ESO wants to be more experimental as MMORPG shifts to seasonal model Hallie Frederick | usagoldmines.com

This year has been a big one for The Elder Scrolls Online. The popular MMORPG celebrated a major milestone with its tenth anniversary, but Zenimax Online Studios is capping off the year by revealing some sweeping changes that are coming to ESO. The most notable is a major change to the way content is going to be distributed to players, with a move away from annual Chapters and a shift to a seasonal model instead.

“Looking back on all the changes that have gotten us here, it is pretty clear that we have generally made the right decisions at the right times for our game,” says the MMO’s game director, Matt Firor, in his end of year letter to players. “And now, we are looking forward to 2025 and how we can change ESO to keep it relevant, awesome, and compelling.”

As mentioned, the main shakeup is the transition to a seasonal model. Firor says that the yearly deadlines ZOS needed to hit with Chapters, and the fact that all kinds of content had to be due at the same time, has “not left us much time for experimentation.” Instead, content can now be shipped closer to when it’s actually completed and “smaller, bite-sized pieces of content” can roll out more regularly with seasons that last either three or six months. Firor says that 2025 will be a mixture of both the old and new model as there will be both large content drops and smaller updates, but the intention is to gradually shift to this new seasonal cadence.

Firor assures that despite the shift away from annual Chapters, ZOS is “not abandoning new quest content” and that it will continue to carry on storylines and create new narratives as well. However, he warns that “as our focus will not be on adding giant new landmasses – although we will do that from time to time – instead, we will use existing zones and areas to tell new stories.”

With the new-found time for experimentation, Firor says that you will literally see entries in upcoming patch notes labeled as “experiments” that are “ideas that may or may not be fleshed out into full game systems” in the future.

In a list of things ZOS has already been working on for 2025, “increasing the difficulty of standard overworld combat” is arguably the biggest. Firor also shares that there are plans to enhance “the overall feel of combat with animation, FX, and potentially audio work” and that new or reworked tools for guild recruitment and management are in the pipeline too.

The first season of The Elder Scrolls Online and more details about it are set to arrive in April 2025. You can read Firor’s full letter, which goes into more details about the shift in content model, right here.

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