Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls Online has announced a huge suite of content coming over the next few months. As Season Zero, the MMO’s first shift into a new form of content delivery, launches on April 2, 2026, the team behind the project has detailed a lot of upcoming content for the game, including its return to Skyrim in 2027.
Alongside the new season, the team behind the MMO took time to talk to press in a roundtable Q&A earlier this month. Alongside answering questions about the game’s new content as well questions about the game’s far future.
One of the biggest questions on the minds of fans is the addition of cross-play to Elder Scrolls Online. Announced earlier this year, Zenimax Online Studios is officially working on bringing cross-play and cross-progression to ESO, but player experience team lead Kira Ross Schlitt admits the feature is “not coming this year”.
Speaking to press, Schlitt explained that the feature is an incredibly complicated addition to a game that was not designed with cross-play in mind. In fact, this is also a reality for another Bethesda MMO, Fallout 76, which is also now working to bring the feature to players years after release.
“It is actively something that we have a team that are spending their full time working on getting [it] going,” Schlitt explained. “But I think it’s really important to call out that cross-play is a wildly complicated project with a lot of considerations.”
The design lead explained that it’s more complicated than some fans may expect as “it touches basically everything in the game and we really need to make sure that it feels good”. Nevertheless, the feature is in active development, although there is no proposed release window for cross-play at the time of publication.
“We want to be thoughtful,” she continued. “We don’t want it to be a destructive experience when it comes online to the very best of our ability. So there are a lot of considerations that we have to take about what does it feel like when we bring people together, how does that work successfully, how does everyone feel excited and empowered and not behind, right.”
Schlitt explained that the complications surrounding the feature don’t mean that the feature is completely scrapped. “It’s not coming this year, but it’s really, really happening,” she promised. When it’ll happen, though? Eh, sometime in the future.
