Sure, the difference between playing the PC version of a game on minimum and maximum settings is a big one. It’s supposed to be. But the gulf between the less-intensive option for The Elder Scrolls Online and the all-of-the-things alternative looks massive.
The side-by-side comparison comes courtesy of IGN, who ran the upcoming MMO with the graphics turned all the way up and all the way down. The advantage of a low setting, of course, is that folks with less robust hardware will still be able to play the game. But, there’s no avoiding the fact that doing so leaves you with visuals that look like they came from two console generations ago.
On the other hand, if you’ve got a set-up that can handle a more demanding graphics load, you’re going to get a nice level of detail as you slash and spellcast your way through the upcoming online release. Set your components — and expectations — accordingly.
Comments
37 responses to “Wow, Elder Scrolls Online Graphics Comparison Is Like Night And Day”
But is it better than Skyrim?
And if it is is it better than Skyrim with the HD Textures pack?
And if it’s better than that is it better than Skyrim with some graphics mods?
You can tell it’s not as good as Skyrim just by looking at it.
This pisses me off. I know it’s an MMO and they make the graphics crappy so more people can run it, but why can’t they make it look at least as good as Skyrim and then lower detail a lot so people can still run it on budget systems?
I don’t care, I won’t be playing it, even as a long time TES fan. The game sounds terrible.
It’s actually pretty close to Skyrim, if not as good…
I’ve played a good 8 hours worth and it’s pre-Skyrim style graphics. Going from over 100+ mods to make Skyrim HD to Elder Scrolls Online is an ugly experience.
It doesn’t look like it. The combat looks rubbish and from what I hear the quests are very typical of an MMO, to very bad extents.
The loot system sounds pretty bad as well.
Combat’s not bad. A bit simplified, but not bad by any means. And the quests vary in quality. I don’t enjoy MMO’s, but I’ll be picking this up when it’s released
I am in the beta and the combat IS bad. Its like a WoW clone with an Elder Scrolls paint job and everything that this game does WoW STILL does better.
It feels like a heartless knockoff cash grab. Did you know one of the races is paywalled behind the collectors edition?
Yep, yet another reason I want nothing to do with it.
It also annoys me they have the ability to play as any race in any alliance behind a paywall as well. Why even bother with the whole alliance thing if anyone can just buy the collectors edition and ignore it completely?
Just quietly, I think you’re either misreading, or listening to people who are misreading the information. The ability to play any race in any alliance is NOT a collector’s edition benefit. It is attached to the explorer’s pack, which comes with ALL pre-orders, be they Imperial Edition, or normal. If you don’t believe me, go have a look at the site.
Yeah I couldn’t remember whether it was just preorders or the collector’s edition. That’s even worse. It’s supposed to be a core element of the story, that each alliance has its own races, and now everyone will be running about playing as whatever race they want in whatever alliance they want. They’re pretty much breaking their own canon already.
The combat is nothing like WoW, what are you talking about?
I mean the questing style which is like the core of the game. I played for about 4 hours and they were all stupid ping pong quests.
The combat is a worse version of Skyrims combat and all the enemies have more health to drag out your sub.
Its not to cater to more people, they have setting changing for that. Its that its server orientated with more then a single person loading it, theres only so far you can push that.
Please understand hardware limitations before you refuse to play a game for pure graphical reasoning.
Oh, don’t you worry, it’s not because the graphics are bad that I don’t want to play it. The graphics don’t bother me, I was just complaining about them, because they are disappointing. I actually never thought about the server load aspect of it, although I don’t see why it should make a difference. Graphics processing is generally always done client-side. I don’t see why having better graphics would increase server load.
As for why I refuse to play it, there are numerous things. Mostly to do with the extensive butchering of the lore and the ridiculous pre-order incentives, as well as the fact that I don’t really agree with MMO pricing schemes. I’m not paying full price for a game then an extra 15 bucks whenever I decide I want to play it a few months later. I’ll wait for it to tank and go F2P before I even consider it.
Definitely fair enough on the cost factor. I can completely agree with you there. The incentives will always become available later if they actually matter, because its poor business if they don’t do that.
As for the server load, the server still has to register the connection of thousands, often hundreds of thousands of people doing actions. MMO’s often use heavily server-side focused calculations, as it makes “hacking” the game quite difficult to achieve, which is why you don’t see many exploitative hacks, and more just simple things like chat bots, or just bots in general.
It has more to do with the fact that its not a closed scripted world. with the possibility of having hundred or thousands or even more models on screen. Games like FF suffer horribly from this especially on the console versions where it gets to the point things psychically have to start Disappearing from screen because everything cant be rendered.
Totally agree.
I got Skyrim with a few graphic mods installed and it looks amazing. So after playing on the ESO beta I knew that I am never going to bother to spend money on something that looks so bad…
Sorry but if you play a game for grphics ur missing out on alot of great games. I played the ESO beta and liked it way better than skyrim. I know of the mods for skyrim but with the legendary edition mods are not needed in my opinion. just ruins the game. ESO is great and nothing like any other MMO out there. Graphics isnt the main part of the game,The actual gameplay is
They make them not ass good because you have to have 200+ people on screen at once. Try spawning 200+ bandits in Skyrim and tell me how that work out for you.
After playing ESO on maximum settings I have to say that it was better than Skyrim in some aspects and worse in others. Keep in mind that when I refer to Skyrim I am referring to the vanilla console version of the game. Additionally when I refer to ESO I am talking about ESO at beta with max settings.
Anyway, in my opinion as far as graphics go, ESO was generally better than Skyrim. Of course it looked slightly different, because it has a slightly more exaggerated art style compared to Skyrim’s realism style. Many of the character models were top notch while a few others did not look overwhelmingly great. Nonetheless, it was still better looking than anything I saw in Skyrim. The lighting effects were good and the textures, especially for metals, looked much better than in Skyrim. The graphics were crisp and very clean for the most part especially for many of the quest characters, but in some areas and on some characters the textures looked a little muddy to me. This lack of detail was seen in both the mud crab’s bland texture and the bear’s flatish fur. Also, in Elder Scrolls fashion all hair options excluding the buzz cut still look like plastic. The game has good atmospheric distance, but the backgrounds did not seem as elaborate as skyrim, while the town looked better. In my opinion, I think ESO-so far- looks better than skyrim, but it is just in a different style.
P.S. I have only been able to play in the snowy Skryim-esque region of the beta so far.
It’s definitely better than Skyrim. Probably better than the HD Pack, even. It’s just that the graphics are not as realistic, so some people think they’re not as good. They’re clearly clearer images, though. With mods, definitely nowhere near as good.
I got into the recent beta, and I’m surprised but I’ve enjoyed my experience with TSO so far.
Maybe give it a go before you give up on it.
I enjoy it, but I hate how simplified things are. I want a big messy bloody interface. Not 6 squares down the bottom and no xp bar.
It just goes to show that money talks. Monthly subscription fees for an MMO needs to appeal to the widest audience possible, even if kids want to use their parents POS flexi-rent computer from Harvey Norman to play it. I see developers doing this every once in a while, trying to become the next World of Warcraft (even though Activision have had their ups and downs, and the people that try to replicate them often fail) … just in the same way that people have been saying that companies like Capcom have been chasing the Call of Duty sales numbers.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no interest in MMO’s … I’ve never played one and I know I probably never will (I’ve seen friends playing them, and that’s enough to know how boring they look). But it’s a shame that the same amount of energy and effort doesn’t go into optimising games to run more efficiently and look even better on high end hardware … AMD seem to be the only guys making an effort with Mantle API (even though results on the internet seem to differ quite wildly when it comes to Battlefield 4 DX11 vs Mantle).
But in the end you have to respect the fact that they can strip a game down that much to make it play on virtually any PC made within the last 10 years. That scope of being able to tweak graphics settings to get a playable game means more to me than developers setting the bar at whatever level they like on consoles, and then leaving the end user to deal with whatever performance is left on the table. I’ve always fiddled with graphics settings on a game to get the best ratio of performance and visual quality on PC … and it bugs me to no end that they often push games beyond the hardware’s limitations on consoles, where you have no say in the matter whatsoever.
BTW – why is this under XBOX when it’s about highest and lowest settings on PC
More interesting is to look at how it’s been tagged:
bethesda softworks, mmo, playstation, ps4, the elder scrolls, the elder scrolls online, xbox, xbox one
I hope the PS4 version is equivalent to the maximum settings.
I doubt it… Ps4 graphics have been so so sofar, anyone want a beta key for this weekend I have a spare
Are you trolling? HAHA
Are you trying to say PS4 wont run this crappy MMO at full graphics
I’ll just leave this here
http://www.jeuxcapt.com/upload/module_images/1361452257_Killzone-Shadow-Fall-PS4-JeuxCapt-10.jpg
I know fistfullofflour personally I was stirring him up 😉
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http://www.elderscrollsonline.com
Create an account and redeem the code it’s a 21GB download and your character will carry over into full game!
Post if you have used this code so you don’t waste anyone else’s time please
Characters are not carried over to release. This never happens (bugs in beta can give characters undue advantage) and would completely defeat the purpose of the head start period.
In other news, water is wet. How is this news?
Xbone vs Pc… Lol Lol Lol, someone had to say it.
I have heard good reports on this game, my only worry is that it will be extremely dumbed down for the console side of things
I didn’t realize it was coming out on console, I guess that would explain why you can only have 6 or so abilities equipped at a time compared to WoWs 50 million.
The Beta is free this weekend guys, you should all download it and get it out of your system before you get tricked into paying money for this stinker.
For consoles or just PC
I got it on PC but I have no idea about consoles 🙁
if only you can lower the graphics settings of real life, then old vain people won’t have to spend so much on beauty care.
Heh. That just reminds me of X:Rebirth for some reason…
I’ve spent about 7 hours playing beta over this weekend, and I’m actually pleasantly surprised. That is not to say that I’m over the moon impressed and going to sing the praises of this game for the next millennium or anything along those lines. The graphics of the game are actually quite decent, and it feels more like an Elder Scrolls game than an MMO, so far. I haven’t come across a single “Kill 30 of these” or “Collect 20 bat wings (but not all bats have 2 or even one wing, because they dont all drop them)” quest yet, in the first couple of areas of play. In and of itself, that is refreshingly different. I feel less like I’m being led around by the nose, which WoW does, and more like I’m being guided in a certain direction.
Combat is a little clunky, but not so bad as some people have said, at least not in my experience. Some people I’ve seen complaining about cooldowns, but I haven’t seen a single one of them on 3 different characters, so perhaps I’ll put that down to lag.
I don’t understand what people were expecting from ESO, I never expected it to be the next Elder Scrolls game, in the way that Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim are Elder Scrolls games. That just doesn’t work in an MMO environment, unless you completely gut it and take away things like levels and instead find an arbitrary, yet ultimately meaningless form of character progression. The point to Elder Scrolls games in the past was, “Play it your way, in the order you want”, which works (mostly) fine in Skyrim with a single player and levelled enemies/loot, but there’s no way of making that work in a MMO format that doesn’t become stupid. But it definitely doesn’t feel like a WoW clone, nor a clone of any other MMO’s I’ve played.
There are some things I would have done differently, had I been developing the game, but I can say that about just about every game I’ve ever played. I’ll be buying the game (that I’ve already pre-ordered… was lucky enough to get one in time to get Imperial Edition) because while I’m not geekgasming over it, it seems interesting enough, and I’m curious to see how the game pans out.
A lot of you seem to misunderstand the problem with very high definition graphics in MMO’s.
The reason MMO’s tend to have simpler graphics than other games has nothing to do with them wanting to support lower performing PC’s, It’s to do with connection bandwidth and latency.
In an MMO you can have many characters on the screen at once, sometimes hundreds of other players on your screen all at the same time, this is especially true in PvP and in cities.
Each one of those other players has a customised skin, different armor, weapons and spell effects/enchants active. All of this information needs to be sent to your computer to draw that character, then additional information for what the toon is doing (ie, direction, speed, attacks etc). That’s a lot of information that needs to be delivered to your computer about another player, and when you have 100 players all doing their own thing on your screen at once, that’s an awful lot of data, which leads to lag.
No MMO can be compared to a single player RPG graphics, they are chalk & cheese.
ESO has the most customisation and the highest quality graphics that I have ever seen in an MMO.
if graphics are all you care about go play and game in the crysis series it looks awesome but its a boring and unplayable game that does nothing except waste your money ive played the beta to eso its a really fun game with great pvp it fits the needs of wanting to play single player or as a group there is a lot of detail no matter where you explore and adventure is everywhere and the game only gets better as you level up