After more than a decade of adventuring across Tamriel, The Elder Scrolls Online has reached one of its biggest pivot points yet. During this year’s ESO Seasons presentation, ZeniMax Online Studios laid out a sweeping overhaul of how the game will evolve from here on out. Gone are the familiar chapters, the predictable cadence, and the annual “big zone + big story” formula. In their place: Seasons, experimentation, deep system overhauls, and a renewed focus on making ESO truly community-driven. It’s a bold leap but shaped by player feedback, internal reflection, and the reality that even a ten-year-old MMO needs fresh air from time to time.
From Chapters to Seasons
Game Director Nick Giacomini opened by looking back at ESO’s defining pivots: One Tamriel, Homestead, the introduction of chapters. These weren’t minor updates, they fundamentally changed how the game was played. Seasons, according to Giacomini, are meant to stand alongside those milestone shifts. Players had grown savvy to the yearly chapter cycle. The predictability flattened excitement, and the 18-month development cycle left little space for reactive changes. Seasons aim to fix both problems.
Seasons will occur quarterly, but what they contain is intentionally fluid. A season might spotlight a new story, a new system, an experimental zone, PvP updates, or requested features. Others might double down on QoL and combat. Flexibility and variety, rather than rigid formulas, will now define ESO’s release calendar. Just as importantly, all seasonal content is free for anyone who owns the game or plays through Game Pass or PlayStation Plus. Gone are the paywalls that quietly fragmented the player base. And to reinforce that accessibility push, ZOS is retroactively adding Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Imperial City, and Orsinium to the base game. Those wondering about last year’s Content Pass… It was only a transitional tool and it’s not coming back.
Transparency is a Feature, Not a Buzzword!
ZOS repeatedly emphasised a new commitment: share earlier, iterate openly, and let players shape the final product. The extensive breakdown of upcoming class changes, including design philosophy, identity pillars, and long-term balancing goals, is the clearest example of this shift. For once, players get insight before changes hit the test server. Features across the game will now be released in smaller experimental chunks. If players like it, it grows. If not, ZOS adjusts. And that spirit threads through the entire 2025–2026 roadmap. Even the holy grail question: ‘cross-play when?’ received its most hopeful answer yet. While ESO’s architecture makes cross-play a nightmare, ZOS is actively researching it, with potential test server experiments on the horizon.
Classes Revamped
Subclassing brought incredible build creativity alas, also incredible balance problems. Pure classes began to feel overshadowed. Abilities designed years apart lacked consistency. And ESO’s class identity blurred. When I interviewed the development team back during the 10-year anniversary festivities, they were well aware this could happen. The combo of heavy monitoring and tweaking turned out not to be enough to counter the class imbalance in Tamriel. Now Zos is turning the ship around with a big overhaul. Each season in 2025 brings major visual refreshes and balance reworks to the game’s classes and core skill lines starting with the following classes:
Season Zero: Dragonknight + Two-Handed line → later Werewolf
Season One: Warden
Season Two: Sorcerer
The goal: make pure classes feel meaningful again without stripping power from subclassing. Class kits will be reorganised, skill lines diversified, and visual/audio quality modernised to match newer classes like the Arcanist. It’s a long project and probably one that may reshape how ESO actually feels to play.
Season Zero: A closer look into the New Normal
Tamriel Tomes replace login rewards, Endeavours, and Event Tickets, merging them into one progression system with weekly and seasonal challenges. No more daily logins required, a relief for anyone with a life outside Tamriel. The free Tome offers cosmetics, currencies, crates, weapon styles, furnishings, and more. Premium and Premium+ tiers (essentially Tamriel’s version of the well-known battle pass from other games) unlock permanent access, instant progression boosts, and extra cosmetics. Trade Bars, earned only through gameplay, fuel the new Gold Coast Bazaar, a storefront resurrecting previously limited-time cosmetics and including new offerings. Event Tickets you currently still have convert automatically into Trade Bars. Events themselves aren’t going anywhere. In fact, ZOS hinted at more events per year.
Season Zero’s showpiece experiment is The Night Market, a limited-time PvE event zone set in Fargrave. Designed for groups but approachable to newcomers, it introduces rotating challenges, new difficulty tiers, and faction-based competition. Win enough favour for your chosen faction, and you could earn a unique house, complete with its own bank. It runs from April 29 to mid-June, but ZOS stressed this isn’t a one-off. If players enjoy it, The Night Market might return. If players love it, it might become permanent.
ZOS now has a team whose sole mission is QoL improvements, and Update 49 delivers one of the most player-friendly batches in years:
Free skill and attribute respecs directly in the UI
Account-wide outfit slots
Faster mount training (three upgrades per cycle!)
Longer antiquity lead times
More mounts for gold, including 16 previously Crown-exclusive options
Bag and bank upgrades are cheaper
Improved zone guides and treasure maps
Increased furnishing limits across all tiers
Both weapon bars earn XP equally
Vampire/Werewolf cures and starters made free and frictionless
And more improvements are already in long-term development, including guild bank/mail overhauls, and even guild housing.
PvP received its most encouraging update in years:
The ongoing Vengeance initiative continues
A brand-new PvP progression system is coming
Three-sided Battlegrounds are returning
Cyrodiil travel will get faster
Problematic keeps like Alessia, Ash, and Chalman are getting fixes
Spawn-camp issues addressed in Huntsman’s Fortress and Reman’s Folly
Combined with seasonal events and refreshed rewards, it finally feels like PvP is being treated as a living part of ESO again.
Final Thoughts
This year’s presentation makes one thing clear: ESO is no longer content to coast on twelve years of tradition. Seasons aren’t just a new cadence; they’re a philosophical overhaul. The team is experimenting, reworking foundational systems, and committing to transparency at a level we haven’t seen before. And honestly? It was needed. The old model felt stale, the big annual story beats predictable, and the gameplay loop comfortable to a fault. ESO needed a shake-up. But with fewer guarantees about big chapters and big zones, the future feels less defined. Exciting, yes. But also risky. Coming out of a transitional year that felt fine but not exceptional, this leap of faith puts ESO in uncharted waters. Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic. I’m excited for the new systems, especially solo dungeons and overland difficulty, and I appreciate the massive QoL push. But I also can’t help wondering whether this new direction will bring the revitalisation ESO deserves or whether the lack of a clear anchor might cause turbulence down the road. Time will tell. For now, ESO is changing its seasons, and we’ll soon see how the weather in Tamriel shifts with it.
