(Image credit: ZeniMax)

The Elder Scrolls Online has had a bit of a rough go, recently, with its initially cool subclassing update not quite hitting the balance mark alongside a brutal rash of cuts at Microsoft, which saw the game's director quit.

Still, ESO's remaining developers have been adamant that it's not going anywhere, a promise that seems congruent with a recent deep-dive into the game's next plans—grab your calendar, baby, ESO's going seasonal.

In a developer livestream, game director Nick Giacomini states that over the game's 12-year lifespan, "we made a lot of innovative decisions when we needed to … They were the right decisions at the time for building the game's foundation, and they show that we're capable of making big, fundamental changes when we need to."

Giacomini elaborates that this whole operation isn't just a change to the game's patch structure—it's a chance to "pause and work on addressing the pain points, and building the future of ESO together. This is the beginning of a major shift, just like One Tamriel was a decade ago, where we're going to be making major changes, just in a completely different way."

Senior creator engagement manager Gina Bruno chimes in, saying that "we know we could have greater transparency and just be better at following up with the community … like Nick was saying, the chapter model that we had been following for the past few years, the whole timeline was this speeding train that we couldn't stop."

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Seasons change

But what is a season? It's a three-month patch cycle, basically. The actual contents of what a season might feature are pretty much Calvinball—by design—but can include new PvP/PvE content to chew on, new features, story arcs, and zones. The backbone of the whole system is the fact that each season'll have new rewards.