ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hey everyone,

We’d like to explain what happened to cause the recent issue with long loading screens, and what we’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The source of the long loading screens came down to a bug we introduced in the Clockwork City DLC.

So, what was the bug? In Update 16, we added in a new system that refined the character texture loading pipeline as part of our ongoing effort to increase performance and framerate in high-intensity situations (such as in Cyrodiil and densely-populated cities). Unfortunately, this new pipeline was causing some character textures to get lost, which was causing the load screen to never drop because there were still textures that need to be loaded.

While we continue to work on fixing this issue fully, we’re going to be making two changes to an upcoming incremental patch. First, we’re going to be reverting to the old pipeline which doesn’t have this issue, but may affect how quickly you see other characters loading in (this will essentially be the same as it was before Clockwork City). Further, we’re introducing a new failsafe that will force your load screen to drop after two minutes if it is only waiting on textures. This patch is currently with first party certification for testing; the patch for PlayStation 4 and PC/Mac will be published next Tuesday, November 28. The patch for Xbox One requires a bit more time with first party certification, and we’re targeting a publish during the week of December 4.

In the future when we have a more permanent fix, we plan to re-enable the new pipeline because it makes for better game performance, but when we do that, we’ll be adding the equivalent of a switch on our side that we can turn off (to fall back to the old system) if we see these kinds of issues crop up again, rather than make you wait for another patch.

We sincerely apologize for the disruption this has caused, and we will endeavor to make sure that problems like these aren’t introduced in the future when adding new systems or making performance enhancements.