Should? Yes.
Could? Not so sure.

Technical debt can really raise the already high prices in nowadays economy.....but there is no crime in hoping

I dunno. Whenever people make posts about upgrading the ESO engine I feel like they have specific things in mind but just fall back on "engine".

Are there graphical things the current engine can't do? Yes. Are those things the limiting factor in what we get for visuals? IDK. They've cited the engine as the reason we can't have capes or some types of physics things, but they've also said memory constraints are the limiting factors in a lot of animation and quantity of elements things they already could do in this engine. Would an engine upgrade would make things more efficient and allow them to do more with less, or would it just allow a lot of things we wouldn't get anyway because of other bottlenecks? I don't know.

Personally I don't have an issue with ESO's visuals. They may not be "the best" but they are very good and satisfying. The coding related things I have issues with are bugs and performance, and I don't feel like most of those are engine related, but I could be wrong.

I am hopeful they can, and they should. Honestly a new engine would allow them more legroom to address some of the big issues in PVP, but like many have said it is a massive undertaking.

That being said with the amount of money, staff, and resources that were given to Project Blackbird for years I do believe it's feasible while also doing Tamriel Tomes and other content.

ivaylo.krumoveb17_ESO wrote: »

Mascen wrote: »

That being said with the amount of money, staff, and resources that were given to Project Blackbird for years I do believe it's feasible while also doing Tamriel Tomes and other content.

Project Blackbird happened in better times long gone. Currently all game studios have drastically cut budgets and are laying employees left and right. This is partly due to global stagnation and partly because of the widespread AI adoption. I doubt ZOS has more than a handful of tool engineers now, if they have any at all.

And since you mentioned Project Blackbird, that's the main reason the studio is in such bad shape now. Most of the good devs they had were fired because ot that fiasco. But lets not go into details about why this happened and whether it was fair or not, it doesn't matter anymore.

Which is likely why, whether they should or not, it wont happen.

They have said on stream, a few times, that there are currently no plans to rebuild or otherwise change the engine. That it would essentially be creating coding a new game from near scratch.

If this new "engine" comes with a turbo, I want to take it for a ride!

edit:

If they want ESO to be a 30 year game like they said, they are likely considering some upgrades. I'm also sure there are plans for a release on the next gen consoles, at least Helix and possibly PS6, and those won't fly unless they go along with some visual bells and whistles.

Personally I would love a change to DX12 to allow for FSR2+, but I'm not holding my breath.

Should they? Sure. Can they? I question whether they have the manpower, expertise, or budget at this time.

And if such a project were to take away from already reduced and at times, anemic, content releases, I fail to see how the game could continue to sustain itself in the interim.

Explore it as an option in the future. We have too many more important problems, like the broken state of combat, Subclassing and the fact our characters have been ruined by U46.

I'd love this, but I almost feel like ESO would need a lot more support / budget for a project like this.

They should have started building the game on a new engine about 5 years ago. They knew from the beginning it would have to be done to keep the game viable sooner or later, so that's what they should be doing or have done already.

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

First, it's a misconception to say the game runs on the Hero Engine, as I recall it was partly involved during early development but it's actually ZOS's own engine.

Second, why would a new engine fix bug issues?

Third, performance issues are often down to inferior player hardware - a new engine wouldn't, for example, be built to run on old generation consoles which are the cause of a lot of the limitations with the existing engine - as well as real world location - Australian players, for example, wouldn't necessarily see any improved performance from a new engine (compared with say a localised server).

Fourth, it would represent a massive diversion of limited resources at a time when new content (in the sense in which most us understand content) is at an all-time low.

^^^ Complete agreement.

Except most performance issues with ESO are server side. It's pretty rare for the performance issue to be internet related and EXTREMELY rare for the performance issues to be hardware related. It's almost always ZOS' server or Akamai, who ZOS contracts as ddos protection etc. Performance issues in ESO are almost always server side. It's the only game I've ever seen where it's like this, but it is. After more than a decade this is undeniably the case.

AScarlato wrote: »

I'd love this, but I almost feel like ESO would need a lot more support / budget for a project like this.

The way I see it is this: despite Rich Lambert's claims that ESO is a 30 year game, I do see ESO as a depreciating asset at this stage. In particular, performance is incrementally getting worse with each patch with no end in sight.

New MMOs are getting rarer and rarer. I think the future for ESO is a fully rebuild engine that they can get another 10-15 years out of.

Waiting years for bug fixes, I won't get my hopes up. For longevity it probably should be, but the game has aged well graphically. Older set textures could use overhauls.