Elder Scrolls: Blades has just announced a closed beta period is incoming, according to Bethesda.
It’s been a while since anyone has heard any new details about the newest Elder Scrolls title from Bethesda, this week all of that changed. Since the new title was delayed into 2019 last year, Bethesda has been pretty quiet about progress on the new mobile game. We saw a few glimpses at previous E3 showings and other events, but not much else has been revealed.
The game takes a quest-based adventure structure where you take a custom avatar on missions for loot, and then use that loot to build and customize your own personal city.
The core gameplay loop seems to focus on a hybrid RPG and city-builder experience, which leads to believe that Elder Scrolls: Blades will be like Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire reskinned to look like The Elder Scrolls, although I hope I’m wrong, as those city-builder war games are notorious for being grindy and laden with microtransactions. We’ll just have to wait and see what becomes of this speculation when Elder Scrolls: Blades releases. Bethesda did find great success with Fallout Shelter, so let’s hope they manage to recreate that magic in this new game.
The beta itself will include the full game, without any restrictions, so that testers can experience and debug the entire experience. The beta will be under NDA and will only be available on iOS users. So only a select few people will be able to get their hands on this content.
Once the beta period ends though, the real wait begins as Bethesda readies the Early Access period. Yes, you read that right, an Early Access period for a mobile title. Said Early Access, and presumably the full game, will be available on both iOS and Android, although dates past the Closed Beta have not been revealed yet. The Early Access period is set to begin Spring 2019, following the Closed Beta which has no set release date as of yet, but will probably kick off in mere weeks.
Source: Bethesda
