Quick Note: Both Nuka World and the Vault-Tec Workshop Pack automatically activate at level 30 and level 20 respectively, or they can be triggered manually by heading to the Nuka World transit centre and Quincy Quarry respectively.

Apologies to anyone reading this blog who is getting bored of Fallout 4 and/or Bethesda, but after taking a look at both Fallout 4 and half of the DLC’s available I thought it would be a good idea to just wrap up everything before moving on. As a consequence I’m going to take a look at the large Nuka World pack which consists of a whole new zone, multiple new enemy types, a bunch of new items and the interesting (at least in theory) ability to construct raider settlements and to take-over normal settlements. Alongside this hefty quasi-expansion, I’m also going to delve into the Vault-Tec Workshop Pack which gives you a modest quest chain and the ability to construct a bunch of new, shiny pre-war settlement items and even construct your own vault (kinda). Finally there’s the Wasteland Workshop Pack which lets you “recruit” most of the wildlife in the game, tame them (kinda) and even kidnap raiders, gunners and super-mutants so that you can force them to fight against each other, wildlife and possibly even your own settlers in arenas you’ve built. It’s an eclectic assortment to be sure, as while almost every other DLC has been about building up your settlements, the Nuka World expansion is essentially about enslaving them and making a heel turn from Wasteland saviour to Wasteland Wrecker. Before taking a closer look at what is without a doubt the most substantial piece of content left though, I’m going to take a quick peek at the Vault-Tec Workshop Pack which is broadly equivalent to the Automatron pack I took a look at last time.

For some bizarre reason, Bethesda seems to think you won’t be able to handle the sheer excitement of the Vault-Tec pack until you’re level 20 or have accidentally stumbled across Vault 88 by clearing out the Quincy Quarry, a highly radioactive raider camp located just south from Jamaica plain which is itself riddled with ghouls. I can only assume this is due to the Vault’s location, as the fights within it are relatively tame and largely optional for wrapping up most of the quest chain and by extension unlocking all of the lovely little workshop items you get. Another weird choice with this DLC is that you can gain 4 unique workshop items, but you can only build each of them once and after that you’re out of luck – so transporting your bespoke objects to another settlement isn’t possible. I’m not sure why Bethesda went through the effort of making the quest chain revolve around building and testing these unique items, only for the game to then go “ah well, that’s them done with” but I digress. What you do get in this pack is a new Workshop location which is contained within Vault 88 and is exceedingly large. At the start of the quest chain, you’ll need to fight through some raiders and feral ghouls to save the Overseer, before being tasked with two parallel objectives. The first is to activate the other 4 workbenches which are buried away within the labyrinthine complex, a task which requires you to find multiple MacGuffins control decks so that you can bring them all online – then clearing away the rubble so that each workbench is interconnected and therefore the settlement can be one continuous area. At the same time you also need to construct various test items within the vault, which includes fighting your way through a bunch of drugged up gunners at one point. Once you’ve built the four pre-requisite testing items and conducted some experiments on the exceptionally eager and slow of thought Clem (one of the new settlers), the DLC wraps up.

And I’m not trying to sell the Vault-Tec DLC short, as the new settlement options are genuinely pretty impressive and let you construct almost every aspect of a vault in any location with some nice use of the snap-fitting settlement system. Unfortunately outside of this and some new decorative items, alongside one or two useful settlement items (such as a barber chair and cosmetic surgery chair that let you adjust your character’s appearance without using the in-game console commands) there isn’t much here. The main quest is a breeze for those who actually took their time on the run-up to the recommended level, as you’ll have a settlement by then with a bunch of resources in it (I assume) and as such having one of the settlers create a supply route makes the whole thing a very short affair. As for the experiments, well they always follow the same basic pattern. You build something new, you connect it to a terminal, you choose 1 of 3 research parameters from the terminal, Clem gives some funny dialogue and you move on to building the next thing. The R&D notes describing each bit of research are mildly amusing thanks to Ted the inadvertent test control who basically isn’t doing any weird research at all, but the choices don’t seem to actually matter that much. Basically when you are testing a new item, these 3 different R&D parameters determine how that item will impact any settlers when they’re built, but generally the items aren’t hugely useful. You get a slot machine for some extra happiness, a power generating exercise bike and a soda stand. The slot machine is kinda useful for bumping up settlement happiness, but this mechanic generally isn’t an issue so long as settlements have food/water/turrets which you’re going to do anyway. Then the exercise bike is basically useless as it either generates less than a single generator or has a chance to explode. Finally the soda stand can be configured to make settlers less hungry, but once you’ve got one settlement producing food this resource takes care of itself and so any benefit is fairly marginal. With that all being said, there is a chance to cause the Overseer to get pissy and rage-quit if you always choose the “nice” option, and there’s a chance that the settlers will get sniffy if you choose the less ethical ones, but basically it doesn’t matter as both the Overseer and the settlers are inherently disposable. You do get a unique vault suit if you manage to not alienate the Overseer, but honestly who cares? It’s not a great piece of armour anyway. As for the other parts of the quest chain, well you shoot up some gunners and have to fight some radioactive fauna to clear out the entirety of the Vault including a Mirelurk Queen. Otherwise it’s a pretty short if modestly entertaining piece of DLC that is the definition of nice to have, but not essential.

Moving on from the Vault-Tec Workshop pack, I decided to grab the bull by the horns and actually play the main DLC that anyone cares about – namely Nuka World(!) Unlike the other two packs this one is an actual, honest-to-God entirely new area which features multiple quest chains and a generous amount of content. The crux of this DLC is that the official theme park of the ever so popular Nuka Cola beverage has been taken over by three competing raider gangs, and it’s up to you to either whip them into shape and become a new sort of Raider boss or just genocide all of those filthy drugged up scum. Obviously if you choose the latter option, you get a pretty exciting and longggg gun fight against myriad enemies before being able to explore the theme park and unlock some new Nuka Cola recipes. If everyone else who actually wants to get their money’s worth though, the DLC starts with you bumbling through a gauntlet of turrets and traps, before defeating the former Overboss of the theme park in a duel which results in you becoming the new overboss. Once you’ve been designated the king (or queen) of the raiders, you start a series of quests to clear out the rest of the park which has been left to rot and determine which raider faction (if any) you prefer. You see while the gangs are all “loyal” to you, they were also all “loyal” to the last Overboss and as a consequence this DLC is mainly about having a jolly good time shooting a bunch of stuff in the theme park and managing these three gangs so that they don’t betray you. The two goals are largely in-sync with each other, as once you’ve cleared up a section of the park from it’s hideously mutated wildlife and/or maliciously poor programmed robots you can assign it to one of the three factions. These factions being comprised of your standard “in it for the cash” raiders (the Operators) who are morally bankrupt and trying to make up for it with cold hard caps, the Darwinian survival of the fittest group called The Pack and finally the psychotic “murder and torture are fun” group called the Disciples. Each faction basically says “favour my guys or we’re gonna hate u” and so if you don’t divide the 5 areas semi-equally then they’re going to cause trouble for you. At least in theory…

You see no matter how you divvy up the zones one group is always going to rebel against you, because there are 5 parks and 3 groups so one group always gets the short end of the stick and will then retreat to the power plant to start shooting at you. You then go there and gun them all down, before getting some mediocre perks from the 2 gangs you didn’t alienate. The other main part of the DLC is that you’re able to setup raider camps, which are like normal settlements except edgier and require you to either shoot all of the existing monsters/inhabitants or pass charisma checks to “persuade” the human settlers to leave. Once this has been done your new totally different raider settlement will begin giving you some cash every now and then, but the amount you earn is pretty minimal and these camps require more setup time as you both need to liberate the settlement and bully nearby non-raider settlements into giving you food. You might be thinking that at least these guys would be good at defending themselves, but nope the raider camps only spawn basic raiders while the enemies are level scaled so they get rinsed half the time anyway. The only “benefit” is that they automatically recruit new members without requiring a radio beacon, but this also means that they tend to grow constantly unless there is a critical shortage of food/water/defence. To give Bethesda some credit, these new camps provide a lot of settlement customisation options and the passive income stream is nice, plus you will encounter various raiders, slavers and the like wandering around the map to a much larger extent than you normally see Minutemen patrols. Speaking of the Minutemen, if you setup one wafer thin camp then Preston Garvey will permanently hate you forever while still being immortal so he will wander around his designated settlement being pissy at you. You’ll also occasionally have to gun down the Minutemen who show up to defend a settlement, which is particularly funny when they decide to show up to defend a settlement held by another group of raiders. If for whatever reason you get bored of role-playing as the Overboss, then you’re free to make every raider hate you forever by shooting some of them at which point you basically get locked out of the rest of the raider content. Preston will still hate you even if you do this though, so if for whatever reason you’re a hardcore Garvey simp then you need to either reset his faction allegiance or use a mod. Or you can just leave him stranded in Concord forever, then recruit him once you’re done with all your raider business.

Nuka World is therefore a fun little diversion, albeit one that’s relatively short on new content. You’ve got a spin on the classic settlement formula but it really doesn’t change very much at all, and while the prospect of being the big bad raider boss is fun for roleplayers I suspect everyone else will find it pretty shallow. You don’t get much in the way of benefits from doing it, and while the 3 raider factions are a cool concept, all of them basically treat you as an errand boy and none of them really do anything – even once you’ve given them multiple areas of the park and raider camps in the commonwealth. The DLC does have a bunch of new enemy types, but once you’ve cleared through the various parks you’ve basically genocided almost all of them for good with the exception of some of the irradiated fauna such as the blood worms and tiny mutant ants. You can craft some new varieties of Nuka Cola, but these require old types of Nuka Cola and are fairly heavy for healing items. There are also some smaller side quests like collecting the rare caps to meet the founder of Nuka Cola, exploring a haunted house riddled with traps and helping a bunch of cultists liberate a UFO theme park ride, but most of these are fairly short and the rest of the extra content is largely a scavenger hunt (like collecting the medallions). While I still think Nuka World as a part of Fallout 4 hits the same standard as the base game, it isn’t as exciting or as interesting to explore as Far Harbour and the RPG mechanics are near non-existent. It’s only really worthwhile for those who are bored of exploring the repetitive quests from the main game or who want to roleplay as a dickhead. Alternatively you can also skip most of the raider quests by just genociding all of the raiders, which is the “good” ending and leads to a pretty intense couple of gun fights as you liberate the park. Beware that this will permanently lock you out of setting up raider camps and doing any other raider missions however.

Last and certainly least, there’s the Wasteland Workshop DLC which is filled with some cool ideas but utterly falls short at being of any interest to anyone. This pack is a smorgasbord of content that people probably wanted, but which couldn’t justifiably be included elsewhere. The big attractions are the cages which are used for catching wildlife & raiders, alongside the ability to create arenas and assign your captured animals and settlers to teams which will fight each other to the death. Alongside these additions there is a bunch of random stuff like a better power generator, a better water pump, some new traps, some new concrete construction materials, some decorations and a bunch of light-boxes which are mainly used as screenshot bait for constructing garish displays. Most of these are nice to have, such as powered doors, more lights, the ability to mount a death-claws head on a wall but none of it is really essential. Perhaps the biggest criticism that can be made of this DLC is the fact that it blends so easily into the base game that you can hardly notice what it added, as a new and slightly better water pump isn’t really enough to get your pulse racing. As a consequence I’ll just say that all the little things are good and move on to the two BIG features, namely the arena teams and the captured creatures.

First things first, the various creature cages are kind of a pain as most of them need specific types of animal meat that you probably don’t have. Mainly because storing meat in the workshop will cause your settlers to eat it, the lazy greedy bastards, and secondly because any meat you gathered you probably cooked for the easy XP and because it made it much more useful. As such you’ll need to stock up on various critter chunks such as Softshell Mirelurk meat, Mutant Hound meat, Yao Guai meat and so on. Then to prevent the wildlife from attacking you and/or your settlers, you need to construct a “Beta Wave Emitter” which requires you to have taken the Wasteland Whisperer perk (which itself requires a Charisma of 9). Then even once you’ve done all this the animals will still attack each other if for example you have a Death-claw and a Yao Guai in the same settlement. These ferocious animals do provide a defence boost, but they will also cause other animals from that species to attack your camp which is a pain in the ass to deal with. So if you want a pet death-claw, you now have to deal with frequent death-claw attacks on your settlers. The raiders, gunners and super mutants you can trap are also always permanently hostile so… yay? Fortunately you can assign all of them to the ARENA by building the two ARENA contestant structures and assigning them in the Workshop, while they try to attack you. Then as soon as they see anyone from the other ARENA team, they will start fighting them, which is a problem if you want to do a team battle. You can construct a bunch of stuff in the way to block the line of sight, but honestly it’s a lot of trouble to watch a bunch of NPCs attack each other, especially as cages take multiple days to catch anything and you must be away from the settlement for them to work. As such both the arena and the cages are cool ideas that don’t really work very well, because the captive creatures aren’t worth the trouble – it’s not like you get a companion animal out of it – and the arena requires a bunch of construction and planning for a brief and expensive diversion. So I’d give the Wasteland Workshop pack a big fat “they tried” out of 10.

In summary then, this batch of DLC features a bunch of content I can only recommend for people who really care about settlements. The Wasteland Workshop pack is solely dedicated to new things to build, while the Vault-Tec pack has a handful of bland quests and only really comes alive when you’re building stuff at settlements. Finally there’s the Nuka World pack which does add a bunch of content, but outside of exploring the new zone and killing a ton of new enemies, the quests are pretty basic and again a lot of the new mechanics revolve around… settlements! Perhaps unsurprisingly I consider Nuka World to be the best one here as it does provide plenty of new areas to explore and a handful of interesting combat encounters, but otherwise this batch is slim pickings. Obviously if you want to roleplay as a bad character then Nuka World is nearly essential, but for good characters you get one massive gun-fight against all of the raider gangs are a bunch of smaller gun-fights against all of the new Nuka World creatures. Which essentially means that if you spent a lot of time fiddling with settlements before doing the Nuka World questline you’ve got the awkward choice of either missing out on most of the Nuka World content or invalidating all of your previous hard work. Overall I’d say that Nuka World is worth a playthrough as the new areas are kinda cool, whilst the other two packs are largely inconsequential and can be safely ignored even if they are somewhat useful for those who are interested in the settlement building part of the game. Do with this knowledge, what you will

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Quick Note – Automation’s quest chain automatically activates once your character reaches level 15.

Following on from my earlier review of Fallout 4, I thought I’d get my full money’s worth and take a look at the DLC for the game as well. This time we’ll be taking a look at Automatron, Far Harbour and the Contraptions Workshop Pack with the remainder (Nuka World, the Vault-Tec Workshop Pack and the Wasteland Workshop Pack) coming next week. Starting things off in alphabetical order, the Automatron pack gets a dizzyingly high rating of “it’s alright” out of 10 from me, your humble truth-seeker and scribe. The reason I’ve chosen to bequeath the Automatron pack with such a rating is simple, it adds an alright quest chain with the occasional challenging fight and makes some tweaks to the larger game world which give the player some new enemies to fight and the ability to create and upgrade robots. This latter part is really the star of the show, with the quest chain basically serving as a way to justify how you’ve discovered the ability to make a robotic workbench and then make a variety of different robot types. Fans of Fo3 and F:NV who experimented with modding might think this sounds familiar and honestly it is, as the RobCo certified mods basically let you do this in both of those games. The main difference this time however is that Bethesda have expanded the concept, so you can not only make robot companions but you can also assign them to settlements and decide which parts they have (which gives you the ability to make some abominations). Basically once you’ve finished the relatively short quest line, you’re given the ability to create new robots for crafting materials and are then able to decide what head/arms/body/legs they have, with the system being broadly analogous to how Power Armour works. This is due to the fact that each arm and each leg are treated separately (unless you’ve chosen the hovering jet that Mr Handy’s have for legs) and each part not only has a variety of types, such as Robobrain treads or Protectron Legs, but also various suboptions which essentially act as armour and weapon upgrades. There are also some other effects such as the ability for your robot to give you a bonus to stealth or regeneration outside of combat, alongside some upgrades that are slightly overpowered but give that part a small chance (generally 2%) of breaking after use. You can build basically as many of these robots as you want, and they’re treated by the game as settlers for the purposes of your settlements (so yes, your Protectron can “choose” the humble farming life). Unfortunately they don’t work as shopkeepers because Fallout 4 is an inconsistent game at best, but everything else works.

And while that’s all admittedly pretty cool, the other additions from the pack aren’t particularly huge. As mentioned you get a modest quest chain which serves as your introduction and it brings everyone’s favourite Fallout 3 character, the Mechanist into Fallout 4. Unfortunately(?) the Antagoniser isn’t here to summon giant ants to aid you, so instead you’re tasked with saving a caravan of traders, which gives you an Assaultron companion and then begin hunting down the Mechanist. To do this you need to gun down some robots at the General Atomics factory, hunt down 3 robo-brains (not as easy as it sounds) across 3 separate locations, before finally assaulting the Mechanists layer. These locations and encounters are generally enjoyable, with most parts of the quest being pretty short but there are two large dungeons here which provide some unique items and can be challenging especially for those hovering near the level 15 mark. You also get to see a variety of new robot modifications, generally themed around unfinished robots that are missing their armour and are instead packing a variety of new melee weapons. Once you’ve finished up the main quest chain you’re able to keep your new companion and are rewarded with the Mechanist’s outfit & lair, alongside receiving all of the potential robot modifications that are available. You’ll probably have also looted the full suit of T60 power armour that a certain troublemaker drops, alongside their unique tesla gun that’s useful for clearing out mobs of enemies. Aside from this main quest the DLC also adds a new raider gang called the Rust Devils, who are basically a geekier version of the raiders who employ more robots, alongside an endless amount of radiant quests that involve tracking down the Mechanists remaining robots. That’s about it for the Automatron DLC, which I consider to be enjoyable thanks to it’s robot building abilities and decent main quest line. Sure there’s not a ton of content on offer, but it’s far from the worst of Bethesda’s offerings and the ability to turn Codsworth into a sentry bot is honestly worth the extra 500ish megabytes that the game demands from your Fallout 4 installation.

After finishing up Automatron I dove into Far Harbour, which actually took a surprising amount of time. This is because to unlock the initial quest for Far Harbour, you either need to hang around Nick Valentine’s detective agency after getting to a certain point in the main quest of Fallout 4, or just stumble across the quest organically. I thought I’d mix things up by trying to get it to trigger organically, but I can safely say that finding the Nakomi residence can be a real pain in the ass if you only have a foggy memory of where it is. To cut a long story short, it’s hidden away at the absolute uppermost North-Eastern corner of the map and isn’t marked on your local map until you’ve basically stumbled across it. As a consequence I ended up “wasting” an hour or two exploring every point of interest on the eastern coast before finally finding it. Once there you bumble around the house, picking up a few audiotapes before finally getting permission to take the family boat to Far Harbour. After your arrival to this entirely new island you get a quick bit of exposition basically confirming that there are three settlements, a normal-ish town, a synth sanctuary called Arcadia and then a Children of Atom cult base. The town and the cultists hate each other, while the synth’s are cut in the middle trying to be reasonable-ish. Unfortunately one of the faction’s is unintentional sitting on Thermonuclear missiles and as a consequence even if Far Harbour and the Cultists don’t just genocide each other the old fashioned way, there’s a pretty significant chance that once both realise there are nukes lying around it’s all going to end in tears. Much like in the base game’s main quest, in Far Harbour you get to determine which (if any) factions are going to emerge victorious from the inevitable final confrontation, which gives this DLC some replayability. As a bonus, the quests themselves are also pretty decent as far as the game goes, with Far Harbour allowing a good level of choice and some actual consequences for failing or succeeding speech checks outside of not getting more caps from quest givers. Alongside an unexpectedly strong narrative thread, this DLC also contains a decent amount of content because as previously mentioned it takes place on an entirely new island which features entirely new factions, quite a few new enemies, a bunch of new locations to explore and some new weapons/crafting recipes/random buildable objects for your settlements. It also gave my character a surprising amount of XP per quest and a significant amount of cash once I started working my way through the side quests. One of these is a particular stand-out as you end up playing detective for a bunch of rich people who’ve locked themselves away in a vault, and one of them has just been murdered. It’s not a particularly massive brain-teaser to figure out, as the game’s quest markers are embarrassingly adamant that you can’t make a mess of things, but it’s still an enjoyable diversion and I ended up with over 1100 bundles of pre-war money as compensation (worth about 3300+ caps depending on the vendor and your perk choices).

Far Harbour can then be considered an equivalent to Point Lookout in terms of DLC content, as while many enemies are re-used (including some random Super Mutants who are on the island because… reasons) there’s plenty of new content to play around with in a brand new setting. It’s not going to turn the world on fire, but I did find the new wildlife to be challenging to deal with on occasion and I also have to confess that the new fog effects looked great and helped lend the island a sense of foreboding and menace. When combined with the island’s rather liberal approach to dosing you in rads, it’s fair to say that Far Harbour is not for the player who is faint of heart (I almost shit on multiple occasions due to massive beasts dropping from trees and bursting out of lakes) or playing on the lower levels. As for how our hero’s saga ends, well it is entirely up to you. What I can say is that there are multiple options to decide how things will end, each of which will have significant ramifications and none of which offer an entirely clean ending. At best you’ll have to get your hands dirty to enforce a level of peace and at worst you’ll be genociding at least one of the three factions. One of the better aspects of this ultimate choice is the fact that doing the side quests (and even progressing along in the main quest chain for the base game) will influence which options are available and whether or not you’re able to pull them off. It also offers some a modicum of roleplaying opportunity, as your character can become a devoted member of the Church of Atom, a mercenary or a peacemaker with each run being fairly different. It’s therefore a strong entry and while not much of an RPG compared to normal games in the genre, it’s still a leap forward for Fallout 4. Last but not least I’ll just mention that you can find a unique-ish suit of power armour and can gain access to a handful of new workbenches, for creating some new settlements. With all that being said, let’s move onto the final piece of DLC I’ll be looking at this week…

…The contraptions workshop of course! As one of the Workshop packs it’s fairly light in content, due to the lack of quests, new areas or new enemy types. Instead it solely focuses on adding new content to settlements that you can fanny around with, in this case a couple pieces of decorative junk and the ability to create production lines inside a settlement which let you turn junk into (almost) anything. The way it works is simple on paper but can be tricky in practice. Basically there are multiple types of conveyor belts, production devices and storage containers which all can be connected to each other and once they’re powered up, you just need to connect a terminal and then the system will largely begin to operate as intended. To give an example, you can build an ammo forge which will create most ammo types from raw materials, such as x10 .45 bullets from x1 fertilizer and x2 steel. You can just drop these in manually, but the intention here is that you’ll produce a hopper (for dropping items), a sorting conveyor belt (to push out those not containing the required materials) and then connect these three things together with conveyor belts. Once setup there is a certain degree of catharsis from watching everything flow by and begin the process of getting turned into the ammo type you’ve selected, but of course things can get more complicated from there. Why just have the bullets flow off the production line and onto the ground when they could go into a storage device that connects to the end of the conveyor belt, for example? Or maybe you’d rather have a tripwire that automatically starts and ends production once you trigger it. Then of course you’ve got the prospect of building machines that can produce anything, but each type of good has it’s own machine. You’ve got a food processor, gun forge, ammo (and energy ammo) forges, an armour forge and so on. Now you could have each one operate independently, but you can also string a bunch together into a fully conjoined production line for maximum factory shenanigans. To be entirely honest aside from ammo, explosives and maybe food this whole DLC is more giving you an excuse to faff around like this more than it is actually providing anything of particular use. Sure you can configure a production line to produce junk items that have a vendor value higher than the cost of their components, but this seems like an extremely convoluted way of earning a bit of extra money in a game with procedurally generated quests.

But before you begin trying to recreate Factorio in Fallout 4, there are a few caveats to bear in mind. Firstly and perhaps most annoyingly, as production objects are controlled by a single terminal you can’t have a singular production line produce multiple types of ammo at once. Instead you’ll need to assemble multiple production lines, as otherwise all connected production forges will produce the same thing. This also applies to the other types such as the food processor and weapon forge. Secondly you’ll be restricted by perk choices from choosing certain outputs, which won’t even show as being potentially available but locked off. For example if you don’t have Gun Nut rank 4, you won’t see .50 calibre rounds as an option from an ammo forge (as you can see from my screenshot above). Thirdly you’ll need to basically dump each material into either a hopper or a container connected to a vacuum belt for the production process to start, so it’s not entirely automatic. Fourthly when setting up the conveyor belt sorters, they only accept the raw material for determining which items to sort – so if you don’t have Steel but instead have an object that’s solely compromised of Steel, then that won’t work. Fifthly and finally, all of these machines require power and a decent amount of space. Plus they only go in a preset direction, so there will be some fiddling to do before everything works right. Now none of these problems are insurmountable, but it essentially means that this DLC is either a brief but amusing gimmick or will require a significant time investment. As for the rest of this DLC, well it’s pretty light on things you might find useful. It does add elevators, a fireworks launcher, logic gates which utilise power flow in different ways and some new ways of displaying items (cases, gun racks and mannequins that can wear any armour) alongside the ability to send settlers to the Pillory stocks and two new traps and some signage. That’s about it though, so this DLC isn’t particularly big and if you don’t care about the new forges and conveyor belts then you’ll probably not care about it at all!

So after diving through three of the Fallout 4 DLC packs at dizzying, breakneck speed I can safely say that they’re all good to have but I’d recommend them to various degrees. Frankly the contraptions DLC is entirely optional and is basically a waste of time unless you’re really into the prospect of watching a production line whizz by. On the other side of the spectrum is Far Harbour, which I consider to be basically essential for anyone who enjoyed Fallout 4 as it’s both a well balanced quest chain with plenty of player agency and an enjoyable additional dollop of content with multiple unique enemy types and new areas to explore. Then sitting pretty in the middle is Automatron, which is great if you want to have an Assaultron or upgraded Codsworth as a companion, but is otherwise just kind of OK otherwise. Sure the additional quests in Automatron are enjoyable enough, but it’s a fairly short (if occasionally challenging) piece of content that I would otherwise only consider essential for The Mechanist fans or those who are easily excited by the prospect of building your own Protectron settlers. For everyone else Far Harbour is the clear winner and the best DLC of the bunch (Spoilers: including next week’s lot), while contraptions is basically a cute little time sink that’s barely worth paying for. Therefore Far Harbour > Automatron > Contraptions Workshop.

The post Fallout 4: DLC Dumpsterfire (#1 of 2) appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Quick Note – These days you can still buy the Fallout 4 base game, but honestly the GOTY edition is the version you should get the base game is a noob trap. Sure the base game goes on sale for slightly cheaper, but if you decide to grab the DLC (which I’ve reviewed here) then you’re going to need to re-buy the GOTY edition anyway.

Fallout 4 (Fo4) is a game that’s garnered a mixed reception in the years following it’s launch, and honestly it deserves it. While the game is a massive leap forward compared to Fallout 3 and even Fallout: New Vegas in many ways, it’s barely an RPG in any meaningful sense of the word. Sure it has some of the trappings of it’s predecessors, with the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system returning, the option of fighting through or talking through many quests and the return of the “choose your favourite faction” ending but these all come with significant caveats. Firstly while the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system (which forces players to build a character via putting points into Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck) is back as ever, it isn’t accompanied by skill points at all. For those who haven’t played a previous Fallout game, this might not sound like a big deal but believe me, it is. You see the S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats were designed to form the skeleton of your character and as such influenced how you would play by giving you an early bonus to certain skills, while making you weaker at others. For example if you put a bunch of points into Strength you would be a powerful melee character, or if you put a lot of points into Charisma you could be a silver tongued deliver that would be able to persuade your enemies to give peace a chance or just extort those damsels in distress for extra quest rewards. This would then give you a natural gameplay focus, with various perks and occasionally quest outcomes being dependent on having the “right” kind of character. While it is true that towards the late game you could still put a bunch of points into say, gun-fighting while playing as a character with the grace and dexterity of a blundering imbecile, you would be constrained by the level cap from being an expert at everything and thus would be putting yourself at a disadvantage. In Fallout 4 however these skills are all gone, so everything is determined by your S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats, which means that instead of managing 13 skills + 7 stats you’re now managing… 7 stats. To somewhat mitigate this simplification of your ability to influence your character throughout the course of the game, you now get a perk after every level and these perks only require you to have a perquisite amount of the corresponding stat. In less pretentious terms, if you want to shoot the bad men betterer you don’t need to worry about distributing points between the various weapon skills (Guns, Energy Weapons, Big Guns), only having enough agility/perception to unlock the +20% more shoot gun perk. Similarly lock-picking and hacking are now just perks under the Agility and Science skills respectively, instead of being their own skills. Speech? Entirely handled by the Charisma stat. Bartering? Just a perk. Unarmed and Melee weapons? Both just +% damage perks. You get the idea. Now to be somewhat charitable to the perk system, it does give each perk multiple levels (e.g. +20% bang gun shoot, then +40%, then +60%, then +80% & ignore 15 bad man armour points etc) and many of the perks from the previous games are nestled within it as well. So there’s still a smidgin of depth to the system but… once combined with the other tweaks you’ll see why Fallout 4 didn’t win RPG of the year.

You see Todd’s brutal snub by Geoff “Dorito Pope” Keighley wasn’t just over this modest change, nor indeed because Fallout 4 is a bad game. It’s actually kind of fun in a mindless sort of way, much like Skyrim which I also reviewed and thought was a bad RPG but a fun little game. In fact I even mentioned that I spent the first 30 hours of the game immediately after buying it on release (supposedly with a friend but he bitched out at the ABSOLUTE last minute) having a great time. Then the trance wore off and I couldn’t help but wonder why the hell I’d been playing it for two days straight, or why I’d bought the PS4 version like the gigantic philistine I am. The thing with Fallout 4 is that despite it’s slow start, it goes start to sink it’s claws into you and won’t let go until you start to realise that every single quest is basically the same and none of your choices matter and you don’t need any more loot because your build is already great and blah blah blah. Even writing this review I found myself weirdly engrossed by the game, 7 years later and while on my 4th playthrough because it nails the “just one more thing” feeling in a way I haven’t experienced since Civilization 4. So why did I start this mutually assured waste of time review by putting the boot in? Well for the simple reason that Fallout 4 is a fun game until you start thinking about it or trying to treat it as an actual RPG. Which is a deal breaker for some, but considering how many people earnestly tell me that [INSERT POPULAR GAME YOU LIKE HERE] is good I can’t help but imagine the sentient gamer is a rare and oft-bullied minority.

So the removal of the skills system aside, what makes Fallout 4 such a lousy RPG? Well the first significant issue is the fact that the guys at Bethesda thought it would be super cool to have a voiced protagonist for the first time in the history of the series. This of course means that you get to be IMMERSED, but unfortunately your character never really says that much and I don’t think it was really worth it. Of greater concern is the fact that by having your character be voiced, each line of dialogue cost money and as such Bethesda dumbed down the dialogue system by having you only be able to respond in 4 ways to each situation. To be fair other RPG’s such as the excellent of slightly janky Alpha Protocol – Coincidently also by Obsidian FYI – handled this limitation without any difficulty, BUT Bethesda totally made a hash of it by having each option always fit the same pattern. By which I mean, someone says something to you and every single time your options are as follows: Pwecious widdle carebear, Dickhead, Question, Neutral-ish response. Then to compound the cock-up even further the question option often doesn’t advance the dialogue at all, so you only really get three options which are Yes <3, Yes and Go Fuck Yourself. To give you an idea of how this works in gameplay, some loser will cry about something and offer you a quest to rescue their waifu body-pillow from a raider camp – to which you can agree nicely, agree normally, ask who their waifu is and tell them to get a life (declining the quest). That’s the extent of the role-playing across the ENTIRE game. Even the speech options fit into this pattern, with certain options occasionally being coloured from yellow to red (corresponding to difficulty) and offering you a bonus if you succeed or a less optimal outcome if you fail. Asking for more money (hitherto controlled by the barter skill)? Well that’s the neutral yes option but now it’s a different colour. Intimidating someone (hitherto dependent on either your Strength, Faction Rank, Weapon Skill, Perks etc)? That’s now the dickhead option but a different colour. So you’ve got less character differentiation thanks to the loss of the skills system and a considerably reduced pool of options in every single conversation within the game. Then to really give those bespecactled RPG loving nerds one last slap in the face, most of the quests are basically the same. You know how in Skyrim it felt like every quest basically boiled down to kill these bandits/viking zombies/dragons? Well in Fallout 4 every quest is basically “go to this ruined building and shoot all the bad men/radiation zombies/angry shreks within it”. Sometimes you also need to pick something up, which will basically always be held by the boss bandit raider/zombie ghoul/shrek super mutant.

Alright so Fallout 4 is a shit RPG and even if it has the same “choose a faction” approach to the main quest as F:NV did (whether it’s a homage or the equivalent of copying the smart kid’s test answers I’ll leave up to you dear reader) it manages to make a mess of it too. You see in F:NV the factions offered a real choice between Deus Ex Machina Howard Hughes, less cool America, the blatantly unfinished faction and the cop-out “oopsie woopsie you failed all the other quests” faction which all had various competing quest lines that gradually drew you into a big final showdown involving basically every faction (including the little subfactions) in the game. It did this by having each major player offer you competing quests throughout the main story, while also offering you the ability to swap the various sub-factions towards one big power or another. Towards the end of the game you’d inevitably have picked a side as a consequence of all your other choices and all that would remain was to make one last throw of the dice and determine the ultimate fate of New Vegas and the Mojave once and for all (Chris Avellone’s “well fuck you none of it ACTUALLY mattered ahahaha tunneller (snakes) rule” notwithstanding). Fallout 4 on the other hand tries to emulate this but uh… none of the factions are ever in competition with each other? Like sure in F:NV you could do a NCR quest and then a Legion quest, but you’d be earning and losing reputation with both factions and once you started hitting the point where each faction had competing objectives things got messy. In Fo4 though all the RPG elements have been stripped back though so there’s no reputation system or morality system (the latter of which was Fo3’s attempt at having quest outcomes matter, mainly by having one of two random groups of infinitely respawning retards keep trying to kill you for no real reason) to worry about. The quests don’t even interfere with each other either, so you can help faction A rescue synths then return to faction B to enslave some synths then hit up faction C to genocide some nerds from faction B and none of it really matters. That is until you’re 90% of the way through the plot at which point the game goes “Yo what’s up? It’s time to pick a faction for the ultimate victory” and then you wipe out at least two of the other factions. Even if you’re really high-up in the ranks of them and probably could have overseen a more diplomatic solution if the game wasn’t for mouthbreathers if your character had been so inclined.

At this point you’re probably wondering how after all this I can still say that I enjoyed Fo4, and for good reason. The answer is simple though, and it’s that Bethesda half-assed the RPG elements of the game specifically because they were confident in the rest of the game. Well OK not really, but still the rest of the game is actually enjoyable in it’s own way – hence why I described it as mindless fun earlier. For all of the effort that Bethesda didn’t put into making a good RPG, I’d say an equal portion went into making a good “wander around while looting and shooting” game. One of the first things anyone playing Fo4 will notice, assuming they’ve played either Fo3 or F:NV of course, is that the combat has been significantly improved. Not only is the gun-play more enjoyable, but we’ve now got baked in weapon mods (in a more extensive fashion than in F:NV by the way), alongside the ability to bash enemies at close range with your gun. Enemies have less of the bullet-sponge effect, especially in contrast with Fo3 while there are also some enhancements to their behaviour including the ability for them to take cover and for certain enemies types to burst out of the ground/terrain or charge you while leaping over cover. In addition many enemy bases populated by human enemies have traps littered around to keep you on your toes, including tripwires and mines. While this latter feature was also in F:NV and Fo3, I’d argue that Fo4 makes particularly good use of it. Then there’s a subtle but significant tweak to VATS, in that no longer pauses the game and in most cases won’t be enough to save you from getting rushed by a melee enemy making the whole thing feel more tense. There’s also a little tweak to the radiation system too, which previously gave you an ever increasing debuff as you got more irradiated but now radiation covers up an ever increasing portion of your health bar in red – effectively reducing your max health more and more until you chug a radaway or go pay a doctor. Finally the game has added a survival mode (just like Skyrim’s but without that CUNTING warmth system) and significantly reworked how Power Armour… works. In both Fo3 and F:NV you had to get specialised training, after completing some specific quests, which then gave your character the ability to equip power armour which was just an improved version of regular armour. In Fo4 by contrast, power armour is an additional layer that enables you to stomp around in your armoured treads and feels like a significant upgrade. Not only can you wear your existing armour underneath it, but each piece also has it’s own independent health bar and can be upgraded just like the other weapons and armour in the game. It also makes you immune to fall damage! Alas there are two draw backs to using it, namely the fact that your power armour has a fuel bar (represented by fusion cores which are relatively uncommon items scattered across the world) and you can’t use certain terminals or crafting stations while in it. The latter is a seemingly minor drawback, but needing to exit your armour, then probably get told you’re now over-encumbered (because power armour increases your carrying capacity a fair amount), then do whatever you needed to do and get back in the power armour happens just enough that it’s a noticeable drawback. There’s even a mod solely designed to bypass this limitation.

Alongside revisions to combat and making the game much more visually impressive (that laughably bad combat armour notwithstanding), Bethesda also nailed the settlement building aspect of the game. Now fans of the previous games who enjoyed the settlement building mods will know roughly what to expect, but Fo4 takes it to a new level by making it part of the base game and by giving it an actual reason for players to engage with it outside of it being enjoyable. Before I get ahead of myself I’ll just be clear, yes you can build multiple settlements and yes the whole process is both intuitive and comprehensive with a snap-fit mechanism for designing structures alongside myriad little props and dohickeys to scatter around your base. These include everything from stores, crafting stations, entire structures, bespoke structures made out of various parts, fences, gates, terminals, lights, defensive turrets and so on and so forth. Basically everything you would really want is included in the base game, and then if you bought the GOTY edition then the game also lets you build and customise robots, tame various animals, setup arena fights to the death and build a bunch of shiny pre-war stuff that isn’t all wrecked. Of course your base wouldn’t be a base without useless NPC spongers citizens/lackeys and as such you’ll need to setup a recruitment broadcasting tower, then make sure your settlement can fulfill all the needs of it’s inhabitants. Oh yes, you heard me right. These settlements aren’t entirely trouble-free and as such you need to make sure you’ve got enough beds, water, food, defence (a combination of turrets, traps and guard posts) and power to keep all the cool stuff working. Fortunately this is fairly easy to do as you can always see how much of every resource your settlement is producing and if there’s a shortage of any specific resource it’s indicated by that resource being highlighted in red when you’re in building mode. Of course you’ll inevitably start building a bunch of stuff you don’t need, like decorations, doors (that the little shits ALWAYS leave open), containers that dynamically show their contents (like display cases, mannequins and magazine racks) and so on. Don’t get too comfortable though, as once your settlement starts growing it’ll inevitably start attracting the attention of raiders/ghouls/mutants who will occasionally attack it and then you’ll need to come back and defend it. This can get a touch overwhelming in the latter stages of the game as you can build dozens of settlements (albeit only in designated spots) and so you might defend from an attack at Boaby Stencher’s Farm only to need to rush to Spunk Garglers Ranch as it’s now under attack too. On the plus side you can share resources between these settlements (once you’ve unlocked the pre-requisite perk), so generally once you’ve stockpiled enough building materials and food/water in one place you’re settle to tinker away to your hearts content in the rest.

Which neatly ties into the other big change in the gameplay that this settlement system has brought about, namely the fact that every random item in the game which was hitherto junk now has a purpose. Previously you’d ignore all of the tin cans, empty bottles, plates, coffee cups and so on because they just didn’t have enough monetary value to justify grabbing them all and taking them back to a vendor. Now however each item is made up of between 1 and 3 components, which are available for use once they’ve been scrapped at your settlement workbench. What this means in practical terms is that if you want to get that weapon/armour mod, or build that thing you’ll now need the corresponding resources. So you’ll be grabbing a bunch of random junk constantly throughout your travels because there are decent odds that when you inevitably return to your base (because it has a machine that cures your radiation poisoning for example) you’ll be short 3 gears of building that missile turret that you need to increase your defence because you got 2 more settlers to join while you were away who both needed beds and food which mean that you’re now a more tempting target for raiders. In this way the gameplay systems all eventually orbit around the settlement mechanic, as once you start building it’s hard to stop and then you’re constantly sallying forth to get just more X or do one more quest to level up so you can get Rank 3 of the make gun gooder perk and… You’re trapped! Todd and his gang have you ensnared in a fiendish gameplay loop where you’re constantly creating and setting little goals for yourself which keep you coming back for more even though it’s 3am and you could’ve sworn you had a life outside of playing videogames. Oh and also the act of looting things from containers and corpses no longer requires you to jump into that little barter menu, instead a miniaturised version of the contents appears and you can grab or ignore everything quickly and easily. It’s a small change but considering how often you’re grabbing random junk (or weapons/armour to feed your buying random junk habit) it’s a really appreciated one.

To summarise then Fallout 4 is simultaneously a big step forward and a giant leap backwards, ultimately culminating in a game that I can recommend but only to those of you who can safely switch off your brains. If you start asking questions about various elements of the plot (such as why one of the factions keeps making super mutants for no good reason) then you’re going to find yourself frustrated by a RPG that totally fails at being an RPG. Instead you need to approach Fo4 as a serviceable FPS game that revolves around building up your own little town(s) and lets you customise them extensively, making up your own little story as you go. While there are some decent quests sprinkled throughout the game, most of them just boil down to “go to X, shoot Y, go back to quest giver Z” and so it’s not a game about quests or narrative but instead blundering through a large hand-crafted world, grabbing better equipment, daydreaming about your next perk choice and then going back to base to build some crap no one but you will ever care about. As such Fallout 4 gets a recommendation from me, as someone who spent plenty of their childhood dicking around with model kits (shout-out Airfix) and city builder games the ability to build settlements in a FPS game is something I found weirdly entertaining. For those who don’t care about this aspect of the game however, Fo4 provides either an alright time exploring and shooting baddies in a Retro Futuristic slice of 50’s Americana, or a total train-wreck of an RPG experience. My earnest advice would therefore be to only care about the game if you are the type of weirdo who wants a FPS/City builder hybrid. Fortunately I am so I’m having a good time and those chumps at Interplay can SUCK IT.

The post Fallout 4 appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Quick Note: If you own the Special Edition or Anniversary edition (I.E. the only versions of Skyrim still available for sale) then this content is included for free.

Following on from last week’s review of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or just Skyrim for short, I’m taking a quick look at the two and a half DLC packs that came out following the game’s release. Of the three, the shortest by far is Hearthfire which allows you to build a couple of houses and generally faff around with children and marriage but is otherwise short on content. Then you’ve got Dragonborn and Dawnguard, which are each much more substantial and are about equal to Oblivion’s Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine respectively. In Dragonborn you are attacked by some cultists who have been sent from an isle that is located conveniently just off the main world map of Skyrim, and so you have to track them down to a Dunmer port “city” (more of a village really). From there you’re able to explore an entirely new island with a myriad variety of new enemies, alchemy ingredients and NPCs while on a quest to stop a different dragonborn who is trying to enslave the world. In Dawnguard meanwhile you’re dealing with enemies who are (mostly) located in the realm of Skyrim, even if some of them are new. These new enemies take the form of vampires and their thralls, although you can choose to join them if you so wish in which case you’ll be responsible for tracking down various vampire hunters and turning the hunter into the hunted. Of the two major Skyrim DLC expansions Dawnguard is unique in that it offers two separate quest chains, albeit with considerably overlap, due to the fact that you have two factions to choose from. Your choice will determine whether or not you gain the ability to transform into a Vampire Lord, alongside the fate of every mortal in the land.

Upon hearing of the ability to turn into a Vampire Lord, you might suspect that joining the Dawnguard (for whom the DLC is named) would be largely pointless and you’d be entirely correct. I still choose them anyway as it felt bizarre for my character who had quite literally just saved the entire world from dragons to then decide to pull a heel and condemn that same world, but the Dawnguard route is definitely the weaker option. Fortunately enough the new companion Selena doesn’t have much of a preference one way or another and is happy to side with you as you genocide her entire kind, but outside of that defection you don’t really get anything. The Dawnguard themselves are largely po-faced and while a few of them can provide skill training, they’re just mortal folk and as such there isn’t much they can offer you. You won’t gain many new abilities or valuable new spells from their route and there isn’t too much in the way of new gear or equipment (aside from some Dragonbone armour and the long awaited return of the Crossbow). That’s not to say that the DLC as a whole lacks new weapons and spells, as you can get some anti-vampire or pro-vampire items alongside a few new Dragon Shouts and spells/buffs, but most of these are available whether you side with the Dawnguard or not. As a consequence there isn’t much of a pay-off for being the hero and so the option comes down to player preference, as the main reward is choosing whether to become a Vampire Lord or not. That’s not to say that it’s bad or not worth playing, but I would generally recommend that players go with the Vampire route if only because that’s clearly where most of the effort went. One thing that might tip you towards the Dawnguard is the fact that you can hire new Armoured Trolls as companions. They are much as you’d expect, normal trolls but with more health and armour. While it’s a small comfort to be sure, at least it’s something and honestly having them obliterate the myriad wolves and bandits that keep nipping at the players heels is quite amusing.

Regardless of which faction you pick however the game does have two segments which take place outside of the normal lands of Skyrim and which are the highlights of this DLC. The first is the realm of the Soul Cairn, a sinister afterlife populated by those who’s souls have been stolen. Here you’ll not only fight a variety of new enemies, but you’ll also be able to receive a handful of quests from the deceased (one of which rewards you with a spooky ethereal horse). It’s an appropriately bleak place and the lack of both vendors and most loot gives it a barren feel, which is enhanced by the flat terrain and dark colour palate. The zone feels like the background of a Daedric quest and while the main quest contained within it is fairly bland, the area definitely gives the DLC a boost and is one of the more memorable parts. It also contains some opportunities to fill your soul gems, as is fitting. Then once you’ve finished your business in the cursed afterlife, you’re quickly sent off to the Forgotten Vale which is the land of the (almost entirely) exterminated Snow Elves. Here the main quest has some cool moments such as fighting your way through Falmer camps and wandering through halls filled with frozen solid enemies, while you search for an enchanted bow which has the power to save the world or bring it to your character’s heel. Much like the Soul Cairn it also contains a swathe of unique enemies and it’s a visually appealing area which is filled with some references to TES lore. While you don’t spend too much time in this area, you can return and there are some cool moments including a fight against two dragons at the same time and some hidden loot (including a mineable creature). These two zones feel like they were a focus for the DLC and are both interesting in their own right, while encouraging exploration and allowing you to return to either at your leisure.

Once you’ve done these zones, the quest chains are basically over and you’ll be attacking the base of the other faction. If you’ve gone with the Dawnguard then you’ll be rushing the evil vampire’s castle, and if you’ve gone with the Vampires then you’ll be destroying the Dawnguard’s castle. In either case you’ll charge in with the friendly faction’s NPCs (some of whom will probably die) before fighting your way through the castle and ultimately facing off against the faction leader in a fight. At this point you’ll use the enchanted bow for good or ill and decide the fate of Skyrim, again. Once everything’s been wrapped up you’re free to loot the place and then things largely return to normal, with your faction’s NPCs heading back to their base camp so you can continue to utilise their skill training abilities (and/or recruiting armoured troll abilities). Outside of this quest chain and the two new areas, there isn’t much in the way of new content outside of the aforementioned handful of new pieces of armour, weapons and some faction related side quests. Two things I haven’t touched on yet are the Werewolf skill tree, which functions much like the Vampire Lord one in that you gain points by making use of the transformation as opposed to just chucking points into them once you’ve levelled up. Both of these transformations come with some caveats, such as the fact that “normal” friendly NPCs will start attacking you on sight as you’re a monster and that some abilities can’t be used due to the fact that you are now BIG and so you’ll need to craft items when you’re not a werewolf or large vampire lord. Finally this DLC does also unlock the ability to change your appearance via a new NPCs located in the Thieves Guild base.

Next up in chronological order is Hearthfire, which is the smallest of the Skyrim DLC’s that were released as paid content. There were two smaller DLC’s including a small quest revolving around a Portal 2 reference and the HD texture pack, but both of those were free leaving Hearthfire as the most modest Skyrim DLC we’ll be taking a look at. In Hearthfire you get the ability to build houses at three new locations, alongside the ability to adopt children and get married to your spouse. Alongside these new features you also get a handful of NPCs that can be hired as carriage drivers and personal bards, alongside some busy work (in the form of fending off groups who of bandits/skeevers/giants who attack your home) and uh… some new food items alongside updated models/visuals for some existing soups and stews. That’s about it as far as the new content goes, aside from the handful of new materials which are used for house and furniture building. Fortunately enough building houses is integrated fairly well with the base game and the requirements aren’t too onerous, although the whole process is paced so that you’re unlikely to be able to build the house of your dreams in one sitting. Instead you’ll need to build up your new home(s) one stage at a time, and of course the first stage is buying the land which involves doing some quests for the local Thane. Once these are done you can purchase the plot of land for 5000 gold, which comes with enough materials to build a basic cottage and then if you wish to upgrade it you’ll need to accumulate various metals and crafting materials. The whole thing is surprisingly engaging and the ability to build up your house means that it will be larger than any of the pre-existing homes you can get in the game, although the requirements involved mean that you’re unlikely to be able to build a great house until you’ve spent a decent amount of time playing as your character. This is due to the fact that while a basic cottage is easy enough to build, the sheer amount of materials required for building a two storey main-hall alongside the three wings (from which you have multiple options such as a Spellcrafters tower, trophy room, extra storage space, etc) is significant. Then you have to factor in all of the furniture and the fact that you’ll need to visit multiple mines/merchants to gain all of the necessary materials, even if you can afford them. On the plus side there are no limits to the amount of homes you can own, so you’ll be able to have a house or build a house in every hold except for Winterhold. Just be aware that one of the Dark Brotherhood radiant quests involves killing Helvard in Falkreath which will make purchasing the Lakeview Manor plot impossible, unless the Jarl is replaced by siding with the Stormcloaks in the civil war questline.

Last but certainly not least is the Dragonborn DLC which is in my opinion the most interesting, due to the fact that it contains an entirely new island which is filled with content, quests and enemies to deal with. As mentioned at the start of this review, the Dragonborn DLC involves facing off against another Dragonborn (Miraak) from the era when Dragons ruled the world and who is a servant of the Daedra prince Hermaeus Mora. Perhaps unsurprisingly Miraak is exceptionally powerful indeed and due to his close affiliation with Hermaeus Mora you’ll be tasked with braving the horrors of yet another Daedric realm whilst gathering the forbidden knowledge you need to save the world (again, again). Fortunately Miraak gives you a heads-up as to his evil schemes by sending a handful of weak cultists to try and murder you, a task doomed to failure thanks to the player’s ability to reload saves. Once you’ve tracked him down you’ll be free to explore the island of Solstheim which is riddled with content to explore, even outside of the main questline that is itself quite fun to playthrough. This main questline involves liberating various groups from the malign influence of Miraak, as you gather books and scrolls which let you venture into the Daedric realm of Apocrypha.

Apocrypha itself is a cool new zone with some striking visuals that can be best thought of as a collection of small dungeons, as you’ll be wandering through miniature levels of this realm before teleporting to the next one by reading various books that are dotted around. Entering this realm is itself dependent on reading forbidden lore, which transports your Dragonborn (in mind if not always in body) into these levels which have a handful of unique hazards and enemies to contend with. It’s worth noting that these enemies are tough and that healing items are relatively limited whilst your in Apocrypha, which caused my Argonian mage some real issues. Fortunately you can just run past most of the enemies, and in some ways this is encouraged as you’re only here to gather forbidden lore before escaping back into the real world. Just be aware that Miraak is no pushover either, so if you’re struggling with the generic enemies then he is going to be a tough boss fight. On the plus side if you take the time to explore each area of Apocrypha fully, you can gain plenty of otherwise rare books which are perfect for finishing the new library in your charming Hearthfire home. As it’s the realm of knowledge there are also some spell tomes, books and mage specific potions scattered around although there are also some debuffs that enemies can inflict which make playing a mage in this realm tricky.

Of course as this is the final DLC for Skyrim, the “real world” as shown by Solstheim is no pushover either. The new enemies can hit hard and they come in many forms, from the broadly humanoid Ash Spawn through to Lich Priests, Werebears, Goblins Rieklings and Ash Guardians (a type of Atronach). Plus there are some new dragons, draugr and even spiders to contend with. Fortunately Solstheim also offers a variety of new armour, weaponry and spells which can be used to vanquish these horrors alongside some new friendly NPCs that can teach you these skills and which offer a myriad assortment of new quests. Oh and I nearly forgot that one of the main selling points of this DLC is (was?) the fact that you can learn some new shouts including the ability to fly around the map on dragons. While this last ability is learned fairly late in the main questline, gaining it is obviously a pretty good way of getting across the island and dealing with enemies dumb enough to fit you outside. Luckily enough most of the approximately 28 side quests involve fights in the wilderness of Solstheim, so this ability can easily come in handy. Plus it’s always nice to make friends with the new dragon who was trying to snuff you out, although it should be noted that having your dragon blast your enemies to death will deprive you of XP.

There’s a lot to be said about the various side quests and even the miscellaneous quests, such as hunting down the East Empire Company pendants for loadsemoney but as there are so many of them it would take too long to go over them with the depth they deserve. So all I’ll say is that working your way through all of the content in Dragonborn will take a considerable amount of time and while doing this you’ll be involved with multiple interesting and unique quests which offer good rewards. The two new settlements are also appealing, with the Dunmer enclave being riddled with cool side content (including tracking down a rare copy of The Lusty Argonian Maid) and possessing a great visual style while the smaller Nord settlement has a smaller amount of quests but does provide you with the ability to mine an entirely new and somewhat overpowered type of Ore. It definitely feels that Solstheim was an attempt by the developers at Bethesda to give Skyrim one last Hurrah and they definitely succeeded.

To conclude while the DLC’s in Skyrim aren’t quite as good as the ones from Oblivion, they’re definitely still a great series of additions to the game and are undoubtedly worth playing through. Dawnguard might be slightly underwhelming if you take the Dawnguard route (ironically enough) but outside of some initially tedious quests to hunt down NPCs that spawn at random locations, the main quest chain is still enjoyable and gives you two new areas to explore alongside some new weapons, enemies, spells and the like. Then you’ve got Hearthfire which is modestly sized but excels at enabling you to build up your own home and roleplay as a family man/woman/lizardwizard. Finally you’ve got Dragonborn which is the best of the bunch as it offers at much larger assortment of equipment/spells/enemies/quests than Dawnguard and does it all across an entirely new island which is riddled with content. And if all of that wasn’t enough, Dawnguard vastly expands on the experience of being a Vampire and/or Werewolf while Dragonborn lets you ride dragons and engage in strafing runs against those seemingly suicidal wolves and bandits. As a consequence I’d have no problem recommending these DLCs to Skyrim fans or even more casual WRPG fans in general, especially as they come included with every version of the game that’s been released since the base versions came out back in 2011. There’s a wealth of content to be found here and while some of it can be bland, most of the quests are great and many of the new locations look brilliant for such an old game.

PS: If you can’t find the Dawnguard hunter and own Dragonborn, then there’s a chance he’ll be in Solstheim for some reason – which is probably why you can’t find him. God knows I had that exact issue and assumed my game had just bugged itself

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Quick Note: Skyrim has had not one, but two significant re-releases on PC alone. As a consequence it can be a little tricky to review, but anyone playing it these days will be playing the Anniversary Edition (AE) which was a slight tweaking of the Special Edition (SE). The main difference between AE and the SE is the inclusion of some “creation club” content, while the differences between the SE and the base game were the inclusion of the DLC content and some visual upgrades. For console gamers, the PS3 and 360 are vanilla, PS4 and Xbone will be SE and Switch/PS5/SeX (or SeS) will be AE.

Despite buying Skyrim near it’s release date (in all honesty I pirated it initially as I was a fat kid who’d rather spend his money on chocolate at the time) I never had the best initial impressions of the game. Maybe I was blinded by nostalgia goggles for Oblivion, which after years of playing games on the N64 and Gamecube felt like a vast leap forward from anything that I’d ever played before. Or maybe it was the fact that I never really cared much for the setting, as I’ve never understood why Vikings are so popular with game developers due to them feeling fairly one note (it’s snowy and you have an axe and uhhhh dude look how JACKED i am). Regardless of my own dumb biases, I went into Skyrim with modest expectations and walked away fairly disappointed as it felt like a really dumb RPG game which while possessing some nice touches such as NPCs asking if they could keep the items you dropped, was ultimately as wide as an ocean as deep as a puddle. I can’t remember how many hours I put into it around the launch period, but I do know that within a couple of days the opinions in my friend group had gone from “GAME OF THE YEAR” to “It’s pretty good” to “It’s OK”. Now don’t get me wrong, I had the exact same trajectory for the next big Bethesda game in the form of Fallout 4 as I thought it RULED for the first 30 hours and then realised it was kind of a hot mess, which is both an accurate term and one I use with endearment. Only Bethesda (and maybe Lionshead) seems to have the power to make it’s sloppy RPG worlds so engrossing, in spite of or perhaps because of their lack of depth. Yet even if I was kinda disappointed with my initial Skyrim playthrough, I did eventually buy the game and then buy it again for the SE edition so I won’t pretend there was nothing there. It’s just not a game that ever succeeded in really keeping me within it’s world for more than 15ish hours per install.

But after around a dozen years of not finishing the game, I figured I would use the terrible lovely weather of the Scottish Summer(TM) to finally play through the entire main quest without getting distracted. In most games this wouldn’t be an issue, but Skyrim is even worse than Oblivion with regards to encouraging you to get distracted as it has both a main questline and then an almost main questline in the form of the civil war between the Stormcloaks (Braveheart x Vikings – the collab we didn’t know we needed) and the Empire. Then there’s the fact that the main questline actively requires you to interact with both the mages guild College of Winterhold and the Thieves Guild to proceed through it. Those of you who can put aside these niggling distractions however will be rewarded with an admittedly hit-or-miss series of quests that were blatantly not designed with Survival mode in mind. But before diving into the main quest and at the risk of getting distracted (as is par for the course for this game) I’ll quickly go over what survival mode is and why it sounded kewl.

Survival mode is an optional added in the Special Edition of the game which forces you to eat, sleep and stay warm within the snowy wasteland that is Skyrim. If you fail to maintain any of these responsibilities, you’ll gradually suffer a penalty to the maximum amount of Stamina, Magicka or Health that you have as parts of the applicable bars will turn black and be considered as empty – even if you heal or use a potion. Alongside this, you’ve also got a penalty to the amount you can carry which is halved to 150lb and arrows are now given a weight so you can’t just carry thousands of them around without any thought. Last but not least, you can only level up by sleeping in a bed like in Oblivion and fast travel is disabled almost everywhere with one or two exceptions. Now considering that in the normal version of Skyrim, you never sleep, never eat, never care about swimming in frozen fjords and generally don’t interact with the cooking, carriage or inn systems as a result, this seemed like an interesting little bit of extra challenge that would add some zest to the game. Unfortunately if in F:NV the survival mode was barely a factor, in Skyrim it’s frankly too much of a factor and it breaks a couple of quests to the point of them being almost impossible unless you have been frantically stocking up on Fire Salts (so you can craft the hot soups that no one else sells because apparently not a single soul in Skyrim wants their soup hot) like a maniac for the whole game. The issue is simple, you get cold really fast and this can not only kill you but also reduces your maximum health pool fairly quickly. In addition you need to have a little sleepy weepy, but unfortunately you can only sleep at inns (or your house) which means that extended quests or ill-advised trips through the world can make it so that you have basically no magic at your disposal. Of course there are ways around this, but generally after every lengthy mission you need to return to an inn, without being able to fast travel. Otherwise you will not have any health/stamina/magicka, because most of the tougher missions in this game involve being somewhere really cold and fighting tougher enemies. There was one segment where I had to keep running outside, summoning a flame atronach, then running back inside so I would warm up, but if I left it too long the enemy dragon would regenerate health so I was in-and-out and in-and-out like an absolute psycho. Then again picking an Argonian Mage is just asking for trouble as you get cold quicker and need to worry about magicka. My advice would be to not bother with this mode, or at the very least play as a Nord or Khajit with light armour for the maximum resistances to cold. Otherwise there will be some quests where you just straight up die trying to get to the objective unless you stocked up on those specific types of soup that require Fire Salts (a rare alchemical ingredient).

Anyway my own self-inflicted suffering aside the Skyrim main quest is perfectly fine if a little monotonous, which I imagine is a big part of why less than 20% of Steam players actually finished it. It starts with you almost getting executed, then almost getting executed by a dragon, before you scurry away and soon end up in the town of Windhelm. Here you get roped into helping fight against those rascally dragons, which involves doing some dungoneering and fighting one of them before absorbing it’s soul. Then you walk up a mountain so you can freeze to death repeatedly for not having the specific kind of soup talk to some old guys who tell you that you are the protagonist and then make you faff around for a little bit. Then you find the McGuffin, but not really, so you can go to a lame party with 4 guests total and then kill around 20 guards with no consequence. After doing your part to liven things up you go rescue a different type of old guy, before doing a bit more dungoneering and then fight the antagonist dragon. Once you’re done not killing the main antagonist you faff around some more, which includes a diplomatic conference in which the main parties of the civil war whine at you about things no one cares about, before you finish honing your ability to yell in an ancient language. Then you’re able to go to Valhalla Solsteim and kill the antagonist dragon for real this time. Now it would be really easy to criticism my whistle-stop tour of Skyrim’s main questline which is spread into 17 missions, but basically they’re all listening to NPCs you can’t kill blabber on about stuff and then going to an area and killing a bunch of dudes (and maybe a dragon if you’ve been an especially good Dovahkiin this quest). You don’t get to make any choices that matter and there are almost no opportunities for roleplaying, and outside of a few specific instances it plays exactly the same as the rest of the game. Sure the party at the embassy and the peace conference are a bit different, but they involve walking around for a bit then responding to the only dialogue choices that advance the quest before falling into the same old routine. There really isn’t much to captivate the player outside of the prospect of saving the world but even after you’ve saved the world the game does a little bit of hand-waving and says “yeah, well, there are still gonna be dragons attacking you because uh…… some dragons don’t accept your hegemony videogames”.

With all that being said no one really plays Skyrim for the main questline and I’m fairly confident Bethesda assumed that from the get-go as it has a ton of content outside of the main quest. Even excluding the other quasi-main quest in the form of the civil war, you’ve got multiple faction related quests including the Thieves Guild, College of Winterhold, Dark Brotherhood and the Companions alongside myriad side quests and then mini-quests which aren’t counted as side quests but instead as miscellaneous objectives. Some of these are very straight forward, such as talking to NPC A, then talking to NPC B, then going back to talk to NPC A but others have a bit more depth to them. One smart trick the game does to keep you interested in what are ostensibly tiny little non-quests is that some of these miscellaneous objectives are the stepping stone into larger side quests, and as they’re generally pretty easy I did find myself doing them as a way of taking a break from the meatier quest chains. They also tend to give some sort of reward, whether it be a couple of hundred gold or just assistance/discounts from vendors. Plus the game also has radiant quests, which went on to cause Fallout 4 no end of trouble but which are essentially bounties that various NPCs place on bandit camps / dungeons / dragons (or actual named NPCs if you’re taking one from the Dark Brotherhood). You then go there and kill the dudes for your mediocre cash reward and the satisfaction of a job done (until you get the next one a handful of in-game days later). With that being said, I don’t think people really play Skyrim for these quests either even if all of the factions combine for a total of around 40ish additional quests which have had about as much time and effort put into them as the main quests. Instead I think people mainly play Skyrim for the feeling of their character getting ever more powerful, which I suppose is the only way that Skyrim can really be considered as an RPG.

I suppose in this regard Skyrim does a decent job, as it retains the classic TES system wherein you gain levels in a skill by using it with your total level increasing as you gain levels in those skills. The main difference here is that not only are there no penalties to using skills at a novice level, but you also gain a perk point each time you level up. These can then be used to unlock perks in the associated skill-tree, which are generally fairly minor but are still useful. Some examples include making novice destruction spells cost half of the magicka to cast, gaining a boost to pickpocketing when the target is asleep and being able to craft higher level items out of certain ores and materials. The caveat to this levelling system is that while you also gain a little bit of health or magicka or stamina (your choice), the enemies in the world are scaled to your level meaning that you end up at around the same level. Now to prevent you from totally abusing this system by staying at level 1 forever and grinding through the various skills, many spells need more than 100 magicka, while 100 stamina won’t get you particularly far without any perks. But I still can’t help but feel that this system leads to the game having a treadmill feeling, much like Oblivion albeit with an ever bigger issue as spells don’t scale. They have a flat amount of damage and while you can learn new spells, there is a point at which you’ve reached the maximum potential. But you can still level up via increasing your other skills, so no matter what build you play you’re basically going to end up as a hybrid class anyway. If you go melee only flying enemies (by which I mean dragons) are going to be a pain, and if you go magic only you’ll bottleneck yourself once you’ve maxed out the destruction skill. Fortunately as you level up you do also get access to better equipment in the form of weapons, armour and potions as vendors update their offerings, randomly generated chests upgrade their contents and enemies carry newer and better gear. Yet even if this does create a sense of your character being unable to totally eclipse most enemies, there are still occasions where the world spawns lower level foes and which prevents the world from suffering the aggressive level scaling problem that Oblivion ended up dealing with.

Overall then Skyrim has learned a few tricks from Oblivion and has avoided the worst excesses of it’s level-scaling system while still managing to retain the variation in cities and quests that made it so popular. Yet even with the new dragon enemies and radiant quest system, I’d be lying if I said it was as enjoyable as an experience especially as the RPG elements feel even more basic. There really doesn’t feel like there is much to distinguish various character builds and the lack of roleplaying opportunities within the majority of quests is a sticking point for me personally. Even if the world has so much to do, I can’t help but shake the feeling that this is a game that has spread itself a little bit too thin as the majority of the content basically plays the same. In large part due to the fact that every character you create essentially plays the same across all playthroughs. Regardless I do still think Skyrim has it’s charms and is worth a playthrough, if only for the way in which the game has a large amount of scripted but amusing interactions and mini-quests which appear as if by random while you play. Yet it’s this same reliance on scripted encounters that makes everything feel a bit artificial and almost like a theme-park. Every time you enter a city for the first time a sequence of events plays out, and it will never change no matter how many characters you create or how you choose to level them. Skyrim is therefore a game which has plenty to see and do, but offers no real reason to stay especially if you don’t much care about the feeling of your character gradually progressing in power and ability. As a consequence I would give Skyrim a modest recommendation (excluding those who are RPG novices and will find it a great starting point) and I would honestly skip Survival mode if I were you.

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Quick Note: As it’s 2023, I’m assuming that you know how Oblivion plays so I’m only touching on what’s in the content pack. If you don’t know how Oblivion plays, then it’s very similar to Skyrim. If you don’t know how either of those games play, then go play one of them (I think Oblivion is better, but it’s jankier).

Much like Knights of the Nine which I looked at last week, The Shivering Isles has an innocuous start that belies the sheer scale of content available once it’s been installed. Initially nothing changes within the land of Cyrodiil aside for the fact that you gain a quest which mentions that a gate has opened on an island in the Niben Bay just to the east of Bravil. Upon travelling there, you’ll find a guard dealing with the demented riff-raff that are occasionally spewed out after their visit to the Madgod’s realm turns them, well, stark-raving MAD. You’re then given the choice of entering this realm, or not playing through the content you’ve paid for, so you enter the gate. Once you do so, you’re then asked again by the Madgod’s custodian as to whether you really want to play through the expansion content, before agreeing and getting dumped into the mandatory tutorial section Fringe. This area is locked off from the rest of the Shivering Isles by a large wall with only 1 entrance/exit in the form of the Gates of Madness which are guarded by the Gatekeeper. The Gatekeeper is a big, tough monster who you see slaughtering a party of adventurers, so your character has to figure out a way to get past it without getting wrecked.

This opens up the first of many quests in The Shivering Isles which are largely linear (and often quite similar) but which do provide some ability to roleplay as there are often multiple different ways to achieve the same goal. In this instance, you’re able to decide how to fight the Gatekeeper and there are 2 main methods of doing so. You can either team up with a maniac hunter who’s obsessed with bones and help him break into a graveyard to gather arrows that are made to be highly effective against the gatekeeper, or you can grill the assistant of the Gatekeeper’s creator to find out his weakness, then gather a poison that you can apply to your weapon which is highly effective against the gatekeeper. In both cases you’re basically doing the same thing (i.e. making your weapon better against the gatekeeper so you don’t get beaten like a drum), but the way you do it is slightly different. For the former method, you need to do a bit of lockpicking but you do get a temporary companion whereas the latter method requires some speechcraft and sneaking. I personally did both and then realised that neither does much for hand-to-hand or mage builds, so I tanked the gatekeeper while my maniac hunter ally did the real damage. After the gatekeeper goes down, the real meat of this expansion pack begins.

Now unlike KotN, the sheer amount of quest content in this expansion means that it’s not feasible to go through the main plot line without turning this review into a modest novella. Suffice it to say, once you get the gates you have the option of running through the north of island, which is the realm of mania or going along the south of the island, which is the realm of dementia. As this expansion pack revolves around Sheogorath, everything is infused with the two-faced nature of the god of madness and as a consequence most of the content is split between these two aspects of his personality – the joyfully manic and the resentfully morose. There are therefore 2 sides to the island, two sections of the main settlement (Bliss and The Crucible), two groups of guards, two main groups of heretic humanoid NPCs, two rulers in the city and so on. Ultimately everything and everyone aside from Sheogorath belongs to one side or the other, with the Madgod himself being split right down the middle and even his manner of speaking veers from one side of his personality to the other. The manic side is brightly coloured, ecstatically upbeat, utterly insane and either very friendly or very dangerous (often both) resulting in garish areas and clothing. On the flipside, the demented areas are grim in both appearance and demeanour, riddled with paranoia and also very dangerous.

You’ll have plenty of time to get familiar with both sides of the Madgods split personality however, as regardless of your choices you’ll need to complete a series of quests which involve familiarising yourself with both sides of this baffling realm. You’ll need to learn what addiction feels like from the Duke of mania, then take part in an investigation to find plotters amongst the demented (which lets you have everyone tortured which is pretty funny). You’ll need to work with both sides of the guards, who are represented by the Dark Seducers (demented) and the Golden Saints as they fight the threats to the Shivering Isles (and each other). Finally you’ll need to explore both Mania and Dementia in depth as most quests require you to leave the city (cities?) and get trekking through the island to fight through various dungeons so that you can gradually work your way through the main questline. As mentioned earlier, a lot of these quests are relatively repetitive as most involve going to a dungeon, fighting your way through it and then rescuing someone or obtaining an item that you need. Then again, it does feel somewhat unfair to ding this expansion for having a lot of similar content as it almost always has a twist to the format or gives you the ability to resolve the mission in a slightly different way.

To give some examples of this, while doing the quest for the Duke of Mania you’re tasked with fighting your way through a dungeon but you need to keep gathering an alchemical ingredient otherwise you’ll be brutalised by withdrawal symptoms that are extremely severe. While rebuilding the gatekeeper, you’re tasked with clearing through a dungeon but get to choose which body parts the new gatekeeper will have, which is a nice bit of legacy building (not that your choices really matter). While setting up a distraction for unwanted adventures, you’ll need to clear out a dungeon that serves as an elaborate mousetrap but get to mess with a trio of adventurers at the end with a series of traps. Yet despite these little twists, most quests really do just boil down to going to a dungeon, killing the baddies and then proceeding to the next step. There aren’t many quests in the main mission that break free of this mould, and even when they do you’re often only being given a mandatory stealth section. The only two that are really different is the mission to find the plotters who are threatening the duchess of dementia and the aforementioned quests where you get to activate traps on an adventuring party (which is basically just pressing 3 buttons). There is also a mission where you have to favour one faction of the guards against another, but this is basically just a big fight with a lot of NPCs running around and focusing on each other while you help sway the balance.

So if you’ve made it this far and are getting the impression that I found a lot of these quests a little underwhelming, you’ll probably be wondering why I recommend this expansion pack so much? Well there are three main reasons I think you’d be remiss for skipping this one. Firstly, the areas and NPCs within them are quite amusing and visually impressive with each NPC being delusion al in a fun way while the zones and island itself are often beautiful to look at (within the limits of Oblivion’s graphical fidelity of course). Secondly the new items, spells and rewards are all well worth it and make it possible to make overpowered characters – as an example of this by the end you get the ability to summon three different powerful NPCs as allies for 120 seconds at a time. Finally the roleplaying potential of what’s contained within this expansion is quite potent, and you even get the ability to change the weather of the Shivering Isles once you’ve cleared the main story. There’s a lot of cool content here, especially the dialogue, but unfortunately it is let down slightly by the repetitive quest design. I actually thought that Knights of the Nine did a better job of varying things, as most dungeons only have a handful of different enemies and so you’ll be fighting the same enemies time-after-time-after-time. My suggestion would therefore be to enjoy the expansion for what it is, and try not to rush yourself as you will otherwise find the plot’s annoying habit of but wait, there’s more! to be extremely tedious. Perhaps fittingly for the realm of an insane daedric prince, nothing is ever simple and you will always be given just one more task until everything resolves itself in a twist ending involving the daedric prince of order, Jyggalag.

As for Jyggalag, he doesn’t make much of an appearance throughout the main plot but he is the primary antagonist and is the reason why you’ve been brought to the Shivering Isles in the first place. Essentially Sheogorath needs a champion who will help him withstand the “Greytide” which involves the minions of order destroying his charming realm of insanity under their dull, grey bootheels. The knights and priests of order are therefore recurring enemies and they can appear within the realm of the Shivering Isles in much the same way as gates of oblivion appeared within Cyrodiil, the only difference is that you can’t enter the crystals that spawn these enemies and must instead use 3 hearts of order to overload and thus close them. Unfortunately the forces of order aren’t particularly varied and as such they contribute to the feeling of repetition which sadly accompanies many of these quests. When you first encounter them, they’re pretty scary but by the end they feel like the bandits and highwaymen that plagued the roads and campsites of Oblivion.

But again, it feels remiss to whine about the main quest too much as there is a lot of content there (14 quests not counting the occasional ways in which they branch for future playthroughs) alongside roughly 20 side quests. There are also a lot of handy treasures scattered around, including water breathing helmets and other magical items alongside some new dungeons to fight through. Just be aware that some enemies in this expansion can inflict quasi-permanent debuffs to your main stats (like Strength, Endurance and so on) which will need to be cured with relatively expensive and rare potions. Just be sure to talk to everyone and you’ll get a healthy dose of the madness that surrounds this land like a fog, and be secure in the knowledge that once you clear through the main quest you’ll have gained a bunch of powerful items and spells. As such I’d say that this expansion is really about the new world and it’s inhabitants rather than the quests, which can be monotonous. To give some examples (I’ve been saying this a lot in this review huh?) you’ve got two competing blacksmiths in Bliss and The Crucible who get upset when you talk to the other one and who both offer the ability to turn new materials into unique sets of armour (Amber for light armour and Madness Ore for heavy armour) and weapons. There are two museums of curios, although only the one in The Crucible has a quest chain attached to it although the owner of the other one will ask if they can put you in suspended animation (no you can’t accept his humble request). And finally as you climb the ranks of this strange new realm, you’ll be constantly in touch with Sheogorath himself who veers constantly between manic merriment and demented irritance. He’s without a doubt the star of the show, and the way in which he makes you rile-up his man servant by constantly summoning him repeatedly is just one of the ways in which he makes the main narrative more amusing than it otherwise has any right to be.

To wrap up, The Shivering Isles is an expansion with a ton of content and character that gives you some very powerful gear, spells and summons. The quests themselves often give you a variety of options in how to proceed, but sadly are often just doing the same thing (i.e. killing everyone in a dungeon) which undermines the expansion a bit. Fortunately enough the dialogue and characters do a good job of keeping things lively and the new areas are visually impressive and contain plenty of attention to detail in spite of the relatively modest size of the expansion which clocks in at under 1GB. Ultimately the Shivering Isles is a meaty expansion pack that offers a lot for existing characters and for players who are able to enjoy the bizarre new realm that’s on offer. Those who are merely looking to push through the main quest line and who aren’t going to engage with the new zones, dialogue or characters will probably be a little underwhelmed but I think most RPG players will be satisfied with what’s on offer here. As a result I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to Oblivion fans, although I would recommend that they pace themselves and stop to smell the roses giant mushrooms along the way.

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Quick Note: As it’s 2023, I’m assuming that you know how Oblivion plays so I’m only touching on what’s in the content pack. If you don’t know how Oblivion plays, then it’s very similar to Skyrim. If you don’t know how either of those games play, then go play one of them (I think Oblivion is better, but it’s jankier).

KotN has a fairly innocuous opening, as your character hears about a prophet appearing in the town of Anvil who is prophesying about the end of the world. This adds yet another quest to your journal, and until you go there the game world proceeds as normal without any trouble. Once you get to Anvil, everyone’s gossiping about an attack on the Cathedral which has been ransacked and is full of corpses. On talking to the prophet, he tells you about the heroic crusade of myth Pelinal Whitestrake who struck down an Evil elvish lord called Umaril in days long past. It turns out Pelinal left the job half done however, as evil in the form of Umaril has returned and has murdered everyone in Anvil’s Cathedral to prove it. As such your selfless (or selfish, depending on your playstyle) adventurer is tasked with gathering up all the pieces of Pelinal’s old equipment, which have obtained relic status. Then by using them, you’ll be able to finish his job for him by defeating Umaril. To do this, you’ll need to gain the help of Nine Divines by praying at each of their 9 wayshrines which are scattered across Cyrodil.

As you can see from the map above, most of these shrines are either next to a town or are at least near a road. This makes finding them somewhat straightforward, but as I started a new character to play through this DLC (say what you like about Oblivion’s level scaling, but it at least makes this possible) the adventure of finding these shrines amidst the realm of Cyrodil was in and of itself a fun little adventure. I would be remiss if I didn’t note that all of the relics scale with your level however, so if you want the best versions you should either be level 21+ or download a mod that scales them to your level. Once you’ve tracked down each shrine and said a prayer, three things happen. Firstly your Infamy points are reset as this questline is only available to “good” adventurers, which means it can be useful for any remorseful vampires, thieves guild or dark brotherhood members. Secondly, it lets you player pray at these wayshrines going forward so that you can gain temporary buffs should you happen upon them again. Thirdly and finally, it advances the quest to the next stage where you get a vision from the big man Pelinal himself. This vision is pretty cool, as it thrusts your character up into the sky where ghostly Pelinal talks some shit about Umaril before he gives you the location of his own erstwhile resting place.

You’re then sent to a submerged ruin which fortunately is largely indoors, as otherwise you’d need to bring a lot of water-breathing potions or have decided to play as an Argonian. While fighting your way through, you come across the remains of one of the Knights of the Nine who was kind enough to be bearing a note that confirms that Pelinal’s bitchin’ helmet is located in this tomb, and that there was a group of Knights/Treasure hunters who were looking for the rest of the relics. Once you’ve yoinked the helmet, you then head to the abandoned priory that served as their base to hunt for clues Scooby Doo style. This turns out to be an apt comparison as the (hidden) basement is clustered with the semi-friendly ghosts of each of the fallen knights. As is typical for knightly fables, they’re polite enough but ask you to prove your worth by beating them up in a sequence of one-on-one fights. This section is pretty cool and while it sounds overwhelming, they’re not too tough (they failed after all) and you have a little bit of time to heal between each duel.

After proving that you are a certified BADASS (sorry, I played through all the Borderlands 2 DLC before playing this) you can then talk to all of the Knights and they tell you where various pieces of Pelinal’s equipment have ended up. Most of these quests are short but sweet and each have their own gimmicks, which I won’t spoil too much. Without giving much away, I’d recommend doing the Gauntlets last and say that you should do the Boots (which require a bit of thinking) before trying for the Mace. The Shield is by far the meatiest of these quests as it requires you to clear out a fort full of hostile Conjurers, who are fairly frail but who can cause you problems if you decided to play with an unarmed melee build like my rotund roleplaying ass. There are also some light puzzles contained within this quest, but they’re all pretty easy so long as you got enough oxygen in the womb. The only issue I had was due to a bug where the rotating statues didn’t appear to rotate (so having them all face the right way was really, really hard). If this happens to you, then you can try restarting the game which fixed it for me – or you can use the console commands to skip to the next stage. Once your questing is done you’ll have obtained almost all of the relics and can now head back to the Priory to brag tell your ghostly gang that you’re making good progress.

Upon your triumphant return your character is greeted by a priory that now has friendly NPCs and which has been spruced up so that it no longer looks abandoned. It’s somewhat jarring, but it turns out an NPC you freed while hunting for the shield rocked on up and brought some friends with him. Fortunately enough, one of these guys was smart enough to bring you one of the two remaining relics and knows where the last one is. The only problem? It’s been using by an evil wraith (is there any other kind?) who is related to the original Knights of the Nine falling apart in the first place. You’re then asked whether you want this helpful chap to become a member of your new, cooler Knights of the Nine. You can turn him down, but I don’t know why you would especially as he (temporarily) becomes your companion and peppers the corpses of everyone you fight with Silver Arrows that you can then sell later for free money. Once you’ve resolved this intense moral dilemma, you’re then tasked with killing the wraith and stealing his sword so that you can complete your relic collection. You’ll also need to take it to a Cathedral so it’ll stop being an evil sword, but that’s a pretty modest ordeal compared to most of the other stuff you’ve been dealing with.

With your collection of relics at 100%, the Prophet and a bunch of aspirant knights show up at your priory to give/listen to a speech respectively. Once the Prophet is done with his pep talk, he tells you that you must all go to Umaril’s new house and kick his cunt in end the threat that he poses to the Nine Divines and all the mortal inhabitants of the world. Three randoms and a guy from the Gauntlets quest then ask you if you’ll let them join your suicide righteous mission, which is a no brainer if ever there was one. By this point you should have 8 knights willing to sally forth with you, unless you told them all to go pound sand because you’re roleplaying angry, angry Pelinal. They’ll all then patiently wait for you at Umaril’s base while you go sell your loot to merchants there with all due speed. Once you’re there, you all charge forth into battle against small groups of enemies who get absolutely battered from all sides

During your heroic assault you’ll slaughter a bunch of enemies before eventually needing to split off from the group because the baddies keep respawning. As per the rest of the battle, my character resolved this issue by punching the obstacle – in this case a big glowing orb which exploded and then caused everyone except Umaril and two of his lackies to disappear. If you’ve got all of the relics equipped, Umaril himself is a very easy fight as you gain a powerful buff that drains most of his stats when you hit him. One thing that’s worth noting is that his sword also scales with your character’s level (the best version requires you to be level 24 or higher) and that you have to loot it while he’s in his physical form. Once you’ve bullied him avenged Pelinal you then need to cast a spell which teleports you to his very soul, at which point you beat him up again before there’s an explosion. An explosion so powerful in fact that it caused my game to crash, necessitating me to redo most of the mission again (thanks Todd). Fortunately Umaril wasn’t allowed to escape death a fourth time, so upon beating him again again again again my heroic character was returned to the Priory for congratulations and a slight sense of anti-climax as all my comrades in arms proceeded to walk right past me back indoors after 10 seconds of cheering. But this is a Bethesda game so that kind of abrupt tonal shift is par for the course. I then returned my relics to the armoury and went back to my humble life as a pilfering, boxing Khajiit.

Once you’ve wrapped up the questline in KotN there’s not too much left to do, nor much that has changed within Cyrodil itself. You’ve now got a cool new priory base and some new equipment that conveys various permanent buffs (aside from being enchanted) but otherwise KotN doesn’t add much. There are the new areas that you’ve fought through and some new valuable books added to the loot tables, plus the ability to gain a blessing from one of the old Knights that you’ve redeemed by completing their quest. You’ll also have gained a handful of new spells but that’s about it. As such this quest is about the journey, not the destination and while it’s fun to playthrough the storyline it’s a one-and-done affair. One last thing to note is that you need to retain your low infamy to be able to use the various relics that you’ve gathered across your crusade, as once you hit an Infamy value of two or more you can’t use them (and NPCs will sass you) until you go to each of the 9 wayshrines again.

In conclusion, KotN is a fun mini-expansion / DLC that doesn’t offer too much outside of it’s quest chain but does provide a fun series of quests for you to enjoy at any level. While the re-establishment of the Knights of the Nine does feel a little bit rushed, the quests themselves offer enough of a variety that I’m willing to let this slide. Admittedly once you’re finished with these quests the DLC kind of ends, but the new gear and spells are great while the new buffs and base are appreciated even if they won’t radically change your playstyle. Ultimately KotN is a memorable and fun quest-line with some good rewards (and an easy way to reset your Infamy points should you need it) that offers great value for returning players or those who’ve already beaten the main storyline. It’s not essential, but I’d highly recommend that any fan of Oblivion play through it – especially as it’s included with the modern versions of Oblivion that are available for sale.

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