Do not waste your money on Dawnguard.

[SajuukKhar]

Probably not, but Bethesda has yet to do that so I don't see the point you are trying to make.

 

[Kiardras]

I want vampire lords. The vamp and were boosts alone justify £13.99.

 

[sonofliber]

I would buy those 100 radiant quests if they added 12 hours of non radiant quests that form a story...... kinda like..... ohh shit..... they did with Dawnguard and its 10-12 hour long Main Quest, and its two new areas that are mostly new assets.

Also the whole "well modders can make X for free" line is idiotic, modders could potentially make ANYTHING, even Shivering Isles, for free. does that mean SI wasn't worth the price? nope.

10 hours? wtf did you do? i thinks its more like 5-7 hours(the longest part if when you need to get THE item), unless you walk the hole soul plane on foot

 

[The White Hunter]

Steam informed that "Dawnguard [is] now available" so like the sucker I am I went to Skyrims store page and prepared to whip out my credit card... Then I see it: 19.99 euro for Dawnguard? They want me to pay five euros more for a fairly short DLC then I did for Orcs Must Die 2? They want me to pay the price of 2 meaty New Vegas DLC for that?

Gethsemani made a stand, said "No way!" and booted up Orcs Must Die 2 instead, because she wants value for her money.

That much? Christ I paid £22 for Skyrim a week after launch, fuck that!.

When did Bethesda become Activision 2.0?

 

[kingthrall]

Look, I'm buckling up for a massive backlash here, but I feel this is something that needs to be said.

Much like the game it is designed for, Dawnguard is alright. The story is pretty interesting, (even though it is totally making it up as it goes along), the High Vampire powers are pretty damn cool, and I appreciate the Werewolf overhaul to make it worth a damn. However, we have to bring up the elephant in the room.

The price.

Dawnguard is clearly doing it's absolute best in the marketing to look like a Shivering Isles-esque expansion, with loads of new places to explore, buckets of new loot, and everything else that made Shivering Isles so damn good. However, do not believe this. Dawnguard has about as much content in it as one of Fallout 3's downloadable content pieces.

The biggest dissapointment is that a huge amount of the added content of Dawnguard does not, in fact, take place in a new location, like Big MT or The Divide in Fallout New Vegas. No, most of Dawnguards content comes from dungeons inserted into the main map of Skyrim, most of them built from very similar assets to the base game.

Translation: A signifigant chunk of Skyrim's content is spent in the same cookie-cutter dungeons you were bored of months ago.

Before you angrily type in your rebuttal, there are new locations in Dawnguard. Fort Dawnguard and Castle Ican'trememberthename serve as the hub for the Human and Vampire questlines respectively, plus, you do get to go do different locations during the main quest. However, you don't get to stay there very long, only one is particularly interesting and different enough from the main Skyrim landscape to be worthy of a mention, and the game does nothing with them, basically using them as locations for fetch quests.

However, the thing that kills my enjoyment of Dawnguard is the choice. Much has been made of the player's ability to side with either the Vampires or the Vampire Hunters. However, this choice is very poorly handled. In a game with this choice done well, like the aforementioned Fallout: New Vegas, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, or, hell, even the Civil War choice in Skyrim proper, the player is given ample time and oppurtunnity to learn of the factions available to them. This cannot be said of Dawnguard. You are forced to make the choice knowing very little of the Dawnguard, and fuck all about the Vampires, so it is literally impossible to make an informed decision on your first run-through.

Couple that with the Crossbow being underwhelming as an addition (it's basically an inferior version of the bow), Dawnguard is a merely average piece of DLC, but for just how bloody expensive is, twice the price of any of Fallout:NV's infintely better DLC pieces, it's not worth the money. If it ever goes down in price, yeah, why not, it isn't bad per se, but right now, this is something only hardcore Skyrim fans should consider, and even then, they should probably think pretty hard about it.

1. The Price- Of course its going to be expensive because its offical new release content from a big company. What did you expect?

2. Crossbow is 100X better than the bow, the fact you dont have to wait and pull back to reload you can pretty much micro and pick apart your enemies focus firing at ease as well as the 50% armor piercing bonus...

3. Not enough time to choose a side? Who cares hard choices are rarely given time to think about, and as an expansion you had the choice to be a vampire so it would of made the choice easier to those who it appealed to. I was not interested in vampires what-so-ever.

3. The lands were stunning, absolutely grand and it didnt matter that it wasnt "a whole new world" and more like a gigantic dungeon add on. What mattered was the content and what I felt was missing was the lack of more quests and things to do when you entered


*minor spoilers now and what I thought was missing from the DLC*


the dead cairn which only had two side quests and the frozen area with the pilgrimage also had two quests from far as I can see.

Secondly the Vampires had way more influence to side with their faction in the DLC to convert and be one than to peruse the vampire hunter. They even gave you a second chance to be one when you entered the cairn as if to say " ARE YOU SURE just like the escapist reviewer said on this very website". There needed to be some more perks or at least additional skill selections in the archery department for the crossbow as I have no appeal to be some wolf or blood clot sucker.

I recommend the DLC to anyone who has a few spare dolars anyway. Im not diehard fan but it was good to chop away at something new than the terrible stuff that has come out this 2012 year anyway.

 

[SajuukKhar]

10 hours? wtf did you do? i thinks its more like 5-7 hours(the longest part if when you need to get THE item), unless you walk the hole soul plane on foot

Easy,
-I did the entire Dawnguard side quest, which was about 7-8 hours.
-I did the Lost to the Ages quest, which was another 2 hours.
-Found all the paragons from the frost giants, all the Falmer books in the forgotten Vale, and found all of Saint Juibs pages in the Soul Cairn, which took about 3-4 hours to do.
-I also did all the quests to find the Dawnguard relic items, and all the Crossbow bolts and upgrades, which was another 1.5-2 hours.

7+2+3+1.5=13.5 hours