Elder Scrolls mobile spinoff Blades is shutting down this summer after eight years, but at least all its store items are ultra-cheap now

In the end, it never made it to PC.

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Whenever I need a reminder of how long I've been impatiently waiting for the next mainline Elder Scrolls game, I think back to how excited I got when I first heard the premise for The Elder Scrolls: Blades .

A dungeon crawling, town-building spinoff with roguelike and PvP modes?

Count me in, right up until I saw some gameplay and it was a pretty meh-looking phone game with oodles of in-app purchases.

Until then, all its store items will be available for a single point of currency, and players will get a free bundle of both gems and sigils "so you can enjoy all the content Blades has to offer." The announcement ends by saying "Thank you for playing and we hope you have enjoyed your time in Blades."
It's the second Elder Scrolls game to call it quits in a little over a year: The digital card game Legends shut down in January 2025 after a half-decade without updates.

While that game has attracted fan attempts at a revival , time will tell if Blades inspires the same fervor in its community.

If nothing else, Legends had some really dope card art any Elder Scrolls fan can enjoy— Caius Cosades never looked so damn shredded.

The death of Legends might have been writing on the wall for Blades, but an 8-year run is arguably still impressive for a cross-platform online game.

It's hard to guess at why it stayed up after the card game went down—maybe it was cheaper to maintain, Bethesda wanted a buffer between bouts of bad news, or the right person just remembered Blades existed—but it's still disappointing things are ending this way, with no attempt at long-term preservation for the game in the form of an offline-only version.

You can't say a lot for An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire, but at least you can still play it .

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Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid.

As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica.

Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples.

When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat.

Any day now...

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