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.
Still, it raked in some cash when it first dropped and presumably had its fans, so I might have given it a go had it ever come to PC. That day hasn’t come, and now, it probably never will: as user Avian81 shared on Reddit, an in-game banner and notice on the Nintendo eShop declare that it will permanently shut down on June 30.
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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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