For your entertainment, I have compiled a few posts I made about Dawnguard on another forum. I'd just like to take the time to thank Bethesda for making an outstanding DLC.

And by outstanding, I mean wretched [censored] nonsensical [censored].

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Dawnguard is just... well, it's amazing.

So even though it's never ever mentioned at all before you install the DLC (of course), you start hearing rumors about vampires, and eventually someone tells you to go join the Dawnguard to fight them. Okay, cool. Never heard of the Dawnguard before, nobody's ever mentioned them, and it's not clear where they get their weapons, armor, people and other resources, but let's roll with it. Same goes for the recent rise in vampire attacks. Not sure what they're talking about - the vampires have always been in that cave just 2 minutes' walk from town, and no matter how many times I kill them, more always seem to come back after exactly 72 hours. But hey, these guys are vampire-hunting experts, I'll take their word for it.

So you go to their huge castle out in the middle of nowhere, which is somehow well maintained, full of people, and yet also completely unknown to anyone else in the world (DLC syndrome), and the first thing that happens?

[img]http://images.uesp.net/thumb/5/53/SR-place-Fort_Dawnguard.jpg/800px-SR-place-Fort_Dawnguard.jpg[/img]

Well, I understand how we could have missed this before. Or why it was abandoned until recently. Not like there are plenty of Jarls out in Skyrim who are living in defenseless shacks or anything.

You see the Dawnguard leader being a dike to some Vigilant because he didn't believe vampires were a real threat (yeah, NPCs cannot into genre awareness as usual). Then the Vigilant says all his friends were killed, and the Dawnguard leader tells him he's sorry, even though immediately before-hand he was calling the guy a wimp and a coward. So then he turns to you, you have a 3-line dialogue where he basically says "we're vampire hunters!" and then he immediately sends you out to some cave to investigate vampire activity, without any character development (other than "this guy is an [censored]"), with no training whatsoever, and no backup. Yeah, great idea.

Of course, you wander alone into this lair of vampires and slaughter them horribly. Then you find a gigantic puzzle in a gigantic chamber. You press a button, and a spike stabs you through the hand, and then the EXTREMEness of it activates a magical seal of some sort. You push some more buttons and a "stone monolith" rises up, opening to reveal... uh, a sixy vampire lady who talks like an 18 year old from a contemporary American city and has cleavage, just because (I think this is Besthesda's completely-not-heavy-handed way of making you sympathetic towards vampires). Despite apparently being imprisoned beneath the ground inside a monolith for thousands of years, you don't even have the option to ask "who the [censored] are you? why the [censored] are you here? why were you inside that monolith? why should I trust you? why do you have a [censored] Elder Scroll on your back? what does it do? oh my god, are you okay? what the [censored]?" Nope, you've just gotta go along with it.

Come to think of it, why were the vampires in that cave? Why were they trying to get to the vampire lady? Did they seal her in there in the first place? So was she like a prisoner? Or were they guarding her? Wait, if she's a vampire and I'm a mortal, why doesn't she kill me like all the other vampires? Quite the coincidence that we only just stumbled across them, even though since she's been there thousands of years, it could have been, you know, pretty much any other time in recorded history.

Oh, and then gargoyles attack you because why not. Nobody's ever seen them before in the land of Cyrodiil (at least without spending 20 jewgolds), but they're just hanging out waiting for you to walk by and you can be sure you'll have killed 500 of them by the end of it. Wait a second, so are the gargoyles the guards? Or are they just monsters? How did they get there? Why are they there? Do they hunt mortals? But then why do they attack the vampire lady too? So are they the minions of vampires or not? I'm so foncused.

So then she decides to follow you as an immortal companion wherever you go, for pretty much no reason, until you take her back to her "home." This "home" is actually a massive, ancient castle that's nearly as large as a [censored] city and is clearly visible from the northern shoreline of the game world from almost any angle and distance... so of course, nobody's ever heard of it, mentioned it before, or been there. Of course not (DLC syndrome)! You take a boat inside and the vampires just let you in for no real reason (and your other follower if you have one, who of course nobody acknowledges), and then you learn there's some bad blood (HAW HAW) between the sixy vampire girl and her not so sixy bearded father.

[img]http://images.uesp.net/thumb/4/42/SR-place-Castle_Volkihar.jpg/800px-SR-place-Castle_Volkihar.jpg[/img]

Inconspicuous, no?

Then he offers you a choice: either run the [censored] away and never return (because vampires who raise humans like cattle, eat people alive, and can be seen literally gorging themselves on human remains at a banquet table, clearly have a sense of honor). This, of course, despite the fact that there is nothing stopping you from, say, reporting the GIGANTIC CITADEL OF EVIL FULL OF MAN-EATING VAMPIRES to, say, every single Jarl in Skyrim (except of course the designers' laziness to add a few more dialogue lines or unwillingness to let you do anything that makes sense), and that you're part of the Dawnguard, aka the order that was created specifically to destroy their kind.

Well, obviously I decided to become a vampire, because so far all I know about the Dawnguard is that they're righteous pussies lead by a giant [censored], and they didn't even give me any training, direction or perks except a crossbow with a quiver of bolts (and I had to ask some random underling for that), so the alternative side has to be better, right? Well, then the head vampire gives me "his blood", and he does so by... biting me. Uh, what? I played Bloodlines, I'm pretty sure that I have to bite the vampire, not the other way around.

I come to inside a dungeon area with "human cattle" and a magic blood fountain just sitting there for me. He explains to me, using a bad accent and reading dialogue that sounds like it came straight out of an instruction manual, how to use my new Vampire Lord powers, which includes "using two types of magic that only do one thing each, but only when you're flying because the designers couldn't figure out a way to let you toggle between them in any way that made sense, oh and of course you can't really fly, just float 6 inches off the ground."

Oh, didn't I tell you? Yeah, it turns out that Vampire Lords are totally a different kind of vampire. They have, uh, much stronger blood in them! Which despite needing to be cultivated and strengthened over centuries, you can absorb pretty much instantly. These Vampire Lords have access to special magic that nobody has ever really documented before (actually they're the same powers that any random mage or vampire gets, but don't tell them that), and they can also transform into their "true forms" in addition to having the usual weakness to sunlight and need to feed.

And it looks like this:

[img]http://images.wikia.com/elderscrolls/images/0/0c/VampireLord.png[/img]

So anyway, then the head vampire tells me, the newest and obviously completely trustworthy initiate who only just got the powers about 30 seconds ago and was given a crash course in Vampire Lord-ism, to talk to some other elven vampire guy. He comes across like a fop, as all elves do. I tell him "it is time." This apparently is enough for him to know that I need to take the Blood-something Chalice, the most sacred and awesome artifact the vampires have, and fill it in some Blood-something cave which has a water spring that looks like blood. And it's magic blood-water!

This stuff makes vampires (or just Vampire Lords?) much stronger. Of course, there are a few questions. Where did this chalice come from? What about that blood-water? If the vampires are so powerful why do they need it? Was it another gift from Molag Bal? If so, why didn't they use it before? Don't the vampires insult Molag Bal by just waiting thousands of years to use their gift to take over the world? Isn't Molag Bal like, the god of violence and brutality? Why did they wait so long to do the work of his they obviously must love and believe in? Why do they trust their new initiate with such an obviously important and monumental task? Do they want to [censored] it up and lose their Vampire Lord perks? Are there dialogue options where I can pose these questions to the NPCs and get answers, or even hand-waves? I'll leave the mystery for you to find out! (the answer is no)

I haven't played any more since that point, but suffice to say, the narrative is engaging and water-tight. Not a plot hole or single iota of derp to be found. I can't wait to continue the epic adventure and learn more.

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I have some questions about Skyrim and Dawnguard.

• Who at Bethesda thought it would be a good idea to force the player through not just one, but two massive outdoor levels, with no useful maps, no map markers, and indeed no real points of reference? Who also decided to make these maps dark and difficult to see in, and feature lots of maze-like and convoluted layouts? Did they seriously think that wandering around directionlessly to find MacGuffins in these places, killing trash mobs every 2 minutes, would be fun?
  
• So if the Forgotten Vale is a place completely devoid of sunlight, why does the message "Your vampire blood boils in the sunlight" appear when I explore it?
  
• Apparently, the Snow Elves are old elves that were almost wiped out... but there's one that is still alive, and has been guarding a holy shrine for thousands of years. Okay, maybe he really has lived that long, but if so don't you think the Forgotten Vale would have become a tourist attraction by now?
  
• Also why can't I ask the Snow Elf "holy [censored] you've been living alone for like a thousand [censored] years, why are you not insane? what do you even eat?"
  
• Why is the Vampire Lord form so bugged to [censored]? Half the time when I transform, I end up transforming twice in a row and I can't revert back because the game strips the special Vampire Lord abilities from me. Also it always takes like 5 seconds for it to register me wanting to turn back to normal form.
  
• Speaking of, Vampire Lord [censored] svcks. It's weaker than your regular character in all probability, it forces you into third-person mode, the controls are awkward and unresponsive, the "bats" ability is too limited to be useful, everyone attacks you so it's useless for anything but clearing out trash mob dungeons, and you can't even pick up loot so you either have to constantly switch forms (see bugs above) or clear out a dungeon and then run through it a second time to pick up anything. What a useless piece of [censored]. And this was the headlining feature?

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Dawnguard is so nonsensical I can't even [censored] comprehend it. Mindless jargon about prophecies, magic artifacts that have never been mentioned before and never will be once the DLC is done, characters who I *think* are supposed to have shocking plot twists and stuff but none of it makes any sense and just raises more questions than answers (ancient evil Snow Elf vampire MADE THE PROPHECY ALL ALONG GASP... who the [censored] cares?), etc. It's also pretty sad that the ultra-special bow that is supposed to be a godly artifact does significantly less damage than my homemade Ebony bow with a 10 damage fire enchantment. What the [censored], Bethesda?

And to top it all off the plot is such a ridiculous railroad. So I'm supposed to kill Lord Hakron, vampire leader? Okay, sure. Because the... prophecy is bad, or something, because it'll make the sun go away forever if completed? And the game assumes I'm not okay with that? Wait, what are the requirements to the prophecy anyway? And if we can "rewrite the prophecy" as we are doing in this quest then how is it even a prophecy anyway? So anyway, we need to kill Lord Hakron, because Serana says that he will kill us if we let him complete the prophecy. So... what, we need to kill him no matter what, anyway? So what's the [censored] difference?

And wait, Serana is just assuming that Lord Hakron will kill me, or more specifically, kill *us*, which means that not only am I being railroaded, but I am being railroaded because the game writers assumed I give two [censored] about Serana, even though she's more annoying than anything else (constantly pointing out the obvious and restating what JUST HAPPENED in the story), and she screws up my stealthy play style by constantly resurrecting corpses and stumbling over traps. And I guess I'm supposed to care about her because she's a girl? With boobs and stuff? Are you [censored] kidding me?

Wait, hold on a sec. So if our entire goal is to kill Lord Hakron to stop him from using Auriel's Bow to complete this prophecy, then please [censored] explain to me,

WHY ARE WE [censored] ON THIS QUEST TO RETRIEVE THE [censored] BOW IN THE [censored] FIRST PLACE?

I still have no idea what the [censored] is really going on in this story. Character motivations don't make sense and the entire quest we are on is based upon the presumption of a girl who doesn't like her father and may be imagining his intentions or making them up to justify killing him. And that would actually be a good twist, except I don't think the writers actually had that intention in the first place.

Only part you forgot was that when Serana is with you she nerfs your Vampire Lord damage to basically being pathetic which makes people think its terrible from the get go.