5th October 2004, 12:46 PM
Nothing new, just didn't want to put this in the thread where we are arguing about BG and KotOR...
I've been playing Arena for a few days now. You know, the now freeware first TES game... then yesterday I played a bit of the Daggerfall demo (thanks to one of my older demo CDs...). Interesting to see the differences and similarities. There are all kinds of techical issues (Arena requires EMS so it must be run in DOSBox, and it runs badly there so I cannot get a smooth framerate... weirdly Daggerfall runs much better than Arena in DOSBox. It also runs in Windows since it can accept XMS... but it runs a bit better in DOSBox I think.), but for now I'll ignore that and stick to more important matters.
I would say that these two, and Arena in specific (since I've mostly been playing it) are interesting contradictions. On the one hand, you have massive worlds. Arena lets you go to cities and towns (and their surroundings) across the continent. You'll visit all nine parts of Tamriel. It's older so it's got some limitations (the cities and towns are not connected by land -- you must use the Travel map to go between them, for instance.), but you can certainly see the connection... anyway, so you start in your home province and start adventuring. So what did I mean by contradictions? On the one hand, it has massive scope. 400+ towns and cities, every one with various inns, temples, equpiment stores, a palace, a mages' guild... and one gate in or out. There are also various tilesets, depending on which culture you are in. Different parts of the world will look different. They've also got their own people... the people on the streets in each province are different. And there are numerous quests you can do... you can pretty much do fetch quests forever, for instance, and there are an uncountable number of randomized dungeons littered around the world.
However... it is also limiting. Character intraction is for the most part VERY limited. People who give you quests will have something to say (just a text block and a yes/no to the quest), but other than that pretty much all you can do is ask people their name and profession (and these will start to repeat after a couple of hours of doing this, making this part mostly ignored), ask for General or Work-related information, or ask where any of the relevant places to go in town are. If you're very near the place the person will also put the name of the store on your map (the only other way to do this is to go into the store, get its name, come out, and label it on the map yourself... a tedious process.). This is important because you want to know which places are which on the automap (inn, store, or temple, mostly, except the mages' guild). The names of stores and stuff also clearly get drawn out of a pool because you'll see the same names over if you visit just a few towns. Each region is different a bit but still... it gets old fast. Especially once you consider the fact that the INSIDES of the stores, temples, and inns are EXACTLY THE SAME EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD. Yup, the same white humans are inside the inns with the same racially-based (as in based on your character's race) comments to make everywhere. While EVERYONE on the streets outside are of the race that is supposedly dominant in that province. This is just stupid... my character's a High Elf, so I should expect that in Summurset Isle the people in the inns should mostly be High Elves, right? Nope, they are uniformly humans with the same insulting things to say they say everywhere else. Stupid.
Really what I am trying to say is that Arena has truly massive scope but very limited variety. Four hundred towns but before you've gone to three you'll see repeating store names, jobs (if you bother to ask), answers to your 'Rumors - Work' or 'Rumors - General' questions, etc. You'll get the same, or very similar, fetch quests in towns. You can explore virtually identical dungeons. The only real differences are the tileset used for the city graphics and inhabitants (in the overworld city map that is, not in buildings) (and this only varies between provinces), the name of the city you are in, and the layout of this particular city or dungeon... and that is certainly random like so much else.
So you can spend forever if you wish in the game, but I've been playing it for like three days and am already getting tired of the repetition... makes me want to just focus on the main quest for a while and then probably not play the game anymore. After all even if you focus on the main quest it's a very long game...
As for Daggerfall, it's both similar and different. Based on the demo I can tell that it focuses on just one part of the continent, but allows travel between all parts of this section of it and has much smaller towns... which means fewer cultures to deal with which makes some of the problems with Arena less. But it's still got very limited interaction with the people where it's mostly either accepting quests, asking about rumors or work, or asking where places are. And it is certainly a massive-scope game but I've heard that that comes at the price of having lots more virtually identical towns with more virtually identical things to do in them and more virtually identical dungeons to hack through (and that's the other major contradiction -- the games tie a deep roleplaying system and massive open world to just about the simplest form of hack and slash gameplay...)... a game you can play forever if you want to, but I don't quite see how it keeps the interest for that long.
Oh yeah if anyone else wants to play it it is here
http://www.elderscrolls.com/tenth_anniv/...-arena.htm
And DOSBox is here (the newest version that is)
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net
I've been playing Arena for a few days now. You know, the now freeware first TES game... then yesterday I played a bit of the Daggerfall demo (thanks to one of my older demo CDs...). Interesting to see the differences and similarities. There are all kinds of techical issues (Arena requires EMS so it must be run in DOSBox, and it runs badly there so I cannot get a smooth framerate... weirdly Daggerfall runs much better than Arena in DOSBox. It also runs in Windows since it can accept XMS... but it runs a bit better in DOSBox I think.), but for now I'll ignore that and stick to more important matters.
I would say that these two, and Arena in specific (since I've mostly been playing it) are interesting contradictions. On the one hand, you have massive worlds. Arena lets you go to cities and towns (and their surroundings) across the continent. You'll visit all nine parts of Tamriel. It's older so it's got some limitations (the cities and towns are not connected by land -- you must use the Travel map to go between them, for instance.), but you can certainly see the connection... anyway, so you start in your home province and start adventuring. So what did I mean by contradictions? On the one hand, it has massive scope. 400+ towns and cities, every one with various inns, temples, equpiment stores, a palace, a mages' guild... and one gate in or out. There are also various tilesets, depending on which culture you are in. Different parts of the world will look different. They've also got their own people... the people on the streets in each province are different. And there are numerous quests you can do... you can pretty much do fetch quests forever, for instance, and there are an uncountable number of randomized dungeons littered around the world.
However... it is also limiting. Character intraction is for the most part VERY limited. People who give you quests will have something to say (just a text block and a yes/no to the quest), but other than that pretty much all you can do is ask people their name and profession (and these will start to repeat after a couple of hours of doing this, making this part mostly ignored), ask for General or Work-related information, or ask where any of the relevant places to go in town are. If you're very near the place the person will also put the name of the store on your map (the only other way to do this is to go into the store, get its name, come out, and label it on the map yourself... a tedious process.). This is important because you want to know which places are which on the automap (inn, store, or temple, mostly, except the mages' guild). The names of stores and stuff also clearly get drawn out of a pool because you'll see the same names over if you visit just a few towns. Each region is different a bit but still... it gets old fast. Especially once you consider the fact that the INSIDES of the stores, temples, and inns are EXACTLY THE SAME EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD. Yup, the same white humans are inside the inns with the same racially-based (as in based on your character's race) comments to make everywhere. While EVERYONE on the streets outside are of the race that is supposedly dominant in that province. This is just stupid... my character's a High Elf, so I should expect that in Summurset Isle the people in the inns should mostly be High Elves, right? Nope, they are uniformly humans with the same insulting things to say they say everywhere else. Stupid.
Really what I am trying to say is that Arena has truly massive scope but very limited variety. Four hundred towns but before you've gone to three you'll see repeating store names, jobs (if you bother to ask), answers to your 'Rumors - Work' or 'Rumors - General' questions, etc. You'll get the same, or very similar, fetch quests in towns. You can explore virtually identical dungeons. The only real differences are the tileset used for the city graphics and inhabitants (in the overworld city map that is, not in buildings) (and this only varies between provinces), the name of the city you are in, and the layout of this particular city or dungeon... and that is certainly random like so much else.
So you can spend forever if you wish in the game, but I've been playing it for like three days and am already getting tired of the repetition... makes me want to just focus on the main quest for a while and then probably not play the game anymore. After all even if you focus on the main quest it's a very long game...
As for Daggerfall, it's both similar and different. Based on the demo I can tell that it focuses on just one part of the continent, but allows travel between all parts of this section of it and has much smaller towns... which means fewer cultures to deal with which makes some of the problems with Arena less. But it's still got very limited interaction with the people where it's mostly either accepting quests, asking about rumors or work, or asking where places are. And it is certainly a massive-scope game but I've heard that that comes at the price of having lots more virtually identical towns with more virtually identical things to do in them and more virtually identical dungeons to hack through (and that's the other major contradiction -- the games tie a deep roleplaying system and massive open world to just about the simplest form of hack and slash gameplay...)... a game you can play forever if you want to, but I don't quite see how it keeps the interest for that long.
Oh yeah if anyone else wants to play it it is here
http://www.elderscrolls.com/tenth_anniv/...-arena.htm
And DOSBox is here (the newest version that is)
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net