Review TES: Arena retrospective at RPG Watch

[HardCode]

So, how did you come to that opinion mr. l?

if you look at what they do release of it, it's clean and uniform. the rest just relies on having a metric fucktonne of cash where you can do things like pair coding (working with a partner to catch your mistakes early) and testing. that's all there is to the term. they're not brilliant or innovative just really 'professional' about it, for lack of a better term.

I guess that's why Morrowind would CTD about every half hour? And the infamous "invalid pointer" error box while picking up inventory, resulting in a CTD

 

[denizsi]

Learn some English before lecturing me again, idiot

Lo and behold; the moron spoke. LOL. Oh musta, plaesa teac Engrish mi.

if you look at what they do release of it, it's clean and uniform. the rest just relies on having a metric fucktonne of cash where you can do things like pair coding (working with a partner to catch your mistakes early) and testing. that's all there is to the term. they're not brilliant or innovative just really 'professional' about it, for lack of a better term.

You got to be kidding. There are so many things wrong in their "proffeshunnality" on a technical level, I wouldn't know where to begin or where to end. They are unmistakable incompetent on many levels. They have some real talent in the team in art and world design, it shows here and there in both games, but it seems to get assimilated down eventurally to the level of other crappinness.

 

[Avin]

Daggerfall rocks. A game with naked members on temples? Daggerfall rocks.

 

[Mr Happy]

And that with the athmosphere is true, it really feels claustrophopic at most places. And the athmosphere is generally more sinister than in the other ES games.

I have to agree with this. Arena had roads, temples and taverns outside cities near the roads. It was more frequent to be attacked at night by robers when the stores were closed and it had prostitutes on the street. You could pay a prostitute and sometimes you would get sifilis. Whoo hoo i'm a real man now. :twisted: But really while Arena used the same blocks and procedural generation techniques the world was more alive.

Unfortunately, I played Arena after Daggerfall, so it never grabbed me as much as its sequel. What's always confused me is why they dropped a procedurally generated world in favor of a scaled down world. Sure, they were reacting to complaints of cookie-cutter towns etc, but unless I'm mistaken, the massive size of daggerfall got a good amount of praise. Looking through nooks and crannies in Morrowind could be enjoyable, but most of the land, especially the ash area, could have been almost as good, and bigger, if it werent hand crafted. I never really got the fun in walking realtime between towns. Now with Oblivion's procedurally generated forests, it makes you wonder why some of that was expanded to a much bigger scale. You don't need a friggin ruin (edit: which were pretty much all the same) every 50 feet to make exploring fun. Plus, no fun travel system.

 

[tunguska]

They have some real talent in the team in art and world design, it shows here and there in both games

A good point actually. The artists at Bethesda really do have talent for scenery. And that has been consistent throughout the series. There haven't been many RPGs that could top the highly stylized graphics of Morrowind. However, until Oblivion, their creature design has always been lagging far behind. I'd rather see 10, highly detailed, unique monsters, than 50 blocky ones. Also if there has ever been an RPG with better graphics than Oblivion I am not aware of it.

 

[elander_]

There are about 1000 dungeons in the game. Just the three main main provinces got half of this. This was because whenever the player gets a new quest that requires dungeon crawling a local dungeon is picked up at random for this. The sensation of playing Daggerfall in this cases is very similar to playing a rogue game because we never play the same dungeon.

Every templated quest starts with a list of resources and character profiles needed for the quest and when the quest is taken this list is instantiated with real locations, items and people. A quest can use a specific or unique location or a named person if required. This is the reason for Daggerfall work the way it did and to have the huge landscape. If a quest needs an house and an npc any town has hundreds of vacant houses that can be used for it.

It's obvious that in Oblivion and Morrowind the new devs missed the reason why Daggerfall was done the way it was. There was no reason to have all those tiny and empty dungeons spread all over the land or to have leveled items and foes in Oblivion if the land was so small and quest so linear. If they were trying to please the old fans they missed the point completely and dumbed down their games unnecessarily. If Oblivion and Morrowind were layed like in Gothic and with a less aggressive scaling system their games would have been much better.