The Elder Scrolls: Blades, a free-to-play mobile RPG released in 2020, will permanently shut down on June 30, 2026. This comes after another Elder Scrolls mobile title, 2017’s digital collectible card game The Elder Scrolls: Legends, was permanently shut down in January 2025 (though development on Legends was halted in 2019). Once Blades shuts down, that will leave management sim The Elder Scrolls: Castles, which was officially released in 2024, as the only remaining Elder Scrolls mobile game.
It’s a disappointing end for a game that had lots of potential but, according to players, was bogged down by excessive wait times and microtransactions. In the game, a destroyed town serves as the player character’s home base, and your goal is to restore the town by completing quests and clearing enemy-filled dungeons. It was missing a lot of the Elder Scrolls‘ signature elements, like an open world, exploration, and unique and memorable NPCs and enemies.
Still, Kotaku‘s Zack Zwiezen praised the early access version of the game, writing that the core gameplay loop was “fun and satisfying,” but acknowledged that some players would find it too pared down for an Elder Scrolls title and the wait times could be a dealbreaker for some users. Elsewhere, reviews were largely negative, and it seems like the game never managed to build a significant player base, even with its additional roguelike dungeon crawler and PvP modes.
Even though Blades was a flawed game, it’s frustrating that it’s being shut down entirely instead of preserved. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete, flawed though its transition and implementation was, at least proved that it is possible to remove the microtransactions from a free-to-play game and turn it into a regular, paid, offline game that users can still access. It’s a shame that Bethesda chose not to do something similar for The Elder Scrolls: Blades; without those predatory microtransactions, it might have finally been able to shine.
