BleedMe_AnOcean wrote: »

Mornin', y'all. I'm new to ESO but not MMOs, and after perusing the forums for a while, I've seen a comment a few times that I absolutely don't understand:

"You can play WoW on a potato." I take this to mean that you can download and run WoW on a subpar machine, and I also take it as an insinuation that ESO demands a higher performance machine.

That's the exact opposite of my experience.

I run an older quad-core i5 (3.2GHz) with a 4GB 740ti (read: ancient, but still displays most games beautifully on my ultrawide 2560x1080 resolution monitor) and 12GB RAM and I have ZERO issues with running ESO. I maintain solid FPS on high settings if I turn shadows down a bit. Now, that said, here's the deal with WoW: I played for 2.5 years. I started in Draenor, and that's when I actually put the video card in my tower. It worked well. Then Legion came out and things went downhill with huge frame drops and the need to drop settings to the point that raids were going to be a pain. I was casual (but dedicated) raider and that's when my system strain became problematic. With 15-30 people in a room casting graphics-intense spells, FPS drops were a nightmare. When BFA came out, I knew my PC wasn't going to handle it. Apparently, with each new iteration of WoW, tens of thousands of people are left in the dust because they just don't have the PC power to run it effectively.

Dumped WoW and said goodbye to Blizz, then picked up ESO for PS4 due to all the comments about how ESO is worse than WoW for requiring expensive PC upgrades and my unwillingness to upgrade my tower any further right now. After dealing with the clunky console system and various bugs, I decided to give PC a shot. I've had the base game for a while so I figured it wouldn't hurt to give it a try. Oh. My. Gosh. The difference is tangible. Things look SO MUCH BETTER on my computer, even though it's a "potato" to the elitists out there because I don't buy and install the newest processors/GPUs the second they come out. I'm running high settings on everything but shadows, and I have my view distance turned up about 3/4 of the slider. I even run Master Merchant, and the only time I get the tiniest amount of lag is when it updates. That's easily remedied in trial situations by disabling the addon.

I don't know if I want to continue pursuing my adventures on console at all, in fact. It's that good.

Now that I've explained all of this... why do people think ESO is more graphics-intensive than WoW? If you head over to the WoW forums, you'll find umpteen billion threads about how Blizzard just keeps building on the same tremendously outdated, clunky code. You'll read how it could be a better game with better graphics (and we can all agree that ESO's graphics leave WoW in the dust, I'm sure) if they would take the time to actually rebuild their code from the ground up rather than relying on their ancient system. I can personally attest that WoW cannot be played on a potato and ESO can be played on a far less optimized machine with better graphics, better response times, and a more immersive experience overall.

If anyone else here has played both games and shares this experience - or if you happen to have some kind of knowledge about the differences in the way the two games are built - I'm interested in reading it. This isn't intended to start a debate. I'm genuinely curious as to why there seems to be this myth floating around that ESO will chew up your video card and spit it out like raw skeever while WoW runs flawlessly on a Commodore.