mediocrepoet said:
What struck you as particularly bad about OB melee combat?
That it sucked.
In OB the team decided that they want to drop some extra abstraction and make combat more actiony and visceral. It ended up anything but. You see, in MW, there was this annoying "air sword" thing where you missed despite animations indicating otherwise. It was a problem, but not that much of a problem - in melee combat most attacks don't result in a hit, same when an completely inept archer tries to hit a distant target, so the problem was exclusive to presentation (not showing miss or dodge) rather than the mechanics. Put in dodge animations for most enemies, add in no penetration sounds for those that cannot dodge and you have a much better combat utilizing exact same mechanics.
In OB the decided that all attacks hit and all blocks succeed - that's when everything went down the crapper because despite they sought more "realistic" mechanics they actually departed from realism, while at the same time decreasing abstraction which made this departure all the more glaring. One shit decision created an entire system of shit mechanics, because:
-if every block succeeds, they had to make damage leak through shields to reflect the block skill which is plain stupid, especially with light, short weapons like daggers
-if every attack succeeds they had to make attacks less powerful and damage scale with weapon skill, which means that if you brain someone with an axe they will survive with minimum damage provided you aren't very skilled in axe combat (hello? Axe to the head)
-if every ranged attack succeeds and if arrows are shown to stick out of people it means that even the least skilled archer will have pinpoint accuracy and that if your skill is low, enemies will taunt you by running around relatively unharmed with over a dozen arrows sticking out from between their ribs in very visible and non-abstract manner.
-if every attack succeeds, then critical events like staggering or knockdowns have to be weaker and any single of them has to have little impact on combat
-alterations to combat system resulted in streamlining of attributes, for example agility stopped influencing dodging, attacks, knockdown resistance and blocking, so they tied it to ranged damage instead in place of much more logical strength
-removal of certain elements like to-hit rolls forced removal of certain magical effects like sanctuary
-bethesda cannot into AI (radiant or otherwise), removal of chance element reduced combat to fighting by algorithm - in MW, as bad as the combat was, it at least involved some fight or flight decisions - for example when you had an unlucky streak - and emotions - for example when you just blocked mighty blow that would have killed you otherwise.
Of course there were other shit decisions involved too:
-MW might not have locational damage, but it did have locational armour, even though hit location was determined randomly - OB had abstract overall AR meaning that armored boots protected against headshots
-MW used rather interesting AR formula allowing strong impacts to be absorbed much less effectively and AR itself represented damage that would get halved. This made damage something more than mere question of DPS and allowed uncapped AR. In OB AR was simple percentage reduction capped at 85%.
-For some reason someone thought it would be a good idea to simplify material progression to simple linear scale and make all weapons available in all materials - farewell sharp, light, brittle glass, welcome glass warhammers and bows.
-For some obscure reason bethesda decided to ditch about half the weapon types
-For some equally obscure reason someone thought that making blunt and blades, as well as heavy and medium armours pretty much copies of each other was a good idea, which practically cut the remaining, combat related content by half
-Perks were glaringly added as an afterthought, which meant arbitrary effect and identical progression of attacks regardless of weapon type - bizarrely enough macestab was the most powerful blunt attack unlockable, and it caused paralysis, just like its counterpart, daggerstab, for some reason requiring maxed out skill to perform (hello? Daggers, stabbitystab weapons)
Then there was level scaling.
What bethesda should have done, if more direct combat was their goal was to take individual parts of MW combat and refine them, then put them under player control - manual instead of random aiming for bodyparts, actual locational damage, visible dodging, more complex swordplay, manually controlled offensive/defensive stances triggering statwise blocking and so on.
What bethesda did was streamline all the complexity and try to model their combat out of simplified abstractions. The result was obviously crap as RPG system, but also complete shit as an action game system, as headshots, for instance, were already the norm in late '90s.
