Starting in 2025, MMO The Elder Scrolls Online will move away from releasing annual expansions, referred to as chapters, to a more seasonal approach. Seasonal content models have become a more popular model over recent years among live-service and MMO titles.
In a blog post from The Elder Scrolls Online Developer Zenimax Online, studio director Matt Firor explained that these seasons will run for “three to six” months and that they will feature “a mix of themed story content, events, store items, dungeons and more.” According to his statement, this move to seasonal context is being made to easy the burden on the development team, as seasonal content will be easier to produce.
This follows a trend that was helped popularised by Fortnite, with other titles such as recently released titles like Marvel Rivals and The First Descendant also following suit of releasing with this structure. Similar to these, Zenimax Online plans to release “smaller bite-sized content,” regularly alongside “some larger items,” throughout the year.
He stated in the blog post:
We’ll be able to have teams launch content when it is ready throughout the year and not work to a date in June—this will let us focus on a greater variety of content spread over the year. This supports the new Seasons model, and will enable us to release content, updates, fixes, and systems in a more efficient manner.
According to Firor, Zenimax Online is also looking to change how they do quest content for the title with this upcoming model. Some of the plans outlined include using existing zones and areas to tell new stories as well as splitting large zones across multiple updates.
This is not the only title looking at a switch to its content structure as Destiny 2 developer Bungie has also said they will move to a seasonal structure in 2025, a statement they made earlier this year. This will see the studio drop medium-size content more frequently rather than large-scale expansions like their recently released The Final Shape expansion. The first of these planned releases is Codename: Apollo which will be released in a pair of paid updates set for the summer and fall of next year respectively.
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