Elsonso wrote: »

The way that I heard it, and this may be the whole story or just part of the story, is that they wanted a clean, minimalist user interface and wanted the player to concentrate on the combat action and not on the UI and pressing skill buttons.

The decision to make the mouse buttons primary for combat is very Elder Scrolls. It does change the dynamic to where the player is focused more on positioning relative to what they are fighting in order to be in a position to attack. I know this is very different from how WoW does things, where the game and UI does all of the heavy lifting for the player that simply pushes buttons in a specific order, or when the icon flashes.

I have no idea how they arrived at 5 skills + Ultimate. It does force the player to weigh and consider what is important to them. It could also be seen as a means to funnel players into situations where they may need other players to provide options that do not fit.

I have also heard comments in the past about how the second weapon was intended to be simply that; it is a second weapon. The way they talked in one interview, it did not seem like the idea of a rotation where the player swapped bars to get 10 skills was part of the design. That may have been invented by the players, like the "all in" approach to allocating points to attributes.

Interestingly, I question the reliability of the D-Pad for the purpose of active combat. Maybe it is built better than it looks. (Edit: my last two XBox controllers were replaced because the "A" button stopped being reliable, and those buttons look a lot more reliable than the D-Pad.)