I liked the DLC that Borderlands had. Those were worth their price. New Vegas had great DLC too, altogether they were worth more than Skyrim.

Yeah Gearbox sure knows how to make DLC. The Armory of General Knoxx was great and was surely worth the price. I haven't played FNV DLC, but I have heard OWB was one of the best Fallout DLC.

Wait that they provide a fix because so far I bought at the same day it come out but I couln't get to play it because of the constant random ctds that prevent to play it .... I use no mods and normal vanilla game so i'ts a dlc issue .

I think the FNV DLC were particularly strong because they presented different experiences (the survival horror of Dead Money didn't please everybody, but it was different, just as the wackiness of Old World Blues gave you something different) and they enhanced the story, filling in the gaps. You got the burned man, you got Elijah, you got to find out where some of the creatures came from, you got to find something out about the courier's past. They fused with the main game to make a coherent whole - while all four also linked with each other. The four DLC completed the story of FNV - they made the whole story come together without interfering with the core game. It was a very well thought out DLC package.

Dawnguard presents more of the same old same old and actively interferes with the main game, forcing itself on the player by prompts to start it and spamming them with vampire attacks. Whereas NV talked about stuff like the burned man in the core game from the outset and then filled in the gaps with the DLC, making a seamless connection, Dawnguard presents a sudden rewrite of the core game by arbitrarily deciding a dread vampire menace was there all along. Rather than fleshing out existing story threads (the underused Thalmor, the loose ends all over the Hogwarts questline), it muscles in on the core game with all of a sudden vampires seemingly being more important than dragons or the civil war. Just so they can chuck in vampire superpowers.

Definitely my biggest issue with Dawnguard, the fact that you are forced to play it unless you want all the non essential NPC's dead. I can't enjoy the face changer or Dragonbone weapons because I have to play Dawnguard otherwise my NPC's will die.

And then some.


I'll have to disagree with that. It and honest hearts focused on giving a new area to explore, but i feel they were the weakest of it's DLCs. If you ask me, Lonesome Road is the best NV DLC, hell maybe the best DLC for any game i've ever played.

Meanwhile, Dawnguard is still 20€, and i'm still "are you kidding? ". But of course there won't be sales on that atleast until they can figure out if they can release it for PS3 Had it been 10€ i would have bought it the (PC) release day

Attack of the fallout fans

Anyway I would have rated it a 80 or 85.

Interesting, Lonesome Road is the best DLC (at least in your opinion). I'll have to check that one out.

As for DG, I don't think its worth the $20 price tag from what I've heard. Many people say "it's more of the same", and IMO that isn't too great of a thing. I would have liked for their to have been major improvement in story, quests, exploration and all of the like, because really, that's what makes Bethesda's open world RPGs great; and what I think Skyrim lacked in terms of quality.

Oh yeah, Lonesome Road is most definitely worth it. I'd recommend heading in there with a character who can handle him/herself in a fight.

It all depends on what you are expecting to get out of Dawnguard.

Everything that has been said about it covers most of its flaws and strengths. When compared to the beefier quests in Skyrim (guild/main), Dawnguard is an improvement, but the two sides being carbon copies of one another is unforgivable under the ruse of choice. It actually becomes insulting how identically they play, only changing the names of NPC's and putting a convenient twist to fit your side.

The exploration portion isn't what I would have liked, but it was certainly enjoyable. Dark, foreboding caverns swarming with falmer, a collapsing bridge, flying chaurus, all add to this. The Soul Cairn doesn't have much of interest, and, as you can't open up a local map, can become a pain to navigate as all areas look identical.

Dawnguard just doesn't make up for some of the things I felt were lacking (short, unexplained guild quests with no choice/consequence, pathetic Civil War questline, etc) by improving substantially in those areas.

I found the Zion based dlc in FNV really svckered me in with the backstory of the survivalist...the FO3 and FNV dlc's tended towards that sort of aspect which leads me to see Dawnguard as very niche orientated, despite being a good story in itself (bugs and glitches are par for the course with Beth, mores the pity).

I hope you realize there was only 1 person who made ALL of the dungeons in Oblivion. One guy. Give him a break. Move on.

That's not really my problem. They should've dedicated more people on making them, like they did in SKyrim.

In SI's example, they have even less excuses, as Oblivion already had a huge success by the time, and they had both the money and the fan responsiveness guaranteed.

We're just comparing. I mean the New Vegas DLCs were very well received (even Dead Money, though it alienated half it's audience, was at least absolutely adored and worshipped by the other half), we're trying to figure out why.

I think Merv makes a good point about tying up loose ends. Something they did with the DLCs is they name-dropped things to come. You heard about New Canaan and the Burned Man, you saw posters for the Sierra Madre and Dean Domino, Elijah and Christine told you all about the Big MT, and your first hint of Ulysses is given to you at the very start of the game, as you try to piece together the main plot. What this did is, when for example Honest Hearts is released, all it takes is an imagine of Joshua Graham's eyes and EVERYONE knows what it means, everyone's excited to go out and buy it AND YET they don't walk away disappointed because these stories and characters weren't hyped like hell, but very vaguely name-dropped.

People think it's cool to -actually- be able to go everywhere you hear about and meet everyone you hear about because it makes the world feel more alive. Natural curiousity will also lead people to want to meet these people, no matter how basic the storyline is.

A DLC that continues on with the cold war with the Thalmor or one to tie up loose ends with the College? Definitely would've been welcome. Instead we have a DLC that puts a giant castle off the coast of Skyrim's most populated city and we're supposed to believe no one ever noticed it before as vampires constantly invade towns and get up in your face.

While I don't know if DLC should provide a massive change of pace (Dead Money got mixed reviews for this very reason), I do think a good story should be a priority. A story that expands upon existing story elements, not one that says "OH BTW VAMPIRES EVERYWHERE" or something right out of left field, but one that people at least know about and will look forward to. Likewise, expand on existing game elements. Did Hearthfire expand on cooking recipes? The trailer made it look like it, and if so, that's good. Take elements that exist and improve them, don't just try and make new systems. When DLC add new spell types, new crafting recipes etc, then this is the kind of thing people will appreciate.


Skyrim, so far, is handling it's DLCs like....a kid with a toy box. Before he's done playing with one toy, he's already moving onto the next. The end result is toys laying about all over the room in a mess as the kid walks away dissatisfied, never truly figuring out what exactly it is that he wants.

We are only trying to save you from yourselves! We bring word of the glorious full ass of New Vegas to the crowds happy with the half of an ass of Skyrim

(And that, obviously, was a joke That made me sound like some sort of fanatic )

And once again, well put Longknife. Personally i love Dead Money because of how different it is. It is a nice break from the usual gameplay of Fallout, and the environment is quite impressive, yet lethal too. And it was only 10€. (No, i will never shut up about the price increase either )

I do too, best DLC I've ever played.
But since we're sort of discussing "what makes a good DLC," then yeah, a lot of people hated Dead Money with a burning passion for that exact same reason.

You really want to be careful with that, though. There's a fine line between "fix" and "addition". Particularly given how poorly done the guilds were originally, you don't want to come across as selling proper guild questlines to fix the broken ones in the original game. It would have to be something with far more meat to it where the new guild questline is only a part of the whole package.

I mean, I'd feel ripped off if I had to buy a $5 DLC to give the werewolves some proper defense and a perk tree... the vanilla game leaves werewolves in a bad position at mid-to-high levels, to the point where they're nearly unplayable without exploits. But in a $20 DLC that gives a sizable questline of semi-reasonable quality, getting those werewolf enhancements that way isn't so bad since you're really paying for new content and not the fixes (though honestly I'd prefer it if they did it in a free patch; for someone who's not interested in the rest of the DLC, even the $5 ripoff would be preferable over the $20 extortion).

People have noticed it. The boatman that takes you there from Windhelm says it's haunted and people stay far away from it. He even refuses to take you there initially because of its reputation, unless you pay him a ludicrous amount of money (and even then he doesn't take you directly to the castle and doesn't stick around). Also it may be just over the hill and a short swim in the game, but to the people in the world it'd be more like on the other side of the Adirondacks, and a good mile from shore.

I disliked Dead Money, I played through it once and it's just not my type of thing - but taking an objective view, I can see that it is good quality content in terms of writing, story, and introducing gameplay that was an interesting variation from that in the main game (and the price on release was good, even though it wasn't for me I didn't feel as though it was a waste of money as I played through it once and felt I'd got my money's worth) - and I can easily see why a lot of people rave about it! It just made me feel a bit panicky, and I prefer to relax whilst gaming, not really into adrenalin myself

I haven't bought and won't be buying Dawnguard - the werewolf perk tree is about the only thing in it I want and I don't want a bunch of stuff that spoils the main game for the sake of a few new dungeons.
And I can assure you that in my game nobody is aware of any haunted castle or seems at all concerned about some vampire menace.

This is one of the reasons NV did it so well and Skyrim is (so far) doing it so badly - in NV you heard about Elijah and knew a bit about him - and then you got a DLC in which he was the central protagonist. Set somewhere the core game already acknowledged the existence of. As Longknife pointed out, the characters you met in the DLC weren't hyped, but they were mentioned. You were encouraged to want to find out more and you were presented with DLC that complemented the main game, expanding on what you'd already heard about.

In Skyrim, it's KAPOW! The vampires and their vampire castle and the hair-raising vampire threat have suddenly appeared out of nowhere...except they were there all along!

And Elijah had a big plan that would affect the entire Mojave - and he was off trying to make that a reality in tandem with the core game and without contradicting the main focus on Hoover Dam. And you could even play out a fake ending where you help him as a sort of 'what if'. You could choose to end your game there if you really wanted to, closing your character's story with making the whole battle for the dam irrelevant. But it didn't rewrite or undermine the main events of the main game. You got a whole new threat that was in total harmony with the main game.

In Skyrim it's all about Alduin ending thje world and the chaos of civil war - oh hang on, sack that, it's now all about vampires who will keep attacking until you go and do the DLC questline (and maybe even after that according to many people). And this sudden switch of priorities has occurred because...it just has.

I think one of the main issues that Dawnguard has, it's more of the same thing that Skyrim offered. Yes we do get new areas, new weapons/armor, a half competent follower, etc but it's not different. New Vegas's DLC's were different from what the main game offered, Shivering Isles was also different from Oblivion. I mean New Vegas sent you to a robot facility, completely different from what New Vegas offered including the exploration which gives a Fallout 3 type feel to it. Lonesome Road, Dead Money, Honest Hearts, all 4 of those DLC's were different from what the main game offered. That's the problem that Dawnguard has, it's more of the same. I'm not going to deny it's better then what Skyrim's main quest offered in terms of the story and quest line but then again that's like saying the Cleveland Browns are going to win the super bowl, it's Ludicrous.

Don't be ridiculous.

I can agree that the DLC handling isn't very good. I'm trying to do the MQ/bits of civil war but I have to put that on hold and deal with the vampire menace. Apparantly vampires are a larger threat. I was never "forced" to do any DLC in F3/NV.

Or Oblivion for that matter, all you got was a quest update that was forgettable in 30 seconds. With Skyrim, no that's not the case and Beth dropped the ball big time.

What happens if you don't complete it? The vampire attacks are simply overwhelming?

That is probably not the case. nothing is overwhelming in this game.

i think its worth the price for what it has, the game brings you much more then just that 2 both main quests! the 3rd one ! its AMAZING!(YES THE FOrg THING)(hopefully this isnt a spoiler )