12.23.2020
Things were not always so rosy for the ESO dev team, though. We kept our aggressive development schedule that, in hindsight, might not have been the right strategy. A combination of the normal ESO content cycle, investigating/fixing long-standing issues, optimizations to improve performance on lower-power devices (also fewer blue-screen errors), and the lack of team (both dev and QA) cohesion brought on by work from home led to a poor experience in many cases for you. The short version is that we kept up our usual frenetic pace, but didn't allow for the realities of working remotely. Each of our four Update launches were marred by errors and problems of various types. Patches to fix those issues sometimes led to more problems. Obviously, this is unacceptable, and we will be addressing this as a team throughout 2021.You already know that the 2021 story arc is called Gates of Oblivion, and I'll leave it up to our reveal show next month to go into the specifics—but I want to highlight that in 2021 we will devote more time overall to stability and game performance and less time to new game systems (with our standard content updates continuing unchanged). We will still be working from home for the foreseeable future, and I want to ensure that our 2021 updates and patches are smooth and the player experience is enjoyable. This is an ongoing process—and remember that we are usually working on updates six months or more before they launch, so when we started WFH in March, we were already working on Q3 and Q4 content, which led to the issues outlined above. We now have planned for the team working remotely for roughly the first half of 2021, so the "introduce fewer new systems" program will continue throughout 2021.https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/59387
5.3.2021
Companion Performance Testing
Companions are a new, exciting feature coming with the Blackwood Chapter, but it’s also a huge system that touches many different parts of the game and has the potential to have performance implications on both the client and server. Improving in-game performance has been a huge focus for us and we’re starting to make significant progress towards our goal; progress that we don’t want to undo with Companions. We’ve been testing Companions a lot internally, but situations on the Live megaservers are a very different scenario and one that we can’t replicate perfectly. As such, we’ve built in a number of dials and knobs that will allow us to tweak the impact of Companions while we find the right balance.https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/572676/pts-patch-notes-v7-0-2#latest
A new huge system that touches many different parts of the game, a month away, on a already very difficult performance year.
What has changed from the letter in Dec 2020 to now?