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Elder Scrolls Arena

denizsi

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Not really. More distinctive with less repetition (or without any repetition at all), but not really "better". Not to me at least. There were few places in the entire game that I found sensibly done and that's it.

Since the whole game takes place in one big dungeon with multiple levels and is all about grinding between puzzles to make it to the next level, level design is all about having enough different places with enough variation so you can feel that you're making progress. Ok, that's in part what a dungeon is supposed to do, but that doesn't make it good or comparably better when most of it's fluff. Battlespire is a ride in a dungeon theme park.
 
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denizsi said:
Dungeons in Daggerfall are a real mindfuck and a real investment to go in, not a ride in the theme park. Arena is too simplistically labyrinthine
If the starting dungeon in Daggerfall is a good indication of what's to come, then I can't agree with the tone you're using.

I completed the starting dungeon (i.e. got out of it). It felt too random. I don't want to insult a game I haven't played properly yet, and that I have high hopes for, so I'll just say that Arena seemed to have found the golden mean between bizarre and built. Its dungeons felt like they might have existed somewhere, even if only in books. The starting dungeon in Daggerfall felt artificial like it was generated randomly in a couple of seconds by some pizza-eating luigi and then thrown straight into the game without a reroll, as it were. Gotta have more pizza, yum-yum, no time for designing levels. Good thing we have this random generator thing. (The beginning of the dungeon gave the impression that the place will have some sort of sense to it, but it turned out not to, which conclusion I draw not as a compliment.)
 

Sceptic

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Divinity: Original Sin
If you're expecting any sense of "they might exist somewhere" feeling from Daggerfall's dungeons you'd better stop playing right now. They're utterly nonsensical and each one can only exist in its own pocket plane. It's why the final dungeon is such a good one: it's supposed to exist in another plane of existence anyway so the nonsensicality at least makes sense in-universe. For ALL of the other dungeons, it doesn't. By the way what you described for the first dungeon (The beginning of the dungeon gave the impression that the place will have some sort of sense to it, but it turned out not to) is the same for all the Castles. Castle Daggerfall in particular starts exactly the way you expect it to, but trying to venture off into the side passages (which you need to do for the MQ at one point) will lead to loss of sanity and lots of mating octopi. By comparison the starter dungeon is the most sensical one. In all this I have to say I agree with you - all the MQ dungeons in Arena at least made some sense. I love Daggerfall's dungeons, but that's because I quickly threw any expectation of realism or basic laws of architecture out of my head very early on; I can't really defend them.

lol at Ken Rolston having so much trouble getting out of the Arena starter dungeon. It takes a couple of minutes tops if you follow the woman's instructions and rush for the exit.
 
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Perhaps Ken suffers from the "make a new character, go through the first dungeon, restart as another character" disease.

God knows how many times I went through Addamasartus (that first cave with the smugglers in morrowind) before I decided on a job / race / mod list
 

hicksman

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Jan 11, 2006
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164
I finally set down to finish Arena a year or so ago after first buying it when it came out originally. It started my TES obsession, which Oblivion finally killed...

It's very much like Zelda. You have a set number of dungeons and the world that connects them and you go back and forth between the two collecting pieces of something. Mix in some unique weapons and you pretty much have it.

I like seeing the roots of the TES series. Huge towns, good character customization, dungeon crawling, cool music, diverse races, and the little things, like holidays.

Dungeons were also pretty hard, again, like Zelda. I found that I sometimes had to leave and level up or get better gear and re-attack the dungeon before i could beat it.

Overall, much simpler than Daggerfall, but still worth a play-through.
 

bhlaab

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Playing with Dosbox, I feel like the game is either too slow or too fast. What's a good number of cycles to use?
 
Self-Ejected

ScottishMartialArts

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I use max cycles. The game runs well in the wilderness and some parts of cities, but once I go indoors or running through alleyways the framerate tanks.

So did anyone else notice that the Arena lists off a dozen or so guilds and factions that are supposed to be running around behind the scenes? I know that there aren't any joinable guilds, but aside from the Mages guild I haven't seen any in-game mention or reference to these other factions that are listed in the manual. Were they just a cut feature or something?
 

Sceptic

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Divinity: Original Sin
Most probably.

For frame rates I was never happy with any setting. It was either too fast or too slow. I think setting core to dynamic makes things a little better, but not by much.
 

Mattresses

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Paula Tormeson IV said:
"Ken Rolston, lead designer of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, says he started [Arena] at least twenty times and only got out of the beginning dungeon once."

:retarded:

Spotted at Oldgames.sk

what the fuck, man? The starter dungeon in Arena is INCREDIBLY easy, the exit is like, left, right, left, right, copy protection. And all you ever encounter are those fucking yellow goblin things and some rats. Privateer's Hold is far more complex, and actually forces you through some hard encounters for a starting character (like that fucking skeleton. Or the bears.).

Arena has boats, this makes it superior.
 

analt

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I always preferred the combat in Arena to the later games. They lost the satisfying smack of swinging a sword back and forth when they added mouselook.
 

denizsi

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And sideways, too. And diagonally.

You can play the game without the mouse look as well. When Daggerfall came out, mouse look was only recently getting recognition from 3D games and I haven't yet adopted it as the clearly superior form of control, using look up/down turn left/right keys instead.

Not that it matters whether you play with or without mouse look. If the mouse look is on, when you hold down RMB, view is locked so that you can swing your weapon. You can also switch between cursor mode and mouse look anytime with a single key. It's in the controls.
 

Luzur

Good Sir
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sometimes its needed to switch to cursor mode since some levers in dungeons cant be clicked in mouselook.

dunno why.
 

analt

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DraQ said:
analt said:
I always preferred the combat in Arena to the later games. They lost the satisfying smack of swinging a sword back and forth when they added mouselook.
You can swing the sword back and forth in Daggerfall with mouselook.

Could have just been the lag on my 486, but it never felt quite the same.
 

denizsi

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Yes, that must be it. I hear it was a taxing game on most systems but the newest, like all Bethesda games. I particularly remember waiting for up to a minute for loading for the tiniest interior cell in Future Shock (the previous Bethesda game using the same engine) on my friend's 486.

Luzur said:
sometimes its needed to switch to cursor mode since some levers in dungeons cant be clicked in mouselook.

dunno why.

Played the game several times. Didn't have that once.
 

DraQ

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Don't targeted spells have to be cast in cursor mode?

Still, with properly set controls, freelook and ability to switch between modes with single key DF could easily rival modern FPS games in terms of ergonomy of its controls.

GUI, on the other hand, was cumbersome shit in DF, I don't think it can possibly be made better than in Morrowind.
 

Luzur

Good Sir
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denizsi said:
Luzur said:
sometimes its needed to switch to cursor mode since some levers in dungeons cant be clicked in mouselook.

dunno why.

Played the game several times. Didn't have that once.

had it like 5-6 times now, most recently in Direnni Tower.
 

denizsi

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Might be a bug or a one-of-a-kind type of issue.

Don't targeted spells have to be cast in cursor mode?

Nope.

GUI, on the other hand, was cumbersome shit in DF, I don't think it can possibly be made better than in Morrowind.

The only thing that ever bothered me was the limited inventory views, quite similar to Fallout. Having to switch between the four interaction modes might be an inconvenience for many, but I found it quite easy to do on a WASD setup. Other than these, I don't remember a single issue I had with the interface.
 

analt

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denizsi said:
Yes, that must be it. I hear it was a taxing game on most systems but the newest, like all Bethesda games. I particularly remember waiting for up to a minute for loading for the tiniest interior cell in Future Shock (the previous Bethesda game using the same engine) on my friend's 486.

Ah, the first game to give me vertigo! Looking down while scampering around guard towers and such. And then the Daggerfall demo came out and I would climb the tallest tower over and over and jump to my death.

Years later I walked out into a plexiglass box and looked down between my feet at the traffic 1,000 feet below, only to realize I felt nothing at all. 3D Games: Curing Phobias and Ruining Tourism Since 1996.
 

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