Have you played Skyrim or any of its mods?
Okay, here’s my skyrim experience:
First I started the tutorial. After following a straight path I eventually got a weapon. From there I realized that I could beat up the guide character and he would never die or aggro. I got my two handed skill up to like 26 or something before the tutorial was over.
Then I tried to keep attacking the tutorial guide after leaving the tutorial, and he aggro’d. I had saved after aggroing him so I had to kill him, so I did that.
Then I went into the nearest town, looked around a bit, then ventured off into the wilderness and found the closest bandit cave. I killed every living thing in the cave by walking backwards and power attacking, including melee attackers, sorcerers, etc. Then I took literally everything in the entire cave that wasn’t nailed to the ground. I carried all this shit extremely slowly to whiterun (okay, I cheated a little here and modified my movement speed in the console), then I sold it all and broke the economy, having more gold than god.
After that I installed like 6-10GB of graphics improving mods (the creation kit wasn’t out yet, so graphics were all people could do). I tried them out, made the game look really pretty, then I turned the game off and eventually uninstalled it when I realized I wasn’t gonna seriously play it.
From that time I ascertained, the attacks didn’t have much variety. The lack of non-random hitstun didn’t work very well (hitstun would sometimes be triggered as a random effect, so basically combat was just standing in the enemy’s face and slashing a lot until one of you fell over, while chugging potions in the menu and maybe trying to fight ranged and backpedal as you did so), the enemy AI wasn’t amazing (run at you trying to attack usually), and the stealth was workable, but still extremely basic.
There have been a number of mods that have improved these things. I have not played any of them, but to truly fix the game would require a lot more effort than what’s been put into those mods. You’d need truly different melee attacks, you’d need better enemy designs, better enemy AI, and better level design to take advantage of those things. The scope is too large to really fix skyrim and the tools are too limited.
Here’s a video series going over how a more advanced AI combat system was built for skyrim by one modder:
Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints 