12 years after its launch, The Elder Scrolls Online continues to truck along with a dedicated community and passionate developers who clearly want to subvert expectations and shake things up more often than not.
Last year, the enduring MMORPG already left Chapters (big traditional expansions) to double down on smaller content drops and seasons. 2024’s Gold Road was the end of TESO’s original model and the beginning of something new. After a slower-than-desired transition in 2025 and worrying layoffs at ZeniMax Online Studios, many veterans were wondering whether TESO’s future was a gradual sunsetting of the game. After learning about its plans for 2026 and beyond, things are looking busier than expected and mostly different. Time will tell if it’s for the better.
Player experience team lead Kira Ross Schlitt, associate design director (content and quests) Jason Barnes, and associate design director (dungeons and encounters) Mike Finnigan gave members of the press an early look at everything that’s happening in the coming months and tried to answer plenty of questions about the MMORPG’s present and future. The entire presentation and Q&A session went on for a while, so we’ve tried to just synthesize the most important and surprising points here.
Starting this week, on April 2, “a new age begins” with Season Zero: Dawn and Dusk, which introduces the limited-time Night Market experience, “a new area in the Oblivion realm of Fargrave that will be available for a seven-week period.” Players can earn a free player home (Night’s Den) and more as they complete a gauntlet of PvE encounters while serving “one of three factions.”
Season Zero also delivers a much-requested feature: higher difficulties for the overland activities which happen across the more open areas of TESO’s regions, including dynamic events, standard questing, and delves, among other activities. Think of something along the lines of Diablo 4’s difficulty tiers. The players can choose from four different ones and play alongside other players who experience the same content with tougher or easier enemies.
On the PvP front, progression is being reworked into the Veterancy PvP system during this next season. Exclusive cosmetic rewards will allow veterans to show off how committed they really are to fighting in the name of their chosen world factions in PvP zones. Combined with upcoming “class refreshes” like the one the Dragonknight recently received, PvP will be seeing lots of changes this year.
The team (plus our first in-game look at the updates) also confirmed much of the friction of regular actions and the basic gameplay loop is being reduced. Examples include a faster training progression for mounts, skill respecs that can be done directly from the UI, and substantial bag and furnishing limits upgrades. A recurring idea which seems to tie the plans for 2026 and beyond together is playing TESO however you want and getting to more of the content (with variety only expanding in the coming months) faster. The team was able to talk about past “content treadmills” and underline that the current vision is to deliver requested features to players as soon as possible and in a more flexible manner that isn’t linked to yearly content drops or rigid schedules.
While we don’t know exactly when Season One will launch this summer, we know seasons moving forward will last roughly 90 days. The main focus for S1 seems to be the Thieves Guild, and a new story is being cooked as we speak. It’s set in “a visually refreshed Glenumbra zone” and continues the narrative first introduced a decade ago. Another side storyline will mark the return of the Daedric Prince of Madness Sheogorath, who wants to go for a walk among Tamriel’s mortals. Needless to say, things get quite crazy quite fast, but most details are being kept under wraps for now.
Perhaps the most surprising bit of content planned for the next few months is The Sage’s Vault, a new “puzzle-focused gameplay area” with roguelite elements which has parties doing more than just fighting. It looked genuinely refreshing and exciting in a way that stands apart from other TESO content drops; this is the kind of stuff which could make lapsed players return to Tamriel.
ZeniMax Online Studios is also willing to take things a step further with more “experimental content” like full-blown naval combat (Sea of Thieves’ influence grows) and something I think nobody expected to see: underwater exploration. Yes, you’ll be walking around at the bottom of the sea, SpongeBob SquarePants style, fights included. It’s the kind of delightfully goofy stuff which feels totally “right” for the Elder Scrolls universe, and I can’t wait to see how that supports the specific activities surely being developed as we speak.
An ongoing effort which was teased during the event was Solo Dungeons which rework the many dungeons already in the game to accommodate players who’d like to take on some of the game’s best activities alone. This involves rebalancing and even changing things around on the level design front, so it’ll happen gradually, but the first ones, March of Sacrifices and Moon Hunter Keep, are rolling out in 2026. The first base game Trial since TESO’s launch is also arriving with the Crimson Veldt. As a good reminder: All future playable content of the new seasonal model will be free, but previous DLC packs and Chapters will remain paid content. Expect ZeniMax and Bethesda to slowly give away more of them like in the past though.
Even though the game’s less immediate future still hasn’t been fully defined (expect smaller streams and substantial blog posts to keep you updated), the devs were comfortable enough to tease we’ll be returning to Skyrim in early 2027 through a new part of the famous region that hasn’t been seen before in TESO. Yes, new areas will still be added to the game even if Chapters are over, and we’ve been warned about incoming bad weather that will be reshaping the gameplay in that specific zone…
I managed to sneak in a question about cross-play, which was confirmed a while back, and cross-progression. ZeniMax remains to committed to making it work, but the developers said it won’t be ready before 2027 due to all the work involved to make sure such a remarkably complex online multiplatform game doesn’t fall apart once it’s implemented.
Overall, the creatives’ enthusiasm while discussing everything coming to the game in the near future is infectious, and what we were shown made me more hopeful about the road ahead, yet I can’t help but wonder how much of this will translate into familiar issues tied to seasonal models and a fear of missing out on key events. Quantity and quality appear to be huge priorities moving forward alongside large QoL changes, so I hope ZeniMax knows how to onboard and welcome back players much better than recent MMO misfires with similar intentions.
The Elder Scrolls Online is available on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5. It’s on Game Pass (Ultimate, Premium, and Essential) as well. The PC Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere services are getting TESO on June 2. Moreover, the Gold Road Collection (which includes all the Chapters) is currently available for PS Plus subscribers until April 6.
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