Elder Scrolls Blades, a review
Recently I finished the main quest of ELDER SCROLLS BLADES.
I have a weird opinion about this game – I enjoyed it considerably, but I don’t really recommend it.
After I beat SKYRIM on the Xbox earlier this year, I wanted to play something else ELDER SCROLLS related. I thought about replaying OBLIVION, but I’ve done that before. I tried playing ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE, but I just kind of bounced off it – it’s so big and complicated, and it’s hard to pause and step away when you’re busy.
That led me to ELDER SCROLLS BLADES, a free mobile game that was ported to the Nintendo Switch a few years ago. Mobile games generally have a bad reputation for a variety of well-earned reasons, but I thought it was worth trying. The reputation of free-to-play mobile games is that they’re enjoyable for a bit, but then you can’t really advance in the game without spending money on microtransactions, so either people 1.) spend a lot of money on microtransactions, or 2.) abandon the game.
So, I thought, let’s try it and see if it’s any good. I mean, it’s free, and there’s absolutely no way I’m paying for any microtransactions. If I buy something, I want it to have actual value for me. (Not to be snide, but this is why I never got into crypto.) I started playing it towards the beginning of March.
It’s basically a mobile-sized subset of the typical ELDER SCROLLS experience. Like, it doesn’t have any stealth or archery elements, which were a big part of SKYRIM and OBLIVION. It doesn’t have an open world, either. What it does have is a series of quests and missions that take place in procedurally generated dungeons. The plot is that the player’s home town was destroyed, and since the Empire of Tamriel is in chaos, it’s up to the player to rebuild the town, defend it from enemies, and defeat the local evil undead Sorcerer-King. So there’s a base-building and town-building element in addition to the randomly generated dungeons.
The gameplay worked for me, I admit. The thing is I’m a really busy guy. I wrote like 800,000 words this year, and there’s all this other Real Life stuff I need to do. (I wanted to do a million words this year, but the reason I missed that wasn’t gaming, it was a combination of various Real Life factors.) I don’t have time for games that don’t allow save states and or that don’t allow you to pick up exactly where you left off. BLADES was designed for bite-sized gaming – you can play one dungeon quest, and then get back to work. That exactly fits with the kind of time I have for gaming nowadays
I admit the endgame can be a bit of a grind. To defeat the Sorcerer-King, you need to be high level, and you need to attack him with exactly the right equipment designed to fit your playstyle. Grinding out those levels took a long time, and I basically stopped playing the game in September and October because I was tired of the grinding and didn’t want to deal with it. But after a break of two months, it was enjoyable to return, and this time I beat the Sorcerer-King on the first try once I had prepared proper weapons and armor for the fight.
But speaking of grinding, let’s talk about microtransactions.
Everything in the game is designed to convince you to buy stuff for it. There’s an in-game currency called “gems” that basically let you skip construction and crafting timers, and there are constant offers to buy gems for actual money. Every day there’s a new notification for a sale on something – $4.99 for 500 gems, $19.99 for a Legendary Chest bundle, that kind of thing. Like many mobile games, if you’re not careful, you could find yourself spending a lot of money very quickly, like “spouse has angry conversation about charges on credit card” kind of money. The game is designed to get you to spend a bunch of money on microtransactions.
That said, it is an entirely playable and enjoyable game without spending a penny. I finished the main game without spending any money, but it took a lot of grinding. I enjoyed that grinding, because I could do it it bite-sized chunks across seven months or so.
So if you’re at all prone too spending too much money on microtransactions and in-game items, you definitely, definitely, should never play this game. But I enjoyed it, and I’ll probably keep playing the random dungeons even though I’ve finished the main quest.
That is my opinion of ELDER SCROLLS BLADES – I enjoyed the game considerably, but I can’t recommend it because the microtransaction model definitely preys on people vulnerable to that kind of thing.
And I will admit that while I didn’t pay for any microtransactions, I did pay for one thing related to the game. I bought Inon Zur’s excellent soundtrack for ELDER SCROLLS BLADES, and frequently listened to it while working on DRAGONSKULL novels this year.
-JM