The Elder Scrolls Online News

Spread holiday cheer while enjoying bonus XP gains and seasonal rewards during this year’s New Life Festival.
[h2]Warm Wishes for a Happy Holiday[/h2]
The 2023 New Life Festival in-game event begins Thursday, December 21, 2023, at 10AM EST, and continues until Tuesday, January 9, 2024, at 10AM EST. During this year’s festivities, you can earn a variety of jolly rewards including New Life Boxes, XP boosts, Event Tickets, and more.

Find Breda in Eastmarch to begin

During the New Life Festival, you will automatically enjoy a 100% boost to XP gain whenever you log into the game, with no extra steps required! If you’d like to join the party and toast the passing of another year, complete the New Life Festival’s introductory quest and collect Breda’s Bottomless Mead Mug memento via the following steps:

1. Open the Crown Store and acquire the free quest, “The New Life Festival.”

• You can also pick up this quest by speaking with Breda at the New Life Festival tent in Eastmarch.
  • You can instantly transport yourself to Breda by using the portal located at any Impresario tent location.

Complete the introductory quest to receive the Breda’s Bottomless Mead Mug memento.

• You won’t need to acquire Breda’s Bottomless Mead Mug if you finished the quest during a previous year.

Enjoy your endless supply of winter spiced mead!
After wrapping up the event’s introductory quest, you’ll unlock 10 special New Life Festival daily quests: nine from Breda and one from Petronius Galenus. The pair will task you to travel across the vastness of Tamriel and share seasonal merriment with its denizens.
[h2]Good Deeds, Great Rewards[/h2]
Whenever you complete one of the 10 daily quests, you’ll be rewarded with a New Life Festival Box. Contained inside these seasonal cases is the chance to receive the following rewards:

• Assortments of alchemy crafting materials
• New Life Festival Toys:
  • Sword Swallower Kit
  • Juggling Knives
  • Fire-Breather’s Torches
  • Mudballs
• Wolfsbane Incense
• One of the following:
  • A Skinchanger motif page
  • New Life Festival Recipes
  • New Life Furnishings
  • Deep Winter Charity Writs
  • Imperial Charity Writs
• A chance for one of the following:
  • An Evergreen outfit style page
  • NEW A Morningstar Frostwear outfit style page
    • If you’ve already earned a Morningstar Frostwear page that day, an Evergreen outfit style page or a Nord Carved armor outfit style page will be given instead

Earn a new armor style
[h2]Impresario & Event Tickets[/h2]
The first New Life Festival daily quest you complete each day rewards three Event Tickets in addition to the reward box. You can earn up to a colossal 60 Event Tickets by the event’s end! Don’t forget that you can only ever hold up to 12 Event Tickets in your inventory at once.

During the New Life Festival, the Impresario will update her stock with the following items:

• All three Passion Dancer Blossom pet fragments
• All components for this year’s morphing collectibles:
  • Passion’s Muse personality
  • Meadowbreeze Memories skin
  • Passion Dancer Garment costume
• All three Hoardhunter Ursauk mount fragments
  • Blessed Honeycomb
  • Gilded and Dyed Saddle
  • Sorcerous Golden Ink
• Bound style pages for the following:
  • NEW Morningstar Frostwear pages
• New Life Festival Grab Bag
  • Mud Ball Pouch memento
  • Nordic Bather’s Towel costume
  • Colovian Fur Hood hat
  • Colovian Filigreed Hood hat
  • Sword-Swallower’s Blade memento
  • Juggler’s Knives memento
  • Fire-Breather’s Torches memento
  • Snowball Buddy pet
  • Powderwhite Coney pet
• Impresario Group Repair Kits
• Companion Guild Commendations

The New Life Festival is also your last chance to pick up the third fragment needed to construct this year’s final event Morphing Collectible, the Hoardhunter Ursauk mount!

The Hoardhunter Ursauk

Additionally, the Impresario’s colleague, Nenulaure the Indrik Vendor, has the following items available for purchase with Event Tickets:

• Nascent Indrik Feathers
• Pure Snow Indrik Berries
• Crimson Indrik Berries
• Frost-Light Indrik Pet
• Rosethorn Indrik Pet

Lastly, the Impresario’s Assistant is offering the following, which you can also acquire with Event Tickets:

• Unstable Morpholith fragments
  • Deadlands Flint
  • Rune-Etched Striker
  • Smoldering Bloodgrass Tinder
• Dagonic Quasigriff fragments
  • Smoke-Wreathed Gryphon Feather
  • Black Iron Bit
  • Bridle Black Iron Stirrups

[h2]Tamriel Rings in the New Year[/h2]
As this year draws to a close, you can send 2023 off in merry style during the New Life Festival and collect some special event rewards as you do. How do you plan to spend the holidays in ESO? Let us know and be sure to share any fun New Life-themed creations with us via X (Formerly Twitter), Instagram, or Facebook.

The New Life Festival in-game event begins this Thursday, December 21 at 10AM EST, and continues until Wednesday, January 9 at 10AM EST.

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!

Commemorate a decade of The Elder Scrolls Online and our amazing community with a special in-person event that kicks off our massive 10th Anniversary Celebration!

[h2]Celebrating 10 Amazing Years[/h2]
Next year, The Elder Scrolls Online will reach its 10th anniversary since it first launched on PC/Mac in April 2014. To celebrate this incredible milestone, we’re kicking off a massive 10th Anniversary Celebration in April.

During the celebration, we’ll look back on ESO’s history and celebrate the game itself, its dedicated group of developers, its passionate, ever-growing community, and its bright future.

Whether you’ve been a member of the #ESOFam since early beta, have recently begun your journey into Tamriel, or are looking for a new epic online roleplaying game—you won’t want to miss this incredible celebration. It all kicks off next year in Amsterdam!

[h2]Join Us in Amsterdam[/h2]
The fun begins next year with the first ESO 10-Year Celebration Event, a two-day in-person event we’re hosting at the SugarFactory just outside of Amsterdam, Netherlands, from Friday, April 5, until Saturday, April 6. You can grab your tickets now by visiting the official signup website below.

->Get Tickets

At the event, you can mix and mingle with your fellow ESO adventurers and developers while enjoying two days of fun. This will include developer panels and roundtable discussions (with some livestreamed), hands-on gameplay, food and drink, live music, community activities, and more. In addition, the April 2024 event will host our first-ever in-person ESO cosplay competition, so if you’ve got an amazing ESO costume in mind that you think the community will love and are planning to attend, get crafting!

We'll share more specifics on the event with the community in the future, so keep an eye out on elderscrollsonline.com and our social channels.

[h2]Celebrate ESO with Us![/h2]
We’re planning to make this the biggest in-person community event we’ve ever had, but it’s not the only one we plan to host during this massive anniversary celebration. There’s going to be a ton of special 10th Anniversary in-person events all over the globe throughout, including a big one in the United States in 2025.

Celebrate ESO’s anniversary with us!

Stay tuned for additional announcements in April 2024 when we unveil more.

Are you excited to celebrate 10 years of adventure in Tamriel’s Second Era with us? Let us know if you’re planning to make your way to the Netherlands for this initial event via X (Formerly Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook—we hope to see you there!

Hi All! We have a message from our Lead Combat Designer, Brian Wheeler, about our upcoming Cyrodiil Population Cap Testing, starting Dec. 6. See the message below:


Heyo all!

Over the course of the next few days, we will be running some tests in Cyrodiil where we’ll be periodically adjusting the population caps. The first realm being tested is PC EU on Wednesday, December 6. During this time, we will increase population caps and monitor throughout the day through prime-time hours; if all goes well, we will do the same on PC NA later in the week.

We encourage everyone willing to fight for their Alliance to hop into their respective Campaigns because throughout the testing period until December 12, everyone in Cyrodiil will earn Double AP!

Thanks in advance for joining this population test for Cyrodiil and enjoy the double AP while the test is active. See you on the field!

-Brian Wheeler