The Elder Scrolls Online is back once again with another update to its performance improvements plan for April, and though the devs of the title have been working from home, the next two updates’ worth of stability and optimization improvements are still on-target for their respective releases in Q2 and Q3 respectively.
The next major update looks to make non-combat pets less taxing on servers, multi-thread player character and fixture loading processes, and improve animation caching to reduce memory situations where there are many characters and monsters in one area. Most of these updates should be on the PTS now with animation caching due in a later PTS patch, while all of these features are on track for Update 26.
After that, another round of stability improvements are due for Update 27 such as a new layer of temporary database storage for frequently accessed data, refinement of critical database functions, better handling of high memory situations, the third phase of behind-the-scenes combat ability improvements which focuses on AoE skills, and stabilizing of the game’s physics engine. All of these updates are on track for Update 27’s release, though the account database “cold storage” work is being rolled back to Update 28.
All of the specifics should be read on ESO’s website, but if that site is still down for maintenance (as it was at the time of this writing), then Reddit’s got a whole copy of the notes.
Incidentally, the game has seen an uptick in activity similar in scope to the game’s console launch in 2015, and while the update post remarks that “things aren’t perfect,” it does take a moment to affirm the work of the game’s server engineers to keep things running.
