Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-26005008-20160407215658/@comment-3547390-20160718222728

The problem is that it indeed was also heavily rushed. I think I am getting a clue what you mean by subpar balance, it feels like things are totally unstable and just keep getting worse as they go along. Last time around I faced the most powerful thing in Elder Scrolls Arena somehow while in a dungeon that I have absolutely no idea if I am supposed to be in or not. I am totally confused on what is going on half the time.

Telepathic guards are indeed annoying. I had a video where I showed off trying to sleep in a bed for a few hours of a house I was intended to protect that night. Nobody was in the house when I rested. Upon trying to rest, we get a mass of guards trying to murder me for daring to sleep in the bed for a second. They also ignored the assassins, which either shows that politics have a blind eye or this game is terrible with factions. Still, most of the questionable design decisions in my book are things that worked perfectly fine in Arena and yet were totally broken in Daggerfall. Arena was a game that was rushed and they had no idea what they were making, so you can expect some instabilities. So why is a game that was designed to be a RPG from the start even more unstable? Why suddenly must I remove items from the ground, have a totally useless map system (at least 3d makes sense, but why the whole 2d dot system that makes it so I cannot select anything), and have time limits imposed on everything? Talking about things badly implemented is too unfair, since I could be here all day ranting about the climbing system and other such atrocities.

Glitches. Daggerfall is just a game of glitches. Seriously, I cannot make it without dealing with glitches in Daggerfall. The good news is that "Insufficient Base Memory" no longer exists (Vorknkx, you will learn what this means and pretty much be able to recall what the name of the error is anytime in the future, simply because if one thing is drained into your head it is that error message), but the bad news is that we get a bunch of stuff that will force you to reload hours before. Oh, and we gave you less save slots to work with as well. Didn't pay attention to fatigue? Better reload, even though Arena would just lower fatigue when you swam. Oh, I have an absolutely brilliant thing that takes the cake that happened in the latest episode of Daggerfall (to be published as part 10 or whatever, I have a lot of parts to upload). If there is a reason to get annoyed by Arena, it is because you will be booted out of the game every five seconds due to an error message. But at least I could load my game and continue, while in Daggerfall it probably will decide to troll you. As I said before, I am probably 10 parts in, yet I only have done one successful quest or so because I reloaded to avoid the glitches. Everything else I ended up messing up due to the glitches or they became impossible to complete due to glitches. I can't do anything without glitches getting in the way.

Arena is playable. It is a totally unstable game that will constantly crash, but it is also possible to have determination and make it through it. I am wondering how I can even have that for Daggerfall, it keeps amazing me with how bad it can get. As I have said, it makes me appreciate Arena, which is quite an amazing thing to do.

I am liking your choices Vorknkx. Most people choose the exact same thing to powergame through it all, this game doesn't exactly have the best balance, so people just pick the best option and nobody touches anything else. It is why Ricky was pretty much the anti-thesis to all of that, a pretty terrible choice for someone going into Arena, even if I wasn't exactly aware of what I was doing back then besides deciding to make a random cat dude that wanders aimlessly through the desert.

Meh, I am not that impressed by procedural generation. I love the concept of it, as I said nothing is better for replay factor, meaning that if it was good it would be better to play over and over than some game that has the same levels. The problem is that they must anticipate that lack in direction, leading in turn to lack of real purpose. I am instead going to random dungeons, which could be great if they were as well designed as if by hand or even mediocre, but the problem is that they often use the same shapes over and over. You get very used to the same rooms and seeing the same thing in some other place. Every place starts to lose its identity as you further explore the world, while things are often designed in ways that things don't work quite right. A basic shooter, little can go wrong, so we could possibly get some randomly generated Quake levels and they only be mediocre things that feel like Q2 all over again. When we get a bunch of things in a game, such as one with complexity such as Thief, you need hand-crafting. Levers, vertical ascension, enemies and quest items in areas that are practical... all this is important to making Thief work right. Daggerfall has all this too, but it does it through procedural generation, which in turn results in a bunch of broken levers, climbing outside of the map a lot (and I thought it was bad when I found that spot I could escape the map in Arena), and enemies stuck constantly on tables while quest items are thrown behind a random pushwall in the middle of a bunch of spiral corridors in a place you would never guess or could ever figure out.

Trust me, I know what it is like to have great games suffering from bugs. Even Thief has its share of bugs, many of them stuff that can be frustrating and one reason why my favorite levels are those that don't make use of such buggy materials. Of course, people only care normally if the bug is harmful, so nobody cares that there are so many ways to exploit in Thief, especially since many of those have been adopted into a professional way to play that I totally disagree with due to the usage of all these glitches. To each their own, but some can be accidentally triggered, so it would be nice if I didn't have glitches in my game. But, as you see, I am willing to put up with it because Thief is an amazing game that is worth the frustrations of some bugs, even the dreaded rope bug or hunting for TRBs. Daggerfall? It isn't worth being considered as the best Elder Scrolls title out of the first two releases. The bugs are so nonstop and get in the way of gameplay so much that it is absolutely insane. I consider myself able to put up with a lot, not many have the patience to play all of Arena, but yet I find myself constantly getting frustrated with Daggerfall's alleged improvements.

Random generation was done in Arena as well. If I recall the two systems, I believe it was Arena's that infinitely draws new resources, meaning you can never run out of things to explore, while Daggerfall is about the size of Great Britain and eventually loops. Arena and Daggerfall were not fully randomly generated, both had their main quests designed entirely by hand. I want to say I was in a main quest dungeon? Daggerfall is so counter-intuitive that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing at this point.

I know what you mean by ridiculously massive dungeons, but that was another thing that wasn't exclusive to Daggerfall. Arena often had it so you would be doing a dungeon for hours with no real progress unless you used certain spells. The only reason people don't complain about it like Daggerfall is because they abuse such spells, stuff that I never even bothered with touching such as Passwall. The problem with Daggerfall is not its length, but its complexity of new features that just add to the tedium.

Things Daggerfall added to dungeons that drive me crazy include levers. Arena didn't have switches at all, while Daggerfall has a bunch that might do something to something in a totally different location. Arena had pushwalls, but they were always mapped to the point that they weren't really hidden. Daggerfall's map is too much of a pain to read, but even if you could read it you would notice that there is no way to tell where pushwalls are, you have to find them by yourself and they may have the important quest object. Daggerfall has boring lore books, fun. Daggerfall allows for vertical climbing, while Arena was pretty much on a linear plane (with some simulated ascension sure, but climbing never was as much of a chore as the terrible system that is Daggerfall's).