I was participating in another thread about voice chat and the topic of accessibility came up. I figured I would make a post about accessibility as a whole because I feel like ESO has a great approach in some ways and can improve in others.

First, I think we see the word accessibility used a lot here on the forums. In recent years we've seen the word used more and more by the developers, especially in relation to their goals for the game. So I'll start by defining what I mean by accessibility.

Defining Accessibility
A lot of the time when someone thinks of the word accessibility, they think of accommodating those with disabilities. I think that that's one big part of accessibility, but I think it's broader than that. I would define accessibility as: having as few barriers to entry as possible for people of all abilities and backgrounds. So in other words, accessibility is about getting the widest possible audience into a game with relative ease and excluding as few groups as possible. This applies to not just the game as a whole, but different activities within the game.

One important part of looking at accessibility this way is that it's about getting people's foot in the door and making sure there aren't things that prevent them from playing. This is completely separate from a game's difficulty. Accessibility ensures that people can get their foot into the door and play the game, it says nothing about how well they will do when they are in the game. This is perfectly okay because as long as people can play the game, they can learn to improve. In fact, maybe it's even a little condescending to assume that to make a game accessible, it needs to be easy. I think this is where ESO goes wrong sometimes and I will get to that later.

Having a widely accessible game is a great goal and a good idea for a game's long term success.

Barriers
Part of the way I defined the word accessibility involved the word "barriers" which can be a lot of different things. Disabilities/Physical Differences can create barriers to access for a game, but so can other things such as: finances, hardware, background, and a lack of knowledge/poor tutorials.

A highly accessible game would be a game that can be played by almost anyone regardless of disability, free or cheap, playable on many different types of hardware, and offers a variety of input methods. So an example of a poorly accessible game would be a game that doesn't have settings to accommodate others, costs a lot to play, can only run on new hardware (live Nvidia 40 series graphics cards or something), and only supports keyboard and mouse or only one input method.

ESO's Accessibility
I think in many ways ESO is doing a great job with accessibility. It can still be played on old hardware, it's available on console, it has native controller support as well as a keyboard and mouse option, it's relatively cheap to pick up and try (also included with Xbox Gamepass), and Accessibility Mode provides many great accommodations for a variety of people. There are a few things related to monetization that may be a little bit of an issue, but for the most part it doesn't directly create barriers for people to play.

There are some major places where ESO needs to improve however. I think that the game's built in tutorials, guides, and early game mechanics do a poor job of educating players and lead to massive knowledge gaps. There's also a "bandaid" approach that is often used in an attempt to address accessibility issues. It often takes the form of decreasing difficulty or adding broken sets/mechanics into the game. Then there's PvP which has some accessibility issues in the form of barriers that prevent players from easily getting into PvP and enjoying it.

Accessibility and Difficulty
Earlier in the post I mentioned that accessibility and difficulty aren't necessarily related, but it often feels like ESO is designed as if they are. I think that a good example of this is Valorant. I consider Valorant to be a very accessible game in a variety of ways. It's a shooter that is very accessible to the deaf/hard of hearing (many aren't), it's free, it can run decently on old hardware, it now has Xbox support and can be played with controllers, and the tutorial/onboarding process is very good, effective, and straightforward. It is a game where a player can very easily get their foot in the door, but it's also a game that is hard to master and has a very high skill ceiling. So Valorant is a highly accessible game, but certainly not an easy/low skill game. It gives players the tools needed to learn and lets them improve as they play.

ESO often nerfs content, mechanics, and core combat design and keeps overland content as easy as possible. I don't think that this is the best approach and paradoxically, I think it actually prevents improvement. Designing a game with the mindset of: "some players will never be able to learn and so everything must be as easy as possible" kind of insults the intelligence and abilities of the players. Now this isn't a "make the game harder" thread in any way, but I do think that ESO's endgame PvE and PvP communities could get much more participation if accessibility was approached differently. How will players learn the importance of blocking, rolling, doing damage under some pressure, breaking free and other important concepts if they aren't reinforced in the game? If you think about it, there's actually very few places where players need to utilize the core combat mechanics that I mentioned outside of PvP and some of the newer veteran content (you can just eat a lot of mechanics from old veteran content). Overland doesn't need to have one shots and super punishing mechanics, but somewhere in the game whether it's a tutorial or early content, these core mechanics should be reinforced. I think that often the transition from overland/normal content to newer veteran content and veteran to veteran hardmode can definitely be improved by teaching core combat mechanics somewhere along the way.

Maintaining Balance
There are certain mechanics and sets that have been introduced into the game to accommodate others, but often these are overtuned or poorly designed. The first iteration of Oakensoul was a nightmare and heavy attack builds have definitely been overtuned at certain points. I completely understand the problem that these items were meant to address. ESO is a fast paced game. There's no cooldowns outside of the global cooldown, weaving has to be done manually, and there is a lot of room for differences in "Actions Per Minute" (as much as it was memed). Some people do actually have issues that prevent them from being able to press buttons quickly and I think accommodating them is a great idea.

I think that accommodating players who aren't able to engage in fast paced gameplay while keeping ESO's combat identity is a tough task. However, I still think that Oakensoul, Heavy Attack builds, and the Arcanist could have been handled better. Arcanist for example was given an extremely high damage AOE beam that shielded the player while it was being channeled. Paired with Velothi, Arcanist required significantly lower APM than other classes, but we all know what happened next. Everyone started using Arcanist, new records were made in every trial, and there wasn't really a reason to use anything else. Oakensoul in its first patch was similar and it even spread to PvP, and heavy attack builds have been similarly as strong.

In PvP it's currently possible to run a Knight Slayer based lightning heavy attack build which allows the player to deal unrollable, auto targeting, unavoidable damage. While this type of build provides a low APM way to engage with PvP, it's incredibly broken and unhealthy for the game.

So there is a middle ground here. Having low APM build options is fine, but they shouldn't be way better than all other options. They should still require skill, just in a different way than high APM builds, and in PvP there should be good counterplay against these builds. So far, this has not been the case when these low APM playstyles have been added.

PvP Accessibility
I think that PvP in ESO has way too many barriers that prevent it from being easily accessed and enjoyed. For one, PvP should be self sustaining. There should be a potion merchant that sells different types of potions for AP so that players don't need large amounts of gold to continue to PvP. I also think that all good PvP sets should be either craftable or directly purchasable with AP (to be fair we aren't super far from this). Being able to upgrade gear at a special table by using AP would be a nice touch as well.

Players should be given a more in depth tutorial that triggers when they enter Cyrodiil for the first time on their account (not character), cause there's a ton of things that the current PvP tutorials miss. I also think that there should be a free special mythic or set of special mythic items awarded for completing this tutorial (or otherwise easily obtained somewhere when entering PvP) that resembles Torc of the Last Ayleid King. I actually think that the idea behind Torc of the Last Ayleid King is great and not used to its full potential. What I picture is a one piece item or group of one piece items to choose from that turns off all item bonuses and possibly traits, but gives the player a fixed amount of health, damage, recovery, and critical resist that is at least viable in PvP, but not necessarily best in slot. Of course this item would be optional to equip, but it would give players who don't have the knowledge or resources to create a viable PvP build more of a shot/better experience in PvP. It would also just be a more easy and convenient option for players that just want to try PvP out. They wouldn't have to research builds or spend time putting anything together, they could just equip this easily obtained 1 piece item.

Related to my previous point, the knowledge required to build for PvP just isn't easily available. There's so many unnecessary set options and unclear set interactions that it creates a barrier for players. The knowledge for making a PvP build should be either more intuitive or more available in the game.

Some Final Miscellaneous Suggestions
I think one easy way to dramatically improve the knowledge gap (other than tutorials) would be to add classifications to skills under where the cost of and range of the skill are listed. I've been asked the question "what is considered direct damage?" a surprising amount of times. There's also some skills that don't intuitively fit nicely into the game's damage categories. One example is Engulfing Flames, it's an ability with a direct AOE initial hit that puts a DOT on all targets hit. Is it buffed by AOE CP? DOT CP? Direct Damage CP? Single Target CP? It's not super clear because that skill has components that could fall under any of those categories. A skill classification section would clear things up. It would just list out everything the skill is considered or buffed by, for example: "AOE, Direct Damage, Charge, Martial, etc.". Also what is considered a "blink" ability? I've been here 9 years and still don't know honestly. A skill classification section would fix that.

Lastly it's been discussed in another post, but in game voice chat support on PC would improve accessibility in several ways. One big way is that it can provide speech to text transcription that appears in the HUD for the deaf/hard of hearing so they aren't excluded from voice chats. Discord doesn't support this natively and the work arounds are absolutely awful. I also think that it would just make things easier for others. Maybe it won't be used as much as Discord, but it should be an option. Of course it should be off by default/opt in.

Conclusion/ TLDR
This has been way too long of a post, but the key takeaways are:

1. Accessibility is much more than accommodating those with disabilities
2. ESO does a good job with most aspects of accessibility, but struggles with tutorials/providing necessary knowledge
3. Difficulty and Accessibility are not really related and should not be treated that way
4. I think that ESO can improve when it comes to keeping the games balance and identity, but expanding accessibility
5. PvP has too many barriers to entry and should be self sustaining. Utilize the idea behind Torc of the Last Ayleid King to provide optional easy PvP access.
6. Add Skill Classifications
7. Voice chat can improve accessibility