Quite a bit might be an overstatement. Well, at least Skyrim could learn a lot from one aspect of Dead Island which is its melee combat. Although Elder Scrolls tries to cover many more gameplay aspects like; stealth, bow'n arrow, melee, magic, and so on, I can understand then why a game like Dead Island was able to do such a better job with its melee seeing as how it basically only focused on a single area. But, ultimately I would like to see Elder Scrolls in the future take some additional tactical approaches to its hand-to-hand combat in later installments. I thought a more tactical and RPG-esque game mechanic may have been foreshadowed by Bethesda's Fallout games because of how you can target limbs, which is also another feature of why I though Dead Island's melee was vastly superior to Elder Scrolls'.

In Dead Island you can target not only a limb but also a specific section of a limb and then chop it off. Some Zombies (thugs) have devastating melee attacks when they flail their arms around and will send you soaring through the air if you're not careful. The best tactic for dealing with a Thug zombie is to first remove both arms so you can finally get within weapon's reach of their neck and finish the job. Besides the tactical applications of limb-removal I also found the analog setting to be extremely innovative when it comes to melee combat in a first-person game. Lastly, in the Elder Scrolls franchise melee definitely does not feel weighted and instead tends to feel (mostly) like you're swinging through air and when you strike someone in melee combat usually only a stream of blood will jet-off in the direction according to the way your arm was swinging at your foe. Dead Island's melee nearly never feels like that. Every swing hits with the right "umph" and every clank feels as though it is connecting with just the right impact to spin or topple your enemy.

Jump to 5:18 in my review to see an example of some of the contact sensitivity and weighted combat feel of Dead Island.

It's just too bad that so much more of Dead Island's aspects were completely shallow when compared to it's melee combat.

What do you think? Would you like to see contact information like this in future Elder Scrolls installments? Possibly enemy types that require tactical dismemberment to defeat? I know I would.