You end up with a bunch of people walking around that look like they came from an entirely different game.
It's like installing Better Faces for Morrowind without installing any other enhancement mods. Nothing quite fits the way you think it should. The whole thing feels like a fan-made mod, crammed into the game.
The Morrowind soundtrack elements - while nice for a nostalgia trip - don't blend well with the vanilla music. Items and equipment from the DLC look bizarre and weirdly colored when placed next to vanilla items. In general, Solstheim feels very true to the Morrowind experience, bringing alien landscapes, unique enemies, and extremely varied gameplay.Īll that being said, Solstheim stands out blatantly from the rest of the game. As a Morrowind fan, I particularly enjoyed delving into the politics and back-stabbing of Raven Rock's aristocracy. Many new characters are well fleshed-out and fun to interact with. These aren't your typical Draugr dungeons. Dungeons also introduce several new puzzle concepts that make great use of specific items, and the mechanics of the game. It brings a lot of variety to a game that is now infamous for cookie-cutter environments. Hermaeus Mora's realm of Apocrypha is well-designed, if maybe too obviously referential. There is, however, a lot of good in Dragonborn. This meant that half of my gameplay in Dragonborn was running back to Skyrim to spam dragon souls, which is more time-consuming than you would think at level 11. For me though, I came over from PS3 specifically to play this DLC, and had little desire to max out a new character just to experience Solstheim. Instead of designing the quests around natural advancement, they periodically come to a grinding halt with a quest that simply says, "Go get this shout and level it to max level before continuing." For most players, this isn't an issue (Xbox native players are probably at end game at this point, and are sitting on a pile of unused dragon souls). This represents some of the worst choices in the main questline. There are new shouts as well, but they exist almost singularly for the purposes of plot advancement (Dragon Aspect being the sole exception I can think of at this time). The new items, equpment, and crafting recipes add little - if anything - other than aesthetic options. Much like the vanilla game, the main questline is less interesting than the sidequests and optional questlines.