Patrick Nolan reviews The Elder Scrolls: Blades…
When starting Blades for the first time, you will be surprised to see that your character does not start their story in chains, as is typical of all the main entries in Bethesda’s fantasy franchise. This is not the only change that Blades has made in its attempt to transition a recognisable Elder Scrolls experience to mobile devices, in fact this change is probably one of the smallest when compared to many others.
At its centre, that’s what Blades truly is. An attempt to distil the Elder Scrolls formula into its finest essence. Unfortunately, this has meant that one of the most recognisable features of the Elder Scrolls franchise got cut in Blades, the open world environments. Almost all gameplay in Blades is linear, only on a select few main story missions will there every truly be an incentive to explore the procedurally generated dungeons you trudge through. These story missions will occasionally have hidden rooms and secrets to find which provide you with extra rewards. You get sent to these dungeons by a constantly refreshing job board that has quests to either fetch items or kill generic fantasy enemies. The only time Blades deviates from this is in the rogue-lite Abyss mode. In Abyss you explore a constantly expanding dungeon for as long as possible before you are overwhelmed. As of right now, Abyss has potential but as it differs so little from the other dungeons you explore the experience never feels all that unique.
As for what you will do in these dungeons and the Abyss? Explore, fight and then loot, it really is a simple as that. This gameplay loop is the core of the Blades experience. You will only break away from this loop when engaging with Blades’ settlement construction mechanics, which happen to be incredibly simple, where you take resources you have collected whilst looting and then comparing them to a list of materials required to build a structure for your town. If you have the required materials you are good to go, build away, if not: explore, fight and loot. The purpose of improving your town is to increase its prestige meter; with each prestige level up, you will have access to a greater variety of buildings and services such as smithies and alchemy labs. Upgrading the town never feels too rewarding and it more often than not just seems like a sinkhole for the resources you spend time gathering.
An element of the loop is perhaps one of the very few innovations that Blades manages to contribute to the Elder Scrolls franchise. Fighting in Blades actually has skill-based mechanics, unlike most Elder Scrolls titles. Your character has to time blocks, combo attacks and time spell casts in attempt to avoid interruptions from enemy attacks. There is also a strategy in selecting what weapons and magic your character should make use of. Enemies all have specific resistances to certain damage types, and you can play around these by carefully selecting your equipment; the same goes for your own character to, as certain armour types have greater resistance to certain damage types. All of this makes gameplay in Blades at least somewhat entertaining. Melee combat is the only way you can defeat your enemies this time around, so you’ll only have accesses to melee weapons, shields and magic for now. So just another compromise on a heap of others.
Obviously mobile devices don’t have the best control input, this can sometimes impact the Blades experience. Turning your characters head for any distance larger than a couple of dozen degrees is often a chore and sometimes screen taps will not register in the midst of combat. Gameplay outside of combat mostly involves moving from one location to another, this is done by either pressing and holding the left side of your screen or by tapping where you want to go; I found directly controlling the character the most efficient way to move.
Levelling in Blades is also markedly different than in most other Elder Scrolls titles. You no longer need to level individual skills, instead you have a central experience bar. Experience can be earned in most of the ways that are common in role-playing-games such as killing enemies or completing quests. Each level nets you a skill point which is invested in one of three skill trees: a magic tree, a passive tree and a combat skill tree. This is definitely one of the weaker aspects of Blades’ design; there is almost no incentive to create specific character builds as the skill system is so rudimentary and, like all dungeons in the game, incredibly linear. Even the traditional Elder Scrolls character creator that made it into Blades does little to alleviate this; racial passive abilities only play a very minor role in gameplay and your characters race can be changed from Argonian to Nord to High Elf at any time, for a price.
This provides an opportunity as good as any to discuss monetisation in Blades, as it often connects to gameplay. The only things in Blades that are blocked behind a paywall are a few decorative items that can be used in your settlement construction. And everything else you ask? That can all be accessed for free, with a catch. Just as everything can be accessed for free, so to can everything be purchased with in game premium currency. You want to complete a quest? You can pay for it. You want a new weapon? You can buy that too. A house, a self-revive, a loot chest you ask? Yep, all of it can be purchased with premium currency that is available for real money and acquirable in small quantities in game. As the game is currently only single player it is difficult to complain about a pay-to-win economy just yet, but Bethesda have promised a player versus player arena mode in the future that may be difficult to balance because of how much premium currency can interact with all aspects of Blades. Bethesda also could not help including loot chests. Almost all gear and crafting materials are gathered from chests which are earned in game and, like everything else, can be purchased with money. The chests earned in game tend to kill pacing as most of them take such an exorbitant amount of time to unlock; a dozen silver chests can take a whole day to open.
You might be wondering why there’s been little reference to the games’ story so far and this is mainly a result of Bethesda’s willingness to ignore it to. Only the very minimal amount of required plot setup is used in a vapid explanation as to why your character does things in the game such as rebuilding the town or dealing with local bandit problems. I imagine most of the story will only make sense if you are already familiar with the Elder Scrolls universe anyways. None of the characters you interact with have voiced dialogue and the text dialogue is so poorly written you can probably skip through all of it with nothing of substance lost.
The only other things worth mentioning are graphics and performance. If you have played the latest Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim, before Blades you will probably suffer a heavy amount of déjà vu. Many of the textures have been ripped straight from Skyrim: creatures, clothes and weapons are all exact copies of their Skyrim counterparts. You could be forgiven for thinking that Blades is just a Skyrim port with greatly reduced graphics settings. In terms of performance, the game runs fairly smoothly; it only ever crashed once or twice in the dozen or so hours played. The main concern is how brutally Blades hits your battery life. Unless you are close to a charger when playing, don’t expect to be playing all to long.
In summary, Blades is a very simple game. It can only be seriously recommended for the true Elder Scrolls fanatics or those who have a particular interest in the oh so simple three-part gameplay loop. Beyond that? Nothing particularly awe inspiring is on show in this dungeon crawler that you can’t find in other free-to-play mobile games or by just switching on a console and playing one of the half a dozen versions of Skyrim currently available. Obviously Blades is still in early access, so one can hope we will see some improvements in the future.
Pros:
+ Combat design
+ Gameplay loop
Cons:
– Oversaturation of microtransactions
– Battery killer
– Dull skill trees
Rating – 6/10
Patrick Nolan
