Elder Scrolls Online devs make their bets on the world-first clear of the MMO's Writhing Wall event, watching entire servers fight a rift in the world map itself

11 years from launch, Elder Scrolls Online is still reinventing itself with the now-live Writhing Wall event being the first of its kind in the MMO, and the folks at Zenimax Online are taking bets on which region and platform will be first to take down the titular wall and unlock Eastern Solstice.

For the uninitiated, ESO's Writhing Wall event is the game's first-ever live, server-wide collaborative world event, in which all players on each server work together to bring down a literal wall cordoning off Eastern Solstice from the rest of the map. Once the wall goes down, Eastern Solstice will be available to all players on that server, provided they own the content pass granting access to the new region.

Talking to GamesRadar+, ESO lead encounter designer Mike Finnigan made his allegiances clear.

"We have some internal betting markets on which servers are going to unlock it first, but we'll leave that," Finnigan tells me. "I'm pulling for Xbox EU, but we'll see. That's dark horse, I think."

Writhing Wall is explicitly designed as a cooperative event for players across a single server to team up and ideally encourage a sense of community, but there's also this competitive element, with different servers racing to be the first to clear the event.

"There's always been that healthy competition, and we just wanted to broaden that appeal," Finnigan says. "I think it's going to be great. I think people are going to have some server identity and be really happy. I know I've heard people talk about, 'Oh, well, I play on NA, and I'm going to jump over to EU and do this,' you know? And I'm like, 'Well, we'll see, we'll see if you do, we'll see how far they're along and how far you're along, and then we'll see how much you want to do. And I think that that's going to be healthy for the game, ultimately."

The Writhing Wall event is live now and all players, whether or not they own the content pass, can head to the island of Stirk to access the intro quest and start making progress toward the event. If you want to see the fruits of your labor once the wall's down, you'll want to pick up the content pass, but you can fight the good fight for your server either way.

Find out where ESO ranks on our list of the best MMOs to play in 2025.