Remember The Elder Scrolls: Blades?

Bethesda’s mobile RPG could have been so much more

Nintendo Switch Screenshot taken by the author.

Nearly four years ago, in the summer of 2018, Bethesda Game Studios Director Todd Howard announced The Elder Scrolls: Blades at the now-defunct E3 gaming expo. Building on the wild but brief success of their free-to-play Fallout Shelter game, Blades aimed to look and play somewhat close to a “true” Elder Scrolls game, but stripped down into a lean loot-grinding Diablo-esque experience.

The game was planned for a wide multi-platform release, hitting iOS and Android, as well as consoles, PCs, and VR headsets. This release plan made its last-generation visual design more reasonable; better to target the lowest common denominator when you’re targeting a wide swath of gaming hardware and phones.

I waited with anticipation. And waited. And waited! The game finally launched in early access for mobile devices in the spring of the following year — and that’s when the problems started. Did it live up to the early marketing hype? In some ways, absolutely. It had a surprisingly sumptuous fantasy land to hack and slash across as your own custom character, in the style of the legendary games before it. It had fun new combat gameplay and lots of overlapping systems. It also seemed to deliver on having more content than the average mobile game, with a smart blend…