TLDR AT THE END.
ESO released in 2014, nearly 10 years ago, with a bumpy start but a quick redirection towards assuring the ceiling was lowered and the floor was raised, resulting in the increase of not only daily players but also consistent player retention. ESO continues to operate in a similar fashion even to this day but I believe the game can be taken a step further. Not just ESO but MMOs as a whole.
The very first thing the player does when they create a new character is pick an alliance and a race tied to that alliance. There is a brief explanation as to what these two things have to offer to the player, giving sort of an idea as to what they're going in as. There is but one problem: the player is immediately gravitated towards taking their eyes away from the game and onto their web browser, searching just how high High Elves can get and if Argonians make good maids. How much stamina does it take for a Breton to screw in a lightbulb?
The classes in the game are for the most part self-explanatory. The Nightblade are surely nimble and focus on stealth, hunting for prey to feed to the Void, and Templars are cringe roleplayers praying to anything while knowing damn welll Talos hasn't been born yet. Players have a general understanding of what they're getting into with the classes and it's easy to imagine what your build will look like, but the same thing can't be said about races and the racial passives.
You're finally in-game after trying to make your character look exactly like O**ma and giving it a name that will put you on Zenimommy's blacklist 😳, and you unlock a Bow skill line after piercing a squirrel with your homing missiles, realizing you should've named your character Bow***a instead.
You sit there and wonder just how many more skill lines there are that you have to unlock. Will you miss out on a skill that could've made a difference against a mob that killed you earlier? Well probably not cause it's so easy but you get the point.
The player will most likely have to take their eyes away from the game one more time as opposed to staying engaged and reading the greyed out skills and maybe even morphs that they could unlock. Could this take depth away from exploration? Sure, but it could also breed curiosity now that the player has to figure out who The Psijic Order are and where they can find them.
You could say all of this isn't that necessary but the issue is that the game continues to give players a reason to take their eyes away from the game with things like "Healing Taken" and "Direct Damage" being the worse criminals of all this guilt. Not only do players have to look up what those terms even mean but the sources are often outdated, inconsistent, or lack details and simple ways of explaining them. It often comes down to forum threads with people saying "well I believe it means...", where you can sort of get an idea.
If the game truly is trying to raise its floor then I believe it's a good idea to implement tooltips detailing, at the very least, the various combat terms. Perhaps some of them can even be reworded, such as "Direct Damage" to "Instant Damage" since the opposite seems to be "Damage Over Time". Flurry is a Dual Wield skill that directly deals damage to its target but is unaffected by buffs to Direct Damage, instead being buffed by Damage Over Time benefits.
At least, that's what they say.
TL;DR: Add tooltips to the game explaining what things like "Healing Taken" means, race skills in character creation, and some (if not all) available skills in the game greyed out until you unlock them. The point is to keep the player engaged in the game and not have them switch to third-party sources to know basic things about it.
Edited by Vhozek on June 24, 2023 7:51PM
𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝘀𝗼𝗿𝗿𝘆, 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝘀. 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗕𝗶𝗿𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴.