Many of you are probably wondering, “Wait a minute, hasn’t Dragonborn been out for ages?”, and yes, if you’re referring to the Xbox 360 version of the third DLC package for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, then you’re correct.
However, due to those pesky exclusivity deals that Microsoft loves to shell out for, PC owners haven’t been able to play the long-awaited DLC until this week, while PlayStation 3 owners have to wait a further six days to get their hands on it.
Still, it’s as good a time as any to examine the various hits and misses of Bethesda’s latest entry into their ludicrously addictive video game franchise. Even if not everything in Dragonborn worked, and it didn’t add quite as much mainstream content as I was hoping for – greedy as I am to soak in as much of this world as possible – it’s still a largely successful jaunt that’s well worth your money.
Here are 5 reasons Dragonborn is awesome, and 5 reasons it sucks…
5 Reasons It’s Awesome
5. Solstheim
Dragonborn takes place on Solstheim, an island North of Morrowind, which is funnily enough the last Elder Scrolls iteration in which this location appeared (the stellar Morrowind expansion Bloodmoon, to be precise). Much like Skyrim, much of Solstheim is covered in ice, but to keep things fresh, a portion of it is also charred by ash as a result of the famed Red Mountain disaster that occurred there.
Bethesda has done a great job in creating a locale that feels consistent with what we’ve seen before in the series, but is also distinguished as a fresh new place; the architecture and design is punchy, with the various cultures all being represented in their own unique and artful way.
Even though the graphics might not have moved on at all since the original game was released (but we’ll get to that in a bit), this new island breathes plenty of fresh life into Skyrim.
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5 Comments
Fantastic article. I am one of those unfortunate PS3 owners who has been relatively shafted by Bethesda by way of DLC content. I can’t really comment on the context of the article due to me having not played the expansion packs yet but it’s certainly got me excited for its imminent release this month.
Shame to hear that dragon riding apparently sucked. I was expecting more out of that.
I have a 360 and ps3. I bought skyrim for the ps3. I heard about the 30 day for dlcs but with being older and not having as much time as I use to I figured it would not be a concern. But, now it has been too long and I have no interest on going back. Would of been nice to of had one of those dlcs on ps3 mid-summer or September/October. Too many games I would rather finish or even start now. Nice article though to see what I missed or didn’t in the dlc.
Another thing that hinders DLC on PS3 is it has a more Rigorous approval period for DLC content than that of Microsoft.
I think that, while I agree with a lot of that stuff, I don’t really see why you’d expect the graphics to be any better? It’s not a new game, and as far as I know, other games don’t upgrade graphics with DLC? There is a High-Res pack for the PC, which is free – but the pre-Dragonborn version has been available pretty much since the start anyway, so that’s not even a change.
I really don’t know why they held back the PC release. I know they were having problems getting it working properly on the PS3, but the PC has a similar architecture to xbox, and no problems were mentioned – why not release it after the month(ish) of xbox exclusivity?
I won’t read this if you make me go through 500 pages.