Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dawnguard is Beautiful!

There's something to be said for the simple photogenic beauty of a game like Skyrim.  Its rolling mountainscapes are inspiring, its verdant woodlands possess an intense mystical energy, and its fetid swamps are super duper fetid.  Still, after nearly two hundred hours in game, I was pretty tired of the land of the Nords.  I was used to the wondrous grandeur of the bullshit mountains and the horrible gleam of sunlight on a dragon's scales as it descended upon me.  It had become ordinary for me, pabulum.  I didn't think there was anything new for Skyrim to show me, even as I spent my days wandering into caves previously unseen, looking for books for my buddy, Orc Libraryman.  Those new caves just used the same dumb, gorgeous art assets as the breathtaking grottos I'd plumbed the depths of earlier.

Then I bought Dawnguard.

At first, I was still pretty unimpressed.  Some new vampire models, okay, and some cool new weapons popping up, okay also.  The first few areas were more Skyrimmy Skyrim stuff, again, pretty well trod territory, wondrous beauty of the natural world, strong hints of Scandanavian culture coloring the entire affair.  Fort Dawnguard was pretty grand, but it wasn't really new.  Then I went on the quest to actually find Serena buried underground.  I crawled inch by inch through familiar Nordic ruins before emerging in an unfamiliar magical superstructure, a kind of massive temple where I found myself assailed by unfamiliar stone gargoyles.  This was new.

And it was just the beginning.

Every personality-less companion Skyrim had presented me with, every blah Housejarl, was suddenly a distant memory: enter Serana, a lady who wouldn't have been out of place in Fallout: New Vegas.  She had history, personality, intellect, and value.  Sure, sometimes she messed with my attempts to stealth through areas, but for the most part she was a tremendous asset: throwing out lightning, making witty comments, keeping her cool in nasty situations.  Serana was amazing, and the places I went with her, even more so.

I could list them off here, but I don't think I'd do them justice.  Moving from place to place became the real motivation for me to continue playing Dawnguard.  Underground cityscapes, new dimensions, the ruins of ancient castles, weird cults buried in familiar ruins with a new twist.  It was all so incredible.  The Forgotten Vale location, unlocked later in the expansion, was especially remarkable: a sort of open area that had a unique fast travel mechanic imbedded within it, paired with some fascinating new resources, harvested in beautiful and original ways.

But the real appeal here, and the appeal that seems to endure in many of Bethesda's expansions to open world games, is the presence of new environs to explore.  Bethesda has become incredibly adept at building rich, textured worlds for players to inhabit.  Even when these spaces are actually quite sparse, if the subtext behind them is rich enough players will fill them with their own stories.  Dawnguard trades on this expertly.  There are rich environments and texts to be found that illustrate in new detail the decline of the Falmer people, but it's just as intruiging to hunt down documents as it is to eke through an aboveground village of contemporary Falmer, blind and bitter and hostile, digging through the trappings of their lives without a single word of narration.

Fallout: New Vegas initiated this tradition, in a sense.  Even as it presented a rich overlay of audio diaries for players to uncover in its expansions, the real oomph behind these spaces was the structure of them and the behavior of the creatures that inhabited them.  Reading diary entries about a school-shaped military training area was interesting.  Inhabiting that space and battling lobotomites and robots was gripping.  Dawnguard, without the benefit of audio diaries, steps up the subtext within its environments. You're not simply picking through the ruins of a long dead society, you're entering a vale where no one but Falmers and Frost Giants has stood in generations.  As you walk through this new landscape, the steaming chorus corpses in a giant's den tell a story ever bit as rich as Ulysses' narration did.  And the wonderful clarity of that landscape giving way to a blinding high-country blizzard?  Simply breathtaking.  That mix of spectacle and subtext, of dragons bursting out of the earth and strangely speckled deer running into mountain lions with useless eyes hunting by scent alone, is really the heart of Dawnguard.

Well, and a handful of other things.  The addition of an actual character is a nice touch, and features that should've been a part of Skyrim at launch, features that players had been integrating through mods for months before Dawnguard and Dragonborn (which I'm still eking through right now, but seems to play on the same wondrous kind of newness that Dawnguard does) came out.  Dragonbone weapons make sense, and are just plain pleasant to see in game.  The ability to craft arrows is just as crucial (and justifies firewood as a resource, finally) and has totally re-invented the way I use bows.  Now I'm happy to let my highest quality missiles fly, instead of painstakingly rationing out my ebony arrows for exceptionally dire situations.

Of course, nothing's perfect.  Dawnguard is pretty buggy (I've now got a valueless 20 stone object in my inventory that I'll never be able to drop which I had to pick up again to complete the expansion) and many of the new items have little or no use to players who come to the expansion after completing the game proper (Auriel's Bow, which is conceptually extremely cool, is actually pretty useless for a player with full Dragonbone gear).  New players, or players interested in replaying the game (something I've actually never done with an Elder Scrolls game to date, honestly) likely won't notice these problems, though, and given that these materials are now bundled into Skyrim on Steam (rather than sold for a hefty $20 each) I imagine that the additional texture that things like Nordic weapons and a companion with a personality add to the game will allay much of the fatigue that I came to Dawnguard with.

And it's worth noting that these "flaws," if they're really flaws at all, did nothing to stay my wonder upon entering an ancient Falmer city filled with frozen corpses.  As I moved through staggering new vistas, plumbed fresh Dwemer ruins and encountered, for the first and last time, the last scion of an ancient race, I was never taken aback by the fact that I was being given material that wasn't useful to me.  Rather, I was just...taken by how remarkable these new spaces were.  Because they were, and will be, as I revisit them, truly amazing places to take my crazy little lizard man.  And it's nice to have bearable company while I'm exploring them.