Though it’s not on the same level as something like Final Fantasy 14 in terms of popularity, The Elder Scrolls Online is still a game that has been doing very well for a prolonged period of time. Available currently on most major platform, it has a pretty large playerbase, and soon, it will be adding even more players to that count, when it launches on Stadia.
One platform that’s notably missing the game, however, is the Switch, and given the excellent support Bethesda’s had for the system over the last couple of years, and the plain and simple fact that the Switch is a massively successful system that any game would benefit from being on, questions about whether the game will be coming to Nintendo’s hybrid console anytime soon have popped up time and time again.
The game’s developers have said before that a Switch version for the game is unlikely, and recently, they did so again, and much more emphatically. Speaking with Twinfinite, game director Matt Firor said, in no vague terms, that the Switch simply isn’t powerful enough to run the game, and if there were to ever be an ESO release on the system, it would have to be through some sort of streaming solution.
“Not going to happen,” said Firor. “The only way it’d work is if there was some kind of streaming service on Switch. It’s just not powerful enough.”
The likes of Resident Evil 7 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey have been playable on the Switch thanks to streaming (though only in Japan), and with even something as massive as The Witcher 3 soon coming to the Switch, one has to wonder whether there isn’t some way to make a game like The Elder Scrolls Online work on it as well.
As things stand right now, The Elder Scrolls Online is currently available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. It was recently confirmed that it will also be releasing for Stadia soon, with Firor saying in the aforementioned interview that they’re targeting a launch in the first half of 2020. Stay tuned for more updates in the meantime.