ESO is being completely reinvented in 2025, for new and old players alike

The Elder Scrolls Online is changing in 2025. ZeniMax’s MMO has been around for over a decade, and has stood firm against giants like WoW and FF14 in that time. But a new direction is coming. As revealed during the ESO Direct, the team is reinventing not just the flow of content, but the ways new and longtime players can engage with Tamriel, too. So if you’re bored of waiting for The Elder Scrolls 6, or haven’t jumped into ESO for a while, 2025 is the perfect chance to do so.

Late last year, ZeniMax said it wanted to shift The Elder Scrolls Online to a more seasonal model. Annual chapters are going the way of the dodo, as the team wants to stop committing to a specific release cadence and be more experimental with the content it launches. With competition like Final Fantasy 14 overhauling its visuals and introducing new ideas with the recent 7.0 patch, this is a perfect way for ZOS to keep its own MMO feeling fresh.

For 2025, that means the all-new Seasons of the Worm Cult. A sequel to the 2014 base game storyline, it’s taking us to the Argonian and Elf-infused island of Solstice. There’s the bustling city of Sunport, a magical carnival, Daedric ruins, and a colossal magic wall that would put Game of Thrones to shame.

Most 2025 ESO updates will be for Seasons of the Worm Cult, with new story content, dungeons, trials, and a huge server-wide in-game event planned. To defeat the Worm Cult you’ll need to work with your server to bring down a gigantic, magical wall, and once you do, Solstice’s tropical island vibes go to hell. Different servers can take down the magical wall at different times, depending on how well they work as one unit. All of this content will be spaced out across the year.

To gain access to all of this you’ll need the brand new Content Pass, which gives you each new Seasons of the Worm Cult update as it arrives. So instead of paying for a Chapter, and other external DLC, this pass will give you access to everything as it happens throughout the year.

Perhaps even bigger than this seasonal change, however, is the upcoming subclass system. Starting in June, you’ll be able to utilize the skill lines of other classes without having to roll a new character. You can’t change your original class and still need to have at least one skill line from it, but this is an account-wide feature, meaning you can mix and match characters you’ve spent countless hours working on.

When one of your characters hits level 50 you’ll gain access to subclassing, with ZeniMax estimating more than 3,000 skill line combos. The feature can also be used everywhere in ESO, because the team wants to give you the freedom to experiment with builds as much as possible. If you have multiple level 50 characters, their skill lines are already unlocked to use as new subclasses, and you’ll level up the abilities as you play. If you have just one character, however, you need to go through quests and train these skill lines in order to use them.

New and returning players won’t be left out in the cold in 2025, either. The ESO tutorial has already been updated, but there’s even more on the way. A new ‘Welcome Back’ feature aims to organize all the ways you can refamiliarize yourself with ESO, and reward you while doing so. The starting zones are also getting a major graphical refresh, putting FF14’s visual update the shame.

As for what the future beyond 2025 looks like, in a roundtable I attended studio head Matt Firor says “This year is more a transition between last year’s Chapter model and next year, which is going to be more ‘not’ like a Chapter. But this year we already had content in the pipeline so we’re doing this bridge year.”

With all this content on the way, though, you’d be forgiven for wondering what ZeniMax is doing about everything else it promised over the last six months. The good news is, it’s all still on the way. “We’re still doing all the other stuff that we talked about,” Firor assures. “Which is making the new user experience better, making the returning user experience better, and you’ll mostly get what’s happening there in patch notes because we do a lot of little things every build.”

Between ZeniMax’s new ways of shipping content, subclasses, and the ongoing effort to integrate players of all skill levels into the world of ESO, 2025 is a big year for the game. So whether you’ve spent a decade or not in this version of Tamriel, now’s the time to dive in.

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