Elder Scrolls Online Ends Chapters, Shifts to Seasons with Cyrodiil Updates

Don’t let go of your Elder Scrolls Online action, the MMORPG‘s annual chapter updates are coming to an end. Studio Director Matt Firor has written to players sharing details about the new plan, as they disseminate the highlights of 2024 and anticipate 2025.

He barely touched upon the past, briefly discussing the Gold Road chapter along with the new housing tour feature and companions integrated in that chapter.

The forecast for the future is dense, starting with Firor revealing that they will not continue with annual chapters. Since the introduction of the Morrowind chapter in 2017, ESO released a new chapter each year. These regular introductions typically comprised new zones, a story for that zone, fresh dungeons, among other enhancements and improvements. This will be discontinued and replaced by “seasons”. Each season will last from 3 to 6 months and will be smaller in scope.

It is not to suggest new zones won’t be added, but they will likely be introduced in smaller portions. Instead of a new zone, seasons will mostly consist of new stories and dungeons incorporated into the existing zones. The motivation behind this change is to liberate the development team from the rigid annual cycle, allowing them to deploy content throughout the year based on when it is ready not just in June. This will provide an opportunity to concentrate on an extensive array of content over the year.

This is viewed as a chance for the MMO’s developers to test new sorts of content, resolve age-old issues, and strive towards enhanced efficiency.

Yet to be clarified, and probably won’t be until the team’s subsequent major disclosure in April 2025, is how this strategy will be financed. In my view, this is the key factor driving this change as the income generated by annual chapter sales needs to be replaced.

An encouraging area highlighted for experimentation is the “need to seriously tackle Cyrodiil performance.” Being a long-standing issue among ESO players, the performance of this PvP zone has been a repeated subject of jokes, making its mention noteworthy. Other “experiments” include enhancing texture quality, yet another revised return/new player experience, and improving animations and UI.

Frankly, I’m uncertain about what this signifies for the future of ESO. This might end up being quite tricky, specifically in 2025 as the team undergoes this transition. Time will tell.