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Elder Scrolls Online - The Combat and the Content of ESO - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Elder Scrolls Online - The Combat and the Content of ESO - MMORPG.com
During the last column, we talked about some of the pressing issues that Elder Scrolls Online has. I would like now to delve a little deeper into the issues. I know we are talking about more of the “negative” aspects of the game but I think we need to clear the air. I said before it’s always good to talk about what is bad to appreciate the good. Let’s begin the deep, dark adventure!
Comments
I get this for sure but I believe the way the skills level up from use is a way different mechanic than how its done on WOW and FFXIV, so I think that is the major reason for not having multiple bars of skills active all the time. Then the leveling skill system would be completely unneeded.
1) Animation Cancelling - Can't stand it. You should not have to do gimmicky stuff that was unintended in the games original design in order to excel in combat.
2) 6 skills - This is EXTREMELY limited. This is like, MOBA levels of limited. I know there are 2 hot bars, but most classes don't really use 6 skills on each bar anyways. A fair bit of slotted passives. (Usually 1 or 2 in each build that have a passive that is really strong and an active you never hit) I know that there are technically 12 skills total, but most classes sit on one bar 90% of the time anyways. Hell, most builds have the same skills on both bars in some slots.
3) No skill cooldowns - To me, this is a huge problem. This is one of the things that makes animation cancelling feel even worse when combined with it. When skills don't have cooldowns, you typically have less impact when you hit the skill. Obviously with cooldowns they would need more abilities, but this still hurts the combat for me. This is also one of the reasons most builds focus on one bar, because you only have the resources to cast using one.
4) Animations - Some of the combat animations look okay, but I think a lot of this has to do with the feel of the game. The weight on the animations does not feel good to me. I think one of the big problems with this is that when you are moving in the game it feels like you are floating on the game world. This is especially apparently when you mount while running or use any kind of speed skill.
5) Potions / Food - Builds pretty much all require these in order to be even remotely effective unless all you want to do is normal dungeons. Even in normal dungeons you need food though. There is a HUGE difference without it. To me, I think these things should be required for Trials exclusively. Not dungeons or open world content.
6) Light / Medium / Heavy Attacking - This whole concept is quite bizarre. I would understand if you were a crazy person and always played in first person, but reality is most people play in 3rd person. The way you have to "weave" different attacks into your rotation and there are passives that benefit different types is absolutely absurd. This does not feel good when you have barely any way of knowing the timing. If there was some kind of on screen indicator that your attack was now a "medium" or "heavy" attack then I think it would feel better. I don't mean a giant text box or something, I just mean noticeable animations.
I think ESO is a solid game despite all these things, but the reason I keep up with the DLC (the ones with new zones / story, not dungeons) is more to do with the story and world. The skill system itself is pretty fun to progress in as well, it is just not always fun to use the skills.
Yes, you need food and potions to be effective at higher levels. That gives crafting a legitimate purpose, so what's wrong with that? I disagree that they're necessary for open world content, I never use them in that context.
ESO is a game I played in beta and keep coming back to over and over. We can second guess the developers all we like, but I think the success of the game speaks for itself. They're obviously doing something right.
Can't really call something that doubles your DPS - and it does exactly that - a meh thing
It's also something that everyone does casually whether they realize it or not: whenever you activate a skill and stop to block or roll dodge or bash because something is about to hit you hard you just canceled an animation.
Canceling out of what you're doing is a necessity in a combat system that features an active defense so it's not going anywhere. The difference here compared to many other MMOs is that the canceled action still activates for full effect despite being canceled. The only exceptions are the few channeled or cast-time abilities.
Love it or hate it, it's very much part of the game. IMO what they really need to do with it is make it more accessible by some sort of official macro system (similar to Rift's.)
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
So if you want to play the game to the fullest, you need to shell out the base price of the game, the first chapter, the second chapter later this year, and a monthly fee for a long time until you can get the dlc you want for free. It also has a cash shop and loot boxes....weeee
Before this we got: Multiple meaty DLCs free with sub and no loot boxes. Now the biggest DLC is Clockwork City which was also pretty small compared to pretty much every other DLC zone. Due to the convenience of the crafting bag, sub is pretty much mandatory at this point too.
I would say they are starting to try to pinch pennies a bit. Tbh I used to not be as bitter about this game, but ever since I completed all 3 faction's quests and the more meaty DLC story lines (including the overpriced Morrowind) I feel like it is much easier to see how greedy they are becoming.
They aren't without an easy access to consumables in their own separate function either. Instead of it being a hotbar it's simply a quick access selection wheel bound to a single button so that you can have another eight items in a compact space.
Coupled with weapon swapping for complimentary or even polar skill suites to fit different mid-action roles, and the game actually carries a good amount of depth to it.
If we use Cameltosis complaints as a baseline, then ESO is already coming close then with a baseline of 14+ active skills, plus the radial wheel for quick access to consumables/cosmetics (plus the dedicated mount button).
Class interdependence doesn't exist in ESO so much as role interdependence. The fact that even a Nightblade can build themselves out as an effective tank goes to that point. The depth there is from the choice in skill setup, gear types, and statting and bonus gear trait choices that all factor into your chosen playstyle.
This isn't to say some character's don't break things, like a Sorc can basically just dump their stats into magic and health and call it a day to do almost anything. Balance issues exist. That's not the encompassing trait of the system though, and you have a good amount of synergy and depth of gameplay both in the core mechanics and in group play. That this is a more active game does affect it's depth as well, as more fights the developers have introduced has continued to lean into this, with many factors you have to account for and respond to, giving combat again another form of depth that a title like WoW only really brings up in boss raid battles sometimes.
How many buttons are bound to a bar is not reflective of the full suite of skills at a character's disposal. Moreover it's a tool that still limits the scope of a game's interactive options and features, and those things need to be designed to work on that bar in a more universal basis. It homogenizes into lightly tweaked versions of the same basic things. In many instances an overpopulated bar can be shown to have redundancies in that regard too, but "necessary" ones only for the sake of managing/overcoming cooldowns or modulating resource use. That's not depth, that's an effort to bypass depth.
You can get a lot more depth out of any system by contextualizing many player actions than you ever will by trying to jam them onto a directly mapped controller or keyboard.
ESO is not the king of this, hell they don't really contextualize much of anything and I would call it a relatively shallow combat system, but shallow in the same manner as one that uses quick-bars. It's beholden to making everything fit into a context-less scenario where one's abilities can be applied to any and every fight. That fundamentally simplifies the depth of a user experience.
EDIT: Quick note to Cameltosis too though, perhaps it's something that was updated at some point and I never really paid attention, but resource management already works for extended skill use, pending you take advantage of certain gearing choices and/or use certain class options. There's character building and gearing tutorials for how to absolve that.
Animation canceling removes/alters the visual component of an attack so the defender doesn't know what's coming until after it already lands, negating a big part of how the combat system is intended to work. But Zenimax can't do anything about it and they don't want to admit that so they're defending it and saying they like it, when in reality it is an unintended consequence of a poorly engineered game. Anyone who's played since beta like I have knows just how floaty both combat and movement in general has felt. It's gotten much better but the flaws were never corrected; they still exist under the proverbial hood.
To fix animation canceling, they'd have to completely revamp a major component of the game's physics all the way from the basic light attack to the most complex abilities, changing everything from how the animations appear to how they function. It's simply far too much work for far too little of a return on that investment so Zenimax is content on ignoring the glaring issues with it. ESO is still a good game but it will never be great because of how rushed it was during development. Once the foundation is set in stone, you'd have to tear the entire house down. If Zenimax had taken their time with the foundation instead of trying to cash in on the hype before it died down, there wouldn't be a need to completely remodel the house like they have multiple times since the game launched well before it was actually ready. But it is what it is. We're just going to have to learn to love it in spite of its flaws.
No auction house, not even a limited one where guilds could put in samples and point us to where to find them for more, or how about allowing merchants to set up small shops like the NPCs have? The limited tool bar and using pets in skill slots suck.
They had me at Nightblade Vampire, though.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Oh god I forgot about the guild auction house stuff on my list of ramblings. The auction house system in the game is terrible. I don't even mean that it is guild based. I mean that it is next to impossible to find anything unless you use a 3rd party website / addons. Even with those it is VERY cumbersome to deal with. They just need standard auction house system that is split up by guilds: You bring up the UI at any guild auction but can search every guild auction with it. It could show location as well as nearest shrine too. People are going to do this anyways using that eso auction site anyways, so should just put it into the game.
Guild shops do exist, they litter every city.
I may not "like it" preferring to let the animations run there course - when not pressed! - but lots of (probably every) games have animation cancelling to some degree.
Only a game in which the gcd equals the longest animation would have no ac. Cue "I can't cast, why am I twiddling my thumbs unable to do anything" threads.
Once the "global cooldown" expires you can cast/use another spell/power and any animation still running will be cancelled. Quick better create lots of video nasties!
Nor is it a minor boost to dps in other games either. Now it won't be in the same league as games with no gcd and it depends on the game but - if you always had to wait until the animation finished before casting another spell - you would see a big drop in dps. In most games. In ESO its just "on steroids".
As for ESO's development being rushed - seriously?
On the combat end it was greatly rushed because originally the game was a full-on classic MMORPG with tab targeting and a use of a more traditional skill bar. This got severe backlash when the userbase got to finally find out about it during closed beta leaks.
Consequently, Zenimax had to re-engineer the combat pretty severely in beta, retooling the system as best they could to meet the more action-styled gameplay of the series the MMO was supposed to be based upon. Unfortunately, the engine they'd built was not intended for this, and it would cost too much time and money to retool the engine itself to push for a formal action gameplay experience, and that's why they ended up delivering the hybrid gameplay we've come to think of as inherent to ESO.
The combat in ESO was almost entirely a byproduct of one big mistake leading into a rushed job to overhaul the entire user experience. It left some almost fatal vestiges in it's mechanics for doing so, but Zenimax has worked really hard to push the game to a point where most flaws are as mitigated as they can be.
Animation cancelling is a vestige of this. Because the actual numeric consequences of an action are not tethered to the action's animation sequence, but instead only factors in as an instant or timed effect, this is where animation canceling in ESO becomes such a severe problem. In other action games that aren't built on a tab-target system it is less of a problem because if someone cancels the animation, they are also often canceling the attack as the animation is tracked to tell if it even hits or not.
In ESO the attack animation is simply a visual overlay to an effect that's usually already taken place as far as the server is concerned. There is unfortunately no way to get rid of this flaw without going into the game's engine itself and rebuilding the entire mechanic so that an attack only registers at the end of an animation, which introduces a slough of new problems with syncing possible faults in timing and a desynch in any actions that are supposed to interact with them.
More or less, this is a sticking point of where early design choices came back and bit the game in the ass, and now they have to live with some baked in issues that can never be fully absolved, because they had to sprint to fix the game with a half-measure.
A ) Combat is a game of animation cancelling and skill spamming for the most part
B ) Most skills don't feel impactful
C ) Only a few cool skills with interesting animations (i.e. Dragon Leap and NB's teleport strike)
D ) Such limited skill selection across all classes to be even reasonably optimal
E ) Every stam or mag version of classes feel the same
All of that plus the auction house system really makes it hard for me to stay longer than a few weeks at a time. I know it's not in the cards, but a combat overhaul would do this games wonders.
I have never understood why the development team haven't included a full UI that has full toggled features.
As for the lack of a proper Auction House - that was an awful idea where the devs are too pig-headed to admit their idea just doesn't work as well as a world system.
And a serious "500 member" trading guild will have close to as many items listed as a "proper" AH. Especially if its a guild with "minimum" sales targets.
Factot in that there are locatins where you can easily browse several guild AHs and ESO will offer more items for sale in one place than "typical" games that don't use megaservers.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
That's a disingenuous comparison.
Pots and other active items don't only exist in ESO. WoW has active effect items and pots that can be slotted to hotbars, in addition to having way more skills.
Blocking and light/heavy stuff is unique, but the rest has been and is continually used throughout the genre. Dodging is used less so due to the prevalence of tab targeting.
Not having central AH sucks as well. Having to join a guild just to sell something isn't much fun especially when most require you to sell a certain amount each week or month or pay a certain amount if you don't.
For me, the game was fine from 1-50 as and you can play it how ever you like with what build you like. Even in the normal dungeons. Beyond that, the game fell apart for me. Grinding became more of a chore and if your wanting to do a harder dungeon or trials, you will need to have certain gear and play a certain way with a certain build. No different from any other MMO. You only have the illusion of choice.
If your a console only player then ESO is a good choice sine it was made for you and you have few choices any way. If your a PC player, there are other other choices that are better imo.
I'm not an IT Specialist, Game Developer, or Clairvoyant in real life, but like others on here, I play one on the internet.
The devs seem great and put so much effort into adding content to the game.. I've bought it... but can't enjoy the combat
..Cake..