Our author Lucas has taken a look at the online card game The Elder Scrolls Legends and is pleasantly surprised by the developers’ attention to detail. Can the game still inspire in 2018?
In addition to the market leader Hearthstone, the grandfather Magic The Gathering also vies for players’ attention. However, The Elder Scrolls Legends stands out from the crowd of card games due to fully voiced campaigns and a great atmosphere.
What is Elder Scrolls Legends? Legends is an online card game. You and your opponent each have health points. The player who reduces their opponent’s health points to zero first wins. To achieve this goal, you use a large number of different cards that you combine in a self-created deck. For beginners, Legends also offers pre-made decks. The Elder Scrolls Legends is essentially Hearthstone in the style of The Elder Scrolls, but much more.
Elder Scrolls Legends captivates with breathtaking atmosphere
A joy for Elder Scrolls fans: As soon as players start The Elder Scrolls Legends, they are greeted by familiar music. The Elder Scrolls Legends sounds like a classic The Elder Scrolls game, thanks to beautiful music pieces from Skyrim and Morrowind alongside new compositions that were recorded specifically for The Elder Scrolls Legends.
Another contribution to the great atmosphere comes from the beautiful animations of the card effects. Whether you manifest ice shards, throw fireballs, or summon Daedra from the realm of oblivion, you feel like a player who defends himself against the legendary namesakes from the Elder Scrolls games. The developer change from Studio Dire Wolf to the new Studio Sparkypants is meant to breathe new life into the game. The UI has already been revamped by the new developer.
A tactical card game with plenty of variety
Legends is beginner-friendly: When you start The Elder Scrolls Legends for the first time, you won’t be confronted with building a deck right away.
Instead, the game tries to teach you some gameplay mechanics through a fully voiced campaign. It doesn’t matter if you’ve previously played similar card games, like Hearthstone or Magic The Gathering. The tutorial campaign takes its time to explain every detail to you in several matches.
The unique features: The Elder Scrolls Legends plays similarly to Hearthstone and Co., but expands the basic framework with clever mechanics of its own. In The Elder Scrolls Legends, you always fight on two separate battlefields, the “Lanes.” Each lane has passive effects that affect all cards on that lane.
Usually, a lane is in the “shadows” and creatures there are concealed in the first round. However, there are also lane effects that raise fallen creatures as undead or give bonuses to selected types of creatures.
Lanes offer more tactics: Only cards that are on the same lane can battle each other. However, a player can be attacked from any lane. If you neglect a lane, your opponent can exploit that weakness and defeat you.
It does no good if your strongest blockers are in one lane and the opponent has their powerful attackers lined up in the other. Changing lanes is only possible with certain card effects. Tactical plays around the two lanes are crucial to triumph over strong opponents.
Additionally, each player has five runes, which are destroyed when you receive certain amounts of damage. Each rune allows you to draw a card. Certain cards drawn in this manner can be played directly for free in the opponent’s turn. The rune mechanic even gives players a chance to win when they have fewer health points than their opponent.
Once you’ve completed your first battles in the campaign “The Forgotten Hero,” you can compete against your friends, other players, or the AI.
Travel across Tamriel and beyond
Campaigns let you experience adventures: Another feature of The Elder Scrolls Legends are the fully voiced campaigns in English. Beautiful animations tell various stories in Tamriel.
The familiar freedom of choice from the games is also present in The Elder Scrolls Legends. Time and again, you must make decisions in the free campaign “The Forgotten Hero” and will be rewarded with a suitable card at the end.
Since the card to be obtained is shown before the decision, each player must decide for themselves whether to listen to their heart or choose the better card.
Besides the campaign “The Forgotten Hero”, players can also confront powerful opponents in the paid campaigns “The Fall of the Dark Brotherhood” and “Return to the City of Clockworks.”
Thanks to better rewards at higher difficulty levels, the campaigns motivate regular repetition.
Campaigns present you with new challenges: In the campaigns, the familiar gameplay is repeatedly spiced up with new elements. In “The Forgotten Hero,” you have to confront a band of pirates in the stormy sea. The wind ensures that a random opponent card switches lanes every round. In solo mode, such special effects are the norm, and each match plays out differently.
Each campaign consists of several chapters, which in turn consist of many individual matches. Just for the beautifully narrated stories and the good English voice acting, it’s worth playing The Elder Scrolls Legends.
What does it cost? “The Fall of the Dark Brotherhood” costs €19.99. “Return to the City of Clockworks” is available for €17.99. Both expansions can also be purchased with in-game currency, gold, which you can grind by playing diligently.
Legends offers PvE and PvP content
In addition to the campaigns, Legends offers a wealth of other content. There is something for both PvE and PvP players.
- Puzzles test your knowledge of the game mechanics. The game presents you with various predefined problems. For successfully completing them, you will be rewarded with various items.
- In practice matches, you can face the AI at three different difficulty levels.
New content every month: Players of The Elder Scrolls Legends can look forward to new cards every month. Additionally, the game is regularly supplemented with large new expansions that implement new cards and mechanics into the game.
The latest addition to the game was eleven new cards from the FrostSpark set. These cards expand the deck possibilities of the game and combine well with the existing cards. The next major expansion of the game has also already been announced. It will revolve around the insane, cheese-loving Daedra prince Sheogorath.
Unleash your creativity with your own decks
Legends allows for creative deck ideas: When assembling your decks, Legends gives you quite a bit of freedom. You select up to two attributes from five different ones. Then only cards of those two attributes and neutral cards are shown to you, which you can add to your deck.
The cards can be conveniently searched by magic cost (the mana in Legends) or keywords like “Orc” or “Guardian.” Your deck can contain between 50 to 100 cards. A diagram gives you insight into the composition of the deck. You can exchange excess cards for soul stones. With soul stones, you can create any cards you may be missing.
Each race has advantages: In addition, there are the typical races from the TES series that you can summon as creatures. Each of them has a unique style. Here are some examples:
- Imperials rely on swarming the opponent with numerous units to overwhelm them through tactical superiority.
- Redguards rely on quick attacks and equipment.
- Khajiit have all sorts of nasty theft effects and steal health, energy, and cards from you when they break through.
- Orcs only feel comfortable when they have even more Orcs around. Then everyone gets better!
- Dark Elves like to sacrifice themselves to achieve more wicked effects.
- High Elves are skilled in the arts of magic and try to control the battlefield with magic.
- Nords rely on their strength and try to break through the ranks of enemies.
- Wood Elves focus on weakening the opponent and then exploiting that.
You can freely mix the races in your deck if they fit the chosen attributes.
Certain cards expand the number of possible attributes of your deck. For example, the deck theme “House of Dagoth” allows you to build decks with three attributes.
Legends is also playable on mobile
Especially on mobile or tablet, The Elder Scrolls Legends is fun. The individual matches can easily be played in between on the bus or train. If you don’t close the app, you can continue your started PvE match for a while. However, in the test, I was thrown out of the existing game after more than 90 minutes of pause.
How much battery does the game consume? Battery consumption is moderate. However, it’s advisable to take a power bank along. Playing cards, navigating through menus, or building decks with fingers or stylus works intuitively after a short adjustment period.
Especially with a poor internet connection (Wi-Fi or mobile data), players must expect very long waiting times. As a last resort, the app may need to be restarted.
This is what Lucas thinks about The Elder Scrolls Legends
The Elder Scrolls Legends expands the known gameplay mechanics of games like Magic The Gathering and Hearthstone with new game mechanics. Nevertheless, Legends remains true to the basic principle of online card games and is therefore quickly learnable for both new and old players.
Legends offers great campaigns for single players but also has something for fans of PvP game modes. The art style of the game cards and the animations are a visual delight. Fans of Elder Scrolls will immediately recognize countless details.
The individual effects of the cards allow for interesting combinations of plays. Especially while traveling, I was able to fit in short matches repeatedly, and over time, the “just one more round” phenomenon occurred.
I recommend The Elder Scrolls Legends to all players looking for a new mobile card game. If you’ve already experienced some adventures in other games from the TES series, Legends is particularly interesting.
The Elder Scrolls Legends is available for Android, iOS, PC, and Mac. It is also set to be released for PS4, Xbox One, and Switch.
