Acrolas wrote: »

Maybe you got a degree. But now you can only Drink Coffee, Print Document, Staple Document, Hole Punch Document, Shred Document, or Answer The Phone (Ultimate Ability). And most people will settle for it, because deep down challenges scare them. And they're really good at stapling after hours of doing it.

People want to feel special for excelling at a below-average system that they're capable of but offers nothing in the way of actual development.

Technically there could be more abilities assigned to the bar, or less. A "hold button for alternate abilities" option is nice but can only bump the ability count realistically to 8 or so without displacing too many other functions. Action RPGs with ability bars get away with even less (try 3) by having each attack, basic included, be satisfying and versatile in the right hands. Limited abilities also forces the player to pick and choose, never able to have one setup that can handle all situations.

And this is more likely why the Devs chose 5. More means we never need to change up our builds and less means we are too restricted to fight effectively.

If ESO was only on PC, i would agree with you. But i dont know how you could add more abilities with the limited buttons on console. Maybe if EVERYONE had the capabilities of the xbox one elite it could work. Unless you added more ultimates that were a toggle like a Sorc's overload which would give you more flexibility. I really wish i could have more abilities but i just dont know how it would work

For people that want to press as many buttons as possible - I found a perfect input device for ya:

I think as people have said it's probably so you have to actually think about what skills you're going to bring to each situation, instead of just having them all equipped all the time.

Hehe given me, more skills and I'd still use the main ones I do now but would just have more passive skills on each, would massively alter what little balance there is already.

Like someone else wrote, they probably just followed the designs of the original games, which feature a minimal ui. You could pause the original games to switch skills and because you can't do that in an MMO they probably picked the least number of skills players could comfortably use.

Lexxypwns wrote: »

NewBlacksmurf wrote: »

The game design waaaay back was around TES in an MMO environment so the controls were to mimic that as well as a few spells or actions being accessed. Because of this....you have those few options or bars

That's pretty much the reason.

Is it that, or is it because the game would be impossible to balance if you had access to all those skills?

Or is it because there's no cool-downs in this game so you don't need 40 skills.

Or is it because they wanted choice in abilities used to be an important thing, thus, theoretically, increasing build diversity.

Go read the News-Development articles around pages 9-13

There are ask us anything and Quakecon articles there.