The Elder Scrolls Online is getting a two-week free trial to celebrate its new Skyrim prologue

(Image credit: Bethesda)

The Elder Scrolls Online will be free to play from Wednesday, April 1 through Monday, April 13 at 7am PT / 10am ET / 3pm BST. 

This freebie will be available on PS4, Xbox One, and PS4, but there are a few stipulations. The Elder Scrolls online will only be free to play on Steam from April 1 through April 6, and playing on Xbox One will require an Xbox Live Gold subscription. However, all players will get access to the full base game. You can sign up for the freebie here

What's more, a new Greymoor prologue quest will also be available to players who dive into the free trial. The quest went live earlier today, and you can unlock it by grabbing it from the in-game store. It's a free quest starter, called "The Coven Conspiracy," so it won't cost you a dime. From there, head to the Fighter's Guild in Daggerfall and speak to Lyris Titanborn, who'll start the quest proper. 

This is all part of the game's next big expansion, and as we said in our Elder Scrolls Online: Greymoor preview, it's bringing vampires, supernatural storms, and archaeology. It's part of the Dark Heart of Skyrim questline which is running this year, and its prologue quest brings players to Skyrim's Icereach Coven. 

"This year's story and chapter centers around vampires and witches and werewolves in Skyrim," creative director Rich Lambert says of the quest's broader story. "People are disappearing, these weird storms – Harrowstorms – are ravaging the countryside, and if you get caught in one of these storms one of two things happens. Either you get turned into a Harrowed, which is essentially a mindless zombie where you just kind of stand there and do nothing and don't react to the world, or you get turned into a Bloodfiend."

Good thing The Elder Scrolls Online keeps getting bigger, otherwise we'd have nothing scrolls-y to do while we wait on Elder Scrolls 6.  

Austin Wood

Austin freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and he's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a senior writer is just a cover up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.