The Elder Scrolls Online Devs Talk About Moving To Seasons, The Thieves Guild, And Player Trust: ‘It’s Not Won Or Earned With A Single Act, And Yet It’s Easily Broken And Lost’

Back in January, The Elder Scrolls Online announced a change in its content model from “chapters”—massive updates that added new areas to the map and took years of development time to complete—to “seasons,” updates that delivered less content than the chapters had, but more frequently. The first season, “Season 0,” added the Gold Coast Bazaar, continued adjustments to core combat, and the battle pass-esque Tamriel Tomes system.

Speaking with ESO game director Nick Giacomini and associate design director Jason Barnes at Summer Game Fest 2026, 12 years after the game’s debut, it sounds like the move to smaller, more frequent updates was the right one. The chapter model, while consistent, was a huge time commitment, “18 to 24 months” according to the duo, with “all hands on deck trying to execute.”

“[The chapter model] was very reliable, but it was also very limited,” Giacomini said. “Players were asking for us to address foundational things, and it wasn’t that there was a lack of desire, but, in order to deliver on the chapter, it was extremely difficult to prioritize those things. We needed to break to a model that is more flexible and allows us to make new content while also freeing us up to address more foundational things and evolve our game in more meaningful ways.”

The initial announcement was met with excitement for the most part, but parts of the community were uneasy about the change. “I think that there was some level of apprehension, and I think that there still is for some,” Barnes said. Our “Season 0 launch has gone very well so far, but there are still some players wondering, ‘well, this is good, but what about in the future?'”

Den of thieves

That future, for Season 1 at least, is deeply rooted in the past; the Thieves Guild, a faction not highlighted in The Elder Scrolls Online for over a decade, is returning to the game with a new storyline, new quests, and more. For the ESO team, returning to the Thieves Guild after so long was a fantastic opportunity to ease the player base into the new seasons model.

“We were shifting to this new seasons model, and we knew we weren’t going to do a new zone, but we still wanted to try a bunch of new stuff while sticking to what makes ESO; questing, storytelling, things like that,” Barnes said. “One of the things that we were exploring was, while we’ve talked about the Thieves Guild in one area, we never really explored what happens when a new guild forms in the world, or when a new chapter rolls up into an area with an existing guild, what goes into that?”

The new Thieves Guild storyline won’t just introduce the guild to new players, however; Barnes mentions that players who remember the original guild story from 2015 will not only recognize some of the characters involved, but they may also see a few lingering story beats pay off. “There are some story beats that continue, and some character arcs that will wrap up,” Barnes said. “It’ll give you a little bit more of a fuller picture.”

Spreading rumors

One of the biggest gameplay changes coming in this Thieves Guild season is the new Rumors system of quest giving. Rather than being directly told where to go and what to do by an NPC, Rumors allows you to pick up on locations of interest scattered throughout the world through random discovery, and following those leads can take you down a whole new questline. 

“Essentially, you’ll just find stuff in the world; there’s no icon, no UI element,” Giacomini said. “You’ll see a dead body with a note next to it, you’ll read the note talking about something like, ‘my boss is suspicious of what we’re doing, I think he’s onto us, let’s meet at this location,’ and the location is described as a riddle. That’s all the player gets, it’s up to them to go out and figure out where to go, and once they get there, another clue will appear, and so on.”

Collected clues can be reviewed via a tracker while exploring, and eventually the bread crumbs will reach a climactic ending. However, players may not always reach the same conclusion, as Giacomini mentioned there are “multiple endings” and “multiple complexities” that can create different results depending on how the player approaches the questline.

Opening the vault

The major challenge of Season 1, in Barnes’s mind, is the Sage’s Vault, a new dungeon which is “unlike anything we’ve done before.” Barnes calls it a “puzzle dungeon,” with challenge rooms that, while presented in a random order, all have an underlying puzzle to solve.

“Each room has some sort of goal; stopping poison gas from filling the room, sneaking around Khajiit songstresses hidden in the shadows, jumping puzzles with mushrooms and lava, and each completed room will give you a chest,” Barnes said. “Underneath it all, though, every room has a secret, and you have to figure out what that secret is, how it connects to other rooms, and make those connections.” 

Barnes calls this new dungeon the “big thing” coming to ESO in the future, saying that he’s looking forward to seeing the community come together to solve its puzzles. As one last incentive, Barnes did confirm the grand prize for solving the Sage’s Vault is a “really cool griffin mount that you can ride on,” though we didn’t get to see it for ourselves.

Maintaining trust

The mixture of a brand new content model with an iconic guild rooted in ESO‘s past highlights the main challenge for a game like this; creating content that appeals to both new and established players alike. The core element, for Giacomini, is trust, and he’s aware of how that relationship with the fanbase works.

“Trust is a funny thing, right? It’s not won or earned with a single act, and yet it’s easily broken and lost,” Giacomini said. “There’s so many ways that players could choose to spend their precious free time, right? As a player, a lot of that comes down to trust; do I trust the team? If I’m going to give them something as precious to me as my time, does the developer have my back?”

For Barnes, what allows the ESO team to earn and keep that trust is flexibility, which is something that the new season-based content model encourages. “Having that seasonal model lets us not only make new content, but we can also look at the pain points, and things we can do to improve, and just fix them. We now have the flexibility to do that.”