Heads up! Elder Scrolls Online on PC installer can delete your files if a custom folder is selected.

If you don’t stick to the default installation directory, you HAVE to create an empty folder somewhere and point to that as the Elder Scrolls Online installer will erase anything it finds in the folder that it is given for installation instead of creating a subfolder itself.

So I wanted to install the “Elder Scrolls Online” on PC yesterday which ended up with me restoring large portions of my PC for several hours. And a lot of foul language was included. So here is what happened.

By default, the installer wants to install the game into “%systemdrive%\Program Files\Zenimax Online”. If you plan not to change this, you are OK.

But if you are crazy enough – like I am obviously – to have games installed to a custom folder, “%systemdrive%\Games” in my case, the installer lets you select a different folder.

I picked my “%systemdrive%\Games” folder at which point the installer said: “%systemdrive%\Games” – but not “%systemdrive%\Games\Zenimax Online”. This got me thinking for a split second, but then I pressed “Install”.

At this point, the installer created “%systemdrive%\Games\Elder Scrolls Online” and all seemed good.

But then my Steam client crashed and the Origin client started to show weird errors.

I soon noticed, that besides creating the new folder, the installer had completely erased everything inside “%systemdrive%\Games”, including the Steam client, Origin and the Blizzard launcher.

It sure seems like I failed the first quest of the Elder Scrolls Online miserably