Salubrious

A grand and intoxicating innocence

  • She/Her ๐Ÿณ๏ธโ€โšง๏ธ

Hey, don't ask me my opinion -- I'm nobody. Just pretend I'm not here.

I mostly just post about things tangentially related to The Simpsons, or Morrowind or The X-COM Files.

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Foxtrot68
@Foxtrot68

I'm not sure if this is a hot take or not but bethesda is so dogshit at designing melee weapon combat that the best they ever did it is still Morrowind.

Fallout New Vegas melee builds rule but that was Obsidian desperately trying to fix Fallout 3 with adding special moves in vats and the DT armor system not making you as vulnerable in combat so you could actually close the distance without dying horribly.

but yeah in Oblivion: there's no strategy, combat is erratic, everyone attacks too fast so you can't really react accordingly, plus the leveling problem can make it absolutely hellish later on if you level wrong, and all enemies start becoming damage sponges.

Skyrim: stunlock guys with a bash, swing, swing, repeat for 400 hours. boring as all hell but it technically works? I guess?? that's not a high bar though. once you figure that one out I'm not sure there's anything more to the combat in skyrim, it's repetitive and it only gets fun if you start breaking the game with the fortify restoration loop, cause it saves you time from having to swing at draugr for 300 hours.

Fallout 4: all weapons have a set speed, most of them feel incredibly bad to use like you're swinging them underwater, and there's 7 unarmed weapons or something. You're too vulnerable again in the early game (especially in survival mode) and if you're not going for the stupid broken vats teleporting ninja stealth build.. not worth it at all to engage in melee combat. the stupid broken vats melee is fun but it gets old. you become the melee stealth archer. somehow.

Fallout 76: lol do you think you can output enough DPS to be a useful team member with melee? You're better off doing the power armor build with a spinning minigun (if they haven't yet patched that one), but yeah melee in 76 is more of the same in 4, none of the new weapons really solve the core issues from 4, and the perk system in 76 is a nightmare mess that cannot produce satisfying character builds.

Starfield: melee combat as a whole was incredibly shit before the recent rework where late game no melee weapon was viable, after the rework.. combat is back to feeling like fallout 4 but worse, at least they let you hold to block like the good old days, in Fallout 4 it was parry only. in a bethesda game where shit is constantly running at you. great decision, but yeah since enemies end up becoming too spongy, aliens especially are too high HP and too high damage, melee still feels unsatisfying as hell. it was clearly an afterthought in Starfield because there's 7 or so melee weapons in the game, if it wasn't they wouldn't have reworked the system completely months after release, and it's still mediocre and not worth it.

now Morrowind, despite the dice roll accuracy mechanics, lets me feel like I'm cleaving some poor bastard with a greatsword or it let me poke them with a spear. imagine having spears in a medieval fantasy game, unheard of. spears are no longer canon in TES lore post morrowind. The staggering chance in combat alone makes combat in Morrowind more satisfying than the combat in starfield, fallout 3/4/76 and skyrim because it's good to have some feedback! you don't feel like you're taking a butterknife to a tree trunk, I have never felt like an enemy in morrowind was a damage sponge because they all die relatively quickly if you're doing combat right, which is you get your movement right, don't let the enemies make contact with your hitbox, and you realize that needing to charge a hit to deal full damage really matters, or if you're using something like a dagger or spear, you can go for quick blows, higher DPS but lower damage per swing, and the RNG isn't as annoying as it's said to be. you get over it, because morrowind doesn't make enemies scale against you in an exponential power curve, they just start spawning with better weapons as you level up, but they don't suddenly take 50 more hits because you're level 50.

bethesda you've had fucking decades to do this right and you still don't. they didn't even rip off obsidian's idea of vats special moves, like come the fuck on.


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in reply to @Foxtrot68's post:

skyrims combat was fun for me iirc but that was only because of mods! lol, the stuff i had installed made everyone block a lot iirc so you had to move into any humanoids swing range, let them swing and then like move out of their range and avoid getting hit then you were able to hit them back! it was fun you could get a little rhythm going!

vanilla was nothing like that ofc