Playing Upcoming MMOs On The Surface Pro: Final Fantasy XIV, Marvel Heroes, Neverwinter, And More

While Razer continues to market their Edge tablet-hybrid as the first gaming tablet, the Microsoft Surface Pro continues to impress. Since release, the little tablet that could has proved the gaming world wrong when it comes to small form, portability, and PC gaming at the simplest and convenient level.

There aren’t many games out there that the Surface Pro can’t play at a quality at least deemed “playable”. Even the recent BioShock Infinite runs well on the Surface Pro. With a wealth of games available to be played on the tablet, we turn our focus to what’s coming. Specifically, we’re looking at the upcoming MMOs that are in beta and how well they run on Microsoft’s hybrid giant.

Please note: All games on this list with the exception of the Elder Scrolls Online have been personally played by me. The information I have about The Elder Scrolls Online on the Surface Pro comes from a good friend of mine.

ArcheAge

Playing through a friend’s Closed Beta Test 5, I was able to somewhat play ArcheAge. If anything, this game is very graphic intensive and seems sluggish at most settings. By turning most of the settings as low as possible, I was able to get results that allowed me to play without feeling crippled by performance. Still, ArcheAge performed the worst out of the games on this list. I was a bit surprised as I was thinking Final Fantasy XIV would be the bottom of the barrel in terms of playability, however, if you’re looking to venture into ArcheAge on your Surface Pro you may want to look towards a different option.

The Elder Scrolls Online

As I mentioned above, this account is from a friend of mine who also owns a Surface Pro. Playing ESO at the lowest level gave pretty good results. While the terrain may look muddy, the game plays well. Taking the settings up a notch, the framerate dipped a tad but the terrain did look better and favorable. The game is under an NDA so he did not go into detail, however, there was a gameplay video leak earlier today in which I wrote about. You can read about ESO’s gameplay here. It seems that Elder Scrolls Online will be playable and at a pretty nice quality on the Surface Pro.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

As the game is still under an NDA, I won’t go into detail about the game itself. That being said, A Realm Reborn performed better than ArcheAge but it’s still sluggish. With all settings turned down to the lowest setting or off, I was able to play without worry as long as I was okay with the framerate in the 20’s. It wasn’t too bad but it was obvious that I mostly would not use my Surface Pro to play A Realm Reborn. This saddens me as I will be playing this game after release and was hoping to take it on the go with me. It isn’t impossible to play the game on the tablet, though. Perhaps when the beta allows us to change resolution I’ll get better results.

Marvel Heroes

Again, another game under an NDA, but I can tell you that Marvel Heroes plays very well on the Surface Pro. It isn’t a very taxing game and since Diablo 3 plays well, I was expecting Marvel Heroes to be at the same level or better. You’ll have no issues playing Marvel Heroes on your Surface Pro so your online superhero itch will be scratched.

Neverwinter

This was the surprising one for me. Neverwinter plays very well on the Surface Pro. This game has a ton of detail and the cities and towns are so lively. While framerate did drop a bit in town, the rest of the game plays nicely. Instances and group areas are very smooth. Neverwinter is a graphic heavy game but it’s very optimized. You’ll be running around the Forgotten Realm on your Surface Pro without issues.

It seems like the upcoming group of MMOs will fair well on the Surface with few exceptions. While ArcheAge looks to be the lone wolf that won’t be play nicely with Microsoft’s tablet and A Realm Reborn isn’t exactly as optimized as I’ve like, the rest of this list plays very well. Unfortunately a chunk of this list still hold active NDAs so I can’t go into too much detail but knowing how these upcoming MMOs work on the Surface Pro should please the tablet’s owners.



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