Greater Dangers Means Greater Rewards with Challenge Difficulty

Tailor your overland and quest experience via Season Zero’s new Challenge Difficulty system.

Choose Your Challenge

If you want to make your adventures in Tamriel more dangerous and rewarding, Season Zero’s new Challenge Difficulty system (arriving when Update 50 goes live on June 8) is your opportunity to customize your ESO combat experience.

“Challenge Difficulty is probably THE most-requested feature from players,” explains Mike Finnigan, ESO ’s Associate Design Director. “The goal is for us to give players a way to tailor their experience in overland and story content to their skill level.” A completely opt-in system, Challenge Difficulty allows you to select between four unique difficulty options, each increasing the danger while also increasing the rewards!

• Adventurer

• • This is the current and default Challenge Difficulty. There is no associated effect, and all rewards are as they are now. If you like how Overland currently operates, then this is the difficulty that is right for you.

• Seasoned

• • You take 100% more damage from monsters and do 50% less damage. You receive 50% more gold and 20% more experience from monsters.

• Master

• • You take 300% more damage from monsters and do 65% less damage. You receive 100% more gold and 75% more experience from monsters.

• Vestige

• • The most difficult option at launch. You take 600% more damage from monsters and deal 80% less damage. You receive 200% more gold and 100% more experience from monsters.

To access and select your difficulty option, open your character’s Character Sheet and make your choice. You can switch back and forth at any time. No matter which option you choose, you can still play with anybody else around since you aren’t separated from your fellow players simply because you have chosen differently.

Familiar Foes, New Difficulty

Your choice has an impact on the challenge level (and rewards) of many in-game encounters, including:

• Overland encounters

• • Such as roaming monsters, world bosses, world events, etc…

• Quest story instances

• Zone delves

• Zone public dungeons

Steam post image Your challenge, your choice! Note that four-player Dungeons, Trials, Arenas, the Infinite Archive, PvP game modes, and the Night Market are not impacted by your Challenge Difficulty choice. “PVP, Dungeons, Trials, and Arenas generally have their own bespoke difficulty,” says Finnigan. “So, we wanted to provide a way for players to augment other areas in a similar fashion but with the caveat that we want to make sure players can still play together.”

Future Improvements

When designing this first iteration of the system, the team wanted to ensure that Challenge Difficulty was both accessible and rewarding while allowing for future improvements. “We wanted to make sure we provided players with some rewards, but we also wanted to initially keep the system light to ensure it’s adopted,” says Finnigan. “We plan to look at layering on rewards in the future in controlled spaces to punch it up.” As always, the team paid close attention to the community’s early reaction to the system on the Public Test Server. “The feedback has been great, and it directly led us to rebalance the numbers a bit. In particular, we received feedback about the Seasoned and Master options not quite being restrictive enough, so we took another pass at the damage players do to make them feel more appropriate.”

Challenge Yourself

With the new Challenge Difficulty system, you can find danger and excitement in every corner of Tamriel. What level of challenge will you try first? Are you excited to explore a more dangerous ESO? Let us know via Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook. The Challenge Difficulty system is part of Season Zero and arrives with Update 50 on June 8.