We are getting an upgrade to the latest most detailed graphic engine currently available. Only reason for being down so long. I guarantee it!
That would be a downgrade, the directx they use is perfectly capable of running the graphics engine as is. Changing to the unreal engine would be a colossal waste of time, money and effort and bloat the source into oblivion. So no. Just no.
The last graphic engine update nearly destroyed the game's playability and was one of the major reasons why the game hit a large snag with Gates of Discord.
There have been many patchs with UI and engine overhauls. The worst patch I recall is the velious release where the game misfired multiple times in 3 days with really awful downtimes.
I remember that patch. It took forever to get right and lag was a real big issue, even for the best of systems. I hope that we don't have a repeat of the Velious release.
At some point, GPU manufactures will decide that DX9 is abandonware(windows already stopped installing it with standard win10), and will simply stop making compatible driver releases for it(getting newer gpus to run DX7/DX8-games can already be tricky). At that point DBG can choose to sunset EQ or update the engine to be compatible with a newer DX. They can't stay with DX9 forever, unless they want to exclude next-gen GPUs from the compatibility-list...
