I hate: Skyrim's Killmoves

 Fatility.

I have been playing a simply obscene amount of Skyrim recently, and that renewed familiarity has sparked up some dormant issues that you only really think about when 200 hours into a playthrough. Such as the killmove system: which sucks. And to be clear, I remember this being one of the most exciting things proudly postured in the marketing leading up to that initial 11/11/11 release date. Oblivion's combat was rather famously one of it's weakest aspects, with a notoriously flimsy 'chopstick' waving of swords that was considerably lacking in impactful connection and even more in strategy. Somehow even Morrowind manages to give it's players more options in the heat of combat than Oblivion did, and the magic/ archery system wasn't much more advanced. So now that Skyrim was going to be directly addressing that, people were excited to try out this fighting system for themselves. Which was when Bethesda lifted that cudgel and squarely struck the heated Iron with the Killmove trailer.

This was a trailer that consisted purely of every single moment in the game where the animations took over and the player performed some choreographed show of martial prowess, far eclipsing anything we'd seen in an Elder Scrolls game to date. It was violent, it was exciting, and I even think it might have made the cut to be included in the Trump Administration's supercut of video game violence, for those who remember that little MLG compilation vid. And we, the many who were ready and eager for Skyrim to drop into our waiting hands for months already, went crazy for it. We ate that action up to the dregs and didn't even hang around the cafeteria lady in order to beg for more, because we'd feasted heartily. All of which is to say that I was pretty predisposed towards the whole Killmove ecosystem for months before the game came out, so I was just fine ignoring any budding complications with it's implementation once the title arrived.

And nor did I really have any reason to be upset. The gameplay was spiced up sufficiently with the special little flourish moment, typically performed on the last enemy in a wave of combat, and the ability to throw on a perk that allowed for decapitations was widely celebrated by the majority of players as 'super dope'. Even playing on Master difficulty it all seemed to work out just fine. And then Bethesda added Legendary difficulty. Now to understand how these two parts of this story work together, I'm going to need to explain both how the killmoves work and how legendary difficulty works, and then you'll see why this turned into a problem so bad that I, just recently, had to cave and get the mod 'Violens' just so that I could disable killmoves almost entirely. I do not exaggerate when I say that this combination of systems makes the combat nearly unplayable in Legendary difficulties lategame, and if you don't have Violens in your load order but are trying an Anniversary Mode Legendary run; be warned about what to expect from Level 30 up!

Killmoves are triggered on the enemy when two conditions are met, namely that slaying the enemy in front of you will take the player out of combat, and that the attack in question has the potential to kill the enemy in the next hit. As in, the expected calculated damage of the hit will drain all the remaining target's hit points. At the very moment that attack is initiated, before the animation to swing has even begun, the game takes control of the action and the player can watch as an animation plays off. Archery players will know that this becomes a problem when the camera takes control for a ranged shot, and then the enemy simply moves out the way and you get a cinematic presentation of your screw up, but otherwise the system works fairly well. However, it also works on the player. Killmoves on the player can activate even if the player isn't the last enemy in the area who needs to be slain, and will take over, once again, if the attack that is about to be executed has the potential to kill it's target. Keep that in mind.

Now Legendary difficulty in Skyrim expands the difficulty of the game merely by applying modifiers to combat which, when you realise them, absolutely suck. So let me give you a warning that once you realise what the game is doing, it might subconsciously ruin Legendary difficulty combat for you in the future forever. Are you fairly warned? Okay: it's just cutting the damage that NPCs take back 1/4 of the expected damage and multiplying player received damage by x 3. Not really the 'fair world' I was shooting for when I picked the highest difficulty. I wanted to be less of a god, not become the world's most paper-thin human. Oh and yes, the buff to damage received is only on the player, meaning that if you walk around with companions they'll serve to be great damage shields with their x 0.25 damage reduction. Basically; you have to get real good at dodging attacks if you're going to be playing Legendary solo.

But then there's a issue there, isn't there? Because as I described with the way that Killmoves work, the animation takes over the second an attack is queued that has the potential to kill the target. Now kill move animations overwrite the controls of the attacker, and the target; which means that if an enemy launches an attack against you that might have killed you, but you have healing potions or, you know, the ability to move out of the way, your chance to save yourself is overruled by the game taking over for a killmove animation. This becomes an even bigger issue in Legendary difficulty, because every enemy does 3x their damage, which essentially makes it so that any level 30 or above enemy with a two handed weapon can instantly kill you just by focusing their melee aggro on you, and there's nothing you can do about it. Dodging is useless when the killmove activates before the attack animation has begun, and solo legendary play becomes effectively impossible.

And even with a huge group of companions, like how I play, it's still an impossible situation to manage. I remember recently conducting the final mission in the Civil War, and it was essentially like trying to navigate a landmine of enemies who would instantly kill me just by looking in my direction. I had to try to sneak around the enemy lines so that I could quickly break the barriers between me and the final room and just hope that the game didn't spawn 6 guys ontop of whilst I'm doing it. The problem becomes even worse who you realise that, whilst human enemies pull off the most killmoves, most other humanoid enemies do too, which makes Nordic Ruins a slog. And then Dragons can do it on top of that, so melee-range dragon fights are a no-go. Basically, the further along in the game you get, the more impossible it becomes to play the way you want to; and that's a bit of a huge problem.

I can't recall the amount of times I nearly tore out my hair from having a five minute fight totally wasted because my handy shields, Sofia and Inigo, dropped aggro for a split second; I've even had times when I've been behind a wall of companion bodies and still had the animation glitch out, thus I've been melee killed from across the room. It's quite clear we're looking at the sort of game for which Bethesda have layered so many systems ontop of each other that they didn't really realise when two glaring mechanics didn't play nice together, and I suppose now it's just too late to change anything. At least from their end. From yours you can turn off killmoves in the Ini, or download a mod to give the player killmove immunity, which sucks to have to do; but the alternative is a practically unplayable melee combat system in a melee focused fantasy game.