Dawnguard - A fun quickie full of insanely stupid plot

How I feel about the sudden ending. (Source: oglaf.com)

When a bunch of friends invited me to write an article on mods and community-made improvements for Skyrim, I was hesitant at first. I really meant to do it for them, but I ended up procrastinating, pushing it away, not wanting to get in touch with Skyrim after I had finished the main storyline and most guild-related stuff just a few days after release. And those familiar with my blog or my facebook and youtube-accounts, will know how that worked out. I'm fucking addicted again.

Suffice to say I was really excited when Dawnguard was finally released. At a whopping 14 Quid, but what the hey. And now that I've played it, the best analogy I can come up with to describe this game is teenage sex (which didn't cost me money, mind): The fact that I didn't know when I'd finally get my hands on it, as well as all the good stuff I've heard about it (lotsa previews and the Xbox version came early), resulted in me getting my expectations waaaaaaay up. And by the time my brain had finally realized that I was in fact doing it, the whole thing was over well before I had the chance to actually enjoy it.

Dawnguard features about the same level of quality you get from any of Skyrim's guild-related quest lines (Dark Brotherhood, Guild of Thieves, yada, yada, yada). Probably the same amount of play time, as well - if that. Now one may argue that you can play the whole thing as either a vampire or a vampire hunter, but since I fucking hate vampires, my course throughout this particular storyline is pretty much set in stone.

The one thing that truly bothered me, aside from the shockingly short storyline, was how unbelievably stupid and pointless said story actually was. But before I get into this (and damn will I get into that!), let me tell you why I still think the whole thing is worth the money:

- Crossbows
- Awesome new areas to explore
- Fun new abilities
- FUCKING CROSSBOWS!1
- New werewolf abilities, making werewolves almost fun to play
- Better vampirism, if you care about this kind of crap
- Did I mention crossbows?

Okay, I'm about to start bashing the crap out of the things which I consider unbelievably stupid about Dawnguard. Don't let this ruin your fun! I genuinely believe that this expansion is fun to play, I've enjoyed the two afternoons worth of fun I had with it and if you don't question every tiny bit of story the way I do, you probably won't give a fuck about most of the things I'm hating right now. Alright? Here goes:

Upon installing Dawnguard, everyone starts talking about the ever-increasing amount of vampire attacks. What fucking vampire attacks? Okay, once I had the expansion installed, I happened to see exactly two (!) fucking vampires attacking a city and up to this point, vampires simply didn't fucking matter in Skyrim. Yes, there's the occasional cave here and there, which is inhabited by vampires rather than bandits or zombies, but for the most part, no one gives a shit about them. But when you first run into the Dawnguard (aka the bunch of pissed-off vampire killers), everyone whines about how they lost all their loved ones to the bloodsuckers. Well, I guess all those random dead adventurers in the generic caverns around Skyrim had friends and relatives after all.

After teaming up with those guys, I was sent to follow some vampires to a cave in order to find out what they were looking for. Some of them got stuck fighting a couple generic undead baddies, but other than that, there were no epic deathtraps or mega bosses down here. Just your typical Skyrim dungeon, really. And then there's that button in the middle of the cave. I pushed it, arranged a couple braziers around it by pushing them back and forth and eventually my fiddling around made some chatty vampire chick appear. It turns out she's been trapped down there for centuries, possibly millenia ("Cyrodiil has turned into an empire?") and apparently, I'm the first bright kid to figure out the evil brazier puzzle that kept her imprisoned. I used to play silly computer games for children when my son was five years old and most of them were more challenging than the particular puzzle at hand. How come nobody ever walked into that cave and solved this puzzle in all those hundreds of years? Because of a few random Draugr zombies guarding it? COME ON!

Even the fucking loading screen explains how fucking MERCHANTS travel through Labyrinthian with their goods and that place is full of traps and zombies. And nobody ever made it to this particular cave, which wasn't in any way hidden or sealed or difficult to detect? Really?
Okay, so talky vampire chick appears out of nowhere with an Elder Scroll on her back and it's hate on first sight:
"Who are you?"
-"Sorry, I don't want to tell you."
"Why were you imprisoned down here?"
-"It's kind of a long story..."
"What's with the fucking Elder Scroll?"
-"Look, I don't really trust you enough to tell you."

Alright, suit yourself, you stuck-up bitch! Five minutes later it turns out she's the daughter of some crazed vampire boss guy and there's some family trouble going on and I really don't care for any of their personal crap, so I skip through the dialogue, vampire dude offers me to become a vampire lord such as himself and kicks me out when I refuse because I'm a fucking werewolf.
So I take her back to the Dawnguard. Because I'm a fucking vampire killer. I bring live vampires to the vampire slayer headquarters. It's what I do. And when they ask what the fuck is wrong with me, the game only gives me the option to defend her and speak up for her. Why? Fuck if I know. Basically, the dialoge option should look like this: "Because I know she's the fucking main NPC for this quest and if we kill her, we break the game." Now that's immersive, right?

They even eat like pigs!

So the Dawnguard guys hate me for being a vampire friend and she's my new BFF. Hurray.
For the next quest she wants me to get rid of all my companions. Including my fucking mount. She wouldn't let me start the quest before I made the horse go away. I'm not making this up.
But she has her reasons: We're sneaking into the crazy vampire family's palace gardens to figure out what happened to talky vampire chick's mother. This is the first time the story gets believable: If you're having trouble with a chick, you will ALWAYS have her AND her mother on your ass, no matter what.

Apparently, daddy vampire wants mommy vampire dead, so mommy vampire is hiding somewhere. And when we're checking the gardens, there is this huge-ass sun dial, which has three gemstones missing. Well, shiny rocks, really. They're the size of my fucking head, each and every one of them. They're "hidden" leaning against a wall or poking out of a tiny puddle. The puzzle here is to find those three shiny objects, place them on the sun dial and then the entrance to mommy vampire's secret laboratory appears...

Okay, let me get this straight: That guy wants his missus DEAD. She disappeared through a secret passage right inside the guy's own fucking castle. Opening up said passage is as complicated as putting three gems, which are literally two feet away from the sun dial, ON the fucking sun dial. And nobody living there figured that out. For hundreds of years.
Now here's the kicker: Let's say they DID find her laboratory, but just didn't care, for whatever fucking reason. Maybe daddy vampire smashed the sun dial to make sure the passage would remain closed. But then nobody could open the stupid portal inside the laboratory, which leads right to mommy vampire's hideout?

I hated this part: So you step into mommy's laboratory and you trip upon her diary, which rests in a cozy spot on a book shelf. And reading said diary reveals a handful of ingredients you need to open the portal, all of which are in the fucking laboratory! I have spent ten fucking minutes checking every god damn shelf, table and drawer to find all the crap I needed, while my vampire companion just sat there, telling me to get all the stuff. Hey, I just met you and this is crazy, but... help me, maybe?
I dunno, maybe the game designers didn't wanna hurt the immersive feeling of rummaging through somebody else's alchemy lab whilst trying to find the right herbs and powders to get to the next fucking quest area.

Okay, plot fetishists might argue that the final ingredient is talky vampire chick's blood, so daddy vampire may have found her hideout and just been unable to open the portal. But come on: The diary describes that she's in the fucking Soul Cairn. The place where all formerly entrapped souls go once their soul gems have been destroyed. And even with that information daddy couldn't figure out some way to get there or at least send someone in his stead? In thousands of years he was unable to find another suitable blood donor to open the portal? There's a fucking dragon down there, mommy is there, the Dragonborn ends up down there and there's even a god damn horse! Apparently it's really not that difficult to get into the Soul Cairn. And that fucker has parked his big, fat ass right on top of the portal for an eternity and never figured out what to do? Hoookay!

New werewolf perks almost make lycanthropy fun

In the spirit of the mod I decided to go with the whole vampire and werewolf thing and shape-shifted. Unfortunately, the guys at Bethesda don't want werewolves to be fun. In fact, they don't even want them to work: Once you wolf out, you're unable to loot, interact with most objects, open your inventory or even look at your god damn map. Have you ever tried finishing a dungeon with these limitations? Okay, you might say, just shift back to human (elf, orc, whatever) form to do all that and shift back to wolf, right?
Wrong. You get one shift every day. Which lasts for a few seconds, unless you manage to kill a human and eat his heart, which will increase your werewolf timer a bit. Fail to eat people for too long and you'll change right back. See ya in 24 hours! So basically, you'll either kill 3 or 4 skeletons and gargoyles and change right back because you cannot eat them or you'll bump into a locked door or some nice loot and sit on your ass for a minute, waiting to change back to normal, because you cannot interact with stuff in wolf form.

Good thing there's a fucking construction kit! I can now shift back and forth at the push of a button, loot, interact with shit and you can even tell girl wolves from boy wolves. The former have boobies now, the latter come with a peepee.

I don't always change into a werewolf. But when I do, I dangle my nuts in front of everybody.

Okay, so I'm wolfing it across the soul cairn, an admittedly awesome-looking place almost entirely devoid of quest markers. I'm supposed to find ten tiny pieces of paper for a guy, some of which are hidden on top of a barrel and may be whirled all over the place when hit by a fireball or some other crap in combat and none of them are highlighted by quest markers. Every other fucking quest in Skyrim comes with pointers that tell you where to go, this one doesn't. Which would be okay, if the quest NPC could at least tell you where to look for his shit. He doesn't, so I'm skipping the fucking quest.

When I finally run into mommy vampire, she's not at all pleased to see me in her daughter's company. Must be the big, hairy balls. So we bitch back and forth for a while until the stupid dialogue system allows me only ONE POSSIBLE SENTENCE: "I would never do anything to hurt your daughter!" Yeah, telling my girlfriend's parents she's moving in with me all over again. Only that I don't give a shit about talky vampire chick and, in all honesty, I've known her for about 1-2 hours of game time.

Maybe Mass Effect has spoiled me a little bit there. Maybe I'm being a little too strict about the whole thing. But I'm supposed to be a vampire hunter. I fucking kill vampires. I don't give a shit about the family problems of that cunt, I don't care whether they live or die or open a Gregg's down in Netherfield. But I can't just kill them for their fucking Elder Scroll, which I need in order to finish my stupid quest. I have to speak up for her once again, choose her side, be her friend, even though she has NEVER done ANYTHING to make me like her. She chose not to talk to me, because she didn't trust me, remember? Then she sent me all around the fucking laboratory to do her fucking work for her! She can go to hell for all I care! But I'd never allow for her to be harmed. ♥
Bullshit!

Epic new mount. Turned invisible after two minutes, now I can't find it anymore. I can still hear it now and then. :D

Okay, some incredibly tedious dialogue, a badly-scripted dragon with more bugs and game-breaking features than Odahviing and some awesome new mount which bugs out and turns invisible later, I finally have all the stupid Elder Scrolls. But - oh no - we cannot fucking read them and need the help of a Moth Priest. They're part of some goofy order who spend all their lives preparing to read the damn scrolls, because there's some really freaky magic involved and yada, yada, yada stupid-ass plot device.
So I end up chasing after the old fucker, drag him back to the Dawnguard HQ and by looking at the scrolls he figures out that daddy vampire wants to blacken the sun with the help of some ancient longbow. Apparently, the blood of a vampire can be used to make that thing all-powerful and vampires really hate sunlight and, well, you get the idea. But before the old fart can read the next scroll to tell us where the awesome bow is hidden, he goes blind. "Oh yeah, that's normal. My bad. Shoulda told you, right?"

Now here's a part I love most: Basically, everyone thinks you're screwed now unless you can find another Moth Priest. So blind guy tells you it's a lot easier: Go to some ancient cave with a cheese grater, rub it against a tree to attract moths and once you're fully covered in moths, you can read the scroll. Which completely defeats the purpose of the whole fucking order of Moth Priests and how they spend all their lives preparing and all that shit. So I go to that cave, pull off that sacred procedure exactly the way old blindie has told me to and a minute later I'm reading the fucking Elder Scroll. Never done this before in my life, I'm not a trained Moth Priest, I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing, but I've grated a tree and I'm being followed by insects, so it's all good. And hey, I'm not even fucking blind! So if that's how you do it in order to avoid going blind, why didn't the old fuck go to the cave to begin with? "Eh, I got reckless and didn't prepare." Fuck me, it's only my god damn eyesight, right? Who needs eyes, anyway?

This is NOT a joke! Look it up on youtube! Here are the fucking moths.

Oh hey, wanna know where that legendary bow, which shoots out the fucking SUN is hidden? You're gonna love this: It's inside a fucking CAVE! Not even a sealed cave, nothing hidden or mysterious about it, it's just a fucking cave in Skyrim. Just like every other cave, which is ALWAYS full of bandits, sorcerers, cultists or some other generic bunch of cunts. For some reason, the local scum of Skyrim loves to make caves their hideouts, yet nobody knew about the fucking bow, which is hidden in a cave?

Actually, they did. EVERYONE did! Once you enter the cave (which even features some dead, non-decomposed adventurer in the middle of it) and run into the guy who watches over the bow, he tells you a hilarious story:
"You're here for Auriel's bow, aren't you?"
-"How the fuck do you know that?"
"Because in thousands of years, I had so many adventurers coming here and every single one came for the bow."

Okay, so for thousands of years, whole legions of adventurers came for that god damn bow. Everyone in Skyrim seems to know where that stupid thing is "hidden". EVERY FUCKING CUNT OUT THERE KNOWS ABOUT AURIEL'S BOW, EXCEPT THE DRAGONBORN AND EVERYONE AT THE FUCKING DAWNGUARD! You even get to meet all the adventurers, who failed before you showed up:

Inventive: A frozen throne

They're all frozen solid. Why? No fucking clue. Why isn't anyone freezing me or my companion? The game sure as fuck doesn't bother explain it. And here's the funny thing: The boss at the end of this dungeon is the brother of the guy guarding the bow. He says you can have the bow if you slay his own brother. He can't quite put a finger on it, but something seems to be wrong with him so he must die. So you run into that guy, his skin is all pale and white, his eyes glow in the dark, he's got pointy fangs and this is an expansion about fucking vampires. Hmmm.... I wonder what could be wrong with him?!

People being too fucking stupid to identify vampires are all over this expansion. Take the awful, shitty, repeatable assassination sidequest: You're supposed to eliminate a vampire, who walks among humans. And when you walk into said vampire, he's pale, has the glowy eyes and fangs and sticks out like balls on a bulldog. And nobody suspects anything. Even better: If anyone catches you during the assassination, the guards come after you, throw you in jail, fine you 1000 gold or kill you on sight. HE'S A FUCKING VAMPIRE YOU FUCKS! CHECK THE DAMN CORPSE! HE'S GOT A GOD DAMN LETTER ON HIM LABELLED VAMPIRE NOTE, WHICH SAYS "KILL THE JARL" WHEN YOU READ IT! WHY AM I SURROUNDED BY ASSHOLES? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!


Other sidequests have you running around Skyrim to collect blueprints for crossbow upgrades. Crossbows are awesome, but the blueprints suck. Explosive fire arrows. Yaaaay. The community has modded those into the game six months ago. Explosive electric arrows. Mkay. Explosive ice arrows. What?
What's worse, all those blueprints are hidden inside regular Skyrim dungeons, most of which you will have completed multiple times by now. I know I have. So I run all the way back to kill the same stupid bandits for the nth time to get some unexciting upgrade. Alright, the 50% armor penetration one is pretty neat, but that's where it ends. How about an attack speed upgrade? Faster reload? Multishot? Bolts that ricochet off of walls? Bolts that penetrate a guy and also kill the dude behind him. There are dozens of ways to make crossbows more fun, but all we get is exploding ice b... I...  I don't even wanna get into that anymore.

My companion in her D3-style demon hunter outfit enjoys the new Xbows. Yaaay!

Okay, so you're faced with a bunch of dull side quests, which are no fun to play and make no sense and you'll do them for a bunch of guys you don't give a shit about. It's a Bethesda game. Last time they tried to make a character awesome was when Sean Bean became Oblivion's main hero and the player turned into his errand boy and nobody liked that. But come on! When the Dawnguard head honcho gave his inspiring speech in front of everybody, a scene which has been in every god damn fantasy novel, movie and video game since Braveheart*, I didn't feel a thing. I could only care less if there was some way to skip all of this boring talk. Besides, Tyrion Lannister has already shown you how this speech is done: "There's a whole lot of formidable enemies out there. Go kill them." End of.
*Yes, Braveheart is a nice film, but I call it fantasy, because it's as close to what really happened as anything seen on Star Wars. Or Robin Hood.


And when the whole thing was over after what must have been two afternoons worth of game time, I felt at least some small sense of satisfaction. Not when I mauled the crap out of daddy vampire. Not even when I teabagged his corpse and watched his flesh and bones melt into a puddle of goo (really cool special effect, btw). But when talky vampire chick turned to me, saying: "So I guess you're off to new adventures now, huh?" And you can see that hopeful glitter in her eye, what with me being her BFF and all. And I said: "Yup. Gotta run! I'll call ya!"

Harkon is dead. With the help of Google Translate and a Japanese modding website, you may grab your companion and make love on his corpse.

And that's the end of that. Am I gonna play it all over again and become a vampire? Fuck no! Am I gonna roll a new toon to experience this epic all over again? lol riiight! But now I have a cool new skeletal horse (which has turned invisible after the first two minutes), a new dragon summon (which is bugged and potentially crashes my game), an ability which drains an opponent's soul and makes them a zombie (has been a mod months before Dawnguard came out) and new werewolf perks (which make werewolves viable at high levels when you fix all the flaws and problems with mods) and an awesome new crossbow. With exploding ice bolts. While I'm being a bit cynical about all these goodies, they all work throughout the entire game and come in handy even outside of all the Dawnguard stuff, so they're all fun to have. And I'm sure future patches will fix those, which don't actually work. That said, exploding arrows, skeletal horses, legendary dragons, improved werewolves, Snow Elves and even new ranged weapons have all been created by the community long before anyone even knew about Dawnguard. Sure, if you don't want to customize your game or you're bound by the confinements of a vanilla console version, then Dawnguard will feel so much bigger and better.

I'm not entirely sure whether this speaks for the creativity of the community and the quality of their mods or against Bethesda's work with the expansion. But what do we really want when we play Skyrim? Fall in love with the characters and cry over lost loved ones? Bullshit. We want fat loot, epic battles, nice graphics and new abilities and skills. And Dawnguard provides on all fronts, so go grab it! It's a bit like having an affair with somebody so incredibly stupid, you'd be ashamed to be caught dead with them, but they're just so awesome in bed! There, look at the things Coronation Street is making me say.

-Cat