because it provides those options. Just as it's also suited to a variety of other play styles. Smash Brothers is a game series that goes out of its way to be suitable to a wide audience's tastes with a myriad of options to customize your experience.

[Rodin]

Gotta side with Zevox here. I personally despise the competitive Smash mindset as I think it removes 99% of the fun from the game. However, I completely understand why it exists and am not about to criticize anyone who enjoys playing that way. Even a cursory glance at competitive Smash matches shows that it requires just as much skill as any other fighting game, and the ability to remove random elements is key to that.

I will say that the ability to pick between Battlefield and Final Destination style stages is an important evolution in a competitive scene that previously only allowed Final Destination. FD style stages actually do favor certain characters over others who can make use of platforms, and including both adds an important layer of strategy.

[Zevox]

I will say that the ability to pick between Battlefield and Final Destination style stages is an important evolution in a competitive scene that previously only allowed Final Destination. FD style stages actually do favor certain characters over others who can make use of platforms, and including both adds an important layer of strategy.

I'm afraid you're misinformed on that one. Final Destination was never the only competitive stage, even back in Melee's heyday. Battlefield exists in Melee too, after all, as do several other stages perfectly suited to competitive play (Fountain of Dreams being a particularly popular one that is basically a Battlefield variant). That was never anything more than a meme.

[Ortho]

It sounds like this not uncommon complaint has more to do with graphics than mechanics. You want to be assured that your sword swing mattered, but the nyx-hound only has, like, three animations. Since you didn't see it duck, you feel robbed. Morrowind, it seems, requires just a touch of theatre-of-the-mind.

I think you've misunderstood. Morrowind has both hitbox detection, and a dice roll on top of that. Regardless of what's happening on screen, it's a complete crapshoot as to whether or not your attack hits.

Personally, I have to play Morrowind with a mod that disables that because it's so dang frustrating to not hit the enemy due to arbitrary chance.

---

Here's my opinion that I'm probably all alone with: I like the default Skyrim UI more than I like SkyUI. I don't want to look at a spreadsheet, I want to look at an inventory.

[veti]

Ok, that Skyrim example is rather ridiculous: You're essentially equating missing a shot due to the enemy actually moving out of the way, to missing a shot because, while you did shoot the guy in the head, the dice gods said "actually no". It doesn't matter that the first evasion can be seen as equally random as the second: if the player's "challenge" to hit is the actual hitting, the least you should get is a clear result from said hit, even if it's paltry. If the player's challenge is to roll high enough to hit, then you shouldn't be expected to aim well as that's an implied part of said roll.

Like I said, "aiming" is how you designate the target. But hitting it is something else.

I guess the game could (should?) show the arrow flying off in wildly the wrong direction, or the sword twisting in your hand or randomly getting stuck in the ground or something... but that would be a lot of work to code, even with modern systems and resources, never mind Morrowind-era tech. And it would probably raise at least as many objections as it settled. (I've seen people on this very forum complaining about the randomness injected by how weapon accuracy is handled in Fallout games, and that's totally transparent and upfront about what it's doing and why.)

So yeah, even though I'm apparently all alone in this opinion, I stand firmly behind Morrowind's hidden-hit-roll system. Of all the things I'd like to mod onto Morrowind, that's not one.

I like spell failure, too.

[Anteros]

I think you've misunderstood. Morrowind has both hitbox detection, and a dice roll on top of that. Regardless of what's happening on screen, it's a complete crapshoot as to whether or not your attack hits.

Personally, I have to play Morrowind with a mod that disables that because it's so dang frustrating to not hit the enemy due to arbitrary chance.

---

Here's my opinion that I'm probably all alone with: I like the default Skyrim UI more than I like SkyUI. I don't want to look at a spreadsheet, I want to look at an inventory.

As opposed to always hitting by default? I can understand hitscan in FPS games or something, but Morrowind enemies literally stand still in front of you taking up 80% of your screen. You'd have to actively try to miss. They're no more difficult to click on than enemies in a turn based jrpg.

[Ignimortis]

Like I said, "aiming" is how you designate the target. But hitting it is something else.

I guess the game could (should?) show the arrow flying off in wildly the wrong direction, or the sword twisting in your hand or randomly getting stuck in the ground or something... but that would be a lot of work to code, even with modern systems and resources, never mind Morrowind-era tech. And it would probably raise at least as many objections as it settled. (I've seen people on this very forum complaining about the randomness injected by how weapon accuracy is handled in Fallout games, and that's totally transparent and upfront about what it's doing and why.)

So yeah, even though I'm apparently all alone in this opinion, I stand firmly behind Morrowind's hidden-hit-roll system. Of all the things I'd like to mod onto Morrowind, that's not one.

I like spell failure, too.

Not exactly all alone with that one. As I've said upthread, I do not particularly like it - but I also understand why it's the way it is, and it genuinely works better with Bethesda's trash combat system than Oblivion or Skyrim's takes on combat design - because it, at least, genuinely reflects your character's growth and progression. Bethesda never managed to make their games actually worthy of the Action RPG title, because you're still piloting a tank like in Morrowind, it's just slightly more fluidly animated.

It's the reason why I never understood all the attempts by modders to make Skyrim into Dark Souls - it's simply incompatible with that style of play, the enemies are too chaotic, attacks are unpredictable and fast enough that you can't really react to them well, and the character controls way worse than even Dark Souls 1.

Frankly, Morrowind's misses are far from terrible as long as you remember the two core tenets - "you are bad at things your character is not good at, player skill will not compensate for that" (which is why I do not consider Morrowind a true Action RPG) and "being tired makes you bad at things". If you run everywhere and enter combat at 10% Fatigue, and swing at someone with a weapon you have 15/100 skill in, you certainly will miss. If you conserve Fatigue and swing a weapon you're decently proficient in (say, 40/100, achievable at chargen), you will hit more than 70% of the time unless you're fighting a master of defensive skills (which are very rare). Advance that skill to 60 or 70, and you will pretty much never miss at 50%+ Fatigue, while your blows will still be more deadly than they would be in Oblivion.

Now, there are certainly things you can do in Morrowind to outwit the engine and the enemies, especially including Spears (I figure that's the reason why spears are gone - they allow you to keep people at a distance and rarely get hit with no real downsides aside from not having decent mid-game options). But 90% of your success will come from your character being good at things, not you being good at action combat.

[Lord Raziere]

It's the reason why I never understood all the attempts by modders to make Skyrim into Dark Souls - it's simply incompatible with that style of play, the enemies are too chaotic, attacks are unpredictable and fast enough that you can't really react to them well, and the character controls way worse than even Dark Souls 1.

Because Skyrim has become the videogame version of DnD: people want to use it as a game engine and not just a game and thus forcibly mod it to do everything despite that not being what it was designed for, just because its popular and what they know rather than it being a good tool to use for whatever game they're trying to make or replicate. thing is, Skyrim is probably worse than DnD in this regard, because at least DnD isn't likely to crash if you mod it that heavily, given me own experiences with Skyrim.

Edit: I had a meme for this, but it includes a swear so I'm not going to chance board rules.

[WritersBlock]

And D&D won't mess up all of your characters and mods with yet another update.

Some of those mods I had that messed up had not had an update in a long time either so...

Well I ended up saying "heck with it" and deleted Skyrim, again. Meh, I am getting an internet upgrade at the end of the week anyway and plan to make the most of it, so I can always use the extra cpu space.

[Ortho]

As opposed to always hitting by default? I can understand hitscan in FPS games or something, but Morrowind enemies literally stand still in front of you taking up 80% of your screen. You'd have to actively try to miss. They're no more difficult to click on than enemies in a turn based jrpg.

Yes, if my attack visually hits the enemy I expect my attack to hit the enemy. This shouldn't be a controversial opinion.

[Zombimode]

And if my attack with a greatsword goes through the unprotected neck of the enemy bandit I expect a decapitation. And yet it takes only 1% of the enemies health in Oblivion. Is that better?

[GloatingSwine]

As opposed to always hitting by default? I can understand hitscan in FPS games or something, but Morrowind enemies literally stand still in front of you taking up 80% of your screen. You'd have to actively try to miss. They're no more difficult to click on than enemies in a turn based jrpg.

Again, the difficulty of the interaction for the player is not the point. The fact that it is required is.

Once you require a direct interaction that the player can either do correctly or incorrectly, no matter how easy to perform, you cannot also randomise the outcome, because the player forms a mental connection between their input "I pointed at the enemy" and the outcome "I hit the enemy".

If you put something in that breaks that connection you frustrate the player, which is why Bethesda took it out, and why almost as many people mod it out as mod tits in, and this being a bethesda game that's a very large number indeed.

[Rodin]

Again, the difficulty of the interaction for the player is not the point. The fact that it is required is.

Once you require a direct interaction that the player can either do correctly or incorrectly, no matter how easy to perform, you cannot also randomise the outcome, because the player forms a mental connection between their input "I pointed at the enemy" and the outcome "I hit the enemy".

If you put something in that breaks that connection you frustrate the player, which is why Bethesda took it out, and why almost as many people mod it out as mod tits in, and this being a bethesda game that's a very large number indeed.

I think that needs a qualifier. If I point a highly accurate single-shot rifle at a target in an FPS, I expect that shot to land. However, if I point a sub machine gun at the same target and pull the trigger I expect to have a random result based on the spread of the bullets.

You can still have random in things that require player skill, it just has to be something that doesn’t break suspension of disbelief. Swinging a weapon that visually connects is one that’s very difficult for the brain to accept if there if there is a hidden dice roll behind it. Spray and praying with a machine gun is easy to accept, because we see people miss that way in movies all the time.

[GloatingSwine]

I think that needs a qualifier. If I point a highly accurate single-shot rifle at a target in an FPS, I expect that shot to land. However, if I point a sub machine gun at the same target and pull the trigger I expect to have a random result based on the spread of the bullets.

You can still have random in things that require player skill, it just has to be something that doesn’t break suspension of disbelief. Swinging a weapon that visually connects is one that’s very difficult for the brain to accept if there if there is a hidden dice roll behind it. Spray and praying with a machine gun is easy to accept, because we see people miss that way in movies all the time.

Even then there's a limit in what a player will accept in terms of bullet deviation as a satisfying game experience (outside of exceptional interactions like anarchy-Gaige). See: Changes in how guns work between Mass Effect 1 and 2 and how the consensus is that gunplay in ME1 is unsatisfying and silly due in considerable part to the way it handles deviation.

[Anteros]

Again, the difficulty of the interaction for the player is not the point. The fact that it is required is.

Once you require a direct interaction that the player can either do correctly or incorrectly, no matter how easy to perform, you cannot also randomise the outcome, because the player forms a mental connection between their input "I pointed at the enemy" and the outcome "I hit the enemy".

If you put something in that breaks that connection you frustrate the player, which is why Bethesda took it out, and why almost as many people mod it out as mod tits in, and this being a bethesda game that's a very large number indeed.

By that logic there shouldn't be RNG in any game ever. Required to click on an enemy in xcom? Well, you were required to interact so you automatically hit! Required to roll dice in DND? Well it must automatically be a 20!

All you're doing by clicking on the enemy in Morrowind is telling the game that you're trying to hit them. The game then decides if you succeed based on your stats. There's nothing wrong with this system at all other than your personal preference.

Also, mods are not a compelling argument. People always cheat at games. That doesn't make it good game design to build the cheat in. Considering that every Bethesda game since Morrowind has gotten progressively worse, I don't think the fact that they changed it is compelling either. There's a reason that we're still talking about Morrowind 20 years after release.

Modern games are designed more and more to appeal to the maximum amount of people. When you appeal to the lowest common denominator what you get is a homogenized mess of a game that no one actively hates, but no one loves either. It's just that making a mediocre game that somewhat appeals to everyone is more profitable than making a great game that highly appeals to a certain niche. We've seen this pattern of dumbing down and homogenizing mechanics over and over with almost every mainstream series.

[LaZodiac]

By that logic there shouldn't be RNG in any game ever. Required to click on an enemy in xcom? Well, you were required to interact so you automatically hit! Required to roll dice in DND? Well it must automatically be a 20!

All you're doing by clicking on the enemy in Morrowind is telling the game that you're trying to hit them. The game then decides if you succeed based on your stats. There's nothing wrong with this system at all other than your personal preference.

Also, mods are not a compelling argument. People always cheat at games. That doesn't make it good game design to build the cheat in. Considering that every Bethesda game since Morrowind has gotten progressively worse, I don't think the fact that they changed it is compelling either. There's a reason that we're still talking about Morrowind 20 years after release.

Modern games are designed more and more to appeal to the maximum amount of people. When you appeal to the lowest common denominator what you get is a homogenized mess of a game that no one actively hates, but no one loves either. It's just that making a mediocre game that somewhat appeals to everyone is more profitable than making a great game that highly appeals to a certain niche. We've seen this pattern of dumbing down and homogenizing mechanics over and over with almost every mainstream series.

I think the thing that's being missed in this example is that in actiony games like Morrowind, getting close enough to do the click while avoiding getting hurt back is part of the challenge. Successfully doing that, and then failing despite it clearly showing otherwise, is bull****. In XCom, you ARE "just clicking", because it is a tactics rpg.

You see how these are different, right?

[Rynjin]

There's a reason that we're still talking about Morrowind 20 years after release.

Because those little known flops Skyrim and Oblivion never get mentioned anymore.

Look I'll come at this from a weird perspective, but if you look at the writing queue for a gaming website you know what you'll ALWAYS find? A Skyrim article of some kind. Along with Minecraft.

And I don't mean this like it's in there with every other game under the sun. No, these two games go into the queue as strong Evergreen material because people search for it. They search for Skyrim and Minecraft content so much that notoriously trend-chasing schlock sites will actually take the time to write articles about it. Skyrim and Minecraft articles are there next to whatever the flavor of the month is in terms of popularity.

Because people like these games, and have not forgotten about them.

You can despair over it all you want, but the choice was made 20 years ago to move the game in an action combat direction, and people liked it. And let's be clear: the combat sucks in both following games. But it still sucks a whole lot LESS than Morrowind, which suffered from having a severe identity crisis in the shift from Ultima Underworld-clone to "ground breaking open world RPG".

(I'm also not going to touch the classification of modding as "cheating" except to say: no.)

[Psyren]

Because those little known flops Skyrim and Oblivion never get mentioned anymore.

People talk about Oblivion? Other than to make fun of the voice acting and conversation pie?

(Note that I agree with you, I just couldn't help myself)

[Rynjin]

People talk about Oblivion? Other than to make fun of the voice acting and conversation pie?

(Note that I agree with you, I just couldn't help myself)

=(

I love Oblivion. And I maintain that love by not playing it very often, thank you very much.

Real talk though, a potentially controversial opinion is that I think Oblivion has the overall best quest design in the whole franchise. It hits that perfect sweet spot between Morrowind's complex "no hand holding" nature and Skyrim's "pure theme park, no substance".

The game keeps things flowing and fun, with minimal frustration (from the quest design itself anyway), and has a great mix of both fluff and substance to its quest.

Even my least favorite faction quest (the Fighter's Guild) has some genuine gut-punch moments in between its abject fluff kill quests.

I really want to play Skyblivion when it releases here in the next decade or so.

[PhoenixPhyre]

=(

I love Oblivion. And I maintain that love by not playing it very often, thank you very much.

Real talk though, a potentially controversial opinion is that I think Oblivion has the overall best quest design in the whole franchise. It hits that perfect sweet spot between Morrowind's complex "no hand holding" nature and Skyrim's "pure theme park, no substance".

The game keeps things flowing and fun, with minimal frustration (from the quest design itself anyway), and has a great mix of both fluff and substance to its quest.

Even my least favorite faction quest (the Fighter's Guild) has some genuine gut-punch moments in between its abject fluff kill quests.

I really want to play Skyblivion when it releases here in the next decade or so.

I think I agree with you. Although I'm still not a fan of the Morrowind/Oblivion style of character leveling (where you mostly have to pump skills you really DON'T care about to max your stat points so you can actually succeed at the things you care about without hitting super-scaling bandits)

[Ortho]

Also, mods are not a compelling argument. People always cheat at games. That doesn't make it good game design to build the cheat in.

Leaving aside the philosophical debate of whether or not it's even possible to cheat in a singleplayer game, I'd love to hear why you consider my mod that removes Fallout: New Vegas's pervasive stutter and crash-to-desktops a cheat.

[GloatingSwine]

By that logic there shouldn't be RNG in any game ever. Required to click on an enemy in xcom? Well, you were required to interact so you automatically hit! Required to roll dice in DND? Well it must automatically be a 20!

Because those are indirect interactions.

There's a layer of abstraction between the input and the action which breaks the expectation of outcome.

And this isn't just me saying this, this is how human brains work. It's part of how our brains have adapted as tool users. Go and ask someone to describe the process of how they drove to work today, and either none or almost none of what they tell you will be the physical steps of operating the car. Because the tool-adaptation of the human brain removes those layers of action if there is a direct link between input and outcome.

[Batcathat]

A good metaphor might be carnival games. If I buy a lottery ticket, I'm fine with random chance deciding whether or not I win, but if I knock over the cans by throwing a ball I would be rather peeved if I was told that, no, I didn't actually knock them over.

[Saambell]

Another good metric of "was this a good mechanic" is "how well would it fit into other games of a similar style". Can you imagine how awful Morrowind's RNG Skill based hits would be in a game like Dark Souls? Both are games that are open ended, don't hold your hand as you explore a large and fantastical world, and have piles of stats. Can you imagine if it was a case of until you improve one or two of your stats, and if your stamina is under a certain amount, you only have a 50% at best chance to actually hit the foe. How infuriating that game would be if it had Morrowind's RNG hit mechanics. And I mean beyond how frustrating and off putting Dark Souls is by default. Dark Souls already has a huge skill investment requirement, tossing in piles of RNG for if your attacks actually did damage would be a straw that would have meant the game would basically have died at launch. Or imagine Monster Hunter, but until you did 100 hunts with a weapon, you always had a chance to miss.

Something as simple as a 1 second animation of the Morrowind target leaning slightly aside would maybe have helped. A visual cue that your attack missed, with the foe reacting to your input, would have taken a lot of the sting out of the misses. Even if its as simple of they lean back for a second, and plays the miss woosh sound that's already in the game, might have helped. Everyone can understand invul frames, and having a visual "oh he did a dodge" even if the sword still flies through their body, would mean the misses aren't just "but i hit, they didn't react, what happened", but a thing you can observe and appreciate when your skills improve to the point they stop dodging. There's a mental difference between "oh they dodged" and "i missed", and by putting the blame on the foe, rather then themselves, players would be a lot more accepting of the disconnect of their sword phasing through the target with no damage. Which, funny enough, adding a tiny animation by mod, would be more true to the original game then removing hit chance. But I guess getting the nightmare of scripting when to play said animation turns off a lot of modders.

And on the topic of "but mods don't count", literally the ONLY reason Skyrim has stayed a top game for over a decade is purely due to the modding community. Skyrim is not a good game, it is however an incredible modding platform. It is a poor game that's not for everyone, but because of how insane the modding community is, it can be turned into each individual player's preferred game. At this point, there is near enough zero players of Skyrim who play vanilla. It is simply not done. Skyrim as released, is dead. But mods have kept the game alive and rereleased for over a decade. Heck, the most recent rerelease, Anniversary Edition, the main update was basically just preinstall a few of the top rated mods. And even if Elder Scrolls 6 comes out in the next year or two, Skyrim will continue to be a modding powerhouse for years to come.

[Imbalance]

A good metaphor might be carnival games. If I buy a lottery ticket, I'm fine with random chance deciding whether or not I win, but if I knock over the cans by throwing a ball I would be rather peeved if I was told that, no, I didn't actually knock them over.

What if the ticket was a random draw with a probability curve rather than a 1/x# chance + a rating score that you can work to increase? Would you be less peeved if it was clear that the ball will become intangible in mid-air if your rating + random number =/= the rating + random number of the bottles? There are animations for a successful hit, but nobody talks about that - what's missing in Morrowind is a DM to narrate a miss.

ETA: I still play unmodded Skyrim.

[Batcathat]

And on the topic of "but mods don't count", literally the ONLY reason Skyrim has stayed a top game for over a decade is purely due to the modding community. Skyrim is not a good game, it is however an incredible modding platform. It is a poor game that's not for everyone, but because of how insane the modding community is, it can be turned into each individual player's preferred game. At this point, there is near enough zero players of Skyrim who play vanilla. It is simply not done. Skyrim as released, is dead. But mods have kept the game alive and rereleased for over a decade. Heck, the most recent rerelease, Anniversary Edition, the main update was basically just preinstall a few of the top rated mods. And even if Elder Scrolls 6 comes out in the next year or two, Skyrim will continue to be a modding powerhouse for years to come.

I don't think that's entirely fair. I agree that modding has obviously prolonged its lifespan, but personally I would be up for playing it entirely unmodded and still have a fun time and I think I'm far from alone in that. Despite its flaws, one of the reasons it has a massive modding community in the first place was that a ton of people played and really liked the vanilla game.

[NichG]

I mean there's also that the problem with the idea that outright misses are absolutely essential to making the game mechanics, skill progression, etc, work. You could just as easily have a system where you basically always hit but the character skill directly scales damage. Or a system where you always hit at some (lower) base damage level, but you roll your character's skill to upgrade those base hits to varying levels of critical hit and your stats determine how much better a crit is than a base hit. Or a system where you always hit but sometimes based on an enemy's armor your strike bounces off of the armor, putting you on a longer recovery cooldown - with chances and cooldown length determined by skills and stats.

So its like, you can change things around to make the gameplay feel better without having to just remove stuff entirely or dumb everything down. The hit/crit/armor contributes to attack cooldown and skill aids recovery/etc system would be even more complex and realistic than Morrowind's combat in many ways, if those are things you care about.

Changing a formula is risky, sure, but if you don't try to do things better you get a slowly decaying march of sequels each of which feel a little more hollow than the last...

Edit: And on modding, I was actually looking at data about this recently. If you look at the curve of Oblivion mods uploaded vs time, Oblivion modding immediately dropped off by a factor of 4 or so when Skyrim came out. Not like a slow shift of people from the one to the other as they discovered they preferred Skyrim but a really sudden drop that never recovered.

The really funny conclusion though is when comparing the mod curve of Skyrim to Stardew Valley, Stardew Valley appears to have an exponentially growing degree of modding attention whereas Skyrim is falling off in a way that looks like it might be power-law.

[Rynjin]

Edit: And on modding, I was actually looking at data about this recently. If you look at the curve of Oblivion mods uploaded vs time, Oblivion modding immediately dropped off by a factor of 4 or so when Skyrim came out. Not like a slow shift of people from the one to the other as they discovered they preferred Skyrim but a really sudden drop that never recovered.

The really funny conclusion though is when comparing the mod curve of Skyrim to Stardew Valley, Stardew Valley appears to have an exponentially growing degree of modding attention whereas Skyrim is falling off in a way that looks like it might be power-law.

Where's this data from, out of curiosity? From what I've seen the Skyrim modding community is just as active as ever. Somewhere between 30 and 50 mods uploaded a day.

Is this data only taking into account LE and not SE/AE?