How The Elder Scrolls Online Is Going All-In On Seasons In 2026

Next, in April, ESO’s first proper season will kick off. Titled Season 0, it will bring with it a major class update for Dragonknight that will see its skills and visuals reworked, as well as updates to the two-handed weapons skill line. Season 0 will also add a new experimental event zone called The Night Market.

This new zone is designed to be much harder than typical overworld combat in ESO (something the team is also looking to address later this year with a new Overland difficulty setting). It’s a group-focused PvE zone where players are encouraged to group up and push farther and farther into the zone. Players will choose one of three factions to represent, earning rewards along the way. Those rewards will include a new upgradable house (the first to include a bank), as well as a new gameplay-effecting reward type ZeniMax Online is keeping quiet about for now.

Though the Night Market is billed as a limited-time event, it will return later in 2026 after its initial run. Should it prove popular, ZeniMax Online said it could potentially become a permanent feature.

Tamriel Tomes

The release of Season 0 will also see the launch of the game’s new battle pass system, called Tamriel Tomes. This system will replace the game’s existing daily challenges and login rewards. Instead, there will be weekly and seasonal challenges (with the ability to re-roll unwanted weeklies) that will progress the battle pass as players complete them.

As players progress the tome, they’ll be able to unlock free cosmetic rewards ranging from armor appearances to new skill styles, as well as currencies like Seals of Endeavor. In typical battle pass fashion, there will be a free version as well as $15 and $30 premium versions that come with additional cosmetics. Premium versions of the battle pass won’t expire, allowing players to continue progressing them after the end of a season.

Going hand-in-hand with Tamriel Tomes is the new Gold Coast Bazaar, a system that sounds similar to World of Warcraft’s Trading Post. The bazaar will sell various cosmetics and former limited-time rewards, as well as some new ones. Items will rotate in and out but will be available for long durations, like the entirety of a season, Giacomini said.

Items in the bazaar can be bought with a new currency, Trade Bars, earned primarily through Tamriel Tomes but also in small amounts in-game. While most of the available Trade Bars will be found in the free version of each seasonal battle pass, the paid versions of Tamriel Tomes will additionally include a small amount of the currency. But you won’t be able to purchase Trade Bars directly with Crowns, ESO’s premium currency.

“Over the years, we’ve introduced so many limited-time cosmetics…and if you missed them, it was either impossible to get them again, or we would re-introduce them unpredictably or inconsistently,” Giacomini said. “The bazaar provides a consistent and reliable place for players to finally be able to claim these rewards.”

The introduction of Tamriel Tomes and the Gold Coast Bazaar will bring some changes to ESO’s optional subscription, ESO Plus. Its price won’t change and no benefits are being removed, but additional benefits will be added, such as subscribers earning battle pass progress at an accelerated rate. Every month a player is subscribed to ESO Plus, they’ll also earn credit towards a free premium Tamriel Tome upgrade that can be bought once 12 credits have been earned. These credits don’t have to be earned consecutively, meaning players can subscribe to ESO off and on and still accumulate credits to eventually be used for a premium Tamriel Tome.

ESO’s 2026 Roadmap

As for future seasons, ZeniMax Online made clear it is treating its 2026 roadmap as a living document that may change or shift over the course of the year, but it does have plans for what later seasons will include. Season 1, slated for late summer, will introduce new Thieves Guild content, multi-stage world events, a new trial, and new story content centered around the fan-favorite daedric prince Sheoggorath. The season will also bring class updates to the Warden.

Season 2 is slated for the winter, and will include Sorcerer class updates, the introduction of solo dungeons (a single-player version of the game’s existing group dungeons), large-scale world events in Skyrim, and a still-shrouded-in-secrecy High Seas of Tamriel event that will involve naval combat. It will additionally add the game’s Greymoor chapter into the base game.

One of the biggest requests ESO players have had over the years is cross-play. In the past, the studio has outlined the difficulties posed by linking its players across Xbox, PlayStation, and PC, but it sounds like, at long last, it’s doing the work to make that dream a reality. The only downside is that it sounds like cross-play might not be coming anytime soon.

“Cross-play is definitely coming, but it’s going to be a while, just to set the stage on that.” Kath said. “We are working on it. It is a complex problem for a game like ESO–it was not ever built with this in mind. There are a lot of considerations we have to make.”

While cross-play may take some time to arrive, there are other quality-of-life changes coming sooner. Some of the changes coming ahead of Season 0 include account-wide outfit slots, the ability to respecc skills and attributes for free from the game’s user interface, and equal experience points for the skills on players’ back action bar. Other improvements coming include faster riding training, with the ability to raise the skill by three points at a time instead of one, and the power to upgrade backs from the UI rather than having to travel to a vendor. Higher furnishing limits are coming to some houses as well.

That’s far from an exhaustive list, and even more “player experience improvements” are slated for later in the year, according to ZeniMax Online’s roadmap. Judging from the whole roadmap, each season looks wildly different from the last. That’s by design, as Kath said the goal is for there to not be a “typical season” blueprint the studio is following. It’s a sentinment Giacomini echoed.

“The key difference is variety and choice,” Giacomini said. “We want to be building what’s important to you, the players, and we believe this new model is the best way to do so.”

More details regarding launch dates for ESO’s Season 0, and new content like the Night Market, will be revealed in the coming months. ZeniMax Online studio director Rich Lambert said last year he wants ESO to be a “30-year MMO. However, he said the studio does still want to make other games, despite Microsoft recently canceling an unannounced new MMO from the studio codenamed Blackbird.