Summary
- The Elder Scrolls: Legends has officially shut down.
- The free-to-play card game is now completely inaccessible, unable to be downloaded or played.
- No reason for the game’s shutdown has been offered, but server maintenance and a dwindling playerbase may have contributed to Bethesda’s decision.
The Elder Scrolls: Legends has officially shut down as of January 30, 2025, and can no longer be downloaded or played. In late 2024, Bethesda announced that The Elder Scrolls: Legends would be ending its run in early 2025, blindsiding fans of the long-running digital card game.
Initially released in 2017, The Elder Scrolls: Legends was a collectible card game for PC and mobile devices inspired by the countless characters and creatures found in Bethesda’s legendary role-playing series. The title’s story saw the player character face off against the High Elf Naarifin, who had invaded Cyrodiil and announced plans to unleash the Daedra to invade the surrounding lands. While the main game was free-to-play, Legends released eight expansion sets during its lifespan, all of which could be purchased separately. Despite earning generally positive reviews over the past eight years, the game has now met its unfortunate fate.
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In November 2024, Bethesda announced that The Elder Scrolls: Legends would be shutting down on January 30, 2025. As of today, the game is no longer available to download. Additionally, as the servers have been fully shut down and Legends offers no offline play, the card game is now completely inaccessible. The Elder Scrolls: Legends was delisted from Steam following the announcement of the game’s imminent closure last November, and while the title had only seen concurrent player counts in the mid-hundreds in the months leading up to its erasure, some fans are bound to be having a sad day. While Bethesda hasn’t announced a reason for the game’s shutdown, a shrinking playerbase is the likely cause, along with the cost of managing its servers.
As players bid farewell to The Elder Scrolls: Legends, many are looking ahead to the future of the series as a whole. A teaser trailer for The Elder Scrolls 6 was released way back in 2018, but few details have emerged since, leaving many to wonder when the title will see the light of day. According to the game’s director, Todd Howard, the game would enter active production after the development team was finished with Starfield. Additionally, leaked documents claim that the game won’t be released until at least 2026, though this date seems unlikely.
Despite the closure of The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Bethesda has seen plenty of success in recent months, notably with the massively successful launch of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle for PC and Xbox Series X/S. It was recently announced that the game had surpassed four million players, with this number expected to grow following the title’s release for PS5 during the first half of 2025.