A New Dawn in Skyrim

I "finished" Skyrim early this year -- in that I completed the main storyline and all the guild side quests, unlocking all 50 of the game's achievements in the process. Soon after, I put the game on the shelf for a while. But in the past month, the game's new expansion, Dawnguard, has brought it back off the shelf and into regular rotation.

Dawnguard is sold as DLC, but it would be more accurate to think of it as the kind of RPG expansion that used to be sold at retail in a separate box. (It's priced more like one too, at $19.99.) It adds lots of interesting new frills to the game: you can pay to have an armored troll follow you around; you get a cool new follower that raises the dead, shoots ice bolts, and is storyline-protected (so she can't accidentally be killed by splashy spell damage!); and you get new perk trees built around being a werewolf or a vampire lord. There's also a rather lengthy and interesting side quest that involves locating an ancient and unique dwarven forge, culminating in a chance to craft a rare and powerful artifact.

But the main thrust of Dawnguard is a storyline about a group of vampire hunters trying to prevent a castle of powerful vampire lords from bringing perpetual darkness to the world. This storyline plays out through a quest line of roughly equal length to the "College of Winterhold" sub-quests in the original game -- which is to say it's something in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 hours of new content, depending on how fast you devour it and how thoroughly you explore all its nooks and crannies.

One point of view you could take on this is that you're paying about 1/3 the original purchase price of Skyrim, but not getting nearly 1/3 as much content as the base game offered. Some reviewers have made this analysis, and also complained (foolishly, in my view) that the expansion is not as revolutionary as the base game, and is therefore unworthy at best, a rip-off at worst.

I myself thought the Dawnguard storyline was very entertaining. The character you interact with most in the course of the story is the most fully realized character in all of Skyrim, base game or expansion. You forge a close relationship with her, her conversation is multi-faceted, and she has way more "idle comments" (and better ones) than any of the other followers you get sick of having around. (cough Lydia cough)

More importantly, having this expansion to play with got me back into the game in general. I've been picking up material from the base game that I never chased down and completed before, and I've been enjoying that too. Since starting back up with Skyrim, I've explored the crafting and enchanting systems much more than I did before, and have thoroughly enjoyed the amazing weapons and armor I've been able to make. In short, the expansion has helped me get more out of the original game itself. All very good.

I do have a gripe, though. One of the things the expansion tried to do was add new content specifically targeted at very high level characters, in the form of new "legendary dragons" that you have to be level 78 (out of a maximum possible 81) to encounter. Which would be fine, except that they attached one of the expansion's 10 new achievements to slaying one of these legendary dragons.

Now, I'm not an achievement hound in every game I play. But Skyrim happens to be one of the handful of games I managed to nab all the achievements for, because the designers there did an excellent job of choosing a few oddball achievements that were just far enough off the normal path to make you engage in out-of-the-ordinary, experimental gameplay, but not so far off the path to really start feeling like a grind.

But the problem stems from how your character levels in Skyrim. Basically, "you are what you do." The more you use a skill -- smithing items at a forge, launching destruction magic an enemy, picking pockets in the street -- the more that skill increases, and with it your overall character level. It's actually a very good system until your character's level gets somewhere into the 50s. To reach level 78, however, you basically have to grind nearly all of your skills up to their maximum value. So if you enjoy archery and took a bunch of perks to boost its effectiveness? If you enjoy sneaking up on people and making sneak attacks and took a bunch of perks to do that? Yeah, forget all that. Set it aside and grab a two-handed sword for a while to grind your way up to 78.

Now, to a point, I would have enjoyed the encouragement to try out a few different things and explore other elements the game has to offer. But it takes a long time to work your way from the mid-50s to the upper 70s naturally. Way too long to throw away all the cool investments you've made in a character.

And so, to gain access to these legendary dragons and their attached achievement, I cheated the system. You are what you do, remember, by whatever measure the game accepts as "doing." Since a great many of the skills are based on dealing combat damage, the shortcut to leveling them is to deal battle damage to something that will just take it, regenerate the lost health, and never attack you back. Something like your horse. I have sat there for hours a night, a book in one hand to keep myself entertained and my XBox controller in the other hand, lazily slashing away at poor Shadowmere as a means of reaching this preposterously high level. It's not fun. It's not actually playing the game. It's not an exploit I wanted to use when I started playing Skyrim. But I feel it's what the designers have forced me to do by adding this element to the Dawnguard expansion. And it totally sucks. I can't wait to get to the level 78 I need (almost there!) so I can forget this foolishness and get back to actually enjoying the game.

So call that a black mark on an otherwise solid expansion. Overall, I'd rate Dawnguard a B+. If you enjoyed playing the main game, I can't imagine being unhappy with the expansion. (Unless you're feeling that completist bug like I am.)