Still, I can avoid this "core" of the game entirely and play as a cowardly trader.
Yeah, but then you miss out on 95% of it. Like I said, trade is just ancillary to combat, apart from goods the only thing you can buy is combat gear. There are better trading games out there.
I went through the tutorial just to get the gist of the control system without missing anything. It was nice enough to reward me with a selection of weapons to test. And the point is they didn't have this plethora of combat styles you claimed it did. It missed out on something as obvious as a gladius or a halberd. It did have a two-handed sword work Conan style, though. But it was all just a bunch of swings with no variance in animation between gladius, handaxe and halberd. And the problem with the bo is that he used it like a grandma, like the end of that bo was heavy beyond imagining.
You need to be a certain level to be able to use the special attacks. I'm guessing the tutorial gives you a lvl 1 character, which pretty much means you can't do shit.
That's actually supposed to be parrying you're doing against thrust attacks. I'm pretty sure the character does move the blade upwards as you "block".
Nope, in M&B and in Warband the block animations are completely static. But animations are just cosmetic, my point is that it's a forcefield. The M&B combat system is very dynamic, your character mirrors the motions you do with the mouse. But to parry a spear thrust you'd have to actively move your sword/mouse. That the character does nothing is not much of a problem, that the
player does nothing is much worse. You can just sit there holding the button and you'll be completely invincible, the spearman will be unable to harm you. With other opponents the system works fine, because they'll just attack from a different direction, so you do have to constnatly change your block direction. But a spearman only has one attack, so the whole system just falls apart.
And it looked dreadful despite being the climax of the main quest.
Well yes, it did. But my point was that in Oblivion, the big battle was a special occasion. In M&B, big battles are an everyday occurrence.
The most hectic fight in ACB is actually defending the mercenary keep. There are around 10 allies and around 20-30 enemies at a time, you're supposed to close the gates and even all your brotherhood assassins at once do little to ease the battle. EDIT: Well, ok, I lied. The brotherhood assassins do a lot to help. In fact I thought it'd be impossible to do without them.
Yeah, that fight is a breeze. By that point I had all my girls trained up to Assassino rank, so I just plonked down a smoke bomb by each gate to keep enemies off my back while I closed it, then called in my kill squad and watched the mayhem. Didn't have to lift a finger.
Role-playing in Oblivion is not really a self-imposed challenge though. It's self-imposed something, but it ain't a challenge. I mean, what do you call pretending to be a guard and standing there at Cheydinhal's keep entrance while the other guard obliviously stares at you? If Oblivion's wiki is to be trusted, that's something people actually do for "role-playing". You can't really "role-play" anything other than a hero without the world's believability collapsing around you.
Well of course you're going to roleplay a hero. I guess the TES motto is "be whichever kind of hero you want to be", then. But it's not so much what you try to do, it's more about how you go about it - muscle, brains, stealth... Sure, you can mix it up and munchkin the hell out of it until you're invincible, but you can also limit yourself. I've found that makes the game a lot more fun.
And I'd say Daggerfall had the right idea for imposing challenges. Actual game mechanic related disadvantages in return for greater XP rates or other game mechanic advantages.
Yeah, that was genius. But it was maybe a bit too free-form, too arbitrary. Why exactly should a perfectly normal human being for example take damage in sunlight or holy places? Doesn't really make much sense to give you that option.