As some of you may know I am a massive fan of RPG’s and my current particular favourite is The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. I’ve now logged well over 100 hours of game-time with my main character and am steadily creeping up on that target with my new Argonian Thief.
The content on offer straight from the box is incredible and the Radiant Story engine means that no two players will have exactly the same experience. Since I spend most of my evenings raiding dungeons, scouting the world for Alchemy Ingredients and talking to my new wife the thought of new content in this wonderfully varied world makes my heart flutter with excitement.
Recently, and as I’ve explained before, Bethesda have been drip feeding snippets of information relating to their first large content released called Dawnguard. For those of you that don’t know the Dawnguard are a guild of Vampire Hunters attempting to rid Tamriel of the blood thirsty plague.
The interesting concepts here are exactly what gameplay dynamics this will bring to the table and even more importantly whether we will get new areas to explore. Bethesda have announced that the pick up points will be available early but that the real meat of the new content won’t start until you are level 10.
In Dawnguard, you can become a member of the Dawnguard Vampire Hunters or alternatively you can become a Vampire Lord. A Vampire Lord is in itself far removed from the traditional Vampires we have all come to love. You shape-shift to become a Vampire Lord, a bit like becoming a Werewolf, and you can transfer back and forth whenever you see fit.
The Vampire Lord has two arms and two bat-like wings that sprout from its creepily mangled back. If nothing else it is a fantastically eerie look. To put this in perspective the Vampire Lord is primarily a caster of sorts, similar to how the Werewolf transformation primarily uses melee. The Vampire Lord can hover and walk which is tweaked by clicking in the left analogue stick. When hovering, the Vampire Lord uses magical attacks but while walking it swipes with its clawed hands. Another nice touch is that holding down the left bumper has the Vampire Lord flap its wings and fly-sprint, oddly this effect can be sustained for a rather long time. The Vampire Lord can also walk across water by virtue of its hovering abilities which looks awesome.
Another addition to the Vampire gameplay is a new abilities tree which runs in parallel with the improvements in your new perks. This has skills like Power of the Grave which grants bonuses to your health, magicka and stamina bars as well as offencive skills like Vampire Grip (which actually sees you drag enemies towards you as suck their life – a’la Darth Vader’s force grip). There’s also the Summon Gargoyle skill which is pretty self explanatory.
The new Vampire Lord also has a lot of non-offencive skills like Mist Form which renders you invulnerable while you recharge your health, magicka and stamina bars. There’s also Supernatural Reflex’s which slows the world down and the standard Detect All Creatures which does exactly what it says on the tin.
A Vampire Lord's inherent abilities are Bats, Vampire Sight and Raise Dead. Bats is a teleport ability that has you disappear and reappear meters away in a swarm of bats. Vampire Sight allows you to see things normal eyes couldn't, and Raise Dead does what it says it does.
Using the Vampire abilities levels up the perks tree which in turn allows you to increase you power. There are however also so obvious drawbacks like being weaker during the daytime.
The opposite of becoming a Vampire Lord is to join the Dawnguard faction and hunt the vampires instead. Although a lot less is know about their abilities we do know that you will gain access to the new crossbow weapons, which has a perk tree all of its own – no doubt similar to Archery. Dawnguard can also have armoured trolls fight for them, plus there's a "whole new base for you to call your own".
The main quest of the expansion lasts around 10 to 20 hours, dependant on whether you tackle everything directly or take your time. Thankfully you'll also be able to use your Vampire Lord or Dawnguard characters in the original Skyrim world too but once you’ve made a choice of which path to follow you will be stuck.
There were a lot of other interesting pieces of information on show within the Dawnguard trailer but none of these have been expanded on since it’s release. These included an awesome new horse style mount that sported blue flaming hair and makes Shadowmere a little redundant as well as dragons diving in an out of the water. The expansion arrives sometime this summer and will cost 1600 Microsoft Points.
So are you excited about this new expansion pack? If so what faction are you going to play through first and why? Please let me know in the comments section below.
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