Friday, September 7, 2012

Hearthfire and Future Skyrim Add-Ons


Hearthfire went up on the Xbox Live marketplace on September 4th.  In Hearthfire, players can purchase up to three parcels of land (one in The Pale, another in Falkreath, and another in Hjaalmarch), then design, build, and maintain one to three homes. Utilizing a crafting table and carpenter’s bench, you can create rooms, exterior adornments, and various other additions to your homestead. Various elements of what will become your home, include: kitchens, bedrooms, storage rooms, libraries, greenhouses, enchanter’s towers, alchemy labs, mannequin displays, cellars, trophy rooms, gardens, fish hatcheries, bee hives, and stables. You can also hire a steward and charge him/her with buying materials for the home, hire your own personal carriage and driver, and even hire a bard for your home. 
For Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Bethesda released four DLC player homes, which became a bit excessive. Though each home introduced interesting new elements to the gameplay, it became unlikely that a gamer would spend a large amount of time exploring or utilizing the new acquisition. Hearthfire tries to eliminate this problem by allowing the player to design the home. Bethesda is banking on the popularity of games like Minecraft to draw gamers to Hearthfire. Personally, I find the home creation limited and the process of furnishing that home extremely tedious. For me, my love of building in Minecraft does not mask the fact that building homes in Skyrim is little more than a deconstruction of purchasable upgrades for previous homes. With the home creation feature, Bethesda has given gamers a very narrow set of choices to design a home instead of releasing the homes already designed with upgrade options purchasable through some merchant. A large amount of my time working with the add-on has been spent mining and finding merchants who sell glass, straw, goat’s horns, and iron ore or ingots.
Hearthfire's best redeeming quality is the adoption feature. You can adopt one or two kids and move them into your home in Windhelm after paying the steward to convert your alchemy lab into a children's bedroom or into any of the homes you create provided you furnish them with children's beds. You will receive a letter by courier encouraging you to adopt from the orphanage in Riften, but there are also orphans in other locations that you can take in. Depending on the personality of the child and the location of the home in which you place him or her, the child will act differently and relay different stories. You can give your children new clothes, toys, and even a dagger for use in home defense. You can play tag or hide and seek, tell them to do their chores, or send them to bed. Still, Hearthfire's charm is fleeting. 


Skyrim’s newest add-on Hearthfire went up on the Xbox Live marketplace on September 4th. Hearthfire is the realization of two Game Jam ideas: building your own home and adopting children. In February at DICE 2012, Todd Howard showed a video (watch below) of new features and ideas for Skyrim that Bethesda employees had dreamt up. Many of the concepts introduced in that video have made it into the game. These include: kill cams for ranged and magic kills, a flaming epic mount, mounted combat, Kinect-enabled shouts, lycanthropy skill tree, the ability to transform into a flying vampire lord, and now, home design and adoption.

Hearthfire succeeds primarily in reminding me that Bethesda has a really great property which they could continue to expand for quite some time, if the gaming market will allow it. If Bethesda were to expand the home creation options and minimize the repetitive furnishing process, future Hearthfire-like add-ons could be worthwhile. While PC gamers have been exploiting Skyrim's full potential since Bethesda released the creation kit, console gamers remain limited to official DLC. Hearthfire may be the beginning of further add-ons that will provide console gamers with a tiny fraction of the creative freedom that Skyrim modding gives PC gamers. Perhaps Bethesda could release an expansion of Hearthfire that allows gamers to rebuild Helgen or build an entirely new settlement. Maybe an add-on for console Skyrim could introduce an interactive writing desk where players could write there own quests or create new NPCs. The Hearthfire add-on indicates Bethesda is thinking toward something like publisher-approved console modding software, and for that reason Hearthfire excites me for future Skyrim add-ons.

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