Can someone explain why a 64-bit system is a big deal?

No. FreeRealms and DCUO were both developed with a proprietary fork of the PhyreEngine, which is cross-platform whereas Forgelight is not. The PhyreEngine was itself originally developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, the in-house Playstation development arm of Sony, and was licensed to SOE (then a separate division of the same parent company) for its own internal use. A different fork of the PhyreEngine is now available on a GNU-like public license.

One of the biggest problems with EQNext, and where their biggest cost overruns happened, was the fact they got bogged down in engine development, and tried to make Forgelight a kitchen-sink solution with a whole bunch of features the MMO didn't need. Essentially, they used EQ money to build a shooter engine with extensive player mod support. They would have been much better off expanding on their PhyreEngine fork, but hey, that's Smed for you.

Thanks for that!

Cost overruns are you kidding me? They had 3(?) in house video studios and were using how many employees for each video segment on so many things? <sigh>

FreeRealms seems to have used Diffuse only, now that I look at my old folder.

Oh oh oh, forgot H1Z1 on Forgelight. We never got our hands on that one, but I believe the textures are built like Planetside 2 for the most part.

I don't think it's a big deal per se unless they implemented actual improvements to make use of 64bit possibilities. But just switching to a 64bit code base alone doesn't improve anything client side.

Server side though it's much easier to get improvements. Databases will be far more performant since they can utilize a huge amount of RAM.

I say we gotta wait and see what they hold in store for us. Just saying don't expect too much right from the start...

The good thing however is: Even when we don't notice much or any improvements at all after the switch, the groundwork is done to implement improvements over time that will make the game a better experience on many grounds

When it takes your developers 15 years to do what other teams did in a few months, I wouldn't hold my breath. The switch is going to allow DBG to save considerably money on their end, where their pricey servers are all memory-bound at present, not compute bound. I don't see the client-side switch as being motivated by any driving desire to make large-scale improvements.

I expect the next large-scale client improvements, will be an UI overhaul. This might require some updates to the graphic-subsystem though. The UI overhaul will likely be "future-proof" for an upcoming GFX upgrade.
I also doubt a real GFX upgrade is in the cards for 2022...It is probably planned for "someday eventually" though.

Server side: I would expect that the 64bit upgrade, is a much needed requirement for a future lag-fix.

These are just my guesses though...

Something tells me they have not been working on this for 15 years and it took other games longer then a few months to do it.

Not to mention they should be able to redo the bazaar code and raise the 2 mil pp limit since they said being 32 bit is the reason they can't go higher since people from mischief are whining extra more about it

Inflation on TLP's is kinda nuts though. There is a much better fix for that: Disallow botting...

It took me five years to clean out my garage ... but only one weekend once I actually started.

I never said they were working on conversion for 15 years; that timeframe, though, is a measure of how they rate its importance. 64-bit conversion is far easier than the 32-bit which preceeded it. That they rate it so low tells us they don't have any immediate plans to take advantage of the changeover. We'll see a slightly slower initial load time, slightly faster zoning times, and a whole lotta emergency server shutdowns while they fix bugs.

The only real fix for botting is to make a ruleset which makes it impractical. (a change which I'd support 110%). Bans simply aren't practical to enforce.

And botting isn't the root cause of inflation. Money sources outnumbering sinks is the real issue. You either increase the number and size of the sinks, lower the drop rate, or you implement an auto-tuning system so the drop rate is tied to the rate of a server's total plat increase.

You say that EQ took 15 years while others only took months..... Yet if you look back WoW pushed 64 bit support back in 2012 meaning they have only had it for 9 years which doesn't add up with the numbers you gave it.

It is easy to make up numbers to make them look bad if you want to but other similar games have not been on 64 bit for 15 years let alone a decade.

There is a persistent theme across many threads of you misrepresenting the statements of others. There is a vast difference between my saying "it took them 15 years" and "they worked continually on it for 15 years". The same difference exists between "others did it in months" and "everyone else on the planet did it in months".

Games are not the entire software world, believe it or not. Had I wanted to be unkind, I could have said 21 years, not 15, as I know teams that began on IA-64 that far back. It takes real chutzpah for you to deny the point that, when a company doesn't release a 64-bit version until 2022, that they obviously don't value that changeover highly. Are you really sure you want to stake yourself to that position?

You are the one that made the claim it took them 15 years to do and others did it in months which isn't remotely true. There is no way they have spent that amount of time on this project and no way that others did it in that short of a time. The simple fact is you appear to be trashing the EQ developers for no good reason.

As I pointed out even WoW with a much much larger team and budget did not go to 64 bit until 2012 which is an indication that it took them longer then a couple of months to complete it.

The simple fact is it took until 2021 to announce the work but we have no knowledge of what all went into this work.

Both statements are indisputably correct. Perhaps you misunderstood a word? You can date the beginning of the software industry's conversion to 64-bit from 2001(1999 if you stretch it) to perhaps as late as 2007. It's at least 15 years.

Many software teams did indeed make the conversion within months; again this is beyond argument. I'm aware of at least one project (roughly 8-10M codelines) that did it in a few weeks. The changeover itself is essentially trivial: what takes the time is correcting the latent bugs exposed. Clean code = fast changeover.

Meaning it took DBG a full decade longer than WoW? You're not helping your case here. And again you misread my statement. WoW and EQ do not compose the entire world software industry.

Of course we do. They didn't write their 64-bit instruction set, language, compiler, and operating system, now did they? The requirements of 64-bit conversion are well-known, and sets some minimum and maximum parameters of the scenario. SOE/DBG most certainly were not working actively on conversion that entire 15-year period, as that is entire orders of magnitude more effort than would be actually required, in even the worst-case scenario.

You seem to be making claims about how long EQ took to get to 64 bit while also making false claims about how long other games took to get to 64 bit. The simple fact is that if you stated it took 15 years for EQ to get to 64 bit and WoW hasn't been on 64 bit for even 10 years yet it is impossible for it to have only taken months for them to get there.

As to why I am using WoW it is because it is one of the biggest and best known names in the gaming industry. Not to mention there is plenty of newer software on the market that is still at 32 bit because there is no pressing need to change. Steam and Discord are both 32 bit and there is plenty of other software that has not yet made the upgrade to 64 bit. I am guessing some will only do it once windows finally stops supporting 32 bit applications which might happen with Windows 11 since there will be no 32 bit version.

64 bit will make it hard to quest with macros for a short time.

I don't know. Maybe English is your second language? Why do you keep persisting in claiming people have said things they haven't?

Yes, it's taken EQ 15 years to get to 64 bit. Perhaps longer-- they're not there yet. No, I never said WoW "did it in months", nor anything even resembling that. Some teams did make the conversion in months, or even weeks. They're not WoW, and they certainly aren't EQ. Still further, your 2012 date is when WoW converted their client. It's my understanding their server changeover was done much earlier ... which only makes sense, as server code in general is going to benefit much more from the changeover.

You seem to be under a misunderstanding of what 64-bit code offers. Steam and Discord are relatively small apps with tiny (by 64-bit standards) memory footprints. They need perform no swapping nor 64-bit arithmetic. Conversion for these apps is entirely negative: they'd be a much larger download, consume more memory, and possibly even run slower.

It sure sounds like you are claiming they have been working on it for 15 years. I mean why else would you bother to claim that it has taken them 15 years to do something?

Sure you didn't mention WoW by name as your claim was a generic others but my point is the same that it still took at least 5 years from your arbitrary time frame for WoW to move to 64 bit

And yet again you are missing my point, it is 2021 and there are still lots of developers working in the realm of 32 bit software. Sure not all software gains the same benefits from 64 bits but that doesn't mean they should be developing in 32 bits still. At the very least they should be offering their programs in both 32 bit and 64 bit especially since 64 bit is required on the mac side.

In the end there is no reason to keep making claims that you have no evidence to back up with about how long it took them to convert it. You should remember that the decision to move to 64 bit is not just controlled by the programmers but the people who control the finances.