The next three spots were taken by the Black Ops 2 Season Pass, Skyrim Hearthfire and then Dawnguard. The conditions for these sales aren’t hard to guess: Black Ops Revolution was delayed for the PS3 and released alongside pretty much all the other DLC packs this past February.

Couple that with discounts on the Skyrim’s DLC, which also saw crucial packs being delayed, and also that both games are fairly hot properties, and voila. Making it rain on the PlayStation 3.

In fact, Black Ops 2 ranks number 4 on the Top 20 PS3 and PSN Games list, with thatgamecompany’s Journey holding steady. Nobody ever said minting money was easy.

Source: Examiner

Thankfully, then, the third major Skyrim DLC release. the newly released Dragonborn, is flat out incredible, and one of the best examples of how DLC should be handled. With an entirely new set of locales to explore outside of Skyrim, and near fan favorite Morrowind, an entirely new questline that adds substantially to both general Elder Scrolls lore, and specifically, to Skyrim’s backstory, and finally, a lot of fan service to players who played and enjoyed previous Elder Scrolls games, and most notably Morrowind, Dragonborn nails it completely.

It’s a substantial download, at over 800 MB, and when you actually start the questline, you realize why: Dragonborn takes place on Solstheim, an island off the coast of Morrowind; across the expanse of the island, you will find the geography changing dramatically, from the now familiar snow clad rocky locales of Skyrim, to the more exotic scenery of Morrowind proper, replete with giant mushrooms and the like.

Dragonborn sees you follow the questline of the original Dragonborn, the Dovahkiin Miraak. After Miraak turned evil, he was banished to Oblivion, and he is now trying to return to Tamriel. Frankly, the story and the setup stop mattering after a while. Wheras the setup is great, because it adds substantially to the series’ extensive lore, after it sets the new questlines up, it gradually recedes into the background in terms of importance, eventually degenerating into giving you just an excuse to go perform the next task that you have been given. Sadder still, Miraak never really comes off as menacing, and after a while, his one gimmick begins to come off as genuinely comical, almost as if the game has become self aware at the sheer absurdity of the story it is trying to tell, and is now making fun of itself.

Where the storyline itself fails, pretty much everything else picks up on the slack. The locales in Solstheim are fresh and incredibly varied, and it feels like a miniature Morrowind/Skyrim hybrid all at once. The main questline itself lasts at least a good half dozen hours, following which there is at least twice that many hours worth of extra content, quite a lot of which is, in true Elder Scrolls tradition, banal, but most of which is impressively addictive. And then there is also the dragon riding.

Dragon riding is probably the most publicized feature of the new DLC, and it’s easy to see why, to the legions of new players introduced to the franchise via Skyrim, the prospect of riding a dragon after you tame it becomes so alluring. And while Bethesda went the really safe route and opted to make dragon riding an all on rails affair, with pre determined flight paths, that does not take away from the sheer freshness and absolute excitement of it, although it does become fairly boring once the sheen has worn off. Whereas right now, it is understandable that Bethesda opted to not have free roaming dragon riding in order to keep the player firmly within the designated playground, I hope one day, we get a game where we can use dragons to get to any part of the scenery we damn well please to.

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In spite of its fairly obvious limitations, Dragonborn is brilliant. To any Elder Scrolls fan with Skyrim, it is recommended. To any Morrowind fan, it is recommended. To any Skyrim fan, it is recommended. To anyone who possibly feels that Skyrim somehow needs to provide them with more value for money than it already did, Dragonborn is recommended. It is a rare example of DLC done right, and is flat out the best Skyrim DLC available at the moment.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.

From the PR, Hearthfire allows you to “purchase land and build your own home from the ground up – from a simple one-room cottage to a sprawling compound complete with an armory, alchemy laboratory, stable, garden, and more. Use all-new tools like the drafting table and carpenter’s workbench to transform quarried stone, clay, and sawn logs into structures and furnishings. Even transform your house into a home by adopting children.”

That’s right. Children. Running around, all mindless and destroying your stuff, keeping you awake at night, children. How adorable! Hit up Steam and check out Hearthfire today.

One of the many such elements that Skyrim offered was property. You could theoretically buy homes and move into them, furnish them, and basically use them as glorified depositories, dumping all your unneeded equipment there, while you went out questing and found new stuff. You could also marry and move into a home with your wife. The scale of all these activities, however, only served to highlight the glaring limitations placed on you: you could only move into pre made homes (though you could furnish them to an extent) and you could never have children.

No more! To address these problems, Bethesda has released the second expansion pack for Skyrim, although truth be told, its more of a glorified DLC pack than it is a full fledged expansion. Hearthfire promises to address all your complaints about the lack of home building and family building in a role playing game, by expanding its scope to basically incorporate The Sims into its fold too. Or well, that’s the idea.

Because you see, Hearthfire works. It just doesn’t work as well as you’d want it to.

Because for example, Skyrim is a massive place. It can take several minutes, sometimes an entire gaming session, to walk across. There are picturesque creeks, valleys, hills, mountains, forests, small settlements, big cities… and theoretically, you should be able to build a house anywhere you want, right? But you can’t. That’s the worst part. You pick from three predetermined locations, and that’s where your house is built. And I hope you like Dawnstar, Falkreath and Morthal, because you can only make homes there. Once you pick the city, you don’t get to pick the plot. You’re assigned the plot automatically once you pay 5000 gold to the Jarl of the city.

I’m sensing Skyrim is a socialist economy.

Anyway, once you get your house, you get to choose from premade rooms, a grand total of nine. You don’t actually construct the house, you just place the rooms around. The rooms themselves can’t be customized beyond the furniture, which also you cannot make; you get to choose if you want it, but you can’t do anything beyond that. In other words, it’s just a series of menu navigations, and you can’t actually customize or personalize any aspect of your homebuilding, from where you live, to what your house looks like, to what’s actually in there.

Hearthfire adds more than just homebuilding, but it fails at most of that too. For example, Hearthfire finally lets you have a kid… but you can only adopt one, you still can’t conceive one. I mean, seriously, this is an M rated game, and sex is taboo?

Anyway, adopting a kid is sort of fun. You go to an orphanage and interview to get one (‘I’m a professional thief with the Thieves Guild), and you get to pick whichever kid you want. You can play with your kid, you can scold him, you can give him money… but it all feels empty, bland, hollow, because the kid never grows. It’s sort of like the first Sims game. No scratch that, it’s exactly like the first Sims game.

Hearthfire isn’t a complete strike out, though. It opens up newer homes (and thus newer ‘banks’) for you to store your stuff in. Itallows you to hire ‘stewards’ which are your NPC companions, and they will stay at your house for whenever you need them (which saves you the trouble of trudging all across Skyrim to find them), and it offers up the convenience of having a carriage outside your new home that will take you anywhere you want. For the asking price, it’s probably even well worth the investment if you’re even a semi serious Skyrim player. It’s just, I can’t help but judge it against what I feel it should have been, as opposed to what it is, and so, I am left with a bitter taste in my mouth.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.