How to solve all your issues with ESO on the Mac

Coorbin

Some people have recommended running ESO in Parallels or Bootcamp. Parallels is pretty laggy because it has to run an entire Windows OS, while Bootcamp requires that you abandon MacOS entirely while playing, and Bootcamp isn't possible for the M1.

To solve all your issues with ESO on the Mac, all you need to do is run it with Crossover Mac. It doesn't crash, it doesn't have weird cursor bugs, it literally runs exactly as well as it runs on native Windows. It might even run a little bit better than native Windows. Loading times are good, the graphics are smooth, alt-tab works, everything works.

In my opinion, the future of ESO on the Mac is through Crossover. And yes, it works flawlessly on an M1 Mac. I believe they are reliant on Rosetta 2 for this, but it works extremely well.

By comparison, "native" Mac ESO runs terribly on my M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM and 8 GPU cores. Loading times are abysmal, it crashes frequently on loading, framerates are all over the place, and I have camera/cursor bugs all the time. None of that ever happens with Crossover.

To install ESO through Crossover Mac, first you have to install Steam in Crossover. Then use Steam to download ESO and run it. If you have a direct ESO account and don't run ESO through Steam, then just install ESO directly using the installer. No hacks, no workarounds, no scripting is needed - it works flawlessly out of the box. I promise it will work better than native Mac ESO.

The state of native Mac ESO is pretty bad, but the future is bright for being able to run ESO with mods (not without, like you have to live with on Stadia) on Mac hardware for years to come through Crossover.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Codeweavers or Crossover. I simply recommend their product as a user.

murgandy

Thank you so much for this info! I'm definitely going to look into this when I get off work this evening.

Inoki

Thank you! I wish they added the game to GFN with add-ons enabled. There should be some way for GFN and other cloud gaming services to enable add-ons from a local drive.

That, and they could focus on their Windows clients all the want, so long as they would enable us to play natively in the cloud.

A question: will it run on an 8 GB M1 mini?

NetherClawSr

Thank you. I didn’t know about that. So with crossover I can use addons same as my guild mates? A license costs 59 right?

Inoki

I tried what you suggested, am now stuck on the launcher screen where it says "Loading..." and nothing is happening. I downloaded and installed CrossOver, installed Steam in it, but before that I made sure I have DirectX, Vulcan installed, but it's loading painfully slow and it's not downloading anything for minutes now. Is that normal?

electric_amoeba

Ah, thank you so much for posting this. This worked like a charm for me!

M0R_Gaming

Inoki wrote: »

I tried what you suggested, am now stuck on the launcher screen where it says "Loading..." and nothing is happening. I downloaded and installed CrossOver, installed Steam in it, but before that I made sure I have DirectX, Vulcan installed, but it's loading painfully slow and it's not downloading anything for minutes now. Is that normal?

When I booted it up for the first time on windows it was the same. After leaving it for an hour it fixed itself and now load times are normal.
Edit: it appears that you and I are talking about 2 different things, whoops. Ya, thats shouldn't happen.


I've never considered running eso via crossover, thanks for the tip! I previously got it because I needed it for plenty of other programs that I had.

Dont forget that crossover also has a 14 day trial! With the newest update crossover runs almost as well as native for me.

Inoki

M0R_Gaming wrote: »

Inoki wrote: »

I tried what you suggested, am now stuck on the launcher screen where it says "Loading..." and nothing is happening. I downloaded and installed CrossOver, installed Steam in it, but before that I made sure I have DirectX, Vulcan installed, but it's loading painfully slow and it's not downloading anything for minutes now. Is that normal?

When I booted it up for the first time on windows it was the same. After leaving it for an hour it fixed itself and now load times are normal.
Edit: it appears that you and I are talking about 2 different things, whoops. Ya, thats shouldn't happen.


I've never considered running eso via crossover, thanks for the tip! I previously got it because I needed it for plenty of other programs that I had.

Dont forget that crossover also has a 14 day trial! With the newest update crossover runs almost as well as native for me.

I left it in that state for about half an hour with no change. Will try again today but if it won’t work I’ll just uninstall and can’t recommend this as a solution. So far it’s been very disappointing.

Inoki

Coorbin wrote: »

Some people have recommended running ESO in Parallels or Bootcamp. Parallels is pretty laggy because it has to run an entire Windows OS, while Bootcamp requires that you abandon MacOS entirely while playing, and Bootcamp isn't possible for the M1.

To solve all your issues with ESO on the Mac, all you need to do is run it with Crossover Mac. It doesn't crash, it doesn't have weird cursor bugs, it literally runs exactly as well as it runs on native Windows. It might even run a little bit better than native Windows. Loading times are good, the graphics are smooth, alt-tab works, everything works.

In my opinion, the future of ESO on the Mac is through Crossover. And yes, it works flawlessly on an M1 Mac. I believe they are reliant on Rosetta 2 for this, but it works extremely well.

By comparison, "native" Mac ESO runs terribly on my M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM and 8 GPU cores. Loading times are abysmal, it crashes frequently on loading, framerates are all over the place, and I have camera/cursor bugs all the time. None of that ever happens with Crossover.

To install ESO through Crossover Mac, first you have to install Steam in Crossover. Then use Steam to download ESO and run it. If you have a direct ESO account and don't run ESO through Steam, then just install ESO directly using the installer. No hacks, no workarounds, no scripting is needed - it works flawlessly out of the box. I promise it will work better than native Mac ESO.

The state of native Mac ESO is pretty bad, but the future is bright for being able to run ESO with mods (not without, like you have to live with on Stadia) on Mac hardware for years to come through Crossover.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Codeweavers or Crossover. I simply recommend their product as a user.

Can you say which bottles are needed exactly for the Steam version to run? I installed DirectX for modern games, VK Upstream, Steam and ESO inside of Steam, but it won’t work.

Inoki

Not sure how some people could get it to work, but it’s not as OP is saying. It didn’t work for me at all, and I looked up sources on which bottles to add to make it work. Turned to official support for help even, no response.

I cannot recommend this “solution”.

NetherClawSr

I will stick with Google Stadia then. Thx

BlueRaven

This might be of interest to the people in this thread.

https://youtu.be/oet8GoDopVc

doesurmindglow

I got CrossOver up and running this weekend, here's what I can say about it:

First off, it's based on WINE and it works. And works with add-ons. I don't exactly know the nature of the trouble others are having with it but one thing that seems important is that it should be installed from the CrossTie in CodeWeavers' built in database -- this is to ensure the dependencies, which include the Visual C++ 10.0 and 14.0 runtimes as well as DXVK are installed. These are loaded automatically from the CrossTie, but might not be if you're simply downloading from Steam or the ESO website.

Second, it runs about as well as the native Mac client, but so far I haven't experienced any crashing. I have attempted instance changes in the most serious problem areas, particularly the Imperial City, and have yet to trigger the common crash to desktop Mac users have been struggling with since the Flames of Ambition patch. It does not seem to rely on the MoltenVK emulator that ZOS using as its porting tool. So it is, at least so far for me, a solution.

There are a few (probably acceptable) downsides I can see: one is obvious, CrossOver has a cost of $59 that comes with a year of support. I think it continues to run unsupported after that so it's probably a one-time cost, and you might be able to avoid it by using WINE directly instead.

I also think the resource load of CrossOver is higher than the native client, and there are sometimes some pretty bad FPS drops (like to 7-8 FPS). Assets sometimes don't fully load in, though I think this issue might be latency related and is present with the native client also. This occurs most frequently in combat, which can be annoying. It does seem like I can reduce this by disabling or limiting add-ons and that tends to be what I do about it. It seems more tolerable and playable than the crashing, though, and I bet on more powerful machines than mine (I'm running one of the last Intel chipsets with 8 GB RAM), you might not notice this issue at all.

Finally, you do obviously have to download and install a whole new copy of the game. This isn't a dealbreaker as the CrossOver game can simply replace the Mac client by (essentially) using a Windows one, but it does take some time. I just let mine run overnight as I did when originally installing the Mac client.

I think it's a decent solution also but I also dunno how universally it works: it's possible other systems than mine might not be able to use it at all. I can only speak to my own experience here.

Inoki

doesurmindglow wrote: »

I got CrossOver up and running this weekend, here's what I can say about it:

First off, it's based on WINE and it works. And works with add-ons. I don't exactly know the nature of the trouble others are having with it but one thing that seems important is that it should be installed from the CrossTie in CodeWeavers' built in database -- this is to ensure the dependencies, which include the Visual C++ 10.0 and 14.0 runtimes as well as DXVK are installed. These are loaded automatically from the CrossTie, but might not be if you're simply downloading from Steam or the ESO website.

Second, it runs about as well as the native Mac client, but so far I haven't experienced any crashing. I have attempted instance changes in the most serious problem areas, particularly the Imperial City, and have yet to trigger the common crash to desktop Mac users have been struggling with since the Flames of Ambition patch. It does not seem to rely on the MoltenVK emulator that ZOS using as its porting tool. So it is, at least so far for me, a solution.

There are a few (probably acceptable) downsides I can see: one is obvious, CrossOver has a cost of $59 that comes with a year of support. I think it continues to run unsupported after that so it's probably a one-time cost, and you might be able to avoid it by using WINE directly instead.

I also think the resource load of CrossOver is higher than the native client, and there are sometimes some pretty bad FPS drops (like to 7-8 FPS). Assets sometimes don't fully load in, though I think this issue might be latency related and is present with the native client also. This occurs most frequently in combat, which can be annoying. It does seem like I can reduce this by disabling or limiting add-ons and that tends to be what I do about it. It seems more tolerable and playable than the crashing, though, and I bet on more powerful machines than mine (I'm running one of the last Intel chipsets with 8 GB RAM), you might not notice this issue at all.

Finally, you do obviously have to download and install a whole new copy of the game. This isn't a dealbreaker as the CrossOver game can simply replace the Mac client by (essentially) using a Windows one, but it does take some time. I just let mine run overnight as I did when originally installing the Mac client.

I think it's a decent solution also but I also dunno how universally it works: it's possible other systems than mine might not be able to use it at all. I can only speak to my own experience here.

I tried it on my Mac mini M1 with 8 GB RAM and it wouldn't get past the launcher's loading status, before the 'Play' button appears in the bottom right.

Also, you might never know what kinds of hiccups you run into once the game updates, which may cause your Wine installation to break, so I would insist ZOS fixes their god damn client, or just refunds everyone their ESO+ for the trouble they have caused so we can be on our merry ways to different games where Mac users are welcomed and appreciated same as everyone else.

It's not our responsibility to look for workarounds for our money, it's their responsibility to deliver upon their promise, and that is a fully functional Mac client, as advertised! 🤬

doesurmindglow

I mean as far as I can tell there appear to be users dating back to 2016 that were able to make this work. I don't know what your issue was but it is working pretty well for me and it does resolve the crashing issue. I have not once crashed on port since adopting it.

It's not without its own problems: I think loading screens are longer, some of the geometry won't always render correctly (though to be fair, I was seeing this on the native client also), and there are often FPS drops at least on my system that suggest it could be more resource-intensive than the native client, I don't know. The "timeout on reloadui" issue I've experienced since the latest patch seems to exist in CrossOver also; it's possible that's legitimately add-on related. But I've done some tweaking to address some of these issues, so it does work as a decent porting tool and I may be switching over to it permanently from the client depending on how the rest of my free trial goes.

I agree the Mac client should work without persistent crashing, or they simply should stop advertising that it does if it's never getting fixed. I will likely keep my Mac client running and continue to update it with each patch, as well as submit tickets if the loading screen crashes remain.

There is actually a third option here probably worth exploring: Zenimax could adopt a Wine-based technology as its own preferred porting method as an alternative to the MoltenVK emulator.

Druachan

Coorbin wrote: »

Some people have recommended running ESO in Parallels or Bootcamp. Parallels is pretty laggy because it has to run an entire Windows OS, while Bootcamp requires that you abandon MacOS entirely while playing, and Bootcamp isn't possible for the M1.

To solve all your issues with ESO on the Mac, all you need to do is run it with Crossover Mac. It doesn't crash, it doesn't have weird cursor bugs, it literally runs exactly as well as it runs on native Windows. It might even run a little bit better than native Windows. Loading times are good, the graphics are smooth, alt-tab works, everything works.

In my opinion, the future of ESO on the Mac is through Crossover. And yes, it works flawlessly on an M1 Mac. I believe they are reliant on Rosetta 2 for this, but it works extremely well.

By comparison, "native" Mac ESO runs terribly on my M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM and 8 GPU cores. Loading times are abysmal, it crashes frequently on loading, framerates are all over the place, and I have camera/cursor bugs all the time. None of that ever happens with Crossover.

To install ESO through Crossover Mac, first you have to install Steam in Crossover. Then use Steam to download ESO and run it. If you have a direct ESO account and don't run ESO through Steam, then just install ESO directly using the installer. No hacks, no workarounds, no scripting is needed - it works flawlessly out of the box. I promise it will work better than native Mac ESO.

The state of native Mac ESO is pretty bad, but the future is bright for being able to run ESO with mods (not without, like you have to live with on Stadia) on Mac hardware for years to come through Crossover.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Codeweavers or Crossover. I simply recommend their product as a user.

I had a look at Crossover and gave it a go but it was a mess. The game generally plays ok native for me mostly but is laggy at times. If Zos want to stick a mac logo on their game and tell us its supported then they can f’ng start supporting Macs. I had thought i may move to xbox once they drop mac support all together but honestly its not worth it.