The Elder Scrolls Blades Early Access Out Now For All

The Elder Scrolls: Blades marks the first time that the series has appeared on mobile devices, with Bethesda promising an experience that would make fans happy. While it had previously only been available in Early Access form for a select few, it is now available in Early Access form for everyone.

The release of the game being available to play for everyone is accompanied by a major patch, which comes with the following patch notes:

Weapons & Armor

• Enchantments: The Fortify Healing enchantment no longer applies to the Absorb Health enchantment.
  • Dev Note: The healing power of this enchantment combination was unintended. A secondary enchantment should not quintuple the strength of a primary one, nor should the power of an enchantment setup surpass all other possibilities without question. This change restricts Fortify Healing to boosting the larger and less frequent sources of healing it’s intended to: potions, food, and skills. Note that Fortify Healing has never applied to Health regeneration bonuses like the one provided by Healing Surge.
• Enchantments: The heavy weapons combat enchantment now deals bonus damage on blocking enemies instead of ignoring Block Rating.
  • Dev Note: This enchantment was generally less effective than an un-resisted elemental damage enchantment, and could never provide more extra damage than what the target’s Block Rating prevented. This change removes that bonus damage cap and powers up the enchantment.
• Enchantments: Fixed a bug that triggered Ravage Health, Stamina, and Magicka enchantments on shields when damage over time effects were blocked.
  • Dev Note: This interaction was unintended. With this change, ravage enchantments on shields now only trigger when a physical attack or ability is blocked, just like elemental damage enchantments.

Jobs

• Gems: In addition to existing rewards, daily and weekly Jobs now provide 2 and 5 Gems, respectively.
• Materials: Material collection Jobs now ask you to collect between 3 and 6 materials.
• Naming: Renamed the ‘Attack of the Enemies’ Job to ‘Attack of the Outlaws.’

Quests

• XP: Increased XP rewarded for completing late-story quests.
• Town level: Removed the town level requirement for starting the Wrath of the Sorcerer-King quest.
• Item: Fixed a bug that let players acquire an important story item without fighting the enemy guarding it.
• Enemies: Fixed an issue that would cause enemies during The Five Stones to remain dead after a restart.
• Error: Fixed a bug in the Rescuing the Townsfolk quest where players could get stuck against Lond’s cage.
• Dialogue: Fixed Aranande’s dialogue so that there is no way to prevent normal quest completion if player somehow skips the hidden objective to talk to her at the beginning of the level.
• Dialogue: Added more barks to quest lines.

Performance and Stability

• Crash: Fixed issues where crashes would sometimes occur when:
  • Creating a short name that includes spaces
  • Entering The Howling Caves quest
• Error: Fixed issue where quitting to town during combat with Shulkunaak before the health bar appears produces errors.
• Error: Fixed an issue where reloading in combat could cause a communication error.

Enemies

• Attack: Fixed a bug that Slowed you as soon as an enemy decided to cast Frostbite, before the spell’s effects were even visible.
• Spawning: Fixed a bug that spawned Wights instead of Skeletons in Jobs centered around Skeletons’ resistances and weaknesses.
• Attack: Fixed a bug that made enemies stop attacking.

User Interface

• Notification: The Store button on the Main Menu now lets you know when a daily reward is available.
• Abyss: Players will now receive a notification of rewards at the end of the Abyss.
• Notification: Fixed an issue where UI notifications did not display while in quests.
• Equipment: Repair All Equipment price now turns red when player doesn’t have enough money to repair all equipment and refreshes when players repair an item.
• Abyss: Fixed issue where Uncommon items are appearing as Common in the Abyss results screen.
• Customization: Fixed issue where entering customization with a heavy weapon equipped blocks the view of the player’s character.
• Loading: Added new loading screen tips about canceling attacks, baiting enemies, and accessing the Tips Menu.
• Enchantment: Fixed a display bug where the value shown for a weapon’s primary enchantment was not increased by a Fortify Primary Enchantment effect.
• Enchantment: Fixed a display bug showing too low a damage bonus for Fortify Combo Damage, the light weapon combat enchantment.
• Workshop: Fixed an issue where the small decorations crafting list in the Workshop is broken in portrait mode.
• Crafting: Fixed a bug that broke the button to start crafting an item when switching from portrait to landscape.
• Workshop: The Workshop now has an empty state telling players to upgrade for more options.
• Rewards: Fixed an issue where an empty celebration menu displays for certain level up rewards.
• Abyss: Fixed a bug that incorrectly displayed the Abyss information pop-up on the Main Menu.
• Celebration: Centered decorations and watcher’s blade in the big celebrations menu.
• Celebration: Fixed the bug where people could tap on store buttons underneath the celebration menu.

Town

• Enchanter: Fixed a bug preventing the Enchanter at a Level 10 Enchanter’s Tower from selling Elevated Soul Gems.
• Enchanter: Common Soul Gems are no longer sold by the Enchanter at a Level 10 Enchanter’s Tower.
• Crafting: Fixed a display bug that briefly showed the previously crafted item when crafting a new item.
• Townhall: Fixed Stone Townhall level 1 visual.
• Visual effects: Fixed inconsistent window visuals on the highest-level form of the Stone Alchemy Laboratory.

Chests

• Tutorial: Tutorial Silver chest no longer displays 3 hour timer.
• Display: Fixed an issue where the + button still displays even when the user reaches max chest capacity.
• Display: Fixed an issue where the chest overflow popup can appear inside the item details page.
• Rarity: Added the item rarity border to the chest overflow menu to display the rarity associated with the chest.

Skills, Abilities, and Perks

• Abilities: Fixed a bug that allowed certain damage over time effects to kill players despite Reckless Fury.

Store

• UI: Fixed a display bug that didn’t show the Gem cost for certain upgrade and material purchases.
• Rewards: Fixed an issue where two daily rewards can appear in the store at the same time.
• UI: Fixed an issue where the slashed price label is not being reset in the IAP details menu.

Audio/Visual

• Sound effects: Added SFX for the store notification in the main menu.
• Visual effects: Fixed a bug that made the Founder’s Statue glow in menus.
• Animation: Added some sparkles to the daily reward icon, and added the animation to the side menu button.
• Text: Fixed text overlap in buttons.
• Sound effects: Fixed audio issue where changing the in-game language setting causes errors to occur for most sound effects.
• Text: Choice Menu will now resize to accommodate more text.
• Sound effects: Integrated a sound that plays when Echo Weapon’s echo disappears.
• Animation: Fixed picture scaling mid-animations issue.
• Animation: Added an outro animation to the store button in the main menu.
• Animation: Fixed daily reward reset animation.

Other

• Text: Store and Level up offer names now wrap better.
• Text: Fixed an issue with garbled item text when you switch from Portrait to Landscape in List View of any shop.
• Localization: Fixed localization issues affecting the Hero Pack in Big Celebrations and the IAP Store details.
• Dialogue: Removed redundant goodbyes in NPC dialogues.

As you can see, this update packs quite a lot of tweaks to the game, which should make it a more enjoyable experience for those who have already been playing it. There’s currently no release date for the full release of the game, though the game has certainly been a success so far in early access form. The game has brought in over $1.5 million on iOS alone up to this point, and that’s just one platform and prior to it being available for all.