Lately Gori has been playing a lot of Elder Scrolls Blades, and doesn’t understand the bad reviews.
An old-school experience
To sum up : Elder Scrolls Blades is a dungeon crawler set in the Elder Scrolls universe : you can create a character from all the races present in most TES games, and it is set up in Western Cyrodiil and part of Hammerfell (I think it’s near Anvil from Oblivion).
While most TES games have been open-world, it’s not the case for all, and one could argue that it’s not what defines them at their core, so here, with Blades, we’re facing a closed-world RPG focused on dungeons crawling and city building.
Your city, slowly coming back to life
The quest map is vast.
What makes the game old-school is perhaps its difficulty, it’s not an easy game (if you play without paying at least) and you actually need pretty high reflexes if you want to progress in fights.
Another old-school element is that it’s not overly guided, you have your missions and you choose them at your pace, without too many cutscenes or guided tutorials.
Finally, the game is a dungeon-crawler, and while there is a scenario, it’s not overly complicated and most missions follow the ages-old Dungeons and Dragons pattern : door, monster, chest.
A deep game
While it’s not Skyrim, Blades is still a deep game, first of all because of its combat mechanics which are much better than in the main Elder scrolls Games. As said before, you need really honed reflexes to master fights, as parry and dodge can mean life or death. You also have a long skill tree with many levels for each skill, so building your character requires thought and maybe even planning (I just put them by intuition, because I’m a pro, or so I believe…)
The atmosphere is also deep, it’s not just a soulless randomly generated-game which changes each time you die, it actually provides partly voiced dialogues and characters with distinct personalities (typical Elder Scrolls characters with their never-ending problems, but you get attached to them).
The dungeons are "clair-osbcur" like those from Oblivion
These guys always get into trouble.
The graphics, while probably siphoned from Skyrim and Oblivion, really add to the immersion and feeling of exploring Tamriel, even if the dungeons can sometimes be linear.
The soundtrack is also beautiful, in the usual style of TES games, and the Oblivion-inspired UI all make the game a very polished product,much more than we usually expect from a mobile title.
What makes an Elder Scrolls game ?
The real question about Baldes is, is it really an Elder Scrolls ?
If by this name we mean open-world, not really, but if we look at the Elder Scrolls through the years, we can see that not all game have been open-world.
In a shocking statement, we could also say that the highlight of the franchise has never been the open-world (are you shocked now ?)
The UI is very Oblivion-inspired.
The long skill tree, more like in Skyrim.
Arena and Daggerfall were dungeons crawlers with an endless world in-between and some cities to get lost in, Morrowind had serious level-barriers (which were not found in later games, and for a reason) blocking some parts of the world, Oblivion was the return to fast-travel and dungeon crawling, and Skyrim… maybe only skyrim was the truly open world of the series…
Of course, that’s a strange point of view, but when you look at the story of the three dudes who made the original games, the open-world was not their cornerstone.
Julian Lefay’s big idea was that the player is equal to the NPC, with the same characteristics (When you reach level 100 in a skill in Daggerfall, it says that “you are one of the finest…” not the finest) and stats range, the only difference is that you practice your skills and not them (at least in Daggerfall), and viewed Daggerfall as “a medieval life-sim”.
Vijay Lakshman and Ted Peterson created volumes of lore and even a fully featured celestial system which is still in use in the modern games (in Arena, you could realistically navigate by stars, I didn’t try it in new ones).
What if an Elder Scrolls game was just a game that is set in the Elder Scrolls world ? And in which your character is built using the same systems as the NPCs, because that’s what Blades is, it is fully grounded in the world of Tamriel, and enemies and characters have the same skills, stats categories and spells as you.
Try it before hating it.
Maybe the hate also come from the difficulty, and the no-frills experiences of dungeons in the game (it’s quite low-key, compared to Dungeon Hunter 6 for instance), but in fact, the best role playing games in the world had almost no frills at all and even no graphics (Zork is just text, Wizardry some lines and text) and their difficulty is legendary.
If you approach the game with an open mindset, open towards a simpler style of gaming (closer to computer games of the 80s and 90s), then you can find a modern gem hidden in the Google Play Store, and if you don’t like it, just go back to your toys, kid.
Hint : if you have the right equipment, events are a good way to progress in the beginning of the game, each time the enemies share a special weakness type.
Now let's go, repair that city !
