Bees? No, not bees! Bats!
I've just had a chance to play some of Skyrim's first upcoming downloadable expansion, Dawnguard, which will be out exclusively on the Xbox 360 on June 26th.
In my demo, my character had already chosen to become a Vampire Lord (as opposed to the vampire-fighting Dawnguard), so I had a chance to mess around with the Vampire Lord's various powers. Side note: Why the heck is this expansion called Dawnguard? It should be called Vampire Lord.
The Vampire Lord works a lot like Skyrim's werewolves—you transform using a right shoulder button. After doing that, you lose access to the gear in your inventory and get a whole grip of new powers. Actually, one of your new powers is a grip… a death grip.
So yeah, you can shoot globes of red death at people and suck peoples' blood and summon a gargoyle… pretty cool. You can flap your wings and glide over the ground, and you can turn on night-vision.
But while all that is well and good, do you know what else you can do? You can warp around the world as a mother effin' cloud of bats. (Can you guess what this ability is called in the quick-select menu? That's right. It's called "Bats.")
Man. I have to admit, I felt more like a wizard than a vampire for the first part of my demo. Then, I discovered "Bats". Suddenly I was blasting around the gameworld, appearing and disappearing in a cloud of vicious black bloodsuckers.
There are plenty of other cool things about Dawnguard, and I'll share more detailed impressions soon.
For now: Bats.