Is this your first time playing ESO?

That secondary launcher is normal, and has been around since launch. It's pretty common for MMOs to have a separate launcher.

vsrs_au wrote: »

Marto wrote: »

Is this your first time playing ESO?

That secondary launcher is normal, and has been around since launch. It's pretty common for MMOs to have a separate launcher.

I've been playing for over a year, and the installer window (I'm not talking about any launcher) I saw today is definitely not one I've seen before.

Did you repair the game? The only time that happens to me in Steam is when I repair the game.

This happened to me once on my old computer, when Steam lost its connections to the already-installed ESO files.

If you play games on Steam, you might notice that after you quit a game it takes a second or longer before Steam shows that the game is ready to launch again. That's because when you quit the game Steam needs to update its own files, and in some cases copy your local game data to the cloud so it can be available on other computers you have Steam installed on. If Steam isn't able to successfully update everything for some reason, its pointers to your local game might get lost or corrupted, such that it no longer recognizes that you've already got the game installed, and it will prompt you to install the game again.

At least, I'm guessing that's the sort of situation you ran into. If you do a search for "steam can't find installed game," or some similar phrase, you'll see that this isn't an uncommon problem. However, that doesn't mean everything is okay, because in this case "not uncommon" doesn't equate to "nothing to worry about." In normal operations, it shouldn't ever hapoen at all, so if it does happen then something abnormal happened.

In some cases it might be possible to simply "add" the already-installed game back into your Steam library-- basically, you tell Steam where to find the game files on your computer. There are step-by-step how-to guides out there if you look for them. But that doesn't always work, such that you might need to actually reinstall the game.

In my case, it turned out that my hard drive was failing, but I didn't realize that until much later when it crashed. Of course, your case might be vastly different than mine was. But you might want to scan your hard drive for errors just in case. Other than that, try not to force-quit ESO and Steam unless you absolutely have to, because that can prevent Steam from updating its pointers to your game files.

ZOS_Bill wrote: »

@vsrs_au

If you are still having issues, please go ahead and provide screenshots of the windows that are popping up.

Thanks, but I haven't seen that different window since I mentioned it in this thread. I appreciate the follow-up, though!