Elder Scrolls Online Cyrodiil Champions: Can This Test Help The Zone Become Better?

Almost all MMORPGs have an open continent as a carrier for the entire game story. For Elder Scrolls Online, this continent is the vast Tamriel. Tamriel consists of 9 provinces, which were ruled by the empire in the past, but this unified situation gradually disintegrated in the second century of the fourth era. Now the 9 provinces belong to different races and forces in Tamriel.

Among them, Cyrodiil, because it is located at the core of the entire continent, used to be the capital of the empire, and it is still the main habitat of humans now-all this is for the game story level. In fact, different provinces also play different roles in ESO’s gameplay. For example, Cyrodiil is a zone that allows players to engage in large-scale PVP battles outside of regular content.

However, it is precisely because of this function that Cyrodiil has to carry many players to enter, so that the zone has long had serious server performance issues. However, after entering 2025, this situation is expected to change through a new test, that is, Cyrodiil Champions.

Introduction To Cyrodiil

As one of the main provinces of ESO, Cyrodiil is not only the capital of Tamriel but also the central battlefield of Three Banners War. In the past, Aldmeri Dominion, Daggerfall Covenant, and Ebonheart Pact fought for control of Imperial City, the Ruby Throne, and Cyrodiil.

On the other hand, when the game was just launched in 2014, Cyrodiil was well received by players and industry insiders as a large-scale open world PVP area. Here you can be a member in one of the three factions in the game, and besiege each other’s territory with hundreds of players from other factions, and earn ESO Gold and even other more precious resources through endless and free battles.

How To Fight In This Zone?

Generally speaking, as long as you reach level 10 in the game, you can enter Cyrodiil and join one of the multiple campaigns. Then in the campaign, if your character is below level 50, the campaign will raise your character’s attributes to the same level as level 50 to eliminate the level difference between players, but it is still recommended to start Cyrodiil campaign after reaching level 50, because your gear and skill level will be better at this time.

During the campaign, you need to fight with players of the same faction and real players of the enemy faction for control of Cyrodiil. There are multiple campaigns in Cyrodiil, but your character can only be assigned to one main campaign and one guest campaign (with different amounts of rewards available). If you want to access other campaigns, this requires 15,000 ESO Gold.

Cyrodiil’s Flaws

Although the campaign gameplay in Cyrodiil and the huge PVP scale it brought made Elder Scrolls Online unparalleled for a while shortly after its launch, the zone soon had many bugs due to the large number of players it had to bear at the same time and the complexity of the entire underlying game, such as poor frame rate and extremely delayed combat, which caused the core highlight PVP siege gameplay to always fail to work properly.

The most direct way to solve these flaws may be to reduce the scale of PVP combat, but then Cyrodiil will undoubtedly lose its greatest value. The only way is to upgrade technology continuously to solve Cyrodiil’s server overload problem. Over the past decade, ESO developers have been working hard on this, and with the arrival of the eleventh year, this embarrassing situation may be expected to change.

What Is Cyrodiil Champions?

Cyrodiil Champions is actually a public test for Cyrodiil bugs that will start running on ESO’s live PC servers on March 24, 2025, and is expected to last for a week to the 31st. This test event will simplify your character’s class skills while retaining all large-scale sieges in Cyrodiil and disable more advanced combat benefits, including passive abilities and armor types.

This simplification will undoubtedly greatly change the class capabilities in Cyrodiil. For example, your character will not be able to cause damage and heal at the same time, which was possible before. In addition, some unnecessary modeling in the battle scenes is expected to be simplified or directly cancelled.

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Although you may doubt whether this approach is only a temporary solution, the development team said that on the one hand, PVE and PVP modes should be strictly distinguished because they provide different experiences, so on this basis, making PVP more distinctive through simplification is a necessary and bold attempt.

On the other hand, simplification will actually be more friendly to players, especially if you are a novice who is afraid of fighting against real people. Simplifying the skill operation in the PVP mode may make you more willing to enter Cyrodiil to experience related campaigns.

The Significance Of Cyrodiil Champions

Since the end of 2024, Elder Scrolls Online has announced and started to implement a number of new initiatives in the hope that you will see a completely different ESO, and the emergence of Cyrodiil Champions is undoubtedly one of the changes.

If the feedback from this test is good enough in the end, it will not only mean that Cyrodiil defects that have troubled players and the development team for many years have finally been solved, but also represent that in 2025, the year when a new era of ESO begins, the game has made another new and representative progress.

In short, Cyrodiil Champions is very worth looking forward to. If you want to know whether Cyrodiil campaign gameplay will get better in the future through it, start to experience it on March 24!