I had a lot of fun with Hearthstone and Order & Chaos Duels. I?m enjoying the hell out of Fallout Shelter. These days, I get a lot more opportunities to turn on the phone and play 10 minutes of something than I do to sit down and play a proper session of an AAA title. I would totally love a TES take on Hearthstone? provided it?s done well, which is where I get worried.

Let me get the good out of the way first. One, Fallout Shelter is awesome, proving that Bethesda Softworks and Game Studios know how to design solid mobile titles and manage external teams. Making a mobile game that appeals both to mobile gamers and to a ?hardcoe? fan audience is hard, and having it make money is harder. Fallout Shelter has done this. Two, they?ve hired one of the designers behind Magic: The Gathering, so they?re serious about getting the design right (rather than just blindly cloning what?s out there).

Now, the iffy: who is actually making this game? Fallout Shelter was created by Behaviour Interactive with supervision/direction by Bethesda Game Studios. Behaviour?s got a number of other titles under their belt, and a lot of experience working with other people?s properties. Legends, as far as I can tell, is being developed in part by a place called Direwolf Digital, but also in-house at Bethesda. Direwolf has been around since 2014 and hasn?t released anything so far. I?m assuming they must be good since Bethesda has contracted out to them, but without games I can?t really judge for myself.

The bad. The art is BAD. It?s well executed, sure, with dynamic poses and interesting lighting, but it?s boring as all hell. Had it not been part of a trailer that said ?Elder Scrolls,? I?d never in a million years have guessed that it?s supposed to belong to the same IP as Morrowind or Skyrim. TES has over 15 years of interesting and unique designs to pull from, and what do we get? A mummy, some blue underwater elf lady, and a generically armored pink elf.

I?m as big of a lore nerd as you can be. I identified the Falmer in a screenshot before Bethesda told us what they were. Yet I can only guess at what the hell those people in that image are supposed to be. Is the furry dude a scrawny Nord? A Reachman? Some kind of Bosmer? Is the blue lady a weird looking Maormer, or is she a Nereid (if so, why pick them instead of literally anyone else)? I?ve posted my revision sketch already, but hot damn, drawing a unique, brand-specific picture isn?t any harder than drawing a generic fantasy one. If anything, it?s easier, since the work of designing the outfits has already been done for you. I don?t know whether to blame some marketing person or an art director or some kind of deadline, but the art is easily the weakest part of this.

I kind of lied in that sentence there. It?s not just that art, but what it represents. I look at it and I don?t see someone asking what kind of genre TES would adapt itself well to, I look at it and see someone seeing the big piles of money Blizzard is sitting on thanks to Hearthstone. Which is fine, that?s how games are made, but hide it better. Again: actually using existing TES designs (Draugr, Ordinators, Imperial Legion, etc.) actually saves your artists time. If you want to get those big bags of money, you need to get us, the fans, to play it. Just like ESO didn?t pull people from the juggernaut of WoW, Legends is unlikely to pull players from the juggernaut of Hearthstone. People will play it because they recognize the TES parts about it, and currently there are no TES parts about that marketing image. Compare to Fallout Shelter, which is made entirely in the image of Vault Boy, with UI that looks like it came out of a PipBoy, and chock full of references to the previous games. Had the image featured an Ordinator in the center, I guarantee you that the facebook page would have a whole lot more than 700 ?Likes.?

Anyway, enough with the negativity. I?m still excited by the concept, even if the visuals are giving me pause. Marketing is outsourced all the time, and isn?t representative of the actual game all the time (see: those ESO Blur trailers). Hopefully this is the case here. Bethesda has had really solid art direction in their last titles, so I want to believe that they?ll continue the tradition into this one.

I really want this to work out. It?s not TESVI, but it?s what we can get what also getting Fallout 4, so I chalk that up to a major win. Plus, it?d be great to have a TES game I can play on the toilet.

P.S. We already have TES Legends: Battlespire. Someone please think of better titles

P.P.S. The fact that there isn't a forum for this game, and that it isn't mentioned on elderscrolls.com, is kind of a strange move. I know it's a while from release, but I find it weird that Bethesda is happy to let it remain undiscussed so soon after its reveal. It doesn't exactly make it look like y'all have confidence in the product.

I remember reading this (or something to this effect) on your tumblr. And yeah, I'll agree that my biggest beef with the card game is that the art strikes me as...uninspired.

My biggest beef is that we know so little about it. The skin of the game is just that, the skin. While it's important to look appropriate, the meat of the game needs to be solid most of all, and we know nothing about the game other than it's a virtual card game.

Speaking of, having one of the designers behind MtG has me a bit iffy, too. Virtual card games aren't just physical card games played on a computer; there are design differences that need to be considered if you want it to feel intuitive to play and fun to watch.

id have to say i prefer having real cards to digital ones. the ones that only exsitst on a digital relm tend to have winning build within days that are spammed by the masses. at which point the fun runs out fast. at least if it is made like hearthstone. i loiked how magic the gathering did it. build and evergrowing library and only certain parts are okay to use for competitive at any given time. the other parts tend to pop back up in competitive use just long enough to keep it fresh and working.

I too agree that the art just looks extremely stereotypical and less inspired by TES but rather generic fantasy. However I won't be a naysayer about the game, but I'll just say: 'too early to tell'. I just hope this ends up well.

On another note, anyone see the like/dislike bar on its trailer on YouTube? It's no Federation Force, but it's pretty down voted to say the least.

I absolutly agree with you on that, there is nothing more to add.

I respectfully disagree with you about the skin being just a skin. Aesthetics are incredible important, especially if you want your game to have some identity, doubly so if you want to compete with huge games like Hearthstone. One thing that TES Legends has over Hearthstone or MtG (for an TES fan of coruse) is the fact that it takes place in Elder scrolls world. But instead they opt for the hyper generic aesthetics in their art.

All I am saying is that if I was scrolling through appstore looking for a CCG, just be checking the pictures, I would completely ignore TES Legends, in favor of Cabals Card game ( even though Cabals is completely broken ) simply because it has much more original and interesting aesthetics.

I feel these plastic generic feeling cashgrabs (this and ESO) takes away from the integrity and "mystery" of the Elder Scrolls series. I wonder if it will not hurt the series in the long run. I hope it will not change it.

To me the ES games have always been about the developers doing their thing, doing what they love and being unique, not looking at what the competition is doing. Even with Fallout 4 and they saying now that the dialogue system needs to look like it does because that is the "standard" and expected now worries me that they don't have this view as strong anymore. It could be their downfall. They have come this far and done so well for a reason. And they did not get this successful or celebrated by looking at what other people are doing or going for simple cash grabs.

Even with a distinct identity, it still needs to be functionally distinct. If it plays exactly like Hearthstone, it's not going to bring many people over since those people have already put quite a bit of time and real money into that game. Plus, I can play a game that doesn't look like TES as long as its fun, but I can't play a game that is not fun even if it looks perfectly like TES.