We went through with the animation reduction efforts in order to save memory for future development efforts within the game. We have heavy constraints with older platforms that require us to save as much memory as we can to ensure that future features will run on every supported platform.
We updated over 900 animation files in order to support this effort, including animations that are used outside of player combat. We have gotten many fantastic reports of animation issues from players on PTS, but tracking down reproductions of these issues and the appropriate fixes on our internal realms takes time.
Similarly, bugs that turned out not to be a direct result of this effort also affected combat animations and needed investigation - for example, certain abilities not doing damage and an issue with controller UI causing performance issues on PC were both issues that impacted the visual look of animations in combat but were not caused by this effort.
As you continue to come across issues, please let us know. Videos of the issues are extremely helpful in tracking down potential bugs and the team will continue to do all we can to ensure that any confirmed issues are addressed in an upcoming package.
You mentioned New World, and that’s actually a perfect comparison: they also kept adding new stuff while their core systems rotted underneath. Eventually, people realized nothing new mattered, and that’s when the real decline started. ESO’s on the same trajectory if they don’t rebuild incentive loops and make older content meaningful again.
Then what did cause them? Those skills weren't touched in the patch notes so why would the code have been changed to cause the bug? Not trying to criticize simply understand what it is you guys are doing.
We went through with the animation reduction efforts in order to save memory for future development efforts within the game. We have heavy constraints with older platforms that require us to save as much memory as we can to ensure that future features will run on every supported platform.
We updated over 900 animation files in order to support this effort, including animations that are used outside of player combat. We have gotten many fantastic reports of animation issues from players on PTS, but tracking down reproductions of these issues and the appropriate fixes on our internal realms takes time.
Similarly, bugs that turned out not to be a direct result of this effort also affected combat animations and needed investigation - for example, certain abilities not doing damage and an issue with controller UI causing performance issues on PC were both issues that impacted the visual look of animations in combat but were not caused by this effort.
As you continue to come across issues, please let us know. Videos of the issues are extremely helpful in tracking down potential bugs and the team will continue to do all we can to ensure that any confirmed issues are addressed in an upcoming package.
tomofhyrule wrote: »Thank you Kevin. That is mostly what I suspected, but it is good to hear it confirmed.
(Crossing my fingers that “future developments” means “new Class coming soon”)
But - and I don’t expect an answer; this is food for thought for the devs - with all of the constraints, is it getting time for ESO to advance its minimum specs?
We’ve been hearing for a while that older hardware has prevented the addition of housing slots and new animations, and now we see the solution is to try to cannibalize that space back, potentially making the look and feel of the game worse to support the addition of new content. And now with other games coming out with a much more advanced housing system and a lot more features, ESO is seemingly ceding ground.
ESO has officially changed their min software specs more than once. But it may be time to consider that 11-year-old hardware may no longer be able to support the game isn its current state. I know that several people who have moved to current-gen consoles or a more modern PC have reported smoother gameplay, so even the oldest hardware is struggling to play the game as intended now… which is not a good look if the game is still saying it officially supports that hardware.
ESO_Nightingale wrote: »tomofhyrule wrote: »Thank you Kevin. That is mostly what I suspected, but it is good to hear it confirmed.
(Crossing my fingers that “future developments” means “new Class coming soon”)
But - and I don’t expect an answer; this is food for thought for the devs - with all of the constraints, is it getting time for ESO to advance its minimum specs?
We’ve been hearing for a while that older hardware has prevented the addition of housing slots and new animations, and now we see the solution is to try to cannibalize that space back, potentially making the look and feel of the game worse to support the addition of new content. And now with other games coming out with a much more advanced housing system and a lot more features, ESO is seemingly ceding ground.
ESO has officially changed their min software specs more than once. But it may be time to consider that 11-year-old hardware may no longer be able to support the game isn its current state. I know that several people who have moved to current-gen consoles or a more modern PC have reported smoother gameplay, so even the oldest hardware is struggling to play the game as intended now… which is not a good look if the game is still saying it officially supports that hardware.
Yeah, it's becoming more and more apparent that older consoles are holding eso back. Support needs to be dropped.
We went through with the animation reduction efforts in order to save memory for future development efforts within the game. We have heavy constraints with older platforms that require us to save as much memory as we can to ensure that future features will run on every supported platform.
We updated over 900 animation files in order to support this effort, including animations that are used outside of player combat. We have gotten many fantastic reports of animation issues from players on PTS, but tracking down reproductions of these issues and the appropriate fixes on our internal realms takes time.
Similarly, bugs that turned out not to be a direct result of this effort also affected combat animations and needed investigation - for example, certain abilities not doing damage and an issue with controller UI causing performance issues on PC were both issues that impacted the visual look of animations in combat but were not caused by this effort.
As you continue to come across issues, please let us know. Videos of the issues are extremely helpful in tracking down potential bugs and the team will continue to do all we can to ensure that any confirmed issues are addressed in an upcoming package.
Mattymoo92 wrote: »We went through with the animation reduction efforts in order to save memory for future development efforts within the game. We have heavy constraints with older platforms that require us to save as much memory as we can to ensure that future features will run on every supported platform.
We updated over 900 animation files in order to support this effort, including animations that are used outside of player combat. We have gotten many fantastic reports of animation issues from players on PTS, but tracking down reproductions of these issues and the appropriate fixes on our internal realms takes time.
Similarly, bugs that turned out not to be a direct result of this effort also affected combat animations and needed investigation - for example, certain abilities not doing damage and an issue with controller UI causing performance issues on PC were both issues that impacted the visual look of animations in combat but were not caused by this effort.
As you continue to come across issues, please let us know. Videos of the issues are extremely helpful in tracking down potential bugs and the team will continue to do all we can to ensure that any confirmed issues are addressed in an upcoming package.
If older consoles are problem let them go… I highly doubt you’ll lose that many customers… not as many you lose by making bad changes
katanagirl1 wrote: »As I mentioned in another thread, if older consoles (and likewise older PCs) are causing such problems for the game, then it is time to move on. I was opposed to the idea during the COVID pandemic aftermath when you often couldn’t get a next gen system, but that is not the case anymore. I switched from PS4 to PS5 not long after it came out, and it was oftentimes unplayable for trials or PvP at that time and has only gotten worse. Many who had the original PS4 simply ran out of space to even play it as the footprint of the game got so large.
We went through with the animation reduction efforts in order to save memory for future development efforts within the game. We have heavy constraints with older platforms that require us to save as much memory as we can to ensure that future features will run on every supported platform.
We updated over 900 animation files in order to support this effort, including animations that are used outside of player combat. We have gotten many fantastic reports of animation issues from players on PTS, but tracking down reproductions of these issues and the appropriate fixes on our internal realms takes time.
Similarly, bugs that turned out not to be a direct result of this effort also affected combat animations and needed investigation - for example, certain abilities not doing damage and an issue with controller UI causing performance issues on PC were both issues that impacted the visual look of animations in combat but were not caused by this effort.
As you continue to come across issues, please let us know. Videos of the issues are extremely helpful in tracking down potential bugs and the team will continue to do all we can to ensure that any confirmed issues are addressed in an upcoming package.
colossalvoids wrote: »We went through with the animation reduction efforts in order to save memory for future development efforts within the game. We have heavy constraints with older platforms that require us to save as much memory as we can to ensure that future features will run on every supported platform.
We updated over 900 animation files in order to support this effort, including animations that are used outside of player combat. We have gotten many fantastic reports of animation issues from players on PTS, but tracking down reproductions of these issues and the appropriate fixes on our internal realms takes time.
Similarly, bugs that turned out not to be a direct result of this effort also affected combat animations and needed investigation - for example, certain abilities not doing damage and an issue with controller UI causing performance issues on PC were both issues that impacted the visual look of animations in combat but were not caused by this effort.
As you continue to come across issues, please let us know. Videos of the issues are extremely helpful in tracking down potential bugs and the team will continue to do all we can to ensure that any confirmed issues are addressed in an upcoming package.
I'll be just dead honest here but when you're cutting on a very core parts of the game to fit something new it's a symptom of a bigger disease. Not that it's just bad inherently by itself as it's a direct downgrade with combat feel and smoothness which are a core part why ESO is still played by many despite many issues it has, but it can't be done indefinitely cutting every smooth corner into a strictly optimised asset lacking their basic properties.
It also should be evaluated if those new things even worth it with those downgrades. Like we got a new card game and I'm betting it's not as well received as company hoped and still here we are, stuck with it and might probably be the one thing also holding a precious memory slot that can be used elsewhere for a better overall experience with the game. Not even mentioning that maybe, a better solution would be dropping the objectively weaker consoles and optimising the other things properly to for them to still have an ability to load a 10yo game despite new requirements.
We went through with the animation reduction efforts in order to save memory for future development efforts within the game. We have heavy constraints with older platforms that require us to save as much memory as we can to ensure that future features will run on every supported platform.
We updated over 900 animation files in order to support this effort, including animations that are used outside of player combat. We have gotten many fantastic reports of animation issues from players on PTS, but tracking down reproductions of these issues and the appropriate fixes on our internal realms takes time.
We went through with the animation reduction efforts in order to save memory for future development efforts within the game. We have heavy constraints with older platforms that require us to save as much memory as we can to ensure that future features will run on every supported platform.
We updated over 900 animation files in order to support this effort, including animations that are used outside of player combat. We have gotten many fantastic reports of animation issues from players on PTS, but tracking down reproductions of these issues and the appropriate fixes on our internal realms takes time.
Similarly, bugs that turned out not to be a direct result of this effort also affected combat animations and needed investigation - for example, certain abilities not doing damage and an issue with controller UI causing performance issues on PC were both issues that impacted the visual look of animations in combat but were not caused by this effort.
As you continue to come across issues, please let us know. Videos of the issues are extremely helpful in tracking down potential bugs and the team will continue to do all we can to ensure that any confirmed issues are addressed in an upcoming package.
We updated over 900 animation files in order to support this effort, including animations that are used outside of player combat. We have gotten many fantastic reports of animation issues from players on PTS, but tracking down reproductions of these issues and the appropriate fixes on our internal realms takes time.
We went through with the animation reduction efforts in order to save memory for future development efforts within the game. We have heavy constraints with older platforms that require us to save as much memory as we can to ensure that future features will run on every supported platform.
We updated over 900 animation files in order to support this effort, including animations that are used outside of player combat. We have gotten many fantastic reports of animation issues from players on PTS, but tracking down reproductions of these issues and the appropriate fixes on our internal realms takes time.
Similarly, bugs that turned out not to be a direct result of this effort also affected combat animations and needed investigation - for example, certain abilities not doing damage and an issue with controller UI causing performance issues on PC were both issues that impacted the visual look of animations in combat but were not caused by this effort.
As you continue to come across issues, please let us know. Videos of the issues are extremely helpful in tracking down potential bugs and the team will continue to do all we can to ensure that any confirmed issues are addressed in an upcoming package.
The decision to make this much of an effort on their part to accommodate older hardware leads me to wonder how much of their player base is on that older hardware. Do they have some internal numbers telling them that there is a significant number of players on older hardware, and that it makes financial sense to hang on to them, despite the issues doing so causes to the larger game? Not losing that large a chunk of the player base outweighs other concerns?
That's the only thing I can come up with to make sense of this kind of change to the game. Even with that rational, it's still a questionable long term strategy.
The decision to make this much of an effort on their part to accommodate older hardware leads me to wonder how much of their player base is on that older hardware. Do they have some internal numbers telling them that there is a significant number of players on older hardware, and that it makes financial sense to hang on to them, despite the issues doing so causes to the larger game? Not losing that large a chunk of the player base outweighs other concerns?
That's the only thing I can come up with to make sense of this kind of change to the game. Even with that rational, it's still a questionable long term strategy.
I'm certain this is a Microsoft issue. Microsoft for some reason doubles down hard on accessibility (despite their most recent blunder with Windows 11 not supporting even what, more than half of the computers that currently use windows?) even when it actively hurts a product because the more people the product reaches, the more customers they have. It doesn't matter if only, lets say, 500 players are still playing ESO on the xbox one. Each and every one of those players are a paying customer who could buy membership, crowns, and crown crates. If Zenimax was still an independent entity, I'm certain last gen consoles and PC hardware would've been phased out by now.

It's often hyperbolically requested that entire patches be rolled back, but could we actually just have u47 back? I don't need to use potions while I'm fatecarver-ing and honestly I don't care for Eastern Solstice.
This animations change hits especially bad in the Frostvault, because it stacks with existing bugs there.
This is... wow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87-LSzBA6zI