Freddie Schwartz
Staff Writer
After the release of Skyrim by Bethesda in November of 2011, the first expansion for the game was released for X-Box 360 and for PC in August. Dawnguard introduces a lot of new items such as armor and weapons as well as new areas to explore, with twenty-two new quests that include both story-related and side quests.
Dawnguard is a powerful vampire clan, Vampire Lords in the game, who have obtained an Elder Scroll which contains information on how to blot out the sun for good. The sun is the vampires’ main weakness. How¬ever, the vampire hunters wish to eradicate the vampires and stop their plans. As the player, you can choose either side of the battle.
Both sides have interesting quests as well as great perks to help you in battle. If you choose to be a vampire lord, you transform into a sinister looking demon-figure. When I saw the transformation, I thought it looked pretty cool but, I was hoping for something more scary and I felt their wings were lacking. It’s really annoying how the sun makes you weaker and if you don’t feed on enough blood daily, people start to fear and hate you. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view. The vampires in the game have always had a lot of issues like this which makes sense because, duh, their vampires. You bite enemies to take their life energy and drain their power. As you get stronger, the more abilities you have such as summoning gargoyles.
As a Dawnguard vampire hunter, you gain new armor and weapons like a crossbow, which you can enchant and upgrade like other weapons in the game. You gain rank and can gain armored trolls to aid in battle temporarily.
There is a lot of new content in the game, not just quests. The werewolf, which was already available, has been updated and now has its own skill tree. So if you loved being a werewolf, you can now upgrade and customize the attacks of your werewolf form, such as summoning ice wolves to aid you in combat and upgrading your strength to epic proportions.
There are new creatures in the game like death hounds, a mount that you gain in a quest that’s an undead, skeletal horse, and dragon bone weapons. You have no idea how awesome it is to roll into the near¬by town on an undead horse with a sword made from dragon bones while slaughtering everyone.
This is one of my favorite games to play and now that there has been even more awesome content added such as epic quest lines, it only got better. This expansion is great for anyone who is playing Skyrim already. I must give this expansion a nine out of ten!
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