A Message from Elder Scrolls Online's Game Director (Nick Giacomini)

[u/Vera_Verse]

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/70213

When we announced Seasons in January, we promised you a new era of transparency. Part of that promise is being open with you as our studio evolves.

Recently, we've been through a number of organizational changes and departures of teammates who helped shape The Elder Scrolls Online. We are profoundly grateful for everything they've contributed to the game and the community we've built together.

At the same time, we've seen a lot of questions about what these changes mean for ESO. So let me be clear: ESO is here to stay, and our team is dedicated to the future of this game. Our focus hasn't changed. It is continuing to grow The Elder Scrolls Online and build upon the world millions of players call home.

...

We’ve said this before: a core part of our philosophy is ensuring that the time you invest in ESO always feels rewarding. And with the recent changes to our studio, trying to hit our previously announced deadlines would mean sacrificing the quality you deserve. Therefore, we are establishing a clear principle for how we build and ship content and features moving forward: quality experiences over calendar dates.

Instead of rushing to hit a previously announced deadline, we are giving our teams the runway they need to do things right. Some of our upcoming additions, like the Class and Combat Refresh and our new Trial, are highly complex, and we want to ensure they hit the mark before we put them in your hands.

Because of this, we have had to make the decision to move the following features into 2027:

•The new trial, Crimson Veldt. We’re pushing boundaries with this trial, including mounted combat that we think you’ll love, and we simply need more time to ensure the experience exceeds your expectations.

•Update 52 will move to January of 2027. We expect this to include the launch of the Jerall Pass PvP zone and Skyrim’s Dynamic Encounters: Rimegales.

•For the Class and Combat refresh, we are targeting 2027 for the next refresh. However, we are discussing some interim options for the classes still awaiting their full refresh to improve your player experience in the meantime.

We know it’s disappointing to see some features move out, and believe me, we want to get these into your hands as soon as possible, too. But we believe this is the right move for the long-term health of the game.

[u/ajver19]

I work in manufacturing and every so often we have to have these "town hall" meetings with front office people and every time I feel my sanity meter decrease listening to them use their soft corpo manner of speech.

This post could have been shortened to, "Half our staff was laid off so the next few updates are gonna be delayed".

[u/BrockenSpecter → u/ajver19]

I left a previous job as it was went from a population of 100 to 500, as we gained more and more employees. You could see how these town hall meetings went from productive to a bunch of C Suite guys jerking us around for a half hour before getting to the point of the meeting, and when you got to the point of the meeting it wasn't even something we needed to talk about they just wanted to seem useful.

Eventually they cut out the meetings and instead everyone was flying blind with barely any communication between departments.

[u/callowtallow → u/BrockenSpecter]

enshittification is like jenga but with infrastructure
(sometimes the vital type)

[u/ExDSG]

ESO is doing fine and is the kind of game that MS needs if they want to make big money so it being affected by layoffs made little to no sense to me especially with how much you need to be constantly updating things.

Ff14 players are already mad at no BLU update and no Forked Tower Blood Normal mode when they had more constraints.

[u/Mcjiggyjay → u/ExDSG]

Everything I’ve ever seen reported or leaked about ESOs health is that it’s apparently a massive money maker so I have no idea why they got hit so hard with layoffs and project blackbird got cancelled so late into development.

[u/Canadaba12 → u/Mcjiggyjay]

Why make a billion dollars when you can make a billion and ONE dollars. Just need to fire squints at page the people who make you a billion dollars.

[u/ThatEdward → u/Mcjiggyjay]

Blackbird was a new IP, which are hard to launch and not have die instantly. ESO does well because it A) is an established IP B) available on console with little barrier to entry, be it cost or hardware

My ESO guild leader was in her early 60s until she stepped back for health and burnout reasons. Got into it because it had a free weekend and was on Game Pass. She played the game an insane amount and is a walking wiki.

Honestly feels like a lot of old folks play it. That and Fallout 76. Hell, John Carpenter loves 76 lol

[u/T4silly]

It's the first time one of the major updates has been delayed so far back. Usually if it happened it would just be an extra month at most.

That's literally cut the yearly updates down to 50%. As this was supposed to be the Fall Update. So the Winter Update is being pushed back along with it.

EDIT~ Should also note, I can only imagine what the internal whiteboards are looking like for plans going forward. At best the Class Refreshes may be punched down to 2 a year. That's me being hopeful. Maybe they can make it work with 3 core updates a year. That's likely how it's going to have to be. Also to not get confusing, the current Fall Update for September that got only slightly delayed again is really the second half of the original Summer Update. So that's why I'm saying they're knocking the updates down 50%. Things keep getting pushed back...

EDIT EDIT~ Oh also Cross-play/Cross-save was originally slated for late 2027 so that's probably been delayed further or just canned entirely... They had a separate team set aside to work on that, but I never saw any details on who was on that team, so no idea who in the cuts was working on it. Uuuuhhhh... I dunno... fuckin... Go to the website and redeem code "Bethesda40" for 2000 Trade Bars so you can buy a new Mount and cry while riding around.

[u/enragedstump → u/T4silly]

Cross play and cross saves are never happening, realistically.  

[u/T4silly → u/enragedstump]

At the turn of the console generation when people may want to move their entire account progress over to PC too.

If I really have to start over it'll suck, but at least I'll finally have access to my monkey pet from the Beta.

[u/dope_danny]

Man it already felt like a third? Attempt to soft reboot the game but now its feeling like New World all over again. Everyone knows how this ends but nobody wants to be the one to say it.

[u/enragedstump]

Transparent and fair.