The Elder Scrolls Online is out now; here’s our Elder Scrolls Online review.
MMO players are used to flinging bits of their interface around, snuggling chat bars in convenient corners of their screen and gluing quickbars to the ceiling to suit their needs. But Zenimax Online have gone one step further, allowing players access to a modding API that allows for dramatic revisions of the game’s UI.
Some of those modder-built add-ons have – and that’s concerned some beta players, who worry The Elder Scrolls Online is only one step away from normalising game-breaking macros.
One popular UI add-on, seen in the video above, displays the current health, mana and stamina of a targeted PvP opponent on-screen.
There’s an argument to be made that such mods serve a legitimate purpose. MMO players like to optimise, and the best way to do that is to have all the relevant information to hand. And even with all their UI tools at their disposal, they still need to best their enemies in real time.
But others have claimed that players are combining add-ons like these with macros which automatically interrupt targeted players as they trigger certain abilities.
The worry is that will destroy balance in PvP – or force players to uniformly adopt a UI element that warps the nature of the game out of its intended shape. And, lest we forget, ESO’s central Cyrodiil warzone remains its biggest draw to players burned out on MMO convention.
Zenimax don’t seem to have made any public response to the complaints thus far – but I can’t imagine they’ll let instances of unambiguous cheating go unchecked until ESO’s April 4 release date.
PvP’s one of the things we didn’t get to try before writing up our Elder Scrolls Online first impressions. Have you had a go with it?