Castles just a Fallout Shelter reskin?

While the long wait for The Elder Scrolls VI presses on, Bethesda has thrown us a bone. Earlier this week, Bethesda Game Studios put out its latest mobile game, The Elder Scrolls: Castles. On the surface, the game looks to be just an Elder Scrolls-themed redux of their 2015 mobile game, Fallout Shelter. But, is there more to the game than meets the eye?

Choosing your leaders and their successors

An incredible first choice.

The Elder Scrolls: Castles makes an incredible first impression. The game opens with a short introduction to how your castle came to be inhabited, and has you make a ruling as the reigning king, Odar. The ruling is simply assuaging Odar’s wife, Ysabel, that his Khajiit mistress means nothing to him. Immediately after this, Odar is assassinated.

Right after Odar’s death, you’re presented with the choice of who you would like to rule the castle next: Ysabel, the king’s widow; Rahim, a local champion; Jofarr, the king’s son; or Alassi, the king’s Khajiit mistress. Naturally, I chose Alassi. This choice immediately saw Alassi confronted by Jofarr, after which I had to choose between assuaging him or vaguely threatening him.

Within this first minute of gameplay, there’s immediately a significantly different feel than anything Fallout Shelter has to offer. The first choice you make in that game is choosing any number between 1 and 999. The Elder Scrolls: Castles, on the other hand, sees you making a choice with some actual supposed impact on how the game is played right off the bat.

And this isn’t just some one-off choice; it’s one that will pop up again further into the game, because time passes in The Elder Scrolls: Castles. Your subjects and even your rulers will die of old age… and other things. This can create a succession crisis, where you will once again choose your new king or queen from a list of eligible subjects.

Much like Fallout Shelter’s vault dwellers, your subjects in The Elder Scrolls: Castles can reproduce. Anytime your current ruler has a child, they will automatically become eligible to rule in the event of the current ruler’s death or banishment. This brief first decision comes up again multiple times, and it immediately sets The Elder Scrolls: Castles apart from Fallout Shelter in a pretty major way.

Building and maintaining your castle

Oil, not electricity.

After choosing your leader, you’re introduced to the main gameplay of The Elder Scrolls: Castles, building your castle. This process is very similar to the vault-building in Fallout Shelter, with a few major differences and a couple minor tweaks. For starters, you have free-range to build rooms and wall them off at will. Rather than building a type of area that comes with the room built around it, you can build a space and put whatever you want in, granted that it will fit.

This change immediately introduces the potential for wildly different looking castles, something that really wasn’t possible in Fallout Shelter. As for the more minor differences, there are resources. In Fallout Shelter, you juggle food, electricity, and water in order to keep your vault dwellers happy. In the Elder Scrolls: Castles, you instead maintain supplies of food and oil, where oil essentially serves the same function as electricity. The Elder Scrolls: Castles also introduces wood production, which is needed to build rooms.

As time goes on throughout the game, you’ll notice that lots of things are analogous to similar rooms and items in Fallout Shelter. However, you’ll also see a fair few additions that are entirely original to The Elder Scrolls: Castles.

Those differences go beyond just building, as the actual core gameplay loop of The Elder Scrolls: Castles offers something much different, that being making rulings as the king or the queen of the castle. Sometimes, your decision can be very easily made. I had a subject give me a potion, and my options were to insult him or praise him. Choosing the best option for actually keeping morale up was not hard at all.

But other times, you’ll be given the choice to give up large quantities of a resource to help a nearby village or satisfy the needs of your subjects. Sometimes these decisions will have you choosing between the morale lost from telling someone no, or the morale lost by having your subjects starve for a brief time.

Additionally, you don’t just have to juggle a general morale stat, you also have more in-depth morale stats for classes and races of subjects. There’s a general common people morale to keep up with, but there’s also specific morale meters for the different races of Tamriel. While this can all sound overwhelming on paper, the game actually does a great job of not making any of it feel like too much.

Is it more than just a reskin?

The Elder Scrolls: Castles has more to offer

Bethesda Game Studios

Many of the mechanics within The Elder Scrolls: Castles will feel very familiar to anyone that has put any amount of time into Fallout Shelter. But, at the same time, the game does quite a lot to feel different from its predecessor. One of the most immediate elements of The Elder Scrolls: Castles that struck me as an improvement over Fallout Shelter is the subjects themselves.

The vault dwellers in Fallout Shelter are mostly bland, and have a few too many stats to juggle. The subjects in The Elder Scrolls: Castles are a little more lively and have a much simpler proficiency system.

The Elder Scrolls: Castles’ improved building system also feels much more satisfying to play around with compared to that of Fallout Shelter. Additionally, the game’s art style goes a long way in differentiating it.

For previous fans of Fallout Shelter, The Elder Scrolls: Castles has much to offer in terms of a revamped and reimagined take on the success of Fallout Shelter. And for anyone that didn’t really jibe with Fallout Shelter, The Elder Scrolls: Castles feels different enough to actually be worth giving a shot.

And if you don’t end up liking it, maybe you’ll just need to hold out for a Starfield mobile game to come out in nine years.