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Matt Firor, ZeniMax Online Studio’s Studio Director, breaks down a special year for The Elder Scrolls Online and discusses its future.
Greetings everyone—it’s time to look back at ESO in 2023 and look forward to 2024.
In 2023, our #1 priority—besides shipping Necrom and Infinite Archive—was to make the service more stable. The hardware refresh of all game servers finished in 2023, and even though we have some more non-player-facing hardware swaps to go, we are all reaping the benefits of more modern and powerful servers powering ESO’s infrastructure. We also have refined our processes to ensure that updates launch with fewer issues, and for the great majority of situations, we achieved that. We did have longer downtimes than usual a few times due to the hardware refresh, but looking back, I’m pretty happy with where things are—especially after our Epic Games Store launch in July, where we saw our highest monthly active user numbers since 2015.
Necrom was our highest-rated Chapter (in some ratings, highest since Summerset), and shows our commitment to amazing storytelling. I’m especially happy with how the Apocrypha zone turned out. Adding to the Elder Scrolls lore on Daedric realms is something we take great pride in, and I think we nailed the combination of obsession with knowledge and creepy visuals that are the hallmark of Hermaeus Mora. And for the first time in a few years, the story will continue in 2024, as the 2023 story (no spoilers here!) ended on a cliffhanger.
And wrapping up 2023, we launched Infinite Archive, adding a challenging, repeatable game mode to ESO. This is a type of content that we want to do more of in the future: really fun, challenging experiences with great rewards that players can enjoy for a long time. ESO is always about great storytelling, so we won’t abandon story quests and content, but we will balance it out with more systems like dungeons, trials, and special new content like Infinite Archive.
Looking forward to 2024, the obvious first thing to note is that April 4, 2024, is ESO’s 10-year anniversary, marking a decade since we launched on PC/Mac. Reaching this milestone with the game in such great shape will be an amazing achievement—and we will celebrate with both in-game and real-life events. You already know about the first two: our 10-Year Anniversary community event in Amsterdam in April and a 10-Year Anniversary-themed ESO Tavern in Germany from July 13-14. Stay tuned for more information about all these events, and I certainly hope to see you in person at one or more of them!
Also, I remind you that April 4, 2024, is the 10-year anniversary of the PC/Mac launch, but many of you didn’t join the community until June 2015, at ESO's massive console launch. As such, we are considering the entirety of April 2024 through July 2025 as our 10-year anniversary period, and we will fill it as much as we can with special events, retrospectives, and lots of other fun stuff to celebrate you, our community, and the ESO dev team. We can’t wait to share all of this with you when we are ready.
Next year will kick off with a Global Reveal show in January, and we are excited to continue the story from last year but in a different part of Tamriel. It's going to be great, and we have some new systems that I think everyone will want to hear about. I'm not going to spoil it now, but you should definitely look out for the Global Reveal announcement and mark your calendars!
Finally, I'd like to take a moment to talk about all of us in the ESO community. Now that we are a year or so past the pandemic, it's good to take stock of where we are and where we want to go.
ESO is in a great place—enjoyed by millions. In fact, almost two million of you joined ESO last year, not counting the players enjoying the game for free from the Epic Games Store. We have been massively successful for many years now, and we are very thankful for all of you who have helped make this happen. As we approach the 10th anniversary of this amazing experience, I would just like everyone to acknowledge the path we've been on and appreciate the hard work we have all done to keep ESO amazing. It takes a village to develop and operate a game like this, and that village absolutely includes everyone reading this right now. Thanks so much for everything you do for ESO.
See you in Tamriel!
