The little I played of it so far is more of the same. I like some of the new music in it and they reused some old Morrowind music as well. Some of the new enemies are fairly challenging. Some dungeons are quite big I visited so far. Seeing Dunmer architecture again is nice. Writing is horrible as usual.
I just started Dawnguard (been trying to get into it but I had no save file to load up and so had to play a bunch to even reach the new content). Sure, Skyrim had dumb writing, but it was short and to the point, and aside from some of the questlines being completely retarded, you could avoid most of the stupidity.
But holy crap, Dawnguard is just... well, it's
amazing.
So even though it's never ever mentioned at all before you install the DLC (of course), you start hearing rumors about vampires, and eventually someone tells you to go join the Dawnguard to fight them. Okay, cool. Never heard of the Dawnguard before, nobody's ever mentioned them, and it's not clear where they get their weapons, armor, people and other resources, but let's roll with it. Same goes for the recent rise in vampire attacks. Not sure what they're talking about - the vampires have always been in that cave just 2 minutes' walk from town, and no matter how many times I kill them, more always seem to come back after exactly 72 hours. But hey, these guys are vampire-hunting experts, I'll take their word for it.
So you go to their huge castle out in the middle of nowhere, which is somehow well maintained, full of people, and yet also completely unknown to anyone else in the world (DLC syndrome), and the first thing that happens?
Well, I understand how we could have missed this before. Or why it was abandoned until recently. Not like there are plenty of Jarls out in Skyrim who are living in defenseless shacks or anything.
You see the Dawnguard leader being a dick to some Vigilant because he didn't believe vampires were a real threat (yeah, NPCs cannot into genre awareness as usual). Then the Vigilant says all his friends were killed, and the Dawnguard leader tells him he's sorry, even though immediately before-hand he was calling the guy a wimp and a coward. So then he turns to you, you have a 3-line dialogue where he basically says "we're vampire hunters!" and then he immediately sends you out to some cave to investigate vampire activity, without any character development (other than "this guy is an asshole"), with no training whatsoever, and no backup. Yeah, great idea.
Of course, you wander alone into this lair of vampires and slaughter them horribly. Then you find a gigantic puzzle in a gigantic chamber. You press a button, and a spike stabs you through the hand, and then the EXTREMEness of it activates a magical seal of some sort. You push some more buttons and a "stone monolith" rises up, opening to reveal... uh, a sexy vampire lady who talks like an 18 year old from a contemporary American city and has cleavage, just because (I think this is Besthesda's completely-not-heavy-handed way of making you sympathetic towards vampires). Despite apparently being imprisoned beneath the ground inside a monolith for thousands of years, you don't even have the option to ask "who the fuck are you? why the fuck are you here? why were you inside that monolith? why should I trust you? why do you have a goddamn Elder Scroll on your back? what does it do? oh my god, are you okay? what the fuck?" Nope, you've just gotta go along with it.
Come to think of it, why were the vampires in that cave? Why were they trying to get to the vampire lady? Did they seal her in there in the first place? So was she like a prisoner? Or were they guarding her? Wait, if she's a vampire and I'm a mortal, why doesn't she kill me like all the other vampires? Quite the coincidence that we only just stumbled across them, even though since she's been there
thousands of years, it could have been, you know, pretty much any other time in recorded history.
Oh, and then gargoyles attack you because why not. Nobody's ever seen them before in the land of Cyrodiil (at least without spending 20 jewgolds), but they're just hanging out waiting for you to walk by and you can be sure you'll have killed 500 of them by the end of it. Wait a second, so are the gargoyles the guards? Or are they just monsters? How did they get there? Why are they there? Do they hunt mortals? But then why do they attack the vampire lady too? So are they the minions of vampires or not? I'm so foncused.
So then she decides to follow you as an immortal companion wherever you go, for pretty much no reason, until you take her back to her "home." This "home" is actually a massive, ancient castle that's nearly as large as a goddamn city and is clearly visible from the northern shoreline of the game world from almost any angle and distance... so of course, nobody's ever heard of it, mentioned it before, or been there. Of course not (DLC syndrome)! You take a boat inside and the vampires just let you in for no real reason (and your other follower if you have one, who of course nobody acknowledges), and then you learn there's some bad blood (HAW HAW) between the sexy vampire girl and her not so sexy bearded father.
Then he offers you a choice: either run the fuck away and never return (because vampires who raise humans like cattle, eat people alive, and can be seen literally gorging themselves on human remains at a banquet table, clearly have a sense of honor). This, of course, despite the fact that there is nothing stopping you from, say, reporting the GIGANTIC CITADEL OF EVIL FULL OF MAN-EATING VAMPIRES to, say, every single Jarl in Skyrim (except of course the designers' laziness to add a few more dialogue lines or unwillingness to let you do anything that makes sense), and that you're part of the Dawnguard, aka
the order that was created specifically to destroy their kind.
Well, obviously I decided to become a vampire, because so far all I know about the Dawnguard is that they're righteous pussies lead by a giant asshole, and they didn't even give me any training, direction or perks except a crossbow with a quiver of bolts (and I had to ask some random underling for that), so the alternative side has to be better, right? Well, then the head vampire gives me "his blood", and he does so by... biting me. Uh, what? I played Bloodlines, I'm pretty sure that
I have to bite the vampire, not the other way around.
I come to inside a dungeon area with "human cattle" and a magic blood fountain just sitting there for me. He explains to me, using a bad accent and reading dialogue that sounds like it came straight out of an instruction manual, how to use my new Vampire Lord powers, which includes "using two types of magic that only do one thing each, but only when you're flying because the designers couldn't figure out a way to let you toggle between them in any way that made sense, oh and of course you can't really fly, just float 6 inches off the ground."
Oh, didn't I tell you? Yeah, it turns out that Vampire Lords are totally a different kind of vampire. They have, uh, much stronger blood in them! Which despite needing to be cultivated and strengthened over centuries, you can absorb pretty much instantly. These Vampire Lords have access to special magic that nobody has ever really documented before (actually they're the same powers that any random mage or vampire gets, but don't tell them that), and they can also transform into their "true forms" in addition to having the usual weakness to sunlight and need to feed.
And it looks like this:
So anyway, then the head vampire tells me, the newest and obviously completely trustworthy initiate who only just got the powers about 30 seconds ago and was given a crash course in Vampire Lord-ism, to talk to some other elven vampire guy. He comes across like a fop, as all elves do. I tell him "it is time." This apparently is enough for him to know that I need to take the Blood-something Chalice, the most sacred and awesome artifact the vampires have, and fill it in some Blood-something cave which has a water spring that looks like blood. And it's magic blood-water!
This stuff makes vampires (or just Vampire Lords?) much stronger. Of course, there are a few questions. Where did this chalice come from? What about that blood-water? If the vampires are so powerful why do they need it? Was it another gift from Molag Bal? If so, why didn't they use it before? Don't the vampires insult Molag Bal by just waiting thousands of years to use their gift to take over the world? Isn't Molag Bal like, the god of violence and brutality? Why did they wait so long to do the work of his they obviously must love and believe in? Why do they trust their new initiate with such an obviously important and monumental task? Do they want to fuck it up and lose their Vampire Lord perks? Are there dialogue options where I can pose these questions to the NPCs and get answers, or even hand-waves? I'll leave the mystery for you to find out! (the answer is no)
I haven't played any more since that point, but suffice to say, the narrative is engaging and water-tight. Not a plot hole or single iota of derp to be found. I can't wait to continue the epic adventure and learn more.
So basically what I'm saying is that I have very high hopes for the Dragonborn DLC.
.
. So will probably head for the hills in the near future.
) in Betrayal at Krondor to really be arsed.
