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The Coolest Forgotten Action RPG Combat System
Making my stupid dual shield dreams come true
Around fifteen years ago, when Skyrim’s first gameplay details came out, Bethesda proudly announced that they’d be going all-in on dual wielding. For the first time in an Elder Scrolls game, you could make different custom combos of weapons and spells in each hand, apparently unleashing wild new gameplay opportunities.
This wasn’t really anything that new for gaming. Halo 2 had made dual wielding a big deal many years earlier on much slower original Xbox hardware. Bioshock was already two installments deep, and its second entry had a spell/weapon combo system that was very similar-looking to Skyrim’s exciting new feature.
Still, on seeing these supposed refinements (and after getting over my envy of my friends who were in the audience for the game’s live PAX footage reveal), I started to imagine what it could mean. They had mostly focused on the now bog-standard combination of fireball spell and sword, which seems like it’s available in literally every other RPG made since. Why have just ranged or melee attacks when you could have both?
After an afternoon of mind-wandering, I settled on the one ridiculous thing I hoped most for the game to have: dual shields. How good and dumb would that be? Blocking with one…
