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OS X Elder Scrolls Online

TESO April

At this time only Beta players are able to play. You will not be able to play until April four minus those early days the came with your purchase. I think its 5 for Imperial edition and 3 for regular. I know this sucks but you'll be ready to play on the hour it becomes public.

Have fun in Tamerel,
Atarria (Atarrial)
 
Mac Beta Test for ESO

I was invited to be a beta tester for ESO las weekend.

I downloaded downloader and then the 29GB client.

Clicked on the Play button and just got a black screen. The mouse still moved and the Mac was not frozen. Big Flop and i have already preordered the Imperial Edition. Hopefully it will be fixed come April!!!

Very disappointing.

Playing on Mac Pro 2x 3.06GHz, 32GB RAM, Evga GTX 680 GPU.
 
Now that the NDA has been lifted:

First the Mac specific issue - they put files in Documents that belonged in the user's Library folder under Preferences, Cache and/or Application Support. About the only thing that I saw that should go in the user's Documents folder would be a ESO Screenshot folder.

Also, the game was installed in a folder that didn't have Elder Scrolls in the name and there was no indication of what the folder name in /Applications was from the installer.

Also the installer downloaded 21GBs of data then installed it instead of doing it in smaller chunks or installing directly. Then it downloaded another 5GBs and then I think another chunk of data.

As for the game:

I didn't like it, it felt too much like a single person game being played with additional annoyances in your way.

The controls felt like they were lifted from a console game and not remapped properly for a computer keyboard and mouse.

And did every door you go through really need a loading screen?
 
eso

i have to say that i was impressed how well the game ran on my maxed out imac 27" mind 2011. ich turned everything to max and everything ran smooth as butter.

blizzard specially D3 run like crap ... so the mac (osx) is enough for gaming if its made good.

gameplay:

i didn´t like it. you will need a controller or better you use a console to play this game.

sadly i didn´t find special elements that could bring me in this world again. maybe its too casual ...

the graphics look really good and as i said it will run good on alder machines too i think.

good work from the porting team !!!!

cheers
 
NDA is over.

Well, the Mac version plays very well on my MacPro 5,1 with 10.8.5, SSD, 12 GB of ram and HD7950 GPU (everything maxed except shadows, acceptable farmerates).
Approximately same performance of the Win7 version on my hardware.

I experienced a lot of lag in AvA (cyrodil) and long loading times when changing istances. Some client crashes also, but that was a stress test with a lot of people invited and we were palying on a server in USA (I am in Europe), so i believe once the game is out this will be fixed.

The game was fun and i enjoyed playing in. I preordered it.
 
The game ran extremely well in my case as well. Sadly many textures still seem very low quality, most likely due to wanting to make the game playing for the vast majority.

I found the melee classes very fulfilling, sadly the ranged magic ones felt like a normal hot key based MMO. So quite boring. The different faction story lines are also not all of the same quality. The High elves have amazing writing and detail.

I did find that after a while the game seemed a tad bland and boring. The world is still static like many MMO's, and is missing that lively hustle and bustle of a normal Elder Scrolls game, and towns.

They're still plenty of room for improvement though.
 
I was very impressed of the game's engine on the Mac. It runs great even on my old iMac 2010 model, while maintaining a very nice and detailed world.

The gameplay, controls and overall feeling is like its single-player Elder Scrolls cousins. Personally I find it very refreshing after years of the WoW's arcade style. Good thing is that most of the quests are not of the dumb type we meet in WoW, Rift etc like kill x mobs or gather y items. They are story-driven and they do seem to affect the environment.

There were also some bugs. Most annoying the random freeze of the UI that needed to reload it. But these will be ironed out surely before launch.
 
And there you have it. Four honest reviews from beta testers above, and the overall verdict is that the game is bland and boring.

I'm an Elder Scrolls Fanatic, but continue to have no interest in ESO, MMOs aren't my bag. I just hope Bethesda is hard at work at the next chapter in the true series, and that they're done with this diversion.

TES VI, Fallout IV. Looking forward to the next hotness.
 
Subscription based, with cosmetic (AFAIK) item shop...

By the way the best part of the game is the character customization...the 4 classess are just initial archetypes, you can skill it up as you please.

As an example, I created a sorcerer and I used it as a tank (donning heavy armor and 1 hand weapon) later as a pure caster with destruction staff and light armor and in the end started using a bow and medium armor with good results in AvA. This free class system reminded me of Ultima on-Line.....

Also the crafting system is deep and fun....
 
doh123 said:
which bodes well... seem to get really weird people or absolute freeloaders in all the free online games. I've always found better people and games on pay-for games.
Click to expand...

Yes, I do hope for a better player community (although WoW is sub-based and has failed tremendously in that area. Literally, it has became the trashcan of the MMO community). But mostly because it is not another epic-item hunting like all the other MMOs. They do not bet on the greediness of the players, but mostly on the story telling, the exploration and the character development.
 
Folks! if you want to play an Imperial you MUST buy that special pack, which costs a bomb.

Not only that only pre-order packages allow people to join any faction with a given race. Normal subscribers are Locked into the race faction at creation.

So if your friends pre-odered those packs, and you don't you can't play with them unless you make a character that's part of that faction.
I think this is a really scummy tactic.
 
As someone who's coming from an MMO background (played EQ, WoW, Warhammer, GW2, FFXIV, EVE) and not overly impressed by previous Elder Scrolls games (Daggerfall through Skyrim), I feel a bit different than the previous posters in this thread.

Running on a late 2012 BTO iMac (27", 680MX, i7, fusion drive), the game is smoother than any other MMO I've run on the machine. It's actually impressively smooth considering the graphics quality (I ran it at max settings). Their default full-screen mode seemed nice to begin with when it didn't black out my additional screens but the client kept stealing keyboard events (so no typing in browsers on a secondary screen). So I had to switch to a maximised window (which keeps the window borders and looks less than great) which worked better with the rest of the OS. Plenty of bugs in the game itself, with quests not functioning and places where a UI reload was needed to get out of weird loops. Also, proper crashes to desktop every 30-60 minutes, sometimes caught by the Zenimax crash reporter, other times not.

That all being said, I felt the game was very much fun. I had a great time playing over the beta weekend and have since then pre-ordered the game. There's a conceptually interesting skill and ability system and the fact that everything is voiced is quite nice. To me, I feel I will easily put in enough hours into the game to justify the cost (and yeah, it's very highly priced). I'm truly looking forward to playing the game, and exploring various aspects of it. I don't know anything about the end-game content at this point, which will be what decides whether or not I keep subbing after the levelling up process but if they can find a way to keep content fresh and fun (without entirely relying on PvP for end-game) I could see myself spending a long time in the game.

Just the fact that the game runs so well on the mac is almost enough to support the developers for me. I haven't seen any other game able to push the visuals that ESO does on this machine in such a smooth way. It's a clear indication that other games simply aren't utilising the hardware that's available. While ESO isn't exactly state-of-the-art when it comes to graphics, it's certainly outperforming anything else I've seen run on this machine. It feels like I got a completely new machine.
 
I was in the stress test weekend a few weeks ago. I installed it on my MBP on both 10.9.1 and Windows 8.1 (Bootcamp). See below for specs.

It ran well in both OS's, although the default graphic settings were set higher by default in Windows.

It was very playable and smooth in OSX, I was impressed!

As for gameplay, well, it's just like Skyrim. It's not exactly like it, there are classes and skills work a little differently, but it's a first person MMO with Skyrim type combat. This consists of clicking to attack/swing and hotkeys for special attacks.

I found it refreshing because I have played WoW for so many years and this is not a WoW clone. If you're looking for a open world type MMO's with quests and you liked Skyrim, give it a shot.
 
Beta Key Giveaway

Hey Guys,

I'm running a giveaway at the moment where you could win a Beta Key for The Elder Scrolls Online upcoming session this weekend and for any future beta sessions leading up to release.

Keys are still being sent out in waves so if you haven't been lucky enough to get your hands on one yet then be sure to check out my tweet for information on how to win! :)

The Elder Scrolls Online - Beta Key Giveaway
 
N19h7m4r3 said:
I did find that after a while the game seemed a tad bland and boring. The world is still static like many MMO's, and is missing that lively hustle and bustle of a normal Elder Scrolls game, and towns.
Click to expand...

Now let's be fair. Wouldn't the hustle and bustle normally come to the towns AFTER the game is released for public retail, when thousands of gamers can actually buy/try/play the game?
 
Solomani said:
Now let's be fair. Wouldn't the hustle and bustle normally come to the towns AFTER the game is released for public retail, when thousands of gamers can actually buy/try/play the game?
Click to expand...

Huntn said:
Maybe he is referring to all of the NPCs that normally populate a solo ES game?
Click to expand...

Yup the NPC's.

So far the game has that same old static MMO world, where some NPCs just stand about. or walk in a tiny path loop.
 
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