Seasons are coming to The Elder Scrolls Online on 2nd April, as Bethesda look to make the biggest shakeup to the MMORPG’s continued development in a long, long time. Chapters are out with quarterly Seasons coming in, bringing all new content and features for free to all players, and a new battle pass system known as Tamriel Tomes. Oh, and all updates will now be launched simultaneously across PC and consoles.
There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get exploring everything announced during the stream.
The New ESO Roadmap
Going from Chapters to Seasons will come with a transition period. Season Zero launches in April and will be followed by Season One and Two later this year on a three month cadence.
Compared to Chapters, this means you will still see quarterly updates for the ESO, but the team point to this switch to seasons letting be more fluid and reactive to fan feedback and game needs, as opposed to the strict annual roadmaps that the team had worked to previously with the one major focal point in June of each year. That the shift to seasons was announced in December 2024 and is only coming to fruition in early 2026 is a sign of how inflexible this could be.
What will a Season contain? Well it could be new zones and storylines, it could be new events, a new or revamped class, skill line or system, a broad range of quality of life improvements, or some mixture of all of these.
ESO Season Zero
Starting with Season Zero the team are looking to blend a mixture of new features and revisiting older content. Update 49 will release on 9th March and precede the main Season Zero launch on 2nd April. This will then run through to 8th July.
The first ever group event zone in TESO will be added in the form of The Night Market – running from 29th April through June as a trial run that could see this return or become permanent. This PvE zone in Fargrave is designed to be genuinely difficulty to overcome, and while you don’t need to be in a guild to head there, but it will help if you’re in one, while there are unique rewards such as a new house to earn.
This comes alongside a new PvP progression system and the first iteration of a new overland difficulty setting, to up the challenge of simply getting around the world.
Classic Content Revamps
Alongside new content is the focus on raising the bar of quality. Visual refreshes and balance updates are going to rollout across the classes and combat styles, starting with the Dragonknight and two-handed weapon skill lines, continuing with the Werewolf, Warden and Sorcerer through the quarterly updates. Each Season will come with one main class to focus on, but smaller improvements sprinkled throughout. The aim is to make a single class more viable without needing to multi-class.
Core quality of life improvements will make outfits possible account-wide, as well as making skill and attribute respecs free within the UI, back bar XP, faster rider training, increased furnishing limits, and plenty more down the line, including guild housing, hybridisation and cross-play.
OK, so where’s the battle pass, then?
Of course, all of this still needs paying for in some fashion, and so there’s the new Tamriel Tomes battle pass with both free and premium tracks of rewards for new armour, weapon styles, crates and more. Daily login rewards are out to help reduce some of the FOMO, and you’ll be able to progress through the ranks with a mixture of weekly and seasonal points from questing, trials, PvP, crafting, dungeons and more – you’ll be able to re-roll weeklies that you dislike, to some extent.
There’s also the Gold Coast Bazaar, which will let you buy rewards including some previously time limited ones, with a steady pace to the shop refreshes. This use the Trade Bars earned through the Tamriel Tome (mostly on the free track) and from some other in-game activities.
Curiously, ESO Plus remains, and will continue to feature all of the standalone expansion contents of before, but the appeal of this optional subscription will be reduced. The main bonuses are accelerated Tome Point earning, and you’ll be able to get a free premium plus upgrade once a year for the Tamriel Tomes.
Is this a good or bad thing for ESO?
All in all, this could be a really positive move for The Elder Scrolls Online. There’s always the fear with battle passes that they become all-consuming engagement traps, and compared to older expansion pack models, seasons can often feel much less significant – it’s already been confirmed that you won’t see big new landmasses, but that the game will have smaller additions and look to revisit areas.
The benefit, though, is that this change helps to reduce the mental burden of stepping into a decade-old game and understanding what you need to buy to get the latest experience. Now it will (mostly) just all be there. And for existing players? The developers getting to be more responsive to feedback and making game changes more publicly and speedily is only a good thing.
