Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-1496755-20190321173915

Arena surprised me very pleasantly a few times with its attention to detail, which was impressive for a 1994 game. Like, for example, the interiors of city houses - a completely optional thing you'd only see if you go and break into them. Still, they didn't think this was something unimportant, they provided a variety of possible interiors. There are different sets of interior maps for the smaller (poor people's) houses and the larger (rich people's) mansions, which can be a pretty decent source of income for Thief-like characters. Then we also have the random wilderness dungeons (towers and crypts), which are also a nice touch, as opposed to Daggerfall's barren terrain between the notable points on the map.

Building an entire world was a pretty ambitious task. They managed to achieve an impressive size with randomization and procedural generation, but the quality suffered, of course. No wonder they switched to hand-crafted worlds later on. Smaller, but more memorable.

Oh yes, these things exist, but are rare. There is about 1% (if not less) chance to contract Lycantropy or Vampirism when encountering the respective creatures and getting hit by them. Lycantropy makes you more powerful and gives you the ability to transform into a Werewolf or Wereboar (depending on what creature you got the disease from). While transformed, you can only get hurt by silver weapons or better... which effectively makes all town guards powerless to stop you! Yeah, try to "Halt" that, suckers. The downside of being a lycantrope is that you have to kill an innocent every 15 days or become progressively weaker, to the point where you only have 1 HP. Also, you are forced to transform when there is a full moon (I don't know how the game determines this), which means no interaction with people and no access to your inventory. Vampirism is a bit more complex - you become more powerful, get an extra bonus based on your vampire bloodline (determined by the region you got infected in), get the immunity to low-quality weapons, and become eligible to receive special vampire quests. The downsides are that you have to kill and feed every 24 hours (or you can't use the rest/loiter functionality) and you take continious damage while outside during the day, or while in holy places - all temples and (curiously) Fighter guilds in the Hammerfell half of the world map (that's due to lore-related reasons, their Fighter Trainer towers are counted as temples to Ebonarm, some war god that doesn't have normal temples lik the other deities). Oh, being a lycantrope or a vampire could also cause you to occasionally get persecuted by Werewolf/Vampire hunters. Lovely :P

Yeah, that's understandable. I am moderately busy these days, but feeling more tired than usual - probably due to the change of seasons. The so-called "spring fatigue".