Rich Lambert, ZeniMax’s Creative Director, spoke at the PAX West gaming convention about the increasing player numbers of the MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online and how the developers now want to address performance issues.
What is currently the problem with ESO? The game has been struggling with performance issues for some time. In April 2019, even queues had to be introduced, and the release of the Elsweyr expansion led to further performance problems.
The developers now want to finally tackle this issue and have announced that starting from the fourth quarter of 2019, they will work on numerous improvements aimed at boosting performance.
Success of Elsweyr surprised ZeniMax, overwhelmed the servers
Why are improvements coming now? At PAX West, ZeniMax’s Creative Director Rich Lambert was asked about this issue. He explained that the release of Elsweyr was the last straw.
According to him, there were already plans to work on improvements before, but the huge influx of players at the release of the current expansion made it necessary to act now. He admits that the situation surprised the team a bit:
With Elsweyr came a large influx of players, everyone was suddenly in, putting pressure on the servers, stressing the client. And we thought: OK. It surprised us a little. The game was 5 years old at that point.
Rich Lambert
Apparently, ZeniMax did not expect to see such a large influx of players after 5 years of ESO.
Now, however, action must be taken to properly address and resolve the issue.
What about PvP? Especially in PvP, the performance issues of ESO can have serious consequences. Rich Lambert is aware of this. He promises that there will also be improvements in this area. However, the backend needs to be optimized first.
The problem cannot be solved overnight; however, he believes that the PvP experience of ESO is currently relatively stable. Improvements are definitely coming.
The group search is a major problem
What about the LFG? Another problem related to performance is the group search. According to Rich Lambert, the system becomes asynchronous when the servers are overloaded. This leads to all players being assigned to a group. Everyone joins in, and suddenly no one can join and is back in the search.
This leads to a loop until the system can finally assign players to a group. Therefore, the LFG system is also to be improved as part of the performance optimizations. Even under load, players will then be assigned to a group and can prepare.
However, all of this will take some time. By 2020, ESO should play significantly better.
Do you also have performance issues in ESO? Are you looking forward to the developers finally addressing this issue?
