New Skyrim combat mod adds enemy circling behavior

Thanks to modding, Skyrim's melee combat has come far from its legacy days.

With the Animation Motion Revolution framework, the quality of custom melee animation movesets in Skyrim has also increased significantly in the last two years. The modding spectrum has become broad enough to retool the game in any combat style the player wishes.

It is possible to invoke the grounded, methodic combat of Dark Souls 1 and 2 with SkySA attack behavior compulsion. On the other end of the spectrum, one can also come closer to Nioh or Dragon's Dogma with Attack Behavior Revamped, stances, and CGO.

The mods, however, all serve to make Skyrim more difficult overall. Monitor144's 'Wait Your Turn - Enemy Circling Behavior' is among the rarest combat mods that try to balance the game in the player's favor.

How does enemy circling behavior benefit Skyrim combat?

The enemy AI in Elder Scrolls games, since the Gamebryo days, functions in terms of actors that act individually. In clearer terms, different classes have their own individual AI package, but they did not try to synergize. Generally, bandit encounters will have no cohesive strategy on the enemy's part other than trap setpieces.

This works out in Skyrim as the encounters are mostly designed around enemy actor placement, and the radiant nature of the individual AI creates emergent gameplay moments. One could argue that in an unmodded game, this adds to the replay value.

The combat modding trend in Skyrim thus far has been re-introducing some difficulty that was cushioned by Bethesda for greater accessibility and streamlining. Most combat modernization attempts like SkySA and Inpa Sekiro Combat try to introduce more fluid animation and mechanics while ignoring the AI issue.

This results in more than one enemy power attacking the player concurrently, for example. In narrow spaces with movement-restrictive mods like Blade and Blunt installed, this creates inevitably difficult situations at times that may strip away the fun factor.

Games like Assassin's Creed and even Dark Souls, to an extent, have telegraphed enemy behavior to make enemy movement predictable and thus easy to strategize against. The fluid Arkham combat system, for example, builds off of the fact that enemies take turns taking on Batman.

Monitor144's mod addresses this by adding an attack window interval and circling behavior, as it says on the can. Instead of swarming the players with attacks all at once, enemies will now take turns and approach the player to give the encounters some fairness.

The degree of leniency is customizable through MCM, where the player can change both the attack window interval and the simultaneous enemy cap (i.e., how many enemies are allowed to attack at once).