Some more personal feedback on the skill system...
Well, TESO seems to be the conventional MMO that still tries to achieve its own flavour and endemic little bits of particular gameplay, like exploration, etc. And while it is certainly far from being ground breaking and gets a lot of its inspirations from either ES games or other past MMOs, it seems to do it decently, but not enough.
TESO seems to have made the choice to put the emphasis on freedom for the player to customize his skills and character the way he wants, a bit like it was possible in SWG, and TSW. The only thing that you seem to have to do is to choose a race and a class, and then it's mostly up to you which skills and stuff you will learn and attach to your character.
Before continuing, for those that have not played SWG (pre NGE) and TSW, here is a gross summary of what skilling is in both :
- SWG had something like 32 professions, including the crafting and social ones, maybe around a dozen of those, and those were one of the main strength of the game, which was very sandbox like. Entertaining and recustomization professions were a strong feature of the game that really bolstered player interaction and social places (like cantinas), with people selling their services and the likes. Anyway, you could choose each time a basic profession that opened the door to many other advanced professions. Once you had gathered all the skill branches of the basic one, you could then start to unlock the advance one of your choice. It was only possible for example to get xp in pistols by using pistols, of course, or in surgery by healing. It was more or less possible to have 2 advanced professions unlocked before running out of skillpoints to spend. Which meant that you could have 2 main combat professions, or 2 social/craft ones, or some kind of hybrid between both. It was possible to change your build any time you wanted, but it was no skill respec like we know these days, meaning that you just erased your skillpoints attribution and started grinding another profession from scratch. But you could change everything at will and make your character something else, thus why you could only have one character per server, unless paying other accounts.
- TSW has around 250 skills that you can learn/unlock, placed on a skill wheel, all tied to a weapon (9 of those). You have to unlock first the core basic skills of a specific weapon before accessing the advanced ones on the outer wheel. You have absolutely zero skillpoints to allocate in the unlocked skills. All the skills you unlock with xp are free to use (either passives or actives), but depending on the weapon you use (you can use 2 at the same time), only the active skills related to said weapons are usable. For passives though, they could be used at any time. And, to limit that a bit more, you havd to choose 6 active skills to add in your hotbar (including one ultimate), and 6 passive skills in the second hotbar (including one ultimate). Only those skills were considered activated and usable, so it was a bit like doing one's own deck of skills. It is probably the most intriguing and free concept of skill system that I have had the occasion to use tbh. And it was rather deep with all those skills and the synergies between each of them to be done (every skill, active or passive, was doing a specific kind of effect, or taking its power from some kind of effect, and combining skills between the links and combos they could provide between them was an interesting exercise in theorycrafting, with absolutely no shame compared to eve).
Well now, that said, TESO uses a kindof similar system, but a bit more messy. You have to choose a race and a class when creating the character, and those will not be subject to change once selected, so choose well... More on that later.
In fact, everything or every item has an associated skilltree. Your class has a main skilltree with 3 specializations with passives and actives, your race has a little skilltree of a few passives, same for your armour, and your weapon has a skilltree with actives and passives. It's interesting because like in SWG, depending on the skills and items you use, you will gain xp in those particular skills and items to spend.
Then you have a little hotbar to fill ala TSW, with 5 active skills to add, and an ultimate. You can then unlock a second hotbar with a second weapon, but unlike TSW you can't use both weapons at the same time in combat, it's just to quickly be able to switch between 2 "decks" of skills. For passives, as long as you unlock them, they are permanently applying, but most of them just boost a specific set of skills or weapons.
Well, all in all, I find this system interesting because it breaks the monotony of wow like predefined systems where you only have to choose a class, and then a few specializations, with the rest being already optimized and calculated for you. Here you have more freedom to do what you want.
The main issue I find with this system is that unlike TSW and SWG where you could really do what you want, here you still have to choose a damn class and a race with specific bonuses. Well, at least, I can understand it for the race since it's rather minor, but for the class, it's something like 25% of your accessible skills. And once done, you can't change it, which can become a nightmare. Want to do a high elve ? And being a brute instead of a wizard ? Well, too bad for you, they have little bonuses for wizardry. Chose a templar because it looked cool, but find yourself disappointed with the skills it brings later on ? Well, you can start a new character from scratch dude.
The problem is that like TSW, this game does not offer any counsel or advice on what to do, or how the system really works. Once you get into the game, and start randomly unlocking stuff, and even before when choosing your class and race, you only get served a tiny cryptic and vague description. You don't really know what you will be getting eventually, so either you do it blindly, or you do your research on the internet before. At least in TSW, the basic skills were unlocked very fast and more importantly, the devs were conscious of the obscure side of their system with hundred of skills to read, so they provided pre made templates to follow (archetypes). Here, there is none of this. There are a lot less skills yeah (and that's not necessarily a good thing), but the first impression is just that the system is damn obscure and messy, because nothing is explained. You have to do your own research. It is the main issue plaguing such systems, where devs do not seem to know how to introduce players to it. Everytime I play with friends to such games (TSW, PoE, or here TESO), I ALWAYS have at least one that will just choose shitty skills combinations or do whatever he wants without thinking of the coherence of his build, and find himself with a dumb gameplay, or a dumbed down character. And then being disgusted of the game because the system "sucks". Well no, it sucks because you didn't bother to learn how the system works, dude.
And your class being locked really sucks, if you want to switch for another one. After all, it's just another set of skill trees, it's not like you were going to change your race or your face or whatever... Why locking the class when your system basically relies on a free customizable skill system ? It's like shooting oneself in the foot.
Author
Topic: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community... (Read 34571 times)