Playing A Game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Dragonborn PC

Learning from Dawnguard's map-placement problems, Dragonborn puts a whole new (miniature) content on a separate map. You travel to the island of Solstheim from a dock in Windhelm, and can then fast-travel between brand new destinations on the island itself.

Solstheim is bigger than the areas added by Dawnguard, with a correspondingly larger amount of questing content. Dragonborn even introduces new alchemy ingredients, weapons and armor, and spells. It's more ambitious overall than Bethesda's last DLC, and wholeheartedly delivers on that ambition.

What makes the Dragonborn content especially satisfying, though, is how intertwined it is with Solstheim itself. Much of Dawnguard had me running back through parts of Skyrim I'd already travelled, but Dragonborn feels fresher with its new towns and dungeons spread out over a whole new map. I didn't just find a new dungeon in the tundra; I got to walk that tundra for the first time, and discover more of Bethesda's meticulous environmental worksmanship.

The only thing I really didn't like was this campaign's predilection to drop me into Hermaeus Mora's wacky, irritating books-and-monsters realm. Similar to Skyrim's dwemer ruins and falmer caves, these areas just felt repetitive, and their enemies were annoying.

But that didn't end up accounting for a huge fraction of Dragonborn's content, and also I learned how to ride dragons, so yeah, this is a pretty excellent expansion to Skyrim's massive world.

Better than: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Dawnguard
Not as good as: maybe Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony, but that's not a great comparison
Word of warning, if you're collecting books: Hermaeus Mora's realm has so many books. I filled my pack with books. Books, books, books.

Rating: Awesome