What you need to know to play for free – TouchArcade

Despite the very real danger of seeing their adventurist career interrupted by bringing a shot at a leg joint, millions of fans have already done so. The parchment of the elders series a real RPG phenomenon on consoles and PCs. Bethesda turned heads at the E3 2018 by introducing a mobile installment called The Elder Scrolls: Blades (Free), and after a few delays, it's finally here … sort of.

At the time of writing this article, the game is currently in early access, which means you can download it and register with Bethesda to get permission to start playing. Once you receive a notification that you are ready to leave, you can get started and start exploring this slice of YOUR traditions.

Why would you? Well, for starters, The Elder Scrolls: Blades it's like playing a game in the main series, an awesome first-person RPG experience with all the flavor you've been waiting for. It has some distinctly mobile keys, we'll talk about it soon, but first you need to know if you can actually play it, even after the early access is over.

blades is a fairly heavy game from a graphical point of view, so any device can not handle it. Here is a list of devices definitely supported, although it is not necessarily exhaustive because there is also an option "Other" when registering:

• iPhone (X, XS, Max XS, XR, 8 Plus, 8, 7 Plus, 7)
• iPad Pro (current models and 2018)
• iPad Mini 5
• iPad Air 3 and iPad Air
• Galaxy S9, S9 + and Note 9
• Galaxy S10 and S10 +
• Galaxy S8 and S8 +
• Pixel 2 and 2 XL
• Pixel 3 and 3 XL
• HTC U11 and U12 +
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro, P20 and P20 Pro
• OnePlus 5 and up, including 6T
• Moto Z2 and newer
• Essential phone
• LG V30 and G7 One
• Xiaomi Mi 6 and Mi Mix 2
• Xperia XZ Premium and XZ1
• Razer phone
• ZTE Nubia Z17
• Nokia 8
• Sharp Aquos R
• Asus ZenFone 4 Pro

So we're going to assume you have a phone or tablet that lets you play and you're in Early Access mode or you're reading this after the game is launched. Congratulations! Now, let's see how you do it.

If you play in horizontal / landscape mode, you move by tapping the place you want to walk or by holding the left side of the screen to use a floating virtual controller. Either way, you can hold and slide on the right side of the screen to look around you. The NPCs you can talk to and the objects you can interact with will have icons nearby, and you simply tap the ones to approach and interact with. The objects you can grab blink or shine lightly and you just tap them to pick them up.

The fight begins when you get close enough to an enemy or you get noticed and he rushes to your grill. To attack, you hold down on each side of the screen and release to swing your weapon. There is a surprising amount of strategy involved; not only are you trying to time for the enemy's guard to be on the ground, but your chances of getting a critical hit also increase if you release it when the circle that appears on the screen when you stand at the point is completely filled. Several successive hits without blocking or avoiding an opponent grant you additional combo damage.

If you have a shield fitted, a button will appear on the left side of the screen. You can block to block incoming attacks, but if you plan the blockage when the enemy is in the middle of its momentum, it will further reduce the damage (sometimes even completely) and slightly stun your enemy, leaving it open for a counterattack. Once you have progressed and learned spells and skills, buttons will appear for them as well, with the first on the left and the second on the right.

One of the coolest part of The Elder Scrolls: Blades can you also play in vertical / portrait mode. If you do, the controls are more or less the same, except you have to type to move – no virtual key. The combat buttons are also in slightly different locations, including the shield button, which will be right in the middle of the screen, down.

bonus: Concerned about healing because there is no way to access your potions inventory during a fight? Do not sweat. When your standard of living is low, you will see a button just above your health bar where you can tap a potion and stay alive. If you die, you'll be able to revive your health, endurance and magic with a scroll, but you can use a limited number per quest.

Once you have completed this tutorial, you will be liberated from all over the world. unlike most Old scrolls Games blades It's not an open world experience, but you'll always have plenty of options for the future.

This is because even if you can not just walk around the countryside, you will always have a selection of quests and jobs to choose from. You can access it from the main menu (hamburger button) or access it directly with the help of the exclamation point icon.

The quests to advance the narrative of history. jobs These are essentially side quests that you can undertake, some of which are available at any time, while others rotate on a daily or weekly basis. This is good for collecting materials to make equipment or to build or improve the structures of your city, which we will talk about a little later.

The quests and jobs have a level of difficulty compared to your current level and the strength of your equipment that lets you know how difficult they are. Obviously, you will want to stock up on consumables if you want to dive into a case of 5 skulls.

With each quest and task being instantiated, just tap on the one you want to tackle and press the 'Start' button to begin. In this direction, blades removed what is often the worst part of fantasy role-playing games that move from place to place.

One of the most mobile aspects (a word I just composed) of The Elder Scrolls: Blades is the city that quickly becomes your base of operations. It's not too unusual for this to be the case in a fantastic RPG, but the way you collect resources, pay for gold to build or upgrade buildings, and take advantage of improvements will be very familiar to gamers. mobile.

To be honest, the city is a real mess when you inherit it for the first time. All the buildings are in ruins and the only things still intact are the outer walls. You will meet and help the forge during the first quests, which will prepare you to solve the problem.

The city has various plots on which houses or businesses can be built, as well as small, medium and large locations for decorations. Housing and decorations are necessary to elevate the prestige level of your city, which allows you to further improve the shops and also opens more story-based quests that advance your overall progress in blades.

Here are the different companies you can create in your city:

• Wrought – The place where you can buy, sell, recover and upgrade your weapons and armor. Upgrades allow you to work with a wider range (read: better materials) to make hardware.
• Laboratory of Alchemy – Sells potions and poisons, as well as the ingredients needed to make them yourself.
• Workshop – If you want more decorations for your city than the ones you will discover while searching, this is the place to make them. In addition, it sells building materials, useful for the making of decorations and the construction or modernization of other structures.
• Tour of the enchanting – This place transforms ordinary objects into magic objects. Sugar.

bonus: All buildings, with the exception of the dwelling, require two adjacent lots. This limits the places in the city where you can install them and also means that you do not want to build housing in these places until you are sure to have room for the right things.

Even before the whole world has access to The Elder Scrolls: BladesI can already guess that this will be the part that annoys people who do not play mobile games often. During your adventures, you'll find chests containing gold, weapons, armor, consumables and building supplies. Sometimes they will simply sit down and you will also receive chests as a quest reward or job. This is the good news.

The bad news is that chests take a long time to open (maybe the reason is that you have to pick them all together?), The best chests last longer and you can only work when you have to work. to open one at a time. Long-time mobile games will not be surprising, but the rest of you.

In addition, you can only keep a total of 10 chests in your inventory at a time, although you can spend bonus money to increase this total. This means that you will certainly have stacked crates if you are working on opening a good one that takes several hours. The chest system therefore works as a de facto limit for your gaming sessions.

There is something you can do about it, however, which is a good transition to the next section …

Not absolutely nothing, that's for sure. On the contrary, gems are the motto that makes all this possible in blades:

• Accelerate the opening of the safes, at a rate of 12 gems per hour, plus fractions thereof. You can use Gems to open chests even when one is on a timer waiting to open, which is nice. The game here is to empty your inventory of standard chests at 1 Gem each while a better chest is waiting. Or at least, that seems like a useful tactic.
• Directly buy chests in the game store, with the price depending on what type of chest it is. The more beautiful the chest, the more gems there are. You know how it goes.
• Accelerated construction time of buildings, whether to rebuild or improve them.
• Buy missing craft or building ingredients. This seems to be the least judicious use of gemstones because you can buy more ingredients for gold or just go on a job to get more. My personal recommendation is never to do it.

In summary, gems can speed up just about everything you need to do in the game, replacing time. They do not help you make you more powerful, except in the case of direct purchases of chests, and even then, you are at the mercy of the whims of the RNG generator to determine if you get something extraordinary.

Gemstones can be purchased for real money, and are the main way blades is monetized. Keep reading to find out how to avoid paying them.

So, you would like more gems but you do not want to pay them. It's a perfectly understandable state of mind. It's not crazy either, because there are many ways to get them for free.

Let's go over together:

• Find them randomly in the dungeons. This is the most fortuitous but the least reliable method to find free gems. In classic RPG fashion, there are lots of jars, crates and everything you can break, and they flash / shine so you know they're breakable. From time to time, a gem will come out. You're welcome.
• Higher level. Every time your character goes to the next level, you get rewards. Sometimes they come in the form of precious stones, and a decent amount. How can we level up, you could ask? You earn XP for defeating enemies, but it's faster to get XP by doing quests or jobs. Faster.
• Complete quests, jobs and challenges. In fact, I am not so positive about it. But it goes without saying that with time, there will be quests and jobs, in particular, that will give gems. We will see.
• Play Abyss and Arena modes. This is more speculation, but it seems solid. Abyss is the endless dungeon of the game. There is no healing consumable and you see how deep in the depths you can come down, with better loot earned the longer you stay alive. The PvP Arena mode is not even available in advance access, but I would be shocked at not being able to win gems seasonally once that's the case.