Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1915529-20140702204420/@comment-3547390-20140904033818

Didn't I tell you? I spend a lot of my time touching things I hate for no real reason. Same reason I play all these Q2 levels. Oh, I am miserable with Arena. Yet I want to beat it, just to have it under my belt and to see what there is to see. Of course, I did eventually give up and look up the answer to the riddle before proceeding to snap at how easy the answer was. Something tells me this isn't the last riddle...

Of course, I might not have to worry about riddles. I have entered some new dungeon (basically, Arena is practically all dungeon delving, there is little point to going to cities beyond asking people where said dungeon is; thank goodness for this too, cities are a lot harder to navigate than dungeons especially at night when nobody will give you directions and you can be attacked by anything) and have gotten my butt handed to me. Apparently, my lack of care for Willpower has come back to bite me, there are spell casting monsters! I have two serious enemies here, one is a spell casting type and one is an extremely powerful beast. The powerful thing is no match to me, but spells! It doesn't help that there is nowhere to rest to restore any of the health you loose, which is basically 2/5 or 3/5 per spell caster after one shot which seems impossible to dodge even if you were to back up upon seeing them and duck behind a pillar (which the spell will glitch through).

For Raadec's sake, if he is even going to read these, I must explain that Skyrim is apparently the Call of Duty of the Elder Scrolls games based on hearsay. You get floating icons everywhere and regenerate health. In Arena, nothing regenerates, not even fatigue. You have to rest, each hour restoring a very marginal portion of your life. Of course, resting anywhere that isn't elevated will result in some overpowered enemy attacking and killing you. The dungeon I am currently in has nothing elevated however, which basically means you can't rest. So, basically, good luck surviving a dungeon filled with spell casters that can kill you in 2-3 hits and melee enemies that are even more "powerful" (forget fighting two of them if you have less than optimal health, which is impossible due to the start being bombarded with spell casters) but easier to kill due to you being heavily armored.

Combine all this with the whole town system (there are hundreds of towns with tons of stores and whatnot, but also thousands of random useless buildings) and a terrible mapping system (to scroll you click the compass, but clicking anywhere in the compass might also cause you to type a note which means scrolling is extremely difficult and unsatisfactory; oh, the towns are large enough that you are only seeing 1/20th or something like that at any one time), then you can see how rough this game is. Oh, every new town does not mark anything, you have to ask villagers to find a certain building. The villagers will tell you to go in a certain direction. After you go that way, keep asking and they will eventually point you close enough so that one will draw something on your map (only works if you are a couple of feet away from the building). This "thing" is basically a line of text that goes from the doorway, which is useful until you realize that many are clustered together which means that upon entering (which also marks them in) you have such a massive cluster of words that you can't read it anyway. Vendors are nice, though you can only sell one item at a time, as you get about 5 tries to successfully convince them to give you a better price. After the five, they will say something witty, and you will just have to retry again. Besides the vendors, barkeep, mage (sells potions), and priest (heals you); there is nobody useful in the game unless it is quest related. If it is quest related and does not involve nobility (Palace), you will talk to one of the four. However, the random people on the street are there to point you to the other goals. You apparently have a 20% chance of them actually pointing you somewhere useful.

When travelling between villages, hopefully you reach it during the day. If you hit a new town during the night (which seems is almost always the case), you will not have the advice of the villagers and will therefore have to randomly wander the town until you see an inn sign in front of a door. Did I forget to mention that you can only see a few feet in front of your face? Or that random monsters wander the town at night and will attack your player while you wander aimlessly? Or that finding anything but an inn is useless (you can mark it however, so there is that) as you cannot access it during the night? Or that enemies tend to spawn randomly anywhere in the map, including right inside you which will cause them to get off numerous attacks?

Oh, you have to go to the towns to find any dungeons, they don't exist on the map by default. Thankfully, once you get it, you can fast travel to the dungeon. Apparently, the world is ridiculously large to the point where the amount of days traveled according to the map is apparently the true number of in-game days it would take to reach it. As days are real-time here, that means it would take 3 or so days to get to a dungeon right next to a city. Fast travel therefore is not an option, it is necessary to not go mind-numbingly insane.

Characters are heavily specialized. If you are a fighter, you will never get to cast a spell. If you are any but one of three classes, you won't be able to use certain armor which will keep you alive (basically everything else makes you prey to the weakest things). Luckily, all locked doors can answer to Mr. Sword so I don't have to worry about being stuck due to being unable to pick a door.

Dungeons are basically wandering around, picking up loot, and whatnot while looking for treasure. Of course, you might encounter riddles like I did. Wrong answers sometimes punish you, sometimes not. If you don't know the riddle and are in 1994 before the age of simply finding out the answer with a search, you thus were fated to not continue the game. No way around it, nothing. Enemies spawn everywhere, often respawning everywhere, and you always want higher ground. Beware of lower ground, enemies can pound you to a pulp while you slowly climb out (you can't hit them from below, this is the only Elder Scrolls game where you can't look up or down). You have directional arrow keys on the screen which do nothing but get in your way and make grabbing a key one of the hardest things to do.

Sound is unstable. Sometimes it doesn't exist (especially with drums, which for some reason blocks all other sounds), while at other times it is amazingly loud (the level up sound, which you of course have no method to figure out when you are going to level up to be warned of said sound). Combined with enemies that can pop up anywhere, you must always be looking at your health bar to ensure it isn't rapidly dropping. If it is, you must slowly turn while allowing the enemy to get off a few more hits before killing the thing. If you don't have a good agility, good luck as even a rat will block most of your attacks. Surprisingly, this combat system makes more sense to me than whatever is in Daggerfall.

Apparently, the developer of recent Elder Scrolls games has never beat the first dungeon. That tells you something either about the difficulty or the developer. I didn't think the first dungeon was hard, even with weak characters, if you know how to play the game. The problem is a lot is rather arcane (it took me a bit to learn how to jump as I did not know it to be a feature, even longer to figure out how to actually reach something with my jump).

In conclusion, drum beats are now in my head and I feel destined to die with a game that I hate yet am playing for lore purposes (I should mention that there is extremely little lore to the point that you know it all 5 minutes into the game).

Batman isn't good? Better him than the X-Men...

EDIT: Just posted... saw the size of my post. I talk way too much.