Clarity and tooltips. Keeping the player engaged in your game.

Vhozek

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.

Hylhe

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.

Or they could, you know, do the tutorial, see that when the npc ask them to choose a weapon, there are a few available (and that they can even take them all), then explore the world, do the quests and someday meet a specific npc that will hopefully not harass them but tell them to go to the Psijics.

That being said, i agree the game could benefit from some rework of the tooltip, to add clarity and harmonise the terms. When you have 5 ways to say the same thing depending on the tooltip, it's a bit confusing. The tooltips can also be broken, this things like "will generate a shield that can absord up to 8s". And i'm playing in french, so the translation can sometimes be... well, let's say "chaotic" to stay polite.

Northwold

It's not just old tooltips that have this problem. I've just started playing Tales of Tribute and exactly the same awful, overly concise to the point it would only be clear if you already knew what the tooltip is trying to tell you language that you see in the champion points menu is littered throughout.

One example: X happens when a card is "in play". But what does "in play" mean. That isn't helpful. It raises more questions than it answers.*

* I know what the answer is, in case people think this is a request for help. Just not from the tooltip.

Vhozek

Northwold wrote: »

It's not just old tooltips that have this problem. I've just started playing Tales of Tribute and exactly the same awful, overly concise to the point it would only be clear if you already knew what the tooltip is trying to tell you language that you see in the champion points menu is littered throughout.

One example: X happens when a card is "in play". But what does "in play" mean. That isn't helpful. It raises more questions than it answers.*

* I know what the answer is, in case people think this is a request for help. Just not from the tooltip.

They should look into YGO to figure out how to design specific wording that works so there's little to no confusion.