First person =/= MMO...

A hot-bar and non real-time combat are two different things. You can have a hotbar and FPS-style combat (i.e. Darkfall ONline) and in fact, I wouldn't mind a hotbar in the SP TES series because all this pausing in the midst of combat to consume potions etc is really annoying. On the other hand, a hotbar and cool-down based combat in the style of WoW is definitely a bad idea for a TES type game (and, as a matter of fact, for any MMO nowadays). The matter will onlybe made worse if they add to that tab-target mechanics. That is going to be a complete turnoff for most TES players.

You guys in love with TERA - hate to break it to you, but it has no PVP to speak of (unless you play on a gank fest server.) This game is designed with massive pvp for the endgame in mind. Just consider that.

Careful, you might spawn whining about how PvP endgame "will ruin ES and is just like CoD", or some such nonsense.

Yeah, Ilum rocks, the Hero's Journey starts here indeed. *cough*.

Even though Morrowinds combat wasn't great, I see it and the rest of the ES combat vastly better than games like GW2 and WoW. It's first person for one, and allows for more control.

This forum is for discussing the game, not only for those going to buy it.

Having a hotbar only for potions and food, etc, would be alright. But absolutely not for attacks/skills. That just sounds [censored] dumb. What about Left/Right mouse button? You know... Like in Skyrim?

that

could work : /

It's a bit funny reading through these posts and finding that a lot of people have misunderstandings about real-time combat. Funny, however not surprising. Was Morrowind's combat real-time? Yes. Some people confuse the dice roll calculations that happened in real-time as a reason to think that Morrowind's combat wasn't real time. Was it a good combat system? No, but it was still real-time.

Most MMOs don't do real-time combat because of latency issues and because it's a much harder endeavor from a programming perspective. It's a lot more difficult to do a real-time combat system in a large-scale MMO as opposed to going the traditional route and doing what is essentially turn based combat that has a lot of makeup applied to give you an illusion that it's real-time combat.

For example, Age of Conan tried to do this. They advertised their "active blocking" and their "directional attacks" and being able to do moves whenever where ever, but in reality it was just turn based combat with a lot of makeup applied. There was no complex real-time calculations being made. No complex real-time hit detection. Compare these MMOs that try to sell you on their unique combat as being "real-time" to actual real-time games like Mount and Blade or Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy.

Ninja Gaiden. Devil May Cry. Dark/Demon Souls. Batman Arkham Asylum/City. Fight Night Round 4. Even DCU Online's combat was real-time, even if a bit boring and easy to exploit (Speed hacks, for example). I could go on and on in any case.

So while Skyrim's combat might not be considered that great when compared to other REAL-TIME combat systems, it's a whole different ballpark if you start comparing it to traditional MMO combat that's essentially turn based combat with makeup applied to try to give the illusion that it's real time. MMOs wish that they could easily implement combat of Skyrim's level into their games. They wish. It's just not so easy to do so most developers take the safe route.

There are some MMOs that have tried to break the mold, although I'm pretty sure they haven't been that successful. Games like APB, DCU Online, Mortal Online, Darkfall Online, etc. It's going to be some time before technology is at the level where real-time combat can be more easily implemented into large-scale MMOs and that's when we're going to start seeing good real-time combat systems in large-scale MMOs. I say this mostly because MMOs that have real-time combat systems seem to mostly have bad combat systems (Mortal Online, DCU Online, I haven't tried Darkfall Online but it looks to be crap too).

APB's combat system isn't bad (Although their gear systems and their pay to win systems are questionable), but it's not quite "large scale". It's more like 100 people max in a single instance of a city.

There you have it, my two cents. Feel free to do tl;dr (Too long; didn't read).

Dust 514 would like to speak with you.

I had also hoped that They would do something new and creative with this title, They had been consistently improving combat through the last 3 ES titles They should have continued with ESO, instead of high-jacking some other companies engine. Soo disappointed in the path they chose.