That is correct, but the physics is available. Adding capes to the model is no different than adding a shield or helm.
Um.no. There are no physics in EQ models. Capes would have to be animated with the armature. Which means 32 race/gender combos, times the number of different movements (animations) I believe TTobey said around 15-30ish. 32x30 times the number of frames for each animation. NO. No they will never do that.
DAoC had capes in 2001. You act like it is so difficult. It is not that difficult to say it cannot be done. Will it be done ... unlikely. They won't even give us different hairstyles.
Here's the thing. In a modern development engine it would be easy. For EQ1 it's hard, because you have to do each frame for each animation and each model, by hand. Or even make the first, last and middle frame, and have the modeling tool interpolate the 'inbetween' frames for each animation and for each model. And even if you're don't care about making it very realistic considering physics, that's a lot of work. I tried to be fun with the Napoleon pic. The facts of the old tech, even with 64bit and whatever advances, aren't really fun, in truth.
How about great idea but no. We can't even get a working UI. These people want capes, hah. Can we have a working game first?
I don't know other games but I know models in fornite that have capes are so annoying to play because the cape gets in the way of visibility.
EQ1 could have capes just fine, but like the other poster stated, they'd have to completely rework all of the PC models and animations from scratch to make it happen. That's more time that the devs don't have to put into making it happen. If they were going to redo models, which is something they've said is off the table, I'd rather they upgrade them to modern gaming graphic standards vs just pinning a cape on the old luclin models. They're still working on DX9 so there's absolutely zero chance they use GPU physics processing to dynamically animate a cape using cloth physics.