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Steam and the ESO launcher conflict

GankThat
GankThat
Soul Shriven
Greetings,

I have never posted here, but I have seen this issue discussed many, many times both here and in the Steam forums where I will be posting this again. When installing the game through Steam for the first time, I have encountered a problem. After reaching out to both ESO support and Steam with no solutions from the pros, I have discovered a fix. First, some background:

I have a SSD that I use for my Windows install. For reasons that are my own, I chose to partition that drive into two parts with the OS on one, and software on the other. The capacity of the SSD is 240GB, and I allocated 115GB for software, and the rest to my OS. Because this game requires 87GB according to the launcher, I thought I was in the clear.

I was wrong. After installing the game through Steam, the game files were downloaded and I was left with approximately 30GB of space left on the install partition. I started the ESO launcher, and it prompted me to install ESO. Strange, I thought I just did. When I click through the install process, I'm told I have only about 30GB of space left, and I need to free up more disk space in order to install the game. Wait... what? I realized the launcher was not recognizing the files Steam downloaded, and was asking for essentially TWICE the required space on my partition. Since that was more than what was even available on that partition, I thought I was out of luck.

There have been many solutions to this problem listed and after several google searches, and searching through official forums, I have discovered the solution and I wanted to bring it to the forefront again.

Once the game is fully downloaded through Steam, you will have all the launcher files as well as all the game files (minus a few patches and whatnot). Simply deleting the "Elder Scrolls Online" directory from the Steam ESO directory (you will know it to be the correct one when you realize it's like 80GB in size), then running the launcher will allow the launcher to install the game rather than Steam, eliminating the need for double the necessary space to install the game.

I hope this solution helps some people out... I'd hate to see people being unable to play such a great game due to this issue.

P.S. If we could download the launcher from our account page after having bought the game through Steam, that would save us all quite a bit of bandwidth and time... just saying... lol
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