

FTC gives you unit frames for both yourself and whichever enemy you’re mousing over (targeted) with health, stamina, and magicka bars.

Unit frames, better known as the bars of health and stuff, are frankly in a difficult spot on the default UI, but FTC allows you to move them around and customize them somewhat. This is where the Foundry Tactical Combat plugin helps. There are four key ways that FTC morphs the Elder Scrolls UI into something that more greatly resembles the traditional MMO UI you’re probably used to: unit frames, flying combat text, buff tracking, and combat logging. It does resemble the Elder Scrolls UI that we all know and love, but we are playing an MMO, right? That’s actually a problem because most veterans nearly have a panic attack when nothing seems familiar to them in ESO by default, its UI does not in any way resemble that of any other MMO that you might have played. I am going to assume that most readers of this column are MMO players and have had experience with nice variety of different MMOs. Fortunately, Atropos was able to work around the issue and continue to make FTC a viable - and dare I say, necessary - part of the ESO UI. The first time I talked about addons for Elder Scrolls Online was about a year ago, right about the time ESO patched up and almost rendered this first mod, Foundry Tactical Combat, nearly useless. I use a lot of mods myself, but there are three specific sets of mods that I don’t think I could play without - and neither should you.

And so crafty players have designed UI mods to help with everything from item sorting to roleplay. And while you won’t need to replace character models as you likely did for past Elder Scrolls games, this UI doesn’t exactly cater to MMO players. And at times, you can tell that this game was made by a staff that doesn’t necessarily specialize in creating an MMORPG. Of course, I can’t say that ESO is perfect there are a few things missing. With its latest update and B2P transition, it’s finally feeling like Skyrim or another Elder Scrolls game - just online. If you have not jumped into Elder Scrolls Online yet, you should really give it a shot.
