6mo ago

The Elder Scrolls Online now “officially” playable on the Steam Deck

store.steampowered.com The Elder Scrolls® Online - The Elder Scrolls Online is Now Playable on Steam Deck! - Steam News

ESO players on Steam can now explore Tamriel using the portable Steam Deck! We are thrilled to announce that The Elder Scrolls Online now has “Playable” status on the Steam Deck. This means that Steam ESO players can now venture into Tamriel’s Second Era using the portable PC gaming device. Never mi...

Gaming On Linux has a write-up too.

37 comments

Damn that's pretty awesome. So this is the actual developer of ESO, that is spending time making their game compatible with Linux?
- Sounds like it — it was posted by The Elder Scrolls Online, not Valve. (Edit: Yes, of course this still means Proton.)
- Not necessarily. My understanding is that you can earn a green check as long as your game feels like a native console experience, even if it's running on Proton
  
  Wine/proton are great but not perfect. Lots of games don't work through proton. "Compatible with linux" can mean doing the work to make sure your windows build is proton friendly and will work on Linux. It doesn't have to mean Linux native.

Great to hear. Im over my MMO grinding days, but ESO is still fun to hop in an for an hour and do some quests.
- How is it solo?
  Been considering an mmo but would want one that's possible solo. Realize that's counterintuitive but was curious.
  
  Thats the main way I play tbh.
  The voice acting is nice, but I won't lie questing is a bit shallower than with Skyrim. Lots of collectables, horizontal progression. Its a nice package!
  It has options for group dungeons and I quite enjoyed the PvP for when you get that multiplayer itch.
  Also world chat keeps things interesting lmao.
  
  I would say that ESO is probably one of the best MMO solo games out there. You can even play the game as an actual Bethesda Elder Scrolls game, to some extend.
  
  Every modern MMO is pretty much solo with people around. I'd say this is especially true for ESO. There's essentially no reason to socialize from what I recall, but I never made it to end-game. I prefer the FFXIV design where you can play solo if you want, but there's also reasons to socialize if you want to. It's much more interesting to hang out in. In ESO, from what I remember, I never felt like hanging out and only played to complete content.

That seems awesome. But I wonder how it will do with Add-ons that you can install on the PC version. I can't play without them since the QOL additions just make everything so much better.
- Add-ons work just fine. You can even get a native version of the add-on manager Minion from Flathub. Not all of addons support the gamepad input mode, but that's the same situation it is on Windows.
- Every add-on I've tried works perfectly on desktop Linux, I'd assume its the same on Deck.
  
  Nice! I may have to try it out. I don't have the Steam version of the game, just the native ZOS client so I don't know if that'll be an issue either.

I'm going to have to spend some more time playing it again! It worked fine on my desktop install previously, so I'm curious to know what they changed to bump it to verified. I'm guessing UI tweaks or something with the launcher.

Yeah, I played it for a lot of time on my Linux desktop, and I never understood why it was unplayable on Steamdeck Nice work!

Doesn't that game require a massive amount of storage with all the expansions/add-ons installed? Doesn't seem very Deck friendly, IMO. Especially for base model Decks. It's one of the main reasons I don't bother playing BG3 on it, either.
Edit: I just looked and can't get a concise answer, seems like tons of players' install size differs by notable margins. Official site says it needs roughly ~95GB plus another ~30GB during the install process (guessing for temp install files during decompression/compression). Meanwhile, some players report folder sizes ranging from ~97GB all the way up to ~150GB. Regardless, seems ~95GB is the bare minimum which is still a lot for even the 500GB Deck models. And there's no way the game would run comfortably off an SD card.
- This is my install size of ESO:
  135,9 GiB (145.899.220.482)
  635 files, 46 sub-folders
- It's definitely massive - I'd guess at the 90GB+ number, but I don't think it reached 150GB. I had it installed awhile back on an SD card and I didn't experience many problems in the game. Just takes a little longer to load new places, but the gaming experience was still smooth.
  
  Yeah, from the comments I read, it looked like some people might have needed to clear their folders out and/or others had installed the PTS files as well. Regardless, ~95GB is still quite large. I'm surprised your loading speeds weren't that bad on the SD card. How fast were your load times, if you don't mind me asking?

Does it still needs eso+ subscription to be fun? I've heard without eso+ there was something shitty about tiny inventory space or something
- It's not the normal inventory, that's fine, it's that if you pay for eso+ you get a separate limitless inventory for crafting, and TBH I couldn't imagine playing without it and still interacting with the crafting system.
- Played it for years and never paid for eso+. Great game!
- It is a tiny bit annoying, but you can get +1 extra slot every 24 hours up till like 60 extra slots total, I think?

How are the controls for this? I found FFXIV controls are great, not perfect but great, and was wondering how they compare. Getting a solid control scheme for an MMO isn’t easy.
- ESO I think is mostly solid that way, they have a limit for how many abilities you can slot, so no button hell like WoW-like MMOs.
  You could play with a controller from day one, it was built for it.
  
  That's actually great to hear. I might have to check it in that case. Thanks.

That’s great!

Has it ever been 'playable'?
- Have you tried it? I played the beta and didn't care for it, but a few years after release I tried it again, with a different mindset, and enjoyed it. I played it for a few months then. It's not the best MMO I've played, but it's good enough. If you want a pretty casual MMO in the Elder Scrolls world, it does the job fine enough. I personally don't think it does enough to push you to socialize (most MMOs now have moved away from this), but it's a decent single-player theme park with plenty of interesting things to do.
- I played the shit out of a for a while, something clicked and I loved it.
- Game's okay.
  The developers however can eat a bag of rancid pig farts.
  
  Why? What did Zenimax do to you?

37 comments