Elder Scrolls The Elder Scrolls: Arena

[LarryTyphoid]

This game is seriously dogshit. I never thought I was a graphics whore before I played this game but this shit looks worse than Wolfenstein 3D and it's embarassing that it came out two whole years after Ultima Underworld. I mean, System Shock came out the same year and here comes Arena with its flat maps, ugly textures, and awful controls. It's crazy how much of a leap forward Daggerfall was from Arena.

 

[Lemming42]

It's not a bad game when you get into it IMO. The big problem is that the late game just completely fucks you over if you're a non-mage character, Reflect is pretty much mandatory to get past the Liches and other assorted bullshit. The problem then, of course, is that the enemies have absolutely no counter-attack to your Reflect shield, and will always kill themeslves as soon as they see you, which turns everything into a massive joke. All they needed to do to fix this was to have enemies close in for melee attacks when they realise you've got a shield up, but nah, they just stand there like turrets and cast hugely damaging attacks at themselves until they disintegrate.

Agreed that Daggerfall is generally a big step up in most ways, but it does tend to grate after a few identical dungeons. Arena's got a lot of boring filler dungeons but it's also got some pretty great ones - Crypt of Hearts, from what I remember, or whatever that one is with the lava streams and the big optional Vampire crypt. Always liked Murkwood and the other outdoor area as well, very clever way to turn the game's awful draw distance into an advantage. Halls of Colossus is cool too, especially when you realise the obvious way to circumvent the entire upper floor.

 

[Bad Sector]

System Shock came out the same year and here comes Arena with its flat maps, ugly textures, and awful controls

Yes but Arena had a large procgen world with hundreds of roaming NPCs, buildings you can enter (to hide or as a thief) which made things a bit more complicated tech-wise. IIRC unlike Daggerfall, you couldn't walk from a city to another, but the game still had vast areas whereas System Shock maps were way more limited.

 

[NecroLord]

Daggerfall is the best game in the series honestly. Shows a lot more polish than Arena,but you gotta give it credit for what it achieved(or at least tried to achieve). All the major provinces of Tamriel are included in the game.

 

[madrigal]

Reflect is pretty much mandatory to get past the Liches and other assorted bullshit.

Shield spell works just as well.

Daggerfall is the best game in the series honestly. Shows a lot more polish than Arena,but you gotta give it credit for what it achieved(or at least tried to achieve). All the major provinces of Tamriel are included in the game.

Daggerfall is the start of the decline and consolification of the Elder Scrolls, removing the best exploration spells in remove floor and wall, promising stuff like polymorph that does not work and then just removing it.

 

[Lemming42]

Daggerfall adds far more than it removes, surely. In addition to the entire skill system, there's things like Climbing and Levitation (I know Arena has rudimentary levitation, but you get what I mean) which, when combined with the more complex dungeon and city designs, open up a whole world of possibilities. Underwater sections in dungeons too. The Linguistics skills are really exciting conceptually too even if they're completely fucked in practice. You could say that a lot of the skills are useless I guess, but then so are some of the stats in Arena. Why is Personality even in the game?!

The only areas where Daggerfall loses out to Arena are dungeon design, not having Passwall, and maybe the loss of vehicles, although DF introduces horses and carts to make up for the loss of Arena's insane 900mph speedboats. Not a huge fan of the magic system in Daggerfall either but it's functional enough.

Morrowind is the true culprit in regards to being the first game to console-ify the series, gut the RPG systems, and streamline everything to the point of self-parody. I like Morrowind, but the step down from Daggerfall is practically a sheer vertical drop.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

I went back and beat this game. The very definition of a 5/10 dungeon crawler. Can't see myself playing it again. It was kinda fun to watch every enemy kill themselves by casting spells at me with a reflect spell, though.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

The one thing I remember about this game is how difficult it is getting out of the opening dungeon at the time. I'm sure I could do better now, but at the time it was a mess of nearly getting killed by rats, navigating through a dungeon that seemed hellbent on killing me, only to escape at night and then get killed by bandits.

 

[smaug]

The one thing I remember about this game is how difficult it is getting out of the opening dungeon at the time. I'm sure I could do better now, but at the time it was a mess of nearly getting killed by rats, navigating through a dungeon that seemed hellbent on killing me, only to escape at night and then get killed by bandits.

Took me 5 mins and I found my way out. Was quite disappointed that I accidentally ran straight to the exit.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

The one thing I remember about this game is how difficult it is getting out of the opening dungeon at the time. I'm sure I could do better now, but at the time it was a mess of nearly getting killed by rats, navigating through a dungeon that seemed hellbent on killing me, only to escape at night and then get killed by bandits.

The starting dungeon's pretty easy, so you probably had a shitty class. I went through as a Nord Spellsword and the whole game was boringly easy. By the time I got the second staff piece, I already had enough cash to buy all the spells I needed plus a practically infinite supply of potions. And I only did one sidequest, which consisted of two small dungeons, the reward for which was the Oghma Infinium, which made the game even easier by giving me an extra 50 points to allocate to my attributes. And if you go without reflect and shield spells then you just get one-shot by wraiths and hell hounds which appear out of quite literally nowhere right in front of you and spam a million fireballs in an instant, so that's not an interesting challenge either.

 

[deuxhero]

Morrowind is the true culprit in regards to being the first game to console-ify the series, gut the RPG systems, and streamline everything to the point of self-parody. I like Morrowind, but the step down from Daggerfall is practically a sheer vertical drop.

Nah, Morrowind actually has content to go with its systems, the most important part of a video game. You'd see most of Daggerfall's systems in the demo (and the only thing stopping you from seeing all of them if not for the low level and skill cap), and the only practical thing you can do with these systems is go through horrificly designed dungeons again and again, or do the bizarre main quest (go around, break into people's palace's in plain view of everyone, kill the human guards, then work for that faction immediately afterwards).

 

[Fowyr]

This game is seriously dogshit. I never thought I was a graphics whore before I played this game but this shit looks worse than Wolfenstein 3D and it's embarassing that it came out two whole years after Ultima Underworld.

Because it used pretty meh Terminator Rampage engine. Check this:
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...s-better-than-daggerfall.143278/#post-7965555
Still, comparing it to UUW is unfair. UUW engine (and its upgraded version in System Shock) was miles ahead (and much more resource-heavy) of other engines of this era.

 

[NecroLord]

Reflect is awesome.
Spell Absorption is also nice,but it can hurt you if you absorb a spell and have full magicka,leading to "magicka overload".
In Morrowind Spell Absorption is even better,as it will not damage you in any way.
Yeah,Liches are pretty scary,I like the fact you can identify a monster in advance by the sounds it makes while in a dungeon...
Arena and Daggerfall are also true Dungeon Crawlers.
Some of the dungeons in Daggerfall are gargantuan.

 

[Vic]

Play Daggerfall Unity next.

 

[perfectslumbers]

Arena is a pretty bad game but graphics are a weird thing to criticise it for imo. Arena is the most atmospheric game I've ever played and the graphics are a big part of it.