Bay 12 Games Forum

A hole in the ground.

What is going on here?

Yeah the dungeons were insane. I even got lost in the beginner dungeon when I started.

I don't feel that save scumming is particular dwarven while accepting the honorable sacrifice of a dwarf is not. Especially when so much energy is wasted that could have otherwise gone into brewing booze or digging deep.

The elf is you, with your pityful attempts to cling on life. What's next? Eating the dwarf's corpse so he can keep on living inside you? Disgusting.

I happen to play Daggerfall currently with two characters. I made screenshots of the SW corner of daggerfall with both chars and they are identical. I do not know if that is also the case for two different installations.

The small towns and locations are randomised though and different for both characters.

Just let him die in peace.He suffered enough.

Quote from: Vibhor on March 29, 2011, 10:03:14 pm

The combat controls are not for realism but for making complex moves.

What complex moves? It has four different moves, four, all of which are simple directional attacks.

In Warband beta, which I took part in, some more subtle mechanics were added to make combat more complex. That's what he meant I guess.

1) Chamberblocking: With executing the mirror attack at the right moment after the opponents does a certain attack, one is able to counter his attack. For example a left-to-right swing can be countered with a well-timed right-to-left swing that way.

2) Weapon sweetspots: Weapon attacks do reduced damage if they connect at the very beginning/end of the animation or if they hit at a bad range.

3) Stun: Heavy weapons can stun people defending with lighter ones, taking away their opportunity of attacking back and allowing a follow-up attack. This is especially true if the initial attack was charged up or had a good (movement) speed bonus.

4) Feinting: Probably started out as a bug in the original M&B, but became the foundation of dueling in Warband. Attacks can be canceled in the beginning of their animation or ready position, allowing to execute a different attack instead. Can be chained, but feint spam usually leads to axe into face for oneself against an avid oponent. There are 2 different kind of feints, early(silent, basicly just changing the ready position) and late(loud feints, shortly after the canceled attack is released). In that context the "unbalanced" tag for some weapons was introduced, that hinders their feint/attack canceling ability.

5) Crush through: Very few weapons, like hammers have the ability to partly crush through a block with a strong attack. This makes fighting with or against them unique.

6) Charged up or chambered attacks: Holding an attack for a short amount of time increases its power (damage or stun if blocked). However the maximum is set about 1 second or so. Holding for longer decreases the power again.

And probably more stuff I forgot. It is by far the most complex fighting system in an FPS-like game that I know of.

Quote

Nothing stupid about making combat less random and more skill-based in multiplayer.

On the face of it, I agree. But I don't agree that the M&B blocking system makes it less random. In my experience, the M&B system is extremely glitchy and often interprets my mouse motion in completely the wrong way even when I move the mouse over a pretty long distance. Short, twitchy motions necessary to counter fast attacks are almost completely random for me. Maybe my mouse sucks, maybe I suck, but that's my experience with it.

I disagree. With abit of training the M&B fighting system allows perfect blocking for an undetermined amount of time. "Glitchy" feeling only comes in multiplayer with ping > 80 or the server running a CPU-heavy mod. It's a question of muscle memory that grants close-to-perfect blocking ability at some point - even with a non-gaming mouse. In fact, that's what makes multiplayer dueling quite interesting of both duelists are good enough. Finding a way to overcome your opponents block with delayed hits, clever feints, occational follow-up attacks, movement that forces the blocker to turn to the opposite direction they have to turn the mouse for the block and so on. All this makes it the best melee system on the market in my opinion.

I agree though that this is only true for multiplayer. In a single player game all this gets dulled by the limited AI. The console cancer consortium and their eternal strive for simplification will not allow such a sophisticated fighting system anyway.