After 11 years and eight fully fledged chapter expansions, Elder Scrolls Online is shaking things up, says Zenimax Online studio head Matt Frior.
Opening up today's ESO Direct, which previewed a myriad of substantial updates coming to the long-running MMO this year, Frior started with a broad statement on the studio's overall direction.
"After a long and successful run, it's time to shake things up in ESO, change the way we deliver content, put more of a focus on testing new ideas, and ensure the game stays fresh and modern for years into the future," Frior says.
"We've heard your feedback about wanting more variety and to shake things up. We agree, we want to keep telling great stories but also mix in new ideas and gameplay systems, and that's exactly what we're gonna do. But we'll do this in a different cadence, one that allows us the developers to broaden our focus and increase variety.
"Instead of a single yearly major release, we plan to spend more time delivering an assortment of new content and gameplay systems aimed at enhancing the base game, making everything better for new and returning players, and above all, focusing on experimenting with new and different types of content."
We don't know all of the tricks Zenimax Online has up its sleeve yet, but Frior and co. did get into some pretty significant specifics. We've heard previously that ESO is ditching its tradition of releasing new chapters every year as part of its year-long adventures, and now we've learned a little more about what's replacing that update cadence.
ESO's first season is focused on the Worm Cult that'll see the return of OG big bad Molag Bal, who's back for the first time since the base game's main storyline. Seasons of the Worm Cult, Part 1 – which arrives in June, with Part 2 due out sometime in Q4 2025 – will also bring back a bunch of familiar allies from the base game main quest including Skordo the Knife, Razum-Dar, and Gabrielle Benele. In a media Q&A attended by GamesRadar+, game director Rich Lambert says the game's first season is a "direct sequel to the base game storyline."
Instead of dropping all at once in one big chapter, ESO's new seasonal structure will see the release of new themed story content, dungeons, and in-game events on a seasonal cadence, and it all kicks off in the island of Solstice, off the Southern cost of Tamriel. The new zone offers up two distinct visual styles, with the Western side being a Caribbean-inspired tropical paradise. Sunport is the main city of the island, with truly stunning architecture influenced by a new tribe of Argonian called the Tideborn.
Naturally, it's not all vacay vibes as the Worm cultists have arrived to harsh everyone's mellow, establishing a camp on the island and building a giant wall made of literal "soul juice" that divides Eastern and Western Solstice. More on that a little later.
For the first time since the game launched in 2014, ESO players will soon be able to mix up their builds with skill lines from other classes with the addition of Subclassing in June with the start of Seasons of the Worm Cult. That'll unlock for all players with characters that have reached level 50, opening up a whopping 3,000 ways to mix and match skill lines compared to the seven available classes now.
There's also a new system that organizes all of ESO's features designed to welcome back returning players who feel overwhelmed by all there is to do in the game, which really speaks to me as someone who drops everything to plow through the game's big updates and then usually falls off until the next one.
Anyway, remember that soul juice wall I mentioned? Well, another big highlight of today's stream is the new "world-changing in-game event" called Writhing Wall, which begins in Q3 2025 and literally puts players up against a giant ethereal wall in the middle of Solstice. The event is ESO's first-ever server-wide world event, in which all players on a server will have to work together in phases to penetrate the wall and put the Worm cult to bed.
In the post-show Q&A, I asked Lambert what happens if the wall isn't breached, and he confirmed that there is an opportunity for failure here: "The goal is that the server has to unlock it, so if the server doesn't work together to unlock it, then they won't be able to go to this new area."
ESO's first battle pass will bundle in the Fallen Banners dungeon pack, which is available to play now. Parts 1 and 2 of the Worm Cult expansion, the Writhing Wall event, and another dungeon pack, Feast of Shadows, are arriving in Q3.
And finally, in terms of the ESO team's broader development approach, Frior summarizes:
"We'll learn by experimenting by being more flexible as a development team. We'll make adjustments and we'll launch new content, but we will always work as hard as we can to keep Elder Scrolls Online fresh, fun, and memorable, just as we've done for the last decade."
Find out where we ranked ESO on our list of the best MMOs to play now.
