ZeniMax Online Studios has revealed in a recent blog post that, going into 2025, it’ll be halting the annual chapter updates that have been running since 2017. It all started with Morrowind, and most recently, players got their hands on Gold Road.
Going forward, that cadence will change, with the team doing away with the larger chapters that are released every June and focusing on a season-based model. This will allow them to sprinkle content throughout the year, rather than crunching to meet the June deadline for a new chapter every year.
Read on to check out this major change coming to Elder Scrolls Online.
‘Shaking Things Up’
In a post on the Elder Scrolls Online site, the game’s studio director, Matt Firor, broke down the chapter changes coming to ESO in 2025.
At the end of last year, we gave a slight heads up that we would be shaking things up.
We will still do lots of story content, but now, looking into 2025, we need to concentrate on different types of content to support all types of ESO players. So, we are putting Chapters aside and will be focusing on new types of content, and a new release philosophy.
Over the course of 2025 we will be moving more towards a seasonal content model and away from launching massive content updates once a year, as we did with Chapters. We will be talking much more about this in the future, but in 2025 expect to see named Seasons of three or six months duration with a mix of themed story content, events, store items, dungeons and more.
This overhaul is designed to free up the development team and reduce the stress of keeping to an annual schedule, which has been running consistently for the last seven years. In the blog post, Firor referenced changes in the gaming industry, player habits, and the rise and fall of competing titles as reasons behind this major update.
To that end, players can stop expecting a major update every year, and instead, they’ll get ‘bite-sized’ content drops every few months.
In Firor’s words, it’s a community-led change that will allow the team to become ‘less predictable’.
There’s an ambitious roadmap shaping up for 2025, though. The team is hard at work on new story content in existing territories, boosting the new-starter experience, and bringing more light to ‘hallmark’ factions like The Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves Guild.
Those changes will come hand-in-hand with UI upgrades, visual enhancements, and tweaks to animations and game performance, as you’d expect. Elder Scrolls Online is now more than ten years old, but ZeniMax Online Studios shows no sign of slowing down when it comes to these enhancements.
Are you looking forward to the shift away from annual chapters in Elder Scrolls Online? Let us know on the Insider Gaming forum.
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