By ESO had a reputation for releasing huge expansions each year with new events and content spread throughout the year. But that’s going to change in 2025.
In 2024, Elder Scrolls Online developer, Zenimax Studios made a change to the way they deliver updates. Instead of releasing an expansion with content spread throughout the year, they decided to release one big expansion at once.
This went well and players also enjoyed being able to access all the content at once instead of having to wait months to play the next content drop.
Now, the developers have announced they are changing the plan once again. This time, they are dropping the whole big expansion release plans to do “seasons” style content drops for the game.
“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 means there probably won’t be a new zone to explore in 2025. Instead, the devs will use an existing zone to tell a different story.
“2025 will be a mix of old and new as we move the dev team towards creating smaller bite-sized pieces of content.”
Other MMOs like Destiny 2 and even recent games like First Descendant and Once Human use this style of seasonal content releases. For these games, it seems to work well to keep players engaged throughout the year.
However, it’s questionable to think whether this strategy would work for games like ESO. Players are already voicing their concerns and are not happy about this big change as it will likely introduce more microtransactions and less content.
ESO recently celebrated its 10th anniversary and with it promised continued support to keep the game alive. However, with this news, it seems the support for the game is slowing down, probably with an even smaller team dedicated to the game.
