What’s a ten letter word for a complete waste of time? At the moment, I can only think of one Hearthfire. Even if the ongoing controversy with the Dawnguard release for PS3 wasn’t going on, this DLC just
represents a complete waste of time on the part of the developer and the
player. Bethesda should have been using
their resources to get rid of the giant pink elephant in the room that they
keep dancing around, but instead they decided to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition…in
Skyyyyyyyyyrim! So, let’s just get on
with it.
The Hearthfire DLC gives you the ability to build a home of
your own design…except it doesn’t. You
follow a predetermined blueprint, and you can only add certain things to your
home. For example, you can have an armory, a kitchen, or a library as the East
Wing of your home, but not all three.
The same goes for the North and West Wings of your home. And for all the fun you have in putting your
home together, once you get inside, adding in furniture is a snap (so long as
you have the appropriate resources). Of
course, you can’t choose where anything goes, so the whole “customizable” thing
kind of falls flat and is more filling in the blanks than anything else.
When I first booted up, I was met by a Courier upon entering
town saying that the Jarl of Dawnstar wished to speak with me. Upon arriving there and having to pay a
thousand gold to pay off a bounty (a guard made a comment and arrows were
involved, that’s all you need to know), I found the Jarl and was offered a
little plot of land to call my own in the middle of the Pale…for five thousand
gold. Needless to say, one of us got
screwed over in that deal and it wasn’t her.
Later on, I’ve learned that other plots of land are actually available
after certain quests in the vanilla game are done, but I didn’t know that
before and the place looked nothing like the brochure. Needless to say, I felt just a little peeved.
The adoption mechanic is almost interesting. The only children you can adopt, however, are
Imperials, Nords, and Bretons, which…alright, fair enough. Of course, those are the only children in the
base game either, though I’m wont to question why there aren’t any Elven, Orc, or Beast race children. I can’t imagine that would have been that
hard, although I’m snickering a bit at the thought of a nine year old Dark Elf
speaking to me in Jiub’s voice. Once you’ve
acquired your child (which you can only do after you’ve completed construction
of your home and supplied a bed and a
chest for them to hide random ideas within), you can play games with them and
send them off to go to bed or do their chores. And I suppose this is good for
role playing value.
The whole thing is actually pretty good for either pure aesthetics
or roleplaying value. But, even with
that in mind, this is boring. You don’t
really get any sense of accomplishment in building your own home, because there’s
no real customization. I’ll rarely give
PC Gamers credit, but I’ll say this: Bethesda, the Modders have you beat here,
on your own turf. And this isn’t even
counting the PS3 issue, but really, guys…this could have been completely
abandoned or at the very least could have been…oh, I don’t know…free?!
You guys have proven you can program for your game to pull up buildings,
just like you did in the game itself. It’s
not that its bad, it’s just…kind of pointless.
Skyrim's "Hearthfire" DLC is now available for download from Xbox Live.
This review is based on...ah, you get it by now.
