I think people felt overly-harsh about it being called a "season" or "pass" based on other games that use those names, when in reality, not much changed. Which was described from the start.

Personally, I wish they'd use a narrative word like Saga for new content bundles. Saga of the Worm Cult could be a year long or 6 months, while still conveying a sense of story and time.

If I buy something I want the entire content.
I played another game that went to this type of setup and it came across as if they were "coding on the fly" as the game progressed.

So I dropped my ESO+ sub and have not purchased this new season content.

There's plenty to do in the game without it for me.

Anilahation wrote: »

Some significant content of games are stapled by actual names of the product.

Wrath of the Lich King
The Taken King
Orsinium
Season of chaos
Heavensward
Path of Fire.

I get the offical name is season of the worm cult but on storefront it is content pass 2025 and it just poorly resonates with potential consumer.

I think this is a really underestimated point and that you are completely right. This terminology is off-putting pseudo gamer-lingo. The fact that several successful modern games have "passes" must have lead people to conclude passes make games successful - whereas I have not met a single person that likes what such a pass implies: temporary content or temporary access.
People are becoming numb to the barrage of FOMO-based attention grabs and I think passes are a failing system.
Even if the content stays the same, this is a poor way of marketing it.

tsaescishoeshiner wrote: »

I think people felt overly-harsh about it being called a "season" or "pass" based on other games that use those names, when in reality, not much changed. Which was described from the start.

Personally, I wish they'd use a narrative word like Saga for new content bundles. Saga of the Worm Cult could be a year long or 6 months, while still conveying a sense of story and time.

If you go to the DLC page in the crown store, they've added titles to DLC/Chapter phases that weren't originally marketed to players in that way. It's perplexing, as if one hand isn't speaking to the other.

In my opinion, it makes that DLC page much easier to follow for a new player, the stories contained within them follow a connective narrative. I'm pretty sure one "saga" even includes 2 chapters (I'm not logging in to find out), showing they're perfectly comfortable detaching from the "year 2025" type of naming convention.

Maybe after 2025 they'll take the same approach and rename this year's content. This was a "transitional year", how fitting to use a super corporate title like 2025 content pass for what amounts to leftover content they released in an unfinished mess while they shift gears for 2026 and beyond. We all know by now that 2025's content pass was just a minor chapter they chopped up and delayed to avoid making any Q4 DLC/Zone.

Plus, they've said numerous times that their pipeline is often 12-18 months in advance so it makes sense that when everything happened with Microsoft, their second game, leadership, and layoffs, that we we're in for a rocky transition.

Personally, I think they will go back to fun names while still using the content pass model, but as they said, it won't be locked to the previous structure of; Q1 Dungeons, Q2 Major Zone, Q3 Dungeons, and Q4 Minor Zone. I'm excited to see what they cook up for the teased Dark Brotherhood revisit, and I hope it's condensed into 6 months (2 updates) with active abilities added to the existing line for example... just something other than 2 dungeons and a big zone with easy mobs and a 5 hour story. Please.

Ishtarknows wrote: »

I was browsing through the menu and realised that Season of the Worm Cult part one includes gear sets from both sides of Solstice. Does that mean 2026 will be Season of the Worm Cult part two?

No, it's just because they artificially chopped up our usual chapter zone in two, they probably never intially intended the West/East and part 1/2 nonsense so there is some confusing elements to the whole thing. We were able to access the part 2 sets on PTS for U46 like 6 months before it was ever accessible.

My money is on whatever the original Q4 content was, has been pushed back to 2026 with more developement time allocated to it, possibly as a mini content pass zone with hopefully an arena.

I think they deliberately change the names with buzzword terms to purposefully confuse the customer, so that you don't know exactly what you're buying on purpose. You're less likely to buy things ironically if you know exactly what it is you're getting. Thats why games have multiple currencies and premium currencies on top of that.

That said, Zos is one of the least egregious examples of this nowadays, and I believe honestly Microsoft is the one mainly pushing the season pass <snip>. Not that Bethesda/Zenimax were above this sort of thing before, but lately Microsoft has been moving very aggressively to make up for all the money they've been spending on billion dollar gaming studios.

They should know then that people will assume changes like this is to blind the customer to their intended direction and doesn't build good faith, we've seen too many times the increased monetization of games once "season pass" or "battle pass" etc is introduced.

Not everything from other games being brought here is bad, but the season pass idea to hide that the year is only getting one zone for instance, definitely not wanted.

<snipped for Cursing/Profanity>

Maybe this would need a dedicated thread but one issue 2025 premium content pass has shown is that, for the first time, buying the premium edition of the game included BOTH the June DLC and the November DLC.
Problem is: for all previous years said premium had not included the November DLCs.
So who buys the 2025 Premium content pass gets everything from this year but only half stories from those "year long" era.
It's sad, confusing, and it doesn't make sense.
It's good how it worked this year in this regard, but why can't it be applied to past content?

Anyway, agree with OP that naming it so lowers the epicness and appeal.

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

They should know then that people will assume changes like this is to blind the customer to their intended direction and doesn't build good faith, we've seen too many times the increased monetization of games once "season pass" or "battle pass" etc is introduced.

>

I will admit I am not a huge battle pass enjoyer, but I do enjoy the way passes have been done on League of Legends and Marvel RIvals.

league doing the opposite of giving you the majority of the items in the pass, but paywalling the big "skin" choices and gacha currency.

Marvel Rivals letting you keep the battle pass forever, so you don't feel force to finish it, and then they implement smaller passes that you can work on as well that you can also BUY to keep up forever.

In just over a month they're going to have another problem: people confused that it's 2026 and they can only see the 2025 pass, which obviously they shouldn't buy because surely it won't work in 2026 or they wouldn't have put 2025 in the name, but then where is the 2026 version?

I know it sounds silly, but I guarentee you it will happen. One of the best things I did in my old job was set up a system to 'refresh' all the user guides on the 2nd January (couldn't be the 1st because it's a bank holiday). Literally all that changed was the 'last updated' date had the current year, and I thought it would be suspicious that they all updated at once, but it saved so much time over trying to explain to people that if they'd look at the whole date the instructions were last updated just over a month ago, and nothing about the process has changed since then so there's no need to wait for another update. Even after reassuring them it would work and they wouldn't get in trouble for using the "old version" half the time they'd decide they'd rather wait for 'up to date' instructions instead of going ahead with their planned activities.