Dawnguard

I’ve been playing the expansion for Skyrim, Dawnguard, for the past week. I have one thing to say about it: it’s very dark. Not it’s content, I mean it’s literally dark as in you can’t see what the hell you’re doing. Playing as a vampire was the only option for me, because that meant I had Vampire’s Sight, allowing my character to use night vision. I had to use this power about 90% of the time because every quest involved being underground more often than a Chud. Skyrim has a more extensive underground system than New York city, and every inch of it is poorly lit. The game itself was considered a triumph over it’s predecessor mainly because of the vastly improved graphics. Half the time you’ll never know there was a change, because you can’t physically see it. It’s always perplexed me why there was such a massive push for the current line of next-gen systems and their graphic capabilities when 80% of the AAA games take place in near-absolute darkness. The games themselves suggest you play in near-to-no-visibility, as the gamma selector will always tell you to manually adjust your graphics until you can’t see a black bar it’s posted on your screen. It wants your entire game to be pitch black.

Dawnguard further takes the whole play-in-the-dark theme to a whole new level, because as a vampire your goal is to blot out the sun. Vampires burn in the sunlight and lose health, so to counter that you can use a special bow and shoot arrows at the sun to black it out. That means it can be black-as-hell out day or night.

You’re given a new companion named Serena. You’ll have to play with her 100% of the time if you want a companion while playing as a Vampire Lord. Being a Vampire Lord is near-to-useless. As a vampire, you already get a bunch of perks. As a Vampire Lord, you lose your ability to fight effectively, to use items, to open doors and chests, to interact with other players, the ability to select magic spells and everything else you might want to do. It also locks you in third person perspective and transformation animations take up valuable time. Plus, any regular citizen will attack you, even your own non-vampire companions. You can level up your Vampire Lord by draining the life force of enemies. This is near to impossible. You have to hit them with the right spell just before they die. You only have two spells, though, so it’s not that tricky selecting it. Aiming it properly in the third-person perspective is. Also: the spell induces almost no damage to the enemy and it has to be a killing blow. If you’ve summoned a monster, or if you have a companion fighting, they’re almost guaranteed to get that last shot in before you. I’ve killed almost fifty people as a Vampire Lord and only got around five souls. I need hundreds to complete the perk tree, and actually level up that Vampire Lord for the Achievement. Plus, your health, stamina and magic are all increased exponentially as a Vampire Lord, but you’re also much, much weaker. I can die easily as a Vampire Lord, but I’m indestructible in normal armour. I don’t know how that works.

I chose the Vampire Lord because my character was already trapped forever as a werewolf because of the Forever Mourning glitch. To become human again, I first had to accept being turned into a Vampire Lord to banish my werewolf blood, then complete a separate quest to turn human. In my version of the game, there’s no other way. It was still much simpler than finishing the glitchy Companion Quest chain line.

Serena, as a companion, is more personable and has greater depth to her character and abilities in combat than your other companions. You learn pretty much everything there is to know about her, while other companions like Lydia are still a blank slate to you. You can also pick up a couple of new wardogs, both of whom I’ve killed by accident while not even swinging my weapon in their general direction. It doesn’t help that the vampire versions are pitch black in the aforementioned blackness. The tunnels in the dungeons levels are also quite narrow. I’ve become trapped for minutes several times while trying to move around my companions and dogs.

The new areas themselves are quite expansive with few load-doors. There’s not much in there that you haven’t already seen, though. The Soul Cairn and the wide-open Snow Elf dungeon are the most notable, mainly because of their size. The Soul Cairn is like the old Oblivion levels, but purple, and about the size of  a new territory with it’s own quests, NPCs, and even currency. The Snow Elf level is long and winding, with one giant open space in the middle that looks like an outdoor area. It’s probably the most striking of all the areas. That where I had my only real, “Wow,” moment.

I was walking across a frozen lake to read a Word of Power off a monolith, when two dragons burst out of the ice. They were both high-level and their fire breath kill my level 60 character in seconds. The Resist Fire potions lying around some skeletons before the area sort of foreshadowed this, but the potions themselves were useless. This is the only time I had to fight two dragons at once, and it made my game freeze.

My game also froze after the big boss battle with the Snow Elf, although that time the action was already done and there really wasn’t anything going on to make it freeze. So there were two big bugs in very obvious places of the game that no one bothered to correct before releasing. This is a Bethesda game. Play at your own risk.

I actually like the quests better than some of the other Guild-Faction stuff I’d finished, but there wasn’t any different feel to playing.