VentureBeat » The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Dragonborn

Dead Island: Riptide releases today at $32 after discount

Dealzon — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:40:31 +0000

This sponsored post is produced by Dealzon.

Another Tuesday, another day full of new game releases. While they aren’t exactly highly anticipated releases, fans of Dead Island will appreciate more zombie slaying action with Dead Island: Riptide. PC owners can enjoy a 20% off coupon, making the digital version of the game only $32.

If you’re a Trekkie, you’re either happy about today’s release of Star Trek or you’re nervous like us, given all the bad memories of subpar Trek games we’ve had to deal with through the years. Previews of Star Trek were so-so, but thus far initial user reviews on Metacritic look to be surprisingly decent – a surprise for the gamers reviewing them too!

Note: We update our GamesBeat weekly deal post every Tuesday with the latest deals. For last week’s deals, check below the “Last Thursday” headline.

Tuesday New Deals

Today’s release: Dead Island Riptide (PC Download) — $32 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Reviews are all in, and if you enjoy Dead Island, you’ll be getting more here. New island, more zombies.

Today’s release: Star Trek (PC Download) — $40 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Somehow initial user reviews are excellent. Subtle marketing or is this the real deal?

Tomb Raider (Xbox 360, PS3) — $39.99 at Groupon. Great price drop considering console titles are rarely on sale so soon after release.

GamersGate Spring Sale (PC Download) — New deals everyday, with lots of excellent titles on sale. Our pick: The Cave for $5.10 and Alpha Protocol for $3.74.

Last Thursday

Dishonored‘s latest DLC The Knife of Dunwall just came out this past Tuesday and thus far has been well received by reviewers. The DLC puts you into the boots of Daud, who is attempting a bit of a redemption after feeling guilt over killing the Empress.

To quickly sum things up, if you enjoyed Dishonored and felt Dunwall City Trials could’ve been better, then this is the DLC you want. Adding icing on the cake, the Steam-activated The Knife of Dunwall can be had for only $8 after a 20% off coupon.

If you don’t already have Dishonored in your collection, the base game is down to $24.99 thanks to an instant discount at GMG. Elsewhere you’ll pay full price for the DLC and at least $5 more for the base game.

Say what you want about GameStop, but their download service can have competitive pricing. This week they launched a Spring PC download sale, which for the most part has respectable discounts. The most standout deals are the best ever pricing on Skyrim DLC. Released last month, the Dragonborn DLC is down to a new low of $10. The popular Dawnguard DLC is also at a $10 new low. As with the base Skyrim game, all the DLC activates on Steam.

Beyond the big Dovahkiin deals, fans of the Assassin’s Creed series should check out the franchise sale this weekend at GamersGate. The best deal is Assassin’s Creed 3 for $24.98 – a new low by $5 and $25 off the usual $50 price tag. The more recent Assassin’s Creed games and DLC are getting 50% discounts while the older ones are as high as 83% off. The offer runs through Sunday, April 21st.

If you think today’s post is all PC gaming, owners of PS Vita should check out Amazon’s $30 deal on Persona 4 Golden, an enhanced port of Persona 4 for the PS Vita. Suffice it to say, the port adds more features and content to probably one of the best JRPGs on the PS2 (mmm… nostalgia).

Hot deals

Last Tuesday’s release: Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwall (PC DLC) — $8 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. List is $10. Green Man Gaming also has a great price on the Dishonored base game for only $24.99 (normally $59.99).

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim DLC Packs — 50% off at GameStop. All the DLC titles are at half price, with most usually around $15 since their respective release dates. Last month’s release of Dragonborn can be had for only $10.

Assassin’s Creed Weekend Sale: Games and DLC — 50 to 83% off at GamersGate. Top choices include AC3 for $25 and the Season Pass for only $15.

Upcoming Releases

Oct. 25: Batman: Arkham Origins (PS3) — $49.99 at NewEgg. The October 25th release date is quite a ways off, but this is the first significant discount we’ve seen thus far. Another offer worth noting is the Xbox 360 version for $59.99 with a bonus $10 credit at Amazon.

PC download deals

SimCity with $10 Credit or $7 Cash Back — $40 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Elsewhere $60. Everyone loves to hate the online only aspect, but truth is they’re still selling SimCity like hotcakes. In addition to the $20 instant discount at GMG, there’s a credit/cash back incentive, making it a $30-$33 value post bonus.

~~Tomb Raider~~ — ~~$26.79 at GameFly~~ after coupon. Update: was $33.49, today-only coupon makes it stupid low price for a month old, well reviewed Triple-A title.

The Sims 3 University Life — $16 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Next best is $40 at Amazon. It’s the lowest price yet on the 9th – yes, 9th! – Sims 3 expansion pack.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning — $5.99 at GameStop. Ties the previous low. Savings brought to you by the state of Rhode Island.

360, PS3, and PC Vita deals

Buy 2 Pre-Owned Video Games, Get a 3rd FREE at Best Buy. Over 7,000 games to choose from, with savings shown in your cart after all items have been added. Deal expires Saturday.

Persona Golden (PS Vita) — $29.96 at Amazon. Elsewhere the game is still selling for at least $39. Excellent title to pick up if you never played the PS2 version.

Halo 4 (Xbox 360) — $23.99 at NewEgg. Next best is $37 at Amazon. This is the cheapest we’ve seen by $6. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid Halo 4 since its release date, this is a solid price.

Hardware

Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 59371960 Gaming Laptop — $799 at Lenovo after coupon. $120 less than this configuration sold for a week earlier. Specs: Ivy Bridge Core i7-3630QM, 1080p Full HD display, and the new Kepler-based GeForce GT 750M 2GB.

HP ENVY Phoenix h9-1420t Gaming Desktop — $862.49 at HP after coupon. $10 shipping. Specs: Ivy Bridge Quad Core i7-3770, Liquid Cooled, Radeon HD 7670, 10GB RAM, and Blu-ray drive. GPU is a bit weak but you can obviously upgrade.

Sennheiser X320 Xbox 360 Gaming Headset — $69.99 at Rakuten. Next best is $100. This is the lowest price we’ve seen on the headset by $13.

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Filed under: Games

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All The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim expansions finally coming to PlayStation 3 in February

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:39:18 +0000

The Xbox 360 has three pieces of downloadable content for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The PC currently has two. The PlayStation 3 has zero — but that will finally all even out in February.

The Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn add-on packs for Skyrim will hit Sony’s home console next month. Publisher/developer Bethesda will release an update to Skyrim just before the DLC goes live.

Dragonborn out Feb. 5 for PC. Also out for PS3 in Feb (date TBA), followed by Hearthfire and Dawnguard (also Feb.) Each 50% off first week.—
Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) January 18, 2013

As a special deal for PS3 users, Bethesda will sell all three add-on packs at half price for the first week of their release. That means, instead of $20 each for Dawnguard and Dragonborn and $5 for Hearthfire, players will get them for $10 and $2.50, respectively.

The PC version of the Dragonborn expansion will hit on Feb. 5, Bethesda’s vice president of marketing Pete Hines said today on Twitter.

Dawnguard first debuted on the Xbox 360 in June. Bethesda released it on PC two months later. The developer struggled to get the add-ons to work the PlayStation 3′s limited RAM, which caused the extraordinary delay.

Bethesda is probably one studio that is ready for some next-gen hardware to help avoid headaches like these in the future.

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat weekly roundup: BioShock Infinite delayed, Epic Games president retires, and Kixeye expands to Canada

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 18:44:45 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Epic Games president Michael Capps retired, Call of Duty: Black Ops II earned $1 billion in 15 days, Irrational Games pushed BioShock Infinite’s release date again, and Zynga filed to make real-money gambling games in Nevada.

You’ll also find reviews for Far Cry 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Dragonborn, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and Writer Rumble as well as previews for Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time.

News:

Mobile news:

Reviews:

Interviews:

Previews:

Filed under: Business, Games

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Dragonborn is a pint-sized Morrowind (review)

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:56:46 +0000

You’re walking peacefully along the ash-covered shore on the island of Solstheim, marveling at the massive mushroom trees in the distance when, suddenly, a flaming spider explodes in your face! Dragonborn, you’re in Morrowind now. …

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s latest expansion takes players to the Morrowind-adjacent island Solstheim, a place bathed in ashes from the volcanic Red Mountain and teeming with a variety of beasties that really want to kill you. This is the first Skyrim expansion to take players outside the snowy confines of Tamriel’s northern territory, and that’s not entirely good. Players familiar with past Elders Scrolls games likely remember Solstheim while those new to the franchise will see it is an ugly, ash-covered wasteland.

Such a desolate place is a perfect backdrop for an epic battle against a power-mad figure from Skyrim’s history. The original Dragonborn Miraak was not a champion like Skyrim’s protagonist. Instead, he served the dragons as a priest before mysteriously turning on them and attempting to enslave all of Tamriel. Since your character is also a Dragonborn, it’s inevitable that your paths will cross.

It’s just a shame that the journey to the ultimate dragon-soul-eating showdown is fraught with frustrating dungeons and truly annoying enemies.

What You’ll Like

Black books
The Daedric prince of fate and knowledge Hermaeus Mora returns in Dragonborn in a big way. His powerful black books are hidden all across Solstheim, each one teleporting the reader into his bizarre and dangerous Oblivion plane.

Like the horrific source of enchantment magic called the Soul Cairn added in Dawnguard, Hermaeus Mora’s world is radically different from both Solstheim and Skyrim. Icky, green-black pools full of tentacles stretch as far as the eye can see while writhing corridors full of spinning book pages twist their way over its inky surface. Mora’s influence is primarily dangerous knowledge, and his world is a demonic library.

Aesthetically, Hermaeus Mora’s plane is amazing. You’ll never spend more than 40 minutes inside a black book, and that’s the perfect amount of time to set you on edge as a sea of Lovecraftian horrors wash over you. I’ve always thought H.P. Lovecraft’s elder gods inspired the Daedric princes, and the black books reflect that perfectly.

A little slice of Morrowind
It’s really cool to get a glimpse of Morrowind in Skyrim. While Solstheim is on the edge of Morrowind’s map, it perfectly reflects the landscape. You can see the Red Mountain billowing ash into the air just off the island’s coast, and that draws a lot of the territory’s native fauna. Those floating brain-tentacle beasts called netch peacefully hover over the coastline and sometimes meander through the magical mushroom trees that dark elf wizards live in.

While an ash-covered landscape might not sound as beautiful as the snowy cliffs in Skyrim, Solstheim has character. It also has its own mountains, where a race of nature-worshiping Nords called the Skaal live.

Ultimately, Solstheim is a great trip away from Skyrim and leaves me wondering if other parts of Tamriel will make their way into the game in future expansions. I like the idea of exploring a large part of the continent in one game without it turning into an online experience.

New items and spells
One of Bethesda’s biggest selling points for Dragonborn is the ability to tame and ride dragons around, but that isn’t my favorite addition. What I like even more is a new powerful set of spells and a crazy suit of lightweight armor that offers 100 percent protection if you can find all the pieces.

Dragonborn more than makes up for the lack of new weapons introduced in the previous quest expansion, Dawnguard. Players now have access to a variety of ebony weapons, enchanted Daedric swords, and a new kind of crafting material that is best described as metallic ice. A lot of existing armor types also get a new coat of paint, giving players more variety when finding the right armor for their characters.

It’s a horror story
Rather than defending the sun from vampires or preventing dragons from regaining their grip on Tamriel, Dragonborn focuses on how dangerous and powerful knowledge is. Miraak, the new antagonist, was once a dragon priest until he learned something that caused him to switch sides and start slaying dragons for personal gain. Miraak’s thirst for power oozes madness, and that is spreading across Solstheim.

When you first arrive on the island, you’ll notice a glowing green pillar just off the coast. If you activate it, your character abruptly starts building a shrine while other workers drone on about remembering past glory. Something is very wrong on Solstheim, and no one can explain why they’re compelled to build the shrines littered across the island.

The moment my character started building the shrine and a weird voice spoke about Miraak in a disjointed way, I knew I had to see the story through.

What You Won’t Like

Dwarven ruins
All right, so I really don’t like Dwarven dungeons, and I think Skyrim’s various plots rely on them too heavily. Exploring Dwemer cities should feel cool and mysterious since you’re rummaging around in the ruins of a civilization that dared to blend dark magic with science, but I look at all that steam-powered machinery and see nothing but tedium. In Dragonborn, these areas get a lot more excruciating thanks to water puzzles.

Yes. Water puzzles. Like a terrible flashback to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the main quest in Dragonborn requires you to manipulate water in a sunken Dwarven city all while new and frustratingly overpowered automatons attack you.

It would be great if for once an epic quest didn’t involve an empty mechanical city full of annoying robots. I get that the Dwarves wiped themselves from existence by being too curious, but at this point I play through new Skyrim quests dreading the next decent into one of these steam-powered nightmares.

Poor performance
I don’t go into Bethesda-developed games expecting a flawless experience. Massive, open worlds lend themselves to all sorts of unpredictable hitches, but Dragonborn’s problems are too predictable.

Whenever you go into a black book or get magically transported across Solstheim, the game freezes for 15-30 seconds. Anytime you get stuck between a dragon and one of the new enemies called lurkers, everything locks up again. And if you ever need to fire arrows in quick succession or blow back a group of monsters with a shout, be sure you’re ready for your attacks to fall flat.

These are just a few of the problems I’ve had with the latest expansion, and they’re incredibly frequent. I’m not sure if it’s because the Solstheim map is entirely new or all the layers of add-on content are working at once, but the constant slowdown and performance issues made playing through Dragonborn a major hassle. My system crashed a few times, but worst of all was getting killed in a fight and reverting to an old autosave just because my arrows fell limply to the ground a few feet in front of me.

If you are eager to play this expansion, I recommend being very patient and manually saving anytime you think you’re coming up to a big fight. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief.

You will die
The character I’ve used to review both Dawnguard and Dragonborn is a level 62 dark elf named Ataeri. He’s an assassin/thief with an emphasis on two-handed combat and archery, and most of the time that works perfectly. Except in Dragonborn.

Monsters and enemies in Solstheim love to swarm you. Ataeri’s strength lies in quick, stealthy attacks or ranged combat, and neither of these skills apply when the things you’re fighting rush you all at once. I’ve rarely encountered battles in Skyrim where I feel completely outnumbered and underpowered ever since leveling my character up to 62, but Dragonborn makes my beloved character feel very weak.

Obviously, no two player-characters are alike, but one thing remains the same: Enemies in Dragonborn are very aggressive and hit incredibly hard. I’m sure a more hand-to-hand focused character would fair better than mine, but it’s absurd that my character is so well leveled (and pretty protectively dressed) and is still dying like he’s going in naked.

I was not expecting to walk into Dragonborn and finish it easily, but I did want my hard work to mean something against new enemies.

Difficult to start
Much like Hearthfire, starting Dragonborn is a bit difficult if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Ideally, a group of Miraak-worshiping cultists will stop you on the road in Skyrim and try to kill you, but I walked from Solitude to Whiterun and never had this happen. Actually, the cultists didn’t attack me until after I’d taken a ship from Windhelm to Solstheim.

I don’t think adding in-game directions for downloadable content is a bad idea. Sure, a seamless story experience is cool, but sometimes a screen saying, “Go to Windhelm if you want to go to Solstheim,” is way more useful than leaving your introductory event up to chance.

Conclusion

Dragonborn is a creepy descent into madness set in a mini Morrowind that isn’t quite as epic as Dawnguard, but it compensates for that with a wealth of new items, shouts, and spells. Its performance issues and overreliance on Skyrim storytelling tropes are difficult to ignore, but beneath all the frustration is a great adventure that examines the power of knowledge and how far one man will go to rule the world.

Score: 80/100

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim expansion Dragonborn launched December 4 on Xbox 360. Bethesda provided a download code for the expansion pack for this review.

Filed under: Games

Dragonborn expansion definitely coming to PlayStation 3

Jeffrey Grubb — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:06:13 +0000

Tomorrow, the latest expansion for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim hits Microsoft’s Xbox 360 (1,600 Microsoft Points), but developer Bethesda still hasn’t released the first downloadable content, Dawnguard, for the PlayStation 3.

Technical woes have forced the studio to delay the release of the add-on for its open-world fantasy role-playing title on Sony’s hardware. The second expansion, Hearthfire, is also absent from the PS3 version.

Well, Bethesda is publicly announcing that Dragonborn will arrive on PS3 in the new year.

This doesn’t mean that the PS3 versions of Dawnguard or Hearthfire are on the way. In the comments of its blog, Bethesda answered a fan’s question about the pair of DLC releases:

“We know you guys are hungry for more content, and we still have more in the works. We’ll share details with everyone as soon as we can.”

Skyrim on PS3 suffered from many performance issues that primarily stem from the system’s meager memory capacity. The hardware houses 512MB RAM, but a huge portion of that is permanently allocated to the PS3′s operating system, which doesn’t leave a lot for big games with vast amounts of data.

Dragonborn is another substantial addition to Skyrim. It pits the player’s here against the the original Dragonborn, which is the title the player’s character currently holds.

Filed under: Games

New Dragonborn downloadable content headed to Skyrim December 4

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:21:28 +0000

Dragons aren’t the only long-dead creatures returning to lay waste to Tamriel in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The original Dragonborn, a warrior who gains power from devouring dragon souls, is back, and judging by how he looks in the just-released trailer from developer Bethesda, he’s not too happy that your character is running around eating all his souls.

The original Dragonborn was a powerful priest that worshiped Skyrim’s scaly menace and even ruled in their name. So, you know, he’s likely a great evil hoping to reclaim his reign.

This downloadable content pack hits the Xbox 360 on December 4 for 1,600 Microsoft Points ($20.) Like with previous Skyrim content updates, a PC version is expected soon after. Unfortunately, Bethesda is still struggling to bring its previous Skyrim add-ons to the PlayStation 3 and Dragonborn is likely to find itself in a similar limbo.

Dragonborn is the third expansion to Bethesda’s popular open-world role-playing game. In June, the developer released the Dawnguard DLC which expanded the role vampires played in the world. Bethesda released Hearthfire in September which introduced home-ownership and child-rearing.

Filed under: Games