Opening

I would like to start off saying that I’ve been playing MMO’s for quite a while now. I feel like I have a good understanding what core functions they need to stay healthy. As of right now I would definitely like to see ESO improved in certain aspects. If some of these things do not happen soon, I feel the game will undoubtedly go free to play with micro transactions. After saying that, I do actually really like this game. I have always loved the Elder Scroll games ever since Morrowind. I hope Zenimax can do what it takes to game this game more successful.

Issue of Movement and Fluid Ability Use

This is probably my one biggest issue right now with ESO. The movement is very unresponsive and as well as the abilities. The character movement in general is just not so smooth. I also play on the NA server, and I’ve heard the EU is even worse. Half of the time I don’t expect abilities to work. I don’t know if it is animation problems or lag, but it has bothered me ever since level 1. Every other game I have played I get around 50 latency or ms and do not have this problem.

Basically I move with almost exclusively with my mouse. This has become a decently popular way to play MMO’s. The only thing I still have on the keyboard is backpedaling because I don’t use it often and of course all my keyboard key binds for abilities ect. Except for in this game, for some reason backpedaling lets you move at full speed which I find atrocious. This is why you strafe, so you can still move at full speed but you can still kite. I also don’t find that strafing is very smooth while in transition with moving forward, and doesn’t seem to work at all with backpedaling.

The other issue I have is when I run with my mouse, if I have an alternate key bind to move forward, it cancels the move on key press and I then have to press either the main or alternate key/mouse to move again. Basically this causes unnecessary stopping in movement. I have never experienced this in any other game.

Then I have that random auto run problem that happens every time I’m moving while going into a game menu and continues to auto run after until I manually press the bind again. It also happens randomly in combat. This causes me to furiously strafe if I was in melee range around my target to keep facing him in order to do damage, or just kills me if I use my bow.

Also, the horse. I hate my horse to be honest. The moment I bought my 43,000 horse and rode it around for a while I instantly regretted it due to horrible movement and chunkiness that damn horse brought. It isn’t fast enough even at 65% percent speed to be worth it most of the time.

Weapon Swapping

I played Guild Wars 2 and I did like the game, but this is when I learned weapon swapping was something that cancels depths and adds unreliability compared to just having all the abilities on one bar and having the weapons change depending upon range. However this would not work in ESO. While it is interesting from certain standpoints, it creates problems, especially in ESO where things are unresponsive. I could see this mechanic working and becoming solid, but it would definitely need some work. Basically I’m scared to weapon swap right now in fear of dying while in combat.

I saw a post saying that it is not realistic to swap your weapons instantly. While I understand that post, neither can you run with heavy armor as fast as light armor, so the whole realism argument is a bit silly. This is game, not real life. People can argue forever about this topic, but the bottom line is what makes for better gameplay? The winner is obvious.

The weapon swapping just needs to be very quick and precise, and if Zenimax does not want that in fear of it being abusive because of how fast the swapping is, then add a short CD on weapon swapping. I’m talking like 2 or 3 seconds possibly. That would be much nicer than some animation delay that varies from time to time to swap. This would also solve the issue of where your swapping get swapped back to the weapon you were on previously.

If this was fixed then I would not feel the need to keep several abilities on both weapon bars. I would LOVE to use ten different abilities. Although that still does not solve the issue of having two different ultimate’s, but I wouldn’t say that is much of a big deal.

Another issue semi-related is you need your weapon drawn before an ability goes off which is very irritating. This is another animation problem which seems to be the core issue of what things are unresponsive.

Weapon Abilities

As of right now weapon abilities are very lackluster compared to class abilities. I would like to see weapon abilities become stronger in comparison from how they are now. I play a Nightblade, and right now out of ten abilities, I have three that are weapon abilities, and I’m thinking of removing one or possibly two because the class abilities are flat out better for Nightblades anyways. I’m using Bow/Dual wield to clarify. My friend that is a Nightblade and he only uses Draining Shot on his bow bar; everything else is class abilities as well. So what is stamina for, just for blocking, sprinting, and rolling? That seems weird to me. Personally that’s the only reason I keep the weapon abilities on my bar is to use stamina. I can’t speak for other classes though since I don’t have experience with them.

PvP

Right how the PvP is limited to big zergs and wanderes. In my experience, no one likes big zergs or siege battles after they’ve experienced this once. That’s one thing I never understand. Why a person wants these huge battles, and sure they sound epic. Realistically has anyone ever had fun where they have slight fps drops with god computers, along dots killing you repeatedly while you see multiple players on your screen and things are randomly dying and you have no clue why? What about the time you spend hitting a siege or wall for 10 minutes to break it down?

This game needs more forms of PvP, and people will say go off on their “WoW clone” tangents, but battleground style/arena is essential for any game that wants players to be primarily interested in PvP. We all are competitive as human beings, and these will provide that sensation. Of course some games pull this off better than others, but I really wish every other MMO would base their battleground and arenas from WoW’s. We have to be honest here, that’s one reason why WoW did so well.

Overall I could see PvP being really awesome if they added some additional modes of
PvP.

API Restrictions and Limited UI functionality

I know this is where I will have naysayers, but having restrictive UI functionality is ridiculous. I do understand that people want “raw” fighting, and clean Elder Scroll UI’s that remind them of Skyrim, but this isn’t a single player Elder Scrolls Game. While it may be and Elder Scrolls game before an MMO, the secondary variable here is indeed the dreadful MMO title that so many Elder Scroll fans seem to be so hateful towards.

I’ll start with the default UI. The default UI is probably one of the worst I have experience in an MMO. The health bars are hard to pay attention to, and are far spread from your resource bars. There no valuable information such as combat damage, buffs debuffs, and cast bars. It does keep true to Elder Scrolls, but will never work for long in ESO. I do believe if you want the clean Elder Scrolls UI, then you should have it though. Morrowind had buffs on the interface and that game was OLD, like before buffs were normally in games at all. So would it really be that bad if ESO had an option for this by default? Afterall, were not playing Skyrim Online: the Interface Edition.

Another big thing is not seeing other people’s stamina and magicka bars. From a PvE standpoint, it helps you understand when to assist your team. For PvP, it helps you understand how to take advantage of the fight when you couldn’t otherwise, adding depth. There is no visual when a player is low on stamina or magicka; I could make a realism argument here about stamina. The player may be defenseless without magicka, so that is when you know to use X ability. It would be an interesting feature to have.

Now as for examples of why you will need buffs/debuffs, cast bars. When all of us start ESO raiding we will have X amount of people in a raid, there will be a lot going on. The boss will require interruption in 2 seconds or sooner in random successions. The boss will start swinging his hands that aren’t much bigger that yours to the sides when there are 5 melee swinging the arms all around the target with all sorts of animations flying across the screen. If there is no interruption, then everyone dies. Would it be fun to fight that boss? Also keep in mind that this is a very simple mechanic and things would get way more hectic with complex mechanics. I don’t see how unless we have cast bars than certain content would be possible unless they plan to make content extremely easy.

An individual’s UI should be their choice. If you would like to play “raw” then do it, but for those of us who would like to be competitive then we should have the option to optimize the UI, and see elements that are essential to competitive combat without causing extreme eyestrain because of too much going on (raids).

Endgame

I’m not going to say much here except that the reason that WoW did so well is because it had exceptional endgame PvP/PvE content. This and the expansions are the sole reasons why it has the enormous player base and still has a subscription fee. This shows how well the game has done despite of all the people that hate on it.

It’s hard for me to picture ESO with good endgame, although I hope they prove me wrong. If Zenimax can pull of good endgame even without fixing anything else besides bugs then they will be in good shape.

The Megaserver

I honestly think this Megaserver thing was a silly idea. How will everyone fit? Will certain places be too busy? Will characters experience phasing from other players? I would really love to see channels within the server similar to how Aion had their game. Basically they had something like 5 channels within the server and you could switch each one with fresh monsters (usually), and players that were currently in that channel. I would absolutely love that feature. You would a option more so to feel like solo dungeons are actually “solo” instead of, “hey, let’s see if I can even get a single hit off the enemy before it dies” in every single monster group in the dungeon. I do like that I can play with anyone that has the game though.

SO MANY BUGS

This isn’t a big thing; I know they are actively trying to fix this. It would have been nice to delay this release to counter all these bugs though. It would make having to log out for every bugged quest nice. Again though, not a deal breaker, they’ll eventually fix this.

Closing

In my closing I would like to say I REALLY hope this game does change for the best. These again are all my opinions, and I expect others to disagree; however, I strongly believe that if Zenimax wants to do well, they will have to change some things up. I want to play ESO; I don’t really want to play Wildstar or WoW when Warlords of Draenor comes out. The bottom line is that ESO may just die out, and I would really be disappointed. I wish luck to Zenimax and their decisions and as well as all you player’s whether you agree with me or not.