Elder Scrolls: Bloodmoon

Roughly a year after the release of The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, Bethesda has published its second expansion. Unlike Tribunal, which has hit the shelves last fall, Bloodmoon offers the same kind of open-ended gameplay that made Morrowind famous. While it allows for a lot of exploration, a whole new level of gameplay and offers and engaging story and interesting quests, this title appears to be a little rushed and not as tightly constructed as its predecessors.

Game mechanics
As were the two previous titles, Bloodmoon is a first-person roleplaying game. You will travel to the newly discovered island of Solstheim, explore it, kill all sorts of exotic beasts and complete various quests. The story, as well as the environment may be familiar to many players: instead of inventing a whole new setting, the designers have borrowed heavily from Nordic legends and history. The people you will deal most of the time are the Skaar, who bear close resemblance to the Vikings.

You will arrive on the island at a brand new fort, which serves as the staging ground for imperial colonization. There, you’ll find the beginning of the two main quest lines. The one that is relevant to the story will thrust you into the role of a private investigator in the service of the fort’s commander. After he disappears, you will need to ally yourself with the Skaar in order to find him. As the story progresses, you will find out about other strange abductions, all committed by werewolves and will get the chance to become one of them or fight them to the bitter end.

The other quest line will get you involved into building a new town. The East Empire Company has decided to construct an ebony mine and a small village around it. As with the primary quest line, you will be able to choose sides later on and affect the final look of the town.

Both quest lines offer something previously unseen in the original game and the first expansion. The werewolf story will allow you to become one of these vicious animals. This has been the main selling point of the title, and rightfully so. Being a werewolf drastically changes the gameplay, and while you may want to switch back to a humanoid soon, for a while it is actually fun. A werewolf is a strange creature: he can’t use any items or cast any spells. He is extremely fast and powerful but very vulnerable to silver weapons, which are abundant on the island. He must kill a human every night; otherwise he’ll starve. And he must be very careful when changing to and from his human form - if anybody sees him, he’ll be recognized as a werewolf by all people and hunted down even as a human. As a result, playing as a werewolf is challenging and attractive to players who got bored with the traditional gameplay.

The second selling point of the expansion is the dynamically evolving world, which is covered by the East Empire Company line of quests. The mining colony will grow as you complete tasks for the company. What starts out as a pile of rocks will quickly change into a mine, residences, and later even stores and a dock. This adds a lot of authenticity to the game.

Unfortunately, the quality of the quests is a mixed bag. They seem to be more inventive, compared to those in the game’s predecessors, but there is very few of them, and most are even more linear than those in Tribunal. The quests start out well. For example, the first task for the Skaar will force you to familiarize with the entire island, as you’ll be visiting twelve different places scattered throughout the map. Because of the relative scarcity of other things to do, this works much better than a comparable quest in Morrowind ("The Pilgrim’s Path"), which most players completed only if they happened to be in a particular location. Here, you will consciously run from one spot to the next in order to fulfill the quest requirements, and discover most of the island in the process. Other tasks are quite inventive in their solution. You will have to "convince" people with your fists, or you’ll play a detective and have a mystery to solve.

Sadly, there are simply too few quests in the game, and many of them are very linear. I finished the two main quest lines in fifteen hours and spent another ten hours cleaning up all the side quests and playing the main storyline again, as a werewolf. At 25-30 hours, the expansion offers much less gameplay than Tribunal. To make matters worse, your freedom will be greatly limited. Many times, people will spell out to you exactly what you need to do, and quite a few quests will make you run between different characters, each of which will send you to the next one. In case you don’t remember the instructions, the journal will always update, telling you exactly what to do next. I found no joy in being unable to figure things out for myself. The last problem with the quests is the lack of balance. While not as much as in Tribunal, I often faced tough tasks, only to be later replaced by much easier ones. For example, getting through the final dungeon proved to be a challenge, as I had to cast every protective spell and often drink healing potions to survive. When I later met the main villain, I disposed of him in a matter of seconds in a very anticlimactic battle.

While I could tolerate the problems with quests, which are still more inventive than those in other recent roleplaying games, the one aspect of Bloodmoon that made me wince was the dungeon design. I haven’t seen such boring layouts for years now, and I hope I won’t see them ever again. There are two main types of dungeons: crypts and caves. Most crypts use one of three very simple designs, each of which offers a main room and very short corridors. Unlike the crypts in Morrowind, the ones used here lie all on the same level. After you dispose of a few monsters, you’ll find some random chests, haphazardly placed all over the place. The caves are even worse: they all consist of impossibly long and barren corridors, most of which end up at a dead end that holds a chest guarded by a monster. You kill the monster and open the chest, which usually contains the same items - a weapon or armor, a flask or two of healing potions, an armorer hammer, an arrow and some gold. The whole design is so repetitive and illogical that I’m wondering whether the expansion hasn’t been rushed at the end.

The final dungeon tries to be original, featuring a set of two relatively simple mazes. As you go through the mazes, however, you will realize that they are also extremely linear, and the surroundings are so dull that you’ll wonder why the designers even bothered. Other than throwing in some extremely powerful enemies, the final maze offers no challenge.

To be fair, the expansion offers some bright spots elsewhere. I really enjoyed the overall lay of the land, especially the seamless transition between the thick forests and the snowy plains. The whole island looks very authentic, even though it is filled to the brink with different features. The ingenious people of the island, the Skaar, are also very well portrayed, with their unique customs and architecture. It is apparent that the designers put a lot of thought into the gaming world and the main story. In addition, I really appreciated the fact that one of the sore spots of the original game and the expansion has been improved upon - the pathfinding of computer-controlled characters. Even in mazes where you loose sight of your followers, they will always catch up with you. Too bad that the same people still enjoy standing in narrow corridors and block your way...

Technical considerations
Morrowind was no stranger to crashes, and its hardware requirements are legendary. Bloodmoon puts both to new extremes, with an atrocious frame rate and a memory leak that makes the game crash every four to six hours.

Probably the most frustrating technical problem is the drop in frame rate. On the same computer where I played the original game at roughly 40 frames per second (never lower than 20 FPS), I was getting 20 FPS indoors in the expansion, and as little as 0.5-2 FPS outdoors, mainly during a blizzard. While some drop in the frame rate was to be expected (due to the abundance of trees, all of which are full 3D models), it is baffling that the frame rate could drop so much during a blizzard on an open ice plain, especially considering that I haven’t seen any difference between blizzards and blight storms from the original game, other than their color. Even after considerably decreasing the graphical settings, I got some jerky movement during periods of snow, storms and in forests.

The second frustrating problem is a memory leak that degrades the game performance until it finally crashes. I have noticed, for example, that loading a game after my death has automatically resulted into halving the average frame rate, and I never managed to play the game for longer than six hours before it dumped me back to the desktop. This is also the most widely reported problem on the official message boards.

The third technical problem is caused by changes in scripting. After installing Bloodmoon, many quests in Morrowind and Tribunal will become unplayable, including the main quest line of the first expansion. In addition, the gaming world will experience some changes, especially in various sounds. For example, blight storms will sound just like blizzards. If you like to tinker with the editor, you will also notice about thirty error messages when you try to load Morrowind and both expansions.

Gameplay - 6
While it’s commendable that the designers returned to an open-ended gameplay, they failed to induce the same kind of urgency that what I experienced in Tribunal. Overall, however, I found the gaming world, the background story and the quest structure very authentic and enjoyable. In addition, the introduction of werewolves and a dynamically evolving environment has greatly enhanced the atmosphere and put new life into the series. All this has been offset by an uninspired dungeon design and very frustrating technical problems. No matter how great the gameplay is, as long as I can’t enjoy it due to slowdowns and crashes, I can’t rate it any higher.

Graphics - 9
I liked the graphics in this game more than those in Tribunal. The snow-covered world, the trees and ice plains, and to a certain extent even the ice caves present a very enjoyable deviation from the original design and the first expansion. In addition, the game offers a whole new architectural style and plenty of new monsters to fight. The only problem I’ve had here was that some of the new monsters seemed to be slapped together without much of a thought. Where most of the monsters in the previous two titles had a certain unique personality, I found many of the new enemies to be little more than targets.

Sound - 7
The only improvements here are new monster sounds and voiceovers. The voiceovers have experienced much more enhancement than in Tribunal. People now greet you more appropriately, often in relation to your current quest. Once you complete it and are assigned a new task, people’s greeting changes. Several characters will also lead lengthy monologues now, some of which are quite entertaining.

Regretfully, I didn’t feel that better voiceovers were enough here. While I could tolerate the lack of new music in Tribunal, I cannot do so here. Tribunal was closely related to Morrowind, both in the terms of their history and culture. As such, they formed a very homogenous environment, and the same music in both places seemed appropriate. Bloodmoon is a whole different story, though. It has its own history, mythology and even different land features and weather patterns. The same music that I was accustomed to hearing on the island of Vvanderfell sounds very strange on the island of Solstheim. I would welcome some new, unique tunes here.

Replay value - 7
Bloodmoon offers a slightly shorter gameplay than Tribunal, but still manages to achieve the $1/hour ratio that many full games don’t. However, the replay value is slightly limited by the relatively linear quest structure and the technical problems. I was very happy to finish the expansion and get rid of it, so that I wouldn’t suffer more frustration.

Overall - 7.3
The Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon is a worthwhile expansion for all Morrowind fans. Those who missed the open-ended questing in Tribunal will be pleasantly surprised, and those who wanted to try something new will have the werewolf to play with. The new landmass, its inhabitants and history all seem very authentic, and it is obvious that the developers spent a lot of time designing it. Sadly, it also appears that the designers have rushed certain aspects of the game, especially the dungeon design, technological implementation and the integration with the title’s predecessors. Without a patch to fix these problems, Bloodmoon will remain attractive only to the technologically savvy fans and those who are more forgiving. The rest should wait for the patch to be released and tested by the gamers before considering a purchase.