The Elder Scrolls Online

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Armchair Developer Brainstorm Feedback

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locieb17_ESO
locieb17_ESO
Soul Shriven
Hi everyone!

I'm pretty sure there were a lot of feedback topics, and I guess mine won't catch on, but I intend this discussion as a means to share and exchange ideas over RPG's, their features, problems and possible solutions, past, present and future. And it's on an armchair dev level because I never actually designed a game, just played a lot of them, so at least my opinions will be from an user's perspective. And of course on this topic ESO will be the main focus.

First of all, I have to establish my perspective. I'm an engineering student who. if succesfull, will be a simulation engineer and I have a huge interest and affinity for games and gaming, especialyl RPG games. And I really love thinknig about and maknig up possible ways to simulate real life with mechanics. (That's what a simulation engineer is all about after all, no?). I play/played quite a few RPGs and MMOs, mainly WoW. And of course I played TES III-V extensively.
As for my enthusiasm for ESO, I had the Imperial edition preordered. Sadly I didn't play the game as mcuh as I wanted and even worse I didn't want to play as much as I hoped I would want. Part of this is because after 10 years of WoW, I guess I just got tired of some of the more common MMORPG elements and perhaps because there's a lot else to take my focus away. All in all I would like to adress what ESO did wrong, why and how to improve on them. Of course these are just my views, but I hope that by writing all this, I accomplsih more than just killnig time.

So why did ESO stumble? OF course I have no idea about the actual size of the active player base, but seeing as how the game had to change subscription plan and the reduced number of PvP realms I would say that it didn't did as good as the developers hoped.
So what went wrong? Because the game is looknig good AND runnign pretty smooth. THe instances are interesting, the fights are one of the best, as a tank finally I feel like I'm in an actual battle and not in an overcrowded asian metro station. (So I don't tank 40 mobs that haven 0 unit collision and stand on top of each other).
The PvP seems quite interesting too (altough I'm not a PvP guy I have been to some really awesome battles during beta and I bet it only improved since)
The zones look good, the quests, altough they trend to have the same scheme in every zone (as in there is an ultimate bad guy you gear towards the entire zone and defeat at the end), there are some really good questzs and genuinely memorable NPC's that feel like they are doing their own stuff (altough you still feel like the center of the universe most of the game, these NPC's help in that department immensely)
And skills themselves feel really good and important too. I really have to choose wisely when picking my abilities and I usually don't feel like I have wasted skill slots.

So then, what's the answer?
In short, it's weak character progression.

The devs know this, this is why they introduced the champion system in the first place, but that's like adding a patchwork on shorts you want to wear in the dead of winter. It makes it better but you won't notice anyhow.

And it's on multiple layer, every layer powering each other to poke a huge hole on the game. And it shows how hard it is to develop MMOs, because everyone expects perfect results that are completely impossible to reach, and if you fail at one point the entire thing collapses. The only harder to design games are Sandbox MMORPG's.

And now I'll mention it and it comes up over and over again, but the developers choose to go, with many design choices, with what SKYRIM established. And that was a grave error. Some of Skyrim's features are weak even in a singleplayer RPG, and are completely null for an MMORPG. I'm not saying that the devs at Bethesda made completely wrong choices, I'm just saying that they only did the first step in a two step process. First step: remove obsolete feature Second step: Add New, up to date feature in place of the old one.

The first layer, the first flaw is the lack of item choices.

Compare Skyrim/Eso to Morrowind. Morrowind had more customisation options how your equip your gear. You could wear bracers on one hand and glvoes on the other. You could wear pants and shirt udner the armor and a robe/cloak/kimono with a belt over the armor. Again I'm not saying that the odl system is the way to go, too many item slots remove value of any single item and then getting new items would feel less of an accomplishment. But I liked the customisation options with it, really made my character feel cool to have a robe over my armor, felt like a badass samurai. OR you could wear half shoulders, or whatever you like.
But what really missing are weapon/armor classes. Like an armor class between leather and full plate. Morrowind called that medium armor while leather was light armor. And one of the greatest sins Skyrim made, also followed into ESO. The lack of freakin' polearms. No excuses. A spear is the most basic weapon besides the club and as it happens it's the most effective weapon against dragons, which is the main feature of Skyrim. There are no dragons in ESO, but neither are polearms, which is sad. No one handed spears, no glaives/naginatas/guandaos, no poleaxes, halberds, nothing. And there are no other type of weapons, like katanas/nodachis or throwing weapons like throwing stars and javelins, maybe even stuff like combat staves, fist weapons and flails. But even if there were any of these item classes it wouldn't accomplish much, because:

There are not enough skills and skill lines in the game. to support items.

This is the second layer of lack of character progression and customisation.
I remember back when we were waiting on the game to be released with great enthusiasm, I was reading on how skills will work in the game. And from what information I got the impression that the character class you choose and the three initial skill lnies that class gives you won't be that significant, because everyone will be able to pick up so many skills and skill lines you will almost forget what class you picked halfway through character progression. That's what the game kinda promised, you can do whatever you want with your character. So I tought that there would be quite a lot of skills to get. For instance I tought there would be at least one skill line for every school of magic (Destruction, Restoration, Alteration, etc) and besides of the general weapon skills (two handed, one handed) specific skill lines for every type of weapon (so two handed axes, one handed axes, maces, hammers, and so on), hell I remember asking if there would be multyple schools with their own skill lnies for doing unarmed/marial arts skills. Compared to this, well reality has fallen short. Individual skills are really good, but there are simply not enough skills to cover a wide field of variety and function. But how could they if...

There is basically no stat and attribute system.

This is the third, and final layer. I honestly believe that the games greatest problems stem from this void of character attributes. Whenever I open my character tab and look at it I cry a little. This system was lacking in Skyrim and is way worse in ESO because here it's an MMO where your characters identity matters way more, since you interact with other people. Choosing between Health Stamina and Magicka at every level up is as fun as choosing the unextended ending in Mass Effect 3. Thisi s where what I said at the start hits the hardest. Bethesda opted to remove the old system of stats because it's flaws started to heavily outweight it's positive effects. For instance feeling the need to play tha game in a certain way so you can build a good character is bad. They were reasonable to remove this system, but in turn they didn't introduce a new system of stats to power their game and you had a good chance to design such a system, but you didn't, for reasons unknown to me. Blizzard had removed the odl talent system when it became outdated but added a new, better one immediately. Sure, it has it's own flaws buti s a majro improvement. They reduced the number of stats over tiem as well, and when they realised that it's gonig to affect the game in a bad way as well, they added tetriary stats to balance it out. And a new MMO, Skyforge, altough it's gameplay is horribly dull for me (I mean, seriously one boring zone bith 36 quests from which 16-18 is to just kill the same 4-5 ypes of mobs, no thanks), but it has a good skill system, interesting character progression system and it's stat system has some very good ideas that make for interesting options to build one's character. Stats like valor (increases damage when the enemy has close to full health), impulse (periodically grants bonus damage on certain abilities), precision (increases minimum damage, reducing the fluctuation of your damage) for instance are awesome ideas. You should have come up with your own system of primary, secondary, teriary stats, perks, abilities and skills you can reach with them and so on.
Currently we only have the most basic attributes, there are no primary ones at all, (magicka, health, stamina are derived statistics). You can get some stats like attack speed, armor penetration and so on, but they don't even show up on your character sheet and you can hardly specialise on them. They are more like effects and not attributes you can really go for and make your character's identity around some of them. At least that's how I feel.
This takes the toll of many aspects of the game. Crafting gear feels emtpy because it's too easy to craft legendary armor and weapons while in turn legendary items are basically the same as common items but with higher numbers. Skills have less identity that they potentially could have and thus having a lot of skills could be just redundant. (I mean you could do so much with stats and skills, like a skill having snergy with a set of stats or skills hacving stat requirements and so on. For example a two handed skill could grant an extra/increased effect if your strenght is high enough, or you could morph it into another skill if you have enough armor penetration or anything like that)

And items feel kinda boring because of this as well, this takes some of the motivation out fo raiding too. Currently set items are the only items that basically have any worth because they grant exta effects. Truly there would be no point in adding new classes of weapons and armor if they don't play differently than the items we currently have.

So that's about it. And don't take me wrong, I'm well aware that my "expectations" are unrealistic and you couldn't possible have hundreds of skills and stats and items in the game and balanced by release, hell the game had quite a few problems at release too, meaning you were stretched thin as it is. But what I think you should have done and maybe still could do is to add a new, genuinely interesting and awesome attribute system into the game and as the game progresses release new item classes, skill lines and skills (maybe even add the ability to design our own skills too) into the game and balance them as we go.

Since PvP is mostly mass PvP individual character balance has only high priority while one or two character builds wastly dominate the field. (As in you either build this archer-healer dragonknight character or GTFO of my battlefield) you mgiht were better off with going like this than not adding features that might tip the balance of the game because of their tendency to being hard to manage. (Because the sheer number of class, skill and gear combination is ridicolous even now)

I hope this huge wall of text of mine can serve a purpose and I wish I could make a Dragon Knight with medium armor (scale/lamellar plate) with a bladed spear that focuses on heavy armor penetration and bleed effects. Until then I wish all of you guys the best!
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