The Elder Scrolls: Blades is for phones, but it'll come to PC one day
Fallout Shelter but Elder Scrolls
Before announcing The Elder Scrolls VI last night, Bethesda's Todd Howard started the The Elder Scrolls: Blades section of their E3 stream by talking about how many people Fallout Shelter had touched. He mentioned some figure in the millions about how many downloads it got, eliciting inevitable whoops from the crowd. It's probably passé to mock the things people whoop about at E3 at this point, but I haven't had the chance yet so here we are. Whoop.
Anyway! Howard started off on that tack because Blades is a free-to-play mobile-focused Elder Scrolls game about dungeoneering and town-building. It's coming to PC (and everything else) as well though, so let's have a looksy.
You can also find a summary over here, but here's the snippet where Howard describes the most important bits:
"Blades has several modes of play. First, the abyss: a roguelike experience where you can see how far you can go in an endless dungeon, and the Arena, where you will do battle 1 on 1 against other players. And the main mode: The town. This is the hub for your story and quests. You are a member of the Blades, the Empire's top agents. Forced into exile, you return home, to find your town destroyed, and need to rebuild it."
"Yes, Blades also features a town building mode. You'll decide what your town looks like, and be able to upgrade and decorate all of the individual elements in it. As your town levels up, you unlock new NPCs, quests and more. You can even visit your friend's towns."
It'll have cross-platform play, which leads Howard to talk about cheekily playing Blades in a meeting against someone at home who's wearing a Vive.
I don't think this one's for me. Bethasda's post about it on their website says that "Blades contains the many hallmarks Elder Scrolls fans enjoy from the franchise", then fails to list anything that's a particular selling point of the Elder Scrolls - just genero RPG stuff like "powerful magic" and "upgradable skills". I haven't played it, of course, but the combat doesn't look all that alluring either. It strikes me as a simplified version of Infinity Blade's, a mobile fighting game that's worth checking out if this looks like your thing.
That crowd whooping over the game being played in portrait mode is partly to blame for sapping my enthusiasm, but yeah, consider it sapped.
When's it out? "This fall, for free", though the initial release will only be for smaller screens than ours. You can sign up for early access shenanigans over here.