19th November 2007, 9:28 PM
As far as town size goes, I just got the Daggerfall demo working again to remind myself (and manually installed all the files so next time I won't have to find the demo CD it required again... 98MB install and it requires the CD just so it can access the other 50-60MB? That doesn't make sense... oh well.). The larger towns on the demo island are fairly good sized. The main town is roughly 18 by 18 buildings in size, I'd guess, and a few others are no smaller... it's probably not as big as a city in Arena, but it looks a lot more like a real town, with a more natural city layout, sensible size considering the location (in Arena because of its design you just visit larger cities, though there are different sizes (of squares; convenient that they have city walls to make the outside border of the town... :)), but even so some of them seem quite big for cities in a 'medieval' world when in the real middle ages most towns had only a few thousand people living in them at most... Daggerfall's scale seems more accurate if anything, for some towns at least. Daggerfall still uses square city designs, but unlike Arena, some towns don't have walls. In Arena the town and outside are separate areas; in Daggerfall it's all one huge world, obviously loaded as you get nearer to a place (probably easy with the kind of slow walking speed...). In Daggerfall the towns are part of the main world -- you just move seamlessly outside by going through the gate or (for towns without walls) just going out, instead of like in Arena where you had to go to the gate and click on it, whereupon you were outside. Arena's gates are also only one 'block' high, meaning that they're only as high as your character... looks kind of odd really. Daggerfall's look a lot better. Houses/other buildings/dungeons in Daggerfall are still separate areas, though. You get into houses by clicking on the door and being warped into the building, but within a building doors open normally... they obviously are just modelled separately from the outside.
Oh yeah, and I've probably said it before too, but the automap in Daggerfall is great. All stores, temples, and inns on the town maps are color-coded automatically, and as soon as you go in a store its name is added on the automap. You can't quick-travel around town, but to get between towns, or to isolated homesteads, dungeons, small clusters of buildings around an inn, or whatever else, there's a travel window. Time (days on longer trips) passes of course, but like in a Baldur's Gate you are warped to your destination... except here you have the (really slow) alternative option of walking there. Oh yeah, and you can get a horse for faster travel, as well as a cart for it to pull to hold stuff, and can buy houses and ships (which, evidently, aren't too useful, but are present...).
This doesn't mean that I get any less tired of the fact that all the NPCs say the same things, though... it's true in every game in this series. Sure, each time they try to add more, but any time you're dealing with thousands of characters, you're going to have them repeat eachother. In Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind, outside of quest dialogs most of what you do with people is just ask how to get to places... but when you're dealing with so many people it would be simply impossible to write something for all of them. This is why most RPGs don't try for TES's kind of scale... some things just don't work quite right (though better writers than Bethesda has would help). Yet it's that scale that makes the series what it is... it's an interesting problem.
Oh yeah, and I've probably said it before too, but the automap in Daggerfall is great. All stores, temples, and inns on the town maps are color-coded automatically, and as soon as you go in a store its name is added on the automap. You can't quick-travel around town, but to get between towns, or to isolated homesteads, dungeons, small clusters of buildings around an inn, or whatever else, there's a travel window. Time (days on longer trips) passes of course, but like in a Baldur's Gate you are warped to your destination... except here you have the (really slow) alternative option of walking there. Oh yeah, and you can get a horse for faster travel, as well as a cart for it to pull to hold stuff, and can buy houses and ships (which, evidently, aren't too useful, but are present...).
This doesn't mean that I get any less tired of the fact that all the NPCs say the same things, though... it's true in every game in this series. Sure, each time they try to add more, but any time you're dealing with thousands of characters, you're going to have them repeat eachother. In Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind, outside of quest dialogs most of what you do with people is just ask how to get to places... but when you're dealing with so many people it would be simply impossible to write something for all of them. This is why most RPGs don't try for TES's kind of scale... some things just don't work quite right (though better writers than Bethesda has would help). Yet it's that scale that makes the series what it is... it's an interesting problem.