Zenimax Online Studios has just announced a suite of upcoming content for Elder Scrolls Online in the form of Season Zero, but the studio is also teasing a return to Skyrim in the near future. As a return to the most iconic Elder Scrolls region, players will be able to revisit familiar areas from The Elder Scrolls V, but we don’t currently know why.
As the year goes on, ESO players will encounter storms across “some of the oldest, most wintery regions of Tarmiel” that will continue into early 2027. “These disturbances will sweep through portions of Skyrim in ESO”, confirmed director Nick Giacomini in an announcement video FRVR received prior to its live broadcast.
Zenimax has confirmed that players will “explore an iconic region never before explored in ESO”. Currently, the game allows you to explore Eastmarch, The Rift, The Reach, Hjaalmarch, and Haafingar with Falkreath available as a dungeon. However, the game does not feature The Pale, Winterhold, or Whiterun at the time of writing.
“This being so familiar, it’s Skyrim and things like that, it’s gonna hue pretty close to some things, but every rock isn’t going to be the same.”
Giacomini explains that the Skyrim season in 2027 will shoow players “the team’s new take on what a zone can be”.While the team behind ESO didn’t explain why Skyrim has been chosen specifically for the game’s 2027 season, they did explain how they pick returning areas versus never before seen parts of Tamriel for the game’s new content.
“It’s a delicate balance,” associate design director Jason Barnes explained in a press Q&A. “There’s a lot of things that just simply didn’t exist in our timeline that were in Skyrim, or vice versa, so it gives us a little bit of leeway of adjusting and finding that balance of, ‘Hey, that’s an iconic thing as soon as I see it, I know it.’”
Barnes teased that “there’s definitely something iconic about the area that you’ll notice” while also not outright confirming what part of Skyrim players will be venturing to. Nevertheless, the new zone, when it arrives next year, will “remind you of when you did play Skyrim and you’ll take a look and say, ‘that’s new, that’s new’, but then you go over that hill and something completely different is there or it’s not there. It’s something we do when we revisit all of our old zones that have previously existed in Oblivion or in other games or in other areas of Skyrim.”
The design director explains that the goal with Elder Scrolls Online is to make sure that returning areas are not a “one-to-one copy” with their own unique areas. While some areas like Morrowind’s Seyda Neen are so close they almost feel like a dream remake, other areas like Vivec are clearly different with reasonable lore explanations as to why they aren’t the same.
Barnes explains that it’s a balance between “making sure there’s enough nostalgia” and leaving room for new adventures. Associate design director Mike Finnigan added that it’s not just about paying off nostalgia, but also reformatting some areas to be more consistent with the gameplay and crowd sizes of an MMO.
While working on an area last seen in Daggerfall allows a tonne of leeway, working on something as iconic as Skyrim offers a lot less leeway. “Depending on which game it appears in, it gives us a little bit more or less leeway,” he said. “This being so familiar, it’s Skyrim and things like that, it’s gonna hue pretty close to some things, but every rock isn’t going to be the same… but if you think of something like Fang Lair, which appeared in Arena, and it looks way different from how it did in Arena, that gives us more leeway to kind of change things up.”
The team admits that the upcoming Skyrim zone will be “very close” to its appearance in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim while also making the same considerations fans expect to fit an MMO.
