Elder Scrolls Online loot box items will soon be earnable with in-game currency

The forthcoming Update 30 for The Elder Scrolls Online, "Tentatively scheduled to launch in June", will add daily and weekly challenges called Endeavors. Completing these tasks will give players rewards like gold, experience, and a new currency called Seals of Endeavor that can be exchanged for items previously only available in crown crates—loot boxes that cost real-world money. 

These endeavors, of which there are over 60, are the kind of tasks players will already be doing. Some examples given in the latest Elder Scrolls Online blog post are:

• Steal or pickpocket items
• Complete quests
• Defeat enemies using Class or Weapon abilities
• Sell items to vendors
• Craft different types of items
• Defeat different types of monsters
• Harvest resource nodes

Endeavors won't have to be activated or handed in—when one is complete you'll get a notification and the rewards will appear directly in your account. There will be separate caps on the number of daily and weekly endeavors you can do, but no limit on how many Seals of Endeavor you can save up. They'll be account-wide rather than bound to the character who earned them, and can be spent on crown crate items like cosmetics, pets, consumables, and mounts. 

As Eurogamer mentions, this change brings Elder Scrolls Online into compliance with the loot box policy of Zenimax's new owner Microsoft, which states that "Items in loot boxes can always be earned through play. All items available through paid loot boxes in our games will also be available through unpaid opportunity by gameplay (i.e. grinding)."

Also coming to ESO in June is Blackwood, which adds new companion mechanics, a murder mystery plot, and a few things that hark back to Oblivion. We went hands-on with Blackwood earlier this week and came away pretty impressed.