Having played more than 130 hours of Elder Scrolls Online on my Macbook Pro, I must say that I was more than a little hesitant to convert to playing on the Xbox One. Though players are no longer able to transfer actual characters from Mac/PC to consoles, starting a new character on the Xbox One has been nothing short of eventful.
First things first, I personally found being able to utilize the Xbox One controller rather than just mashing keys and click-spamming to be immensely more immersive and thoroughly more enjoyable as a whole. Having played as a Dunmer Dragonknight as well as a Breton Templar on the Mac, this third play-through as an Altmer Sorcerer has been nothing short of gratifying. The fact alone that Sorcerers have exclusive access to summoning familiars makes them a very appealing class but the synergy between playing as both a High Elf and a Sorcerer makes for an extraordinarily powerful damage-per-second based character. Combined with the familiarity of the Xbox One controller which makes combat seemingly flow much better than it does on computer versions.
One of the other more evident differences between the two have been a drastic change in the frames-per-second my different systems can handle. I should mention that my Macbook Pro was purchased in 2012 so it’s not equipped with the latest or greatest hardware, but having said that my Xbox One has been able to handle considerably larger scale battles and environments much more handily than my laptop which begins to overheat and burn a hole in my lap if I play for too long. However, there have been several occasions on both systems where I’ll have been assaulting an enemy fortress for twenty to thirty minutes only to have the game crash upon finally charging into the enemy keep alongside the other hundreds of players; which I suppose is mildly forgivable considering the scale.
Another concern of mine upon converting to playing on the Xbox One was the format of the various in-game menu’s which are easily mapped to various keys of a keyboard while playing on Mac/PC but could prove to be much less manageable in a console setting. If anything, the Xbox One menu has been easier to learn and navigate through than on Mac/Pc, and some areas like the Skills section are considerably easier to use. Similarly, the tech support has been very responsive and when I wrote them complaining about the fact that I would be having to buy a second in-game membership as well as the second disc for my Xbox One they did, at least, transfer my mounts purchased on my Mac version over to my Xbox One. Similarly the fact there is no in-game text chat for consoles takes away one of the best features of the Mac/PC versions.
Holistically the experience has been much more enriching converting to the console version: as the combat feels considerably more natural and there are considerably fewer glitches. If you’re deciding between the two or simply considering converting from one to the other, I’d definitely recommend the console versions although paying for an in-game membership can only be renewed monthly for consoles and thus, the price remains at a steep $15 a month.
