Elder Scrolls Online’s Longest-Running Issue Is The Target Of A New Play Test, But It’s Just A First Step

When The Elder Scrolls Online first launched in 2014, one of its biggest selling points was Cyrodiil: the MMORPG’s large scale, open-world PvP zone where hundreds of players across the game’s three factions could lay siege to each other’s territory. Cyrodiil was even a major positive note in GameSpot’s original Elder Scrolls Online review, with reviewer Kevin VanOrd calling developer ZeniMax Online’s MMO “at its best when the PvP action heats up” and its massive battles “good fun.”

Flash forward to shortly after ESO’s post-launch honeymoon period, and the cracks in Cyrodiil quickly began to show. The huge number of players, and the complexity of the underlying game as a whole, led to major server performance problems that the mode still struggles with today despite numerous attempts by ZeniMax Online to fix the situation. Playing Cyrodiil in 2025 means contending with poor frame rates and extremely laggy battles, ultimately making the PvP sieges unplayable for many–a sad state of affairs for what was once a key back-of-the-box feature. But that may be about to change thanks to Cyrodiil Champions, a new experimental test mode.

Cyrodiil Champions is an ambitious open test on ESO’s live PC servers running March 24-31 that ZeniMax Online is hoping will definitively identify the core problem behind the mode’s frustrating performance. This test campaign will keep all the large-scale siege battles Cyrodiil is known for but massively simplify class abilities and disable nearly everything else (passive abilities, armor types, stats, and more) in order to (hopefully) prove a point–that it is the sheer complexity of each player’s stats and abilities interacting with one another that is resulting in server-breaking performance issues, rather than poorly written code or bad server infrastructure.

“The number one goal for this test is to prove once and for all some of the performance debates we’ve been having internally,” ESO game director Rich Lambert said in an interview with GameSpot. “We win either way, right? We win if it goes off and it does exactly what we want and players love it. We win if it fails, because then we can go back to the drawing board and say, ‘Yep, it’s not that. So what is the actual problem?'”

Lambert said the team is constantly getting feedback about Cyrodiil, and it is one of the biggest complaints ZeniMax Online hears about ESO. For eight years, ESO has been on a yearly chapter release cycle (ESO’s version of expansions) that have added a large new zone alongside new story content and usually one larger feature, like NPC companions or ESO’s card game Tales of Tribute. In a blog from December 2024, studio director Matt Firor announced ESO would not receive a new chapter in 2025, with the team instead moving to a seasonal model consisting of smaller updates.

Firor said the team wanted to experiment more moving forward and outlined a number of ideas it has on how to improve ESO in the year ahead. He specifically called out the need to “seriously” address Cyrodiil performance and said the team had set an “ambitious” goal to see it return to the hundreds of concurrent players the mode supported shortly after launch in 2014.

Cyrodiil Champions is the solution ZeniMax Online has come up with, despite it still being in its early stages and far from a fully fleshed out feature. Lambert said the team decided on this route back in October, with the goal of putting together a test version quickly to prove the concept.

For Lambert’s part, he likens the ambition behind the Cyrodiil Champions test to that of the game’s 2016 One Tamriel update, which dramatically transformed ESO by removing faction-restricted zones and made it so all of the game’s quests and enemies would scale alongside players.

“We want to change,” Lambert said. “We want to move forward. We want to spice things up. In my brain, Cyrodiil Champions is on the same level of crazy as One Tamriel was when we did that way back in the day, and that completely changed our game for the better. I think that’s what Cyrodiil Champions could be, and we want to do more of that stuff going forward as well.”

The test will dramatically alter class abilities while in Cyrodiil. Whereas many abilities can normally do damage and heal, or damage and crowd-control targets, or hit a large number of targets at once, that won’t be the case in Cyrodiil Champions. An ability, like the Templar’s Javelin, that usually does damage and knocks down opponents will instead just do the knockdown, or abilities that normally heal and deal damage will now do one or the other. Some abilities may deal damage to a reduced number of targets. It’s all being done in the name of server performance, and pinpointing what, precisely, is causing Cyrodiil’s performance woes.

Lead combat and PvP designer Brian Wheeler said doing a “hard separation” of PvE and PvP abilities is something the team has discussed for a long time, and that by removing extra layers from each ability, the team can finally hone in on Cyrodiil’s performance issues. He said he knows it’s a dramatic shift for the game.

“Engineering efforts have kind of gone as far as they can possibly go,” Wheeler said. “At this point, it’s on design. It’s on us to look at abilities and go, ‘Does this really need to do all the crap that it’s doing?'”

Even if the test is a success on a technical level, Lambert said continuing to expand and build out Cyrodiil Champions isn’t a sure bet. It all depends on how players respond as to what will come next.

“The internal playtests have been really, really positive,” Lambert said. “Time-to-kill has gone up, so you’re not getting two-or-three-shotted. There are builds, the really persnickety builds on live, the really tanky guys that you just can’t do any damage to, a lot of that stuff is gone. It’s just a really cool, welcoming, easy-to-pick-up game mode now. Which is really cool. Again, it’s not a fully fleshed out feature, so there’s going to be some warts and what not in there but we knew that going in. We chose to do that so we could get it out quick, and not spend two years and then find out, ‘Oh, well that was actually not going to solve anything.’ We are making a conscious effort on what we are focused on and why we are doing it, and hopefully players will like it as much as we have in our playtests.”

Should the test not go as expected, Wheeler said it will still give the team further direction on how to solve the problem of Cyrodiil, something he said he’s been “clamoring for” for a decade. And whatever comes next, whether it’s additional Cyrodiil Champions tests that continue to bring the feature to full-realization or something else entirely, Wheeler said ZeniMax Online will always look to keep what fans love about Cyrodiil intact.

“We know that Cyrodiil is a unique experience that doesn’t really exist in other MMOs,” Wheeler said. “Regardless of where we go with Cyrodiil, that is something that is still going to be a core tenant. The keep battles, that fight, this feeling of grand scale, this feeling of war…The unique thing about Cyrodiil is the sandboxy warfare that it has, and whatever we do, we are going to do what we can to keep that intact and having that vibe.”

Those who want to try out Cyrodiil Champions for themselves can play the experimental Cyrodiil campaign in ESO from March 24-31 and score in-game rewards via a new Golden Pursuits reward track. While the test is only on PC, console players will also be able to participate in certain activities to earn rewards for the duration of the test.