The problem with combat in Morrowind is that it simultaneously measures player skill and character skill. Chance-to-hit works when the character does the aiming and gap-closing for you. When you have to handle that with poor depth perception and you have chance-to-hit on top of that, it’s always going to feel like garbage.
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Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 days agoI totally agree. Morrowind gets a lot of hate for it’s combat (some deserved), but most of the time it’s people not understanding what it’s trying to do. You don’t complain in BG3 when an attack fails, and that’s the same thing Morrowind was doing. It cared about character skills, not player skill.
Yeah, if you create a scrawny character who has never held a blade, grab a dagger, run into a dungeon until you’re exhausted, then try to fight then you should miss. The later games, especially Skyrim, not caring about the character makes every playthrough feel the same and no one has a unique experience.
Morrowind needed animations to convey what was happening, but the foundation is very solid. It’s just the technology at the time limited it and it didn’t communicate what it was doing well.
eRac@lemmings.world 2 days ago
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I disagree. It’s been done well before. Where Morrowind fails is only in that it doesn’t display success or failure well. If your character did an animation where they fumbled their attack, or the enemy dodged or blocked, then it would be fine. Instead you just spam attacks that all look the same but only some make your targets health bar go down.
Feedback is always critical. Instead of implementing proper feedback, Bethesda instead simplified it so they don’t have to and all attacks succeed. It still looks and feels bad, but it made it so it doesn’t need to show failures.
eRac@lemmings.world 1 day ago
Do you have an example that does first person melee combat well while rolling for accuracy?
VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It’s also from the era when people were expected to read the manual while the game installed, so the game never has tutorials for certain things, most prominent being fatigue. New players tend to run everywhere, drain their fatigue meter, and struggle to hit anything or cast a spell. Just reading the manual, as the devs originally expected, solves a lot.