Why are Skyrim’s DLCs like that?

Skaal Village — Full of snow, Nords, and mind-boggling design decisions.

Hello everybody, I’m currently quite sick. This leaves me pretty bedridden but mostly annoyed. When I’m annoyed I start overthinking things.

And because I’m me, this overthinking is bound to get me thinking about Skyrim again. And that’s how I arrived at today’s question: why are Skyrim’s DLCs such a technical mess?

Yes, I’m gonna be judging on a purely technical basis here, because as you know, I’m not one of those ride or die lore type guys. As far as I’m concerned, the Dragonborn DLC is a fantastic expansion, and a great throwback to both Soltheim as seen in Morrowind’s Bloodmoon expansion, as well as Morrowind as a whole with bits and pieces of Ashlands now mixed in.

I don’t know if I’ve ever said this, but the Elder Scrolls, ever since Morrowind, has had this pattern. Morrowind was very alien, and its first expansion, Tribunal, focused on some of the bigger lore stuff that didn’t make the original game. Then the second expansion was a completely new world, but it was a lot more “normal” than Morrowind’s Vvardenfell, though of course it definitely still had its flair.

Then Oblivion flipped that concept around a bit. Its base game was very sanitized and hospitable. Then its first expansion expanded on the Nine Divines, which had their role greatly reduced from the base game. And then finally, Shivering Isles would bring you to a completely new world which instead was alien and inhospitable again. I’m pretty sure it has never been confirmed by a developer, but I wholeheartedly believe that the Shivering Isles as a region takes a lot of design cues from Morrowind. Not only that, but Bethesda now knew enough about their engine to have some fun with it. You’d see a lot more unique AI behavior, and its weird faces could now be even weirder and be justified by the lore, which is definitely one of its strengths. The one weakness I find the Shivering Isles to have, besides its now pretty dated writing, is the fact that Bethesda messed up the dialogue conditions for almost all NPCs in the expansion, resulting in a lot of it going unheard due to simple oversight. Hey, I said they knew more about their engine, not that they could work with it perfectly.

And that then brings us to Skyrim, which is a kinda inbetweener story. Yes, it’s definitely not as creative as Morrowind with its world, but a lot less sterile than Oblivion’s depiction of Cyrodiil. Skyrim was also, at least by that time in late 2011, the most unfinished game Bethesda had yet released. A record they would no doubt go on to break.

Skyrim’s first expansion, Dawnguard once again took place in the base game, added some new locations there and focused on content that was meant to be featured more prominently in the base game, in this case vampires. Which, yes, were most certainly pretty undercooked in the shipped version.

I also gotta add that for a Skyrim expansion, Dawnguard does relatively little wrong, I’d say. Yes, it kinda botches the almost non-existent lore of the Volkihar vampires, and it breaks some base game vampires’ faces, but besides that the blemishes are relatively minor.

Most of Dawnguard’s technical oddities come in the form of Bethesda not willing to design unique faces for NPCs. A lot of the default faces from Skyrim, especially when it comes to named NPCs, all come from Dawnguard. The expansion also added two new types of generic vampire enemy, nightlord vampires and nightmaster vampires. I guess that’s kinda neat, to have a more difficult class available now that your players are likely higher leveled, but purely on a design perspective these are pretty lame as they’re basically carbon copies of their previous highest-ranking entries with very minor tweaks.

And then another very strange design decision is the fact that Bethesda got two new voice types created for generic vampire enemies. Befittingly called DLC1Male and FemaleVampire. But for some reason, these voices are barely used at all. Only one named NPC each uses them, and if I would mention their names you’d be none the wiser. Modhna and Namasur. They’re both just background vampires living at Castle Volkihar. And besides those two, the voices are only used by the generic new enemies mentioned prior. But keep in mind, this also means that if you aren’t of a high enough level to encounter these generic enemies, as they only start appearing from level 60 onwards, you are not gonna be hearing the new lines anytime soon. Because, you know how bandits and the like have these idle lines they may say if you are just sneaking around their camps? Well, vampires didn’t have those in the base game, they lacked a lot of the dialogue seen by other generic enemy classes such as bandits, Forsworn, or warlocks and witches. This is “fixed” by Dawnguard, but I would’ve mixed the new voice in with lower level enemy ranks as well, for some variety, but that’s just me, you know?

Oh, also, the new female vampire voice is done by Lani Minella, who also does the female dark elf voice in the base game, so I know a lot of people aren’t even gonna notice the fact that there is a new voice. When a new voice type is done by a returning actor, it’s usually just for technical reasons. If they used the female dark elf voice for all the vampires, they’d still have the same actress, yes, but they would constantly be referring to Vvardenfell and ash and all that. Creating a new voice type alleviates that.

That’s also why Arch-Curate Vyrthur is voiced by Stephen Russell, who also does the unique voice for Mercer Frey, as well as the standard MaleSlyCynical voicetype. Their actors are the same, but the reaction lines differ wildly. Got that? Okay, then we can move on to Hearthfire.

Oh man! I guess I gotta preface this section by saying that I never care about home building. I feel like it robs the game world of a place that was never meant to have a building there. Like, I honestly feel like me putting up a house there is disrespecting the original worldbuilders. So you can only imagine how happy I was when one of Fallout 4’s core mechanics was basically that, and that most of its expansions were focused on it! Yeah, I wasn’t the happiest of campers, let me tell you.

For real, I don’t know if this is relatable or not, but when I got the ability to renovate Sanctuary I removed a log from the road, then realized I couldn’t put it back there, felt bad and never touched the system again. Yeah, I don’t feel like it’s my place to design the world, I only inhabit what someone else made for me to inhabit. Think of that what you will.

But back to Hearthfire, let me open up with something insane. Did you know that there’s evidence that Hearthfire might’ve once been a part of Dawnguard rather than a separate expansion? Yeahhhhh. So, in the final game, Dawnguard content is usually prefixed by “DLC1”. Dragonborn content with “DLC2”. But Hearthfire stuff is in most cases prefixed by “BYOH” standing for Build Your Own House or Home.

But in the DialogueViews files we can see Hearthfire stuff being prefixed with DLC1 as well. So either it was gonna be the first expansion instead of Dawnguard, which seems unlikely given the size of both of those, or it was gonna be a part of it.

I honestly don’t know if that’s a good change or not. I mean, one DLC adding both new houses I can build myself as well as new stuff to the base game’s world, that would’ve turned me off even harder. And it’s possible that they could’ve charged more with both those concepts as one. I honestly don’t know. But I suppose that either someone decided to split them up because their contents were so different, or to maximize profit, or because they needed more time fine tuning Hearthfire, because man! Does that expansion ever need fine tuning!

I mean, Dragonborn might have the weirdest technical issues, but Hearthfire definitely has the laziest! Here’s my favorite example of this. So, you can have three potential houses, right? Helljarchen Hall in the Pale, Windstad Manor in Hjaalmarch, and Lakeview Manor in Falkreath. Each of these houses also grants you a housecarl, a bard, and a carriage driver. Now, can you guess which one of these three houses was finalized first?

The correct answer would be Lakeview Manor. How do I know that? Is it because I looked at the file entries in chronological order? Well, I could’ve done that, but there’s an even easier way to check. You see, your standard NPC living in any hold belongs to said Hold’s crime faction, purely so that they’re able to report crimes.

For Lakeview Manor, everyone is in Falkreath’s crime faction. Now for the problem, both the bards and carriage drivers at the other houses are also set to that crime faction, suggesting they had their data simply copied.

Now the other two housecarls don’t have that issue, because their crime factions are unique to them. Buuuuuuut they have something even worse going on. All three of the housecarls have some AI packages that make them patrol alongside your house. But the other two housecarls seemingly got their data also copied from Falkreath’s Rayya. This means that if you get a housecarl in Hjaalmarch or The Pale, that housecarl is gonna patrol the site of your house. But their AI package is still checking for the house in Falkreath Hold. If it’s built? Good. Then they will just go hang over there.

If it’s not built yet, then their AI package has an invalid target, and they go to the place where all NPCs with bugged AI packages end up, Helgen. Yeah, that’s just where they go, don’t ask.

And that’s just the top of the iceberg of weird issues. I’m sure you’re probably all too aware of the weird mannequins that have a will of their own. But then there’s the more obscure stuff that I like, such as the expansion randomly just deleting a cookpot from Solitude’s Proudspire Manor. Or my favorite, just adding an unused civil war flag as a little detail to a kid’s room, just ‘cuz.

But, basically every issue I’ve shown you so far has been copying-related. But the opposite is also true. Every house gets a charter. Heljarchen Hall has one. Lakeview Manor has one. Windstad Manor, though? Not quite. The charter exists, it just goes unused. Why? Because the scripting related to the workbench it’s supposed to be is just simply unfinished, which isn’t the case for the other two. Again, all they would’ve needed to do is copy the code and change the book reference, but the code just isn’t there.

Also, the top of all houses get a unique birds’ nest on them. Or at least they’re supposed to. Hawks’ eggs are added by the expansion and appear on top of Lakeview Manor and Heljarchen Hall, while with Windstad Manor it’s just the base game rock warbler nest. Despite this, hawk feathers are used to decorate it. My guess? The base game nest was a placeholder they just never swapped out. It sure seems like Windstad Manor got the short end of the stick here.

And I guess that’s all the relevant stuff I wanna cover about Hearthfire now. Believe me, there’s plenty more to bitch about, especially if you know about Sofie’s shop menu. But yeah, this expansion just isn’t for me. I don’t care about house building. I don’t care about adoption, though I do like the added orphans throughout the game, I feel like they fit in pretty well. I like the fact that they tried to make each housecarl a bit unique and representative of their regions, though again, that also brings a lot of bugs with it. Plus I never really cared about the housecarl system in the first place. So yeah, it’s a big “meh” from me.

But then we get to the Dragonborn expansion. Time to put on your best conspiracy theory cap, people. As did you know that most of the people living on Solstheim aren’t really people but Dremora?

That is a joke, but it’s not entirely false. As one of my biggest pet peeves with this DLC is the fact that it just doesn’t really care about the smaller details. For example, 26 of the named NPCs are set to the “Dremora” class. Why Dremora? Does that mean anything? No, that class is just the default when creating a new NPC in the Creation Kit, I don’t really know why. But that does show us that after getting created, no one bothered to give these guys any proper classes, they just stuck to the default. This also goes for their levels, by the way, a lot of untouched basic level 1 NPCs. Remember how rare that was in Oblivion? Yeahhh.

Most of the affected NPCs inhabited the Skaal Village. And it features two more things that annoy me to no end. The village is one of the returning locations from Bloodmoon, and in that expansion it had some unique architecture, basically identical to how Thirsk Mead Hall was depicted. Well, in Dragonborn, Thirsk still appears unique, while the Skaal Village reuses wooden Whiterun assets with snow on top. I’m sorry if I ruined the village for you just now, I know I did for myself when I first noticed.

And then there’s Aeta. She’s the only child in the village, because Todd knows we need some children in the expansion, right? Well, for some crazy reason they decided to give her these unique clothes which consist of recolored base game children’s clothes, but now with some snow covering. That’s great and all, but uhhhhh… Hello? Have you seen where we are? Have you seen what the others are wearing? Literally, there’s no better time for Bethesda to reuse assets than now. Give her a Skaal coat as well! You would just need to resize it and bam! But look at the poor, she’s probably ready to meet the All-Maker anytime her parents make her go outside. No wonder the Skaal are dying out if this is the way they treat their children. Maybe it’s just a test, survive long enough to earn your coat. Sounds very in-character for them.

But then there’s another problem that’s more crucial and affects about 3 of the 4 settlements in this expansion. Where are the guards? In Raven Rock, crime is handled by the Redoran Guard, that makes sense. But what about the other settlements? Are there Telvanni guards at Tel Mithryn? Skaal Guards at the village? Thirsk guards at the mead hall?

Well, uh, no. Despite all three of these places getting unique crime factions, they don’t have any guards or any specific NPCs made to handle arresting you, paying bounties, or otherwise.

So, what’s the catch? Well, I can totally believe the fact that the Nords at Thirsk are meant to be their own guards. But there are two problems with that 1) It’s never ever addressed in-game or in lore if that’s the case, plus these guys have admittedly become quite complacent. Still, I suspect they would still be their own guards due to their small numbers. But problem number two comes in the fact that all of the hall’s people have base game voice types. What does that mean? Well, they still react the same to crime as if they were NPCs on mainland Skyrim. So they still ask for your surrender, yell for the guards, etc. It just doesn’t make any sense.

For Tel Mithryn it’s the same thing. Yes, they’re a very small settlement but I kinda feel like Neloth of all people wouldn’t wanna clean up his own mess. He’d have guards working for him. And again, if they honestly couldn’t get that set up in time, just add a line to someone in Raven Rock where they’re “Oh, you want me to work as a steward for Neloth? No way, that guy even gets all his trained guards killed, I wouldn’t feel safe there!” I mean sure, it would still be janky for gameplay purposes, but it’d be better than nothing.

And once more, that also goes for the Skaal Village. You know, in Bloodmoon, these guys even had generic guards protecting the town. And the village is one of the few places that grew in population between games, so there really is no excuse here. Either they just forgot about it, or they just ran outta time. It’s weird.