We might still have a long time to wait before we hear anything about The Elder Scrolls 6, but there is a new series game releasing soon. The Elder Scrolls: Castles is a mobile title in the vein of Fallout Shelter that’ll release on iOS and Android.
Bethesda revealed Thursday that the mobile title is launching globally on September 10. Preregistration is now available on the App Store and Google Play Store.
In Castles, you’ll play the right hand of a ruler who has to manage a castle. A lot of the other gameplay will be familiar to Fallout Shelter players. You can customize your castle with rooms, edit the layout as you go, and add decorations for looks or for bonuses. For example, the video shows off a dragon painting that can increase everybody’s health generation by 5%, along with a lantern that reduces oil consumption.
You’ll also need to assign workers to tasks they’ll excel at based on their stats and personality traits. Increase resident happiness, and they’ll have babies to expand your kingdom.
There are things to do outside your castle, too. You can complete quests for resources and engage in battle with enemies. It’s sort of standard mobile combat in a lot of ways, where you equip the proper tools and let your characters automatically start fighting, although the developers say that it’s difficult to master.
Unlike Fallout Shelter, which focuses on keeping your vault dwellers alive and happy, a lot of the game will be spent helping your monarch rule. Some of that involves assisting them with decisions, like how to handle ogre raids. And you need to make the “correct” choices. If your advice doesn’t go over well or happiness decreases, people can die — including your monarch. Although if that happens, you can just appoint a new one.
Going back to combat, there’s also a new roguelike mode, where you choose upgrades and fight off enemies in endless mode.
This isn’t the first Elder Scrolls mobile title. Bethesda released the action-focused The Elder Scrolls: Blades in 2020, and while the combat was fun, it was weighed down by microtransactions. Castles surprise dropped into early access in 2023, but the studio was mostly quiet on it before today’s announcement.
