11th May 2007, 6:17 PM
Right, there's absolutely no way you could do an area the size Daggerfall covers and design it all unless you spent an insanely ridiculous amount of time drawing the map...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daggerfall
As it says: massive, massive size, but with repetition. The random seed would be to decide which blocks are being used for the area in question, I'd imagine...
As for Arena, it's not as big as Daggerfall in total area, though it is different of course because of the 'cities and random generation surroundings which you quick-travel between around the whole empire' concept, not the 'one part of the world you can explore thoroughly' concept that TES II-IV have used.
Oh, Daggerfall was also horribly buggy when it first shipped, only being fixed later in patches, and had nudity (take off your character's clothes and you're naked, though there is a 'no nudity' menu option) and an M rating (for both nudity and blood). Arena has no nudity though.
Oh, one other thing the first two games both do do is have a different combat system for your sword. Instead of just hitting a button to attack, you hold down one of the mouse buttons and 'swing' it across the screen to hit... you do need to be careful to keep it out of the interface section, but other than that I found it at least different. Morrowind dropped it for standard "hit the button" combat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daggerfall
Quote:Daggerfall is the largest Elder Scrolls game to date, featuring a game world estimated as being 161,600 square Kilometres — roughly twice the size of Great Britain — with over 15,000 towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player's character to explore. According to Todd Howard, Elder Scrolls programmer, the game's sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is 0.01% the size of Daggerfall. Vvardenfell, the explorable part of the province of Morrowind in the third game has 6 square miles. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has approximately 16 square miles to explore. In Daggerfall, there are 750,000+ non-player characters (NPCs) for the player to interact with, compared to the count of around 1000 NPCs found in Morrowind and Oblivion. It should be pointed out that the geography and the characters in these later games are much more detailed.
An automap was implemented to help players navigate through the lengthy tombs and ancient underground fortresses. Players have to visit approximately 6-8 provinces in order to finish the game, although a total of 47 areas are present. A limited array of building blocks were used to construct the towns and dungeons, causing some reviewers to complain about the game's monotony. In 2002, Morrowind, the third game in the series, responded to this issue with a smaller, more detailed world with unique-looking cities and NPCs with greater individuality.
As it says: massive, massive size, but with repetition. The random seed would be to decide which blocks are being used for the area in question, I'd imagine...
As for Arena, it's not as big as Daggerfall in total area, though it is different of course because of the 'cities and random generation surroundings which you quick-travel between around the whole empire' concept, not the 'one part of the world you can explore thoroughly' concept that TES II-IV have used.
Oh, Daggerfall was also horribly buggy when it first shipped, only being fixed later in patches, and had nudity (take off your character's clothes and you're naked, though there is a 'no nudity' menu option) and an M rating (for both nudity and blood). Arena has no nudity though.
Oh, one other thing the first two games both do do is have a different combat system for your sword. Instead of just hitting a button to attack, you hold down one of the mouse buttons and 'swing' it across the screen to hit... you do need to be careful to keep it out of the interface section, but other than that I found it at least different. Morrowind dropped it for standard "hit the button" combat.