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Bethesda recently opened early access to its latest mobile game, The Elder Scrolls: Blades, and as we learned yesterday that this access was extended to anyone with a Bethesda account, I thought why not use this title for that our readers can see exactly what it has to offer. So tie in, because I predict a bumpy ride.
story
Compared to any major version of TES, the history of Blades is exceptionally dull. You play the role of a blade that was forced into exile but who recently returned home to find her destroyed village. So, of course, it will be your job to embark on a series of endless quests so you can win the funds and items needed to rebuild your hometown, one structure at a time.
Your goal is to rebuild your destroyed hometown
The story honestly does not offer anything special, and it is clear that its primary purpose is to explain why, in the world, you spend so much time playing the role of a planner in a scary TES game. The design of the stories does not become more lazy than that, bathes in its glory.
Graphic
The graphics look good, especially for smartphones, although the indoor environments appear much more detailed than the outdoor spaces of the game. I have the distinct impression that a lot of the effects of particles, fog and from the light of the game are not effects at all, but pre-rendered images. This gives the game an inexpensive feel, much like the early 3D games of the late '90s that relied on many predefined backgrounds. Game environments rarely change in appearance. Once you've plunged into a few dungeons, you have almost everything there is to see.
Pleasant graphics could use more variety
Currently, there are no options to change the graphics in the settings. Therefore, if you see questionable performance (which happens), there is nothing to do about it. So far, after testing the game on GS8 + and OP6T, I noticed more than a few snags in the framerate of the two devices, and on the old GS8 +, I also experienced some freezes, it does not There is no doubt that this is a very demanding task. Game. I hope that developers will look into this issue before the release of the global version because, in the current state of things, the performance is not as good on most devices.
Settings are pretty sparse
Controls
The controls are interesting, and although they can use work, I love the fact that you can choose to play the game in landscape or portrait mode. More mobile game developers should aim for a similar design. Navigating the menus in portrait and landscape mode works very well, although the movements in the game world differ between the two views.
I would say it's better to play with portrait tablets, but you can also get away with this view on a phone. The movement is done by tapping the screen exactly where you want your character to move, which works pretty well, although the movements of the error are common. Fights may also seem a bit crowded due to limited horizontal space, but once you are used to using your two thumbs at the same time to attack, block and remove your skills, you should not have a lot of you can hardly fight. in portrait. Heck, I bet some players will even prefer the fight from this point of view, as it's a more comfortable way to hold your phone.
Portrait
The landscape view is probably the way most people will choose to play through the blades. This view offers a more traditional control method. At the bottom left of the screen you will find your left thumb controller and lower right, the right one. During the fight, you will find your blocking button on the bottom left of the screen and your attack button on the right. , plus a pinch of special moves between the two. For the most part, the use of the thumb works as expected, even if they turn the camera rather slowly. If you move one of your thumbs to the top half of the screen, you will be able to adjust the camera much faster. So even though this setup may seem confusing at first, especially because it's never explained in the game, once you know where your controllers and camera controls are, you should be able to maneuver with sufficient precision.
Landscape view
gameplay
The game Elder Scrolls: Blades looks like any other Android skinner. So, whether you like it or not, it depends on the type of game you like to play. If you are an amateur of occasional experiences, you revisit your free time all day and do not worry about things like creaking constantly extremely repetitive content, lack of skill-based gameplay, or coping with an insurmountable amount of time waiting, then you will probably feel like home playing Blades. There is always something to work on, which can be fulfilling when you reach the goals you have achieved.
Twenty-two minutes of practice game The Elder Scrolls: Blades, watch the progressive worsening of the image rate
Of course, if you're hoping for something that looks like the Mainline series, you're going to be very disappointed. You will spend a lot of your time diving into the dungeons, whether as a job, quest or daily challenge. There is also an endless dungeon in your city called The Abyss, which offers better rewards as you go. Unfortunately, most dungeons are similar, which makes sense as many of them are procedurally generated.
In the History section, your main goal is to develop your city. To improve your village, you must collect loot. This loot can primarily be obtained through loot crates, and loot crates can be found in quests or purchased at the store. There are three types of boot crates in total: wood, silver and gold. It takes five seconds to open a wooden crate, three hours to open a silver medal and six hours to open a gold crate. At first, you can only hold ten crates in your inventory, and you can only open one at a time. Therefore, if you have several cases of gold and silver, it may take several days to unlock the items needed to rebuild your city. . As you can imagine, this is a considerable amount of time. You have the opportunity to improve your chest capacity, but you will have to spend premium money to increase your limit.
It will cost you ten gems to add ten extra slots to your chest inventory.
Combat offers a mixed bag. When you walk in a dungeon, you will encounter enemies and, if you get too close to one of them, you immediately engage in combat. This transition is often very jerky, but it indicates at least that it's time to fight. Each enemy contains an assortment of animations, and it is up to you to determine who will signal his attack so that he can block or counter it as you time. More or less, fighting is like a mini-game that's wasting time and wasting the time needed to open loot boxes and improve your city.
At the beginning of the game, you will start fighting and wipe the ground with your enemies. Keeping both thumbs near your attack and blocking buttons helps you, and generally, if you attack on one side and the other, you will find a winning series of hoof strokes that will win most met. This fun ends at around eighteen when you inevitably hit a wall. And as advancement is tied to the growth of your city, and that growth is related to objects that you find randomly in the coffers, and that you can only open one box at a time you can not do anything other than wait or pay once. you hit the wall.
monetization
You can say almost immediately that Bethesda designed Blades from the ground up as a shallow money grab. After all, this is a free game that includes in-app purchases of up to $ 99.99 per item, so it's not a mystery. These PAIs are mainly useful for buying a secondary currency, gems, and can be used to eliminate the many obstacles that hinder your progress in the game. You can also earn this secondary currency by playing, but you will never win enough to unlock all the timers in the loot box you encounter.
Tons of IPA and premium currency for sale in the store
The growth of your city is directly related to the loot that you unlock in the many loot chests of the game. These boxes all contain timers and they can only be opened one after the other. It seems that this mechanism is designed to force players to pay to advance at an acceptable rate or wait for each timer in the boot to be given the opportunity to unlock the items needed to reach the next level in your city.
You can only unlock one safe at a time
Heck, you can even use the secondary currency to complete most tasks in the game without having to play them, which should tell you everything you need to know about this version. Everyone has heard of the term "pay to win", but Blades is another beast, because its design requires players to pay for not having to play some of its content. Bethesda is already known as a developer who publishes uncompleted and extremely buggy console and PC games, but by creating content that you ask the public to pay to avoid costs, it goes beyond the ineptitude of developers and clearly indicates the real purpose of this game.
Who wants to waste time playing the game when you can pay to finish all your work
At the very least, Bethesda seems to be aware of the problem of balancing the coffers and said the money cases would be rebalanced in the future.
Characteristics
Since you need to log in with a Bethesda account to play Blades, it makes sense that cloud backup is included. No matter what device you choose to play on, you can quickly take your last place. I even spent some time testing the game on my iPad Pro to see how well the cloud backup worked. I have not lost any data yet, and I must say that the functionality is transparent, which is appreciated.
Simply log in with your Bethesda account to resume your last visit.
The lack of support for physical controllers is a feature that is squarely lacking. You will have to play on a touch screen, there is no way to get around it, which is bad for those of us who prefer to play with a physical controller or who need a better one. accessibility. This missing control method also means that Shield TV support is most likely a pipeline.
It also appears that Google Play Games Services is included, although I have not found any features in the game after logging into the automatic GPG account.
Last thoughts
The Elder Scrolls: Blades offers exactly what I expected, which is really not much. I may have become cynical over the years, or maybe I've been in this situation for so long that I can instantly feel a money grab a mile away, but the result is the same. The Elder Scrolls: Blades is a free and shallow skinner box that requires the player to spend money on his or her secondary currency (bonus) in order to mitigate the obstacles that he regularly poses in your path. On top of that, the fight is boring, the story does not exist and, for some reason, we are all charged with rebuilding a city, because you know, it's exactly what TES fans would like to Series. While Bethesda's Fallout Shelter has been positively received thanks to its noninvasive monetization, The Elder Scrolls: Blades goes in the opposite direction with its tiny timers. If you like to chase the carrot on the stick casually, then you'll love Blades, but if you're looking for a quality TES experience, that's not it. He does not even come near.
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