Things that Arena does better than Daggerfall

[KeighnMcDeath]

Arena often made me think of Alternate Reality in a few ways.

I enjoyed both games but never managed to finish DF. Arena, after I gained momentun, I just tried to rush dungeons and finish the game. Replays, I would try to speedrun the game. DF, I'd get so dungeon explore blind that I'd look for rando's to explore. Seems odd. The DF mapping sucked so navigating the map was a damn pain.

 

[Wayward Son]

Honestly Arena does most things better than Daggerfall imo. Only thing daggerfall has on arena that i can think of was the addition of factions you could actually join for benefits and the ability to craft items (arguable since it’s so easily broken)

 

[0sacred]

wb Wayward Son

Also getting to visit all of Tamriel. Daggerfall's environs tended to be a bit samey

 

[Wayward Son]

wb Wayward Son

Also getting to visit all of Tamriel. Daggerfall's environs tended to be a bit samey

To add to this, Arena felt like an actual adventure. Daggerfall never felt like that in the one playthrough I did. I was always just doing whatever quest happened to come up, even when it came to the main quest.

 

[Lemming42]

Yeah, Arena's the only TES game that really has a sense of constant forward motion and rising danger/tension to it. The plot might be simplistic but it's well-told, with the dungeons becoming tangibly more complex and dangerous, your character becoming similarly stronger as the adventure goes on, and Silmane and Tharn's brief interjections doing a very good job of convincing you of the wider implications of the adventure and Tharn's growing panic as he slowly realises you might actually be able to assemble the staff.

It probably helps that, artifact quests aside, the entire of Arena is just the main plot. The "Bethesda formula" that we see from Morrowind onwards is so counterproductive to telling the kind of stories they want to tell with the main quests, in that the tension is constantly broken by trudging across the map to collect alchemy ingredients or stopping to do a minor "deliver this letter for me" sidequest. Oblivion gates are opening!!! Let's pick flowers. The dragons are returning!!! Let's go fishing. Daggerfall is sort of in a weird middle ground where the plot tries to ease this conflict by being relatively low-stakes (until the introduction of Numidium) and also having people constantly tell you to go do whatever you like for a month and wait for them to contact you, but the result is a main quest that - while actually really good from a writing perspective - feels in no way urgent and is basically background noise.

 

[Wayward Son]

Damn this is all making me wanna play Arena again

 

[Wayward Son]

Another thing I don’t think gets talked about enough is that I think the paper dolls in Arena are as good as if not better than Daggerfall

 

[OndrejSc]