Earlier this year, Bethesda shut down its digitalHearthstone-like card game,The Elder Scrolls: Legends. Set during the Great War, this CCG was unique as it came accompanied with a picture-book-like story that filled in the gaps betweenOblivionandSkyrimthrough battles with AI opponents.
While a critical success, garnering an average of 80 on Metacritic, it struggled to foster a community, and Bethesda simply couldn’t justify the cost of maintaining the servers anymore. However, when it was shut down, even the offline elements were made unavailable, rendering huge parts of TES lore inaccessible outside of cutscene compilations on YouTube.
That means “The Fall of the Dark Brotherhood” is no longer available, a fascinating insight into what led to the Skyrim sanctuary.
Thankfully, fans are working to fix that. Four months ago,u/RenianVZannounced The Elder Scrolls: Legends Reborn, a community-led initiative to bring the card game back online. “I’ve been working on a server emulator project since the end of December [when the game was delisted],” they explained. “And wanted to post a brief intro for anybody interested in the progress. There’s obviously a fair bit of work and a long way to go, but it’s a glimmer of hope for the community.”
There’s Still No Word On A Release Date, Though
They’ve been sharing updates on their progress regularly in the months since, which they describe as “a ton of trial and error” as they try and piece the servers back together. Some have voiced concern that Bethesda might take issue with the project (though that seems unlikely givenit has openly supported the fan-made Oblivion remake despite its official remaster), but that hasn’t dissuaded u/RenianVZ and the rest of the team. “I’d be surprised if it was ever a blip on their radar,” he said.
While the game has been delisted, it was free-to-play, so there are still ways to download it on Steam.
Their most recent update was posted over the weekend,a 24-minute videoshowing off a working multiplayer match with randomly-generated decks. It’s a huge leap from the error box you normally see when booting up the game, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. When asked if there’s “Any forecast on when we might see a release,” u/RenianVZ replied, “Not yet, we are still plugging away as much as possible.”
Nevertheless, this is a huge win for game preservation, bringing back an underrated Elder Scrolls spin-off mere months after it was taken offline. With some of the most important 4th Era narrative beats in the series outside of Skyrim, it would’ve been a shame to leave Legends behind so soon, but hopefully it finds new life when this fan project launches, whenever that might be.
