Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1915529-20160623203125/@comment-3547390-20160627235321

Arena is the first game of the Elder Scrolls series made by Bethesda and showed them going in a different direction, previously they had only done sports games and Terminator titles. Pretty much, they saw Ultima Underworld by Looking Glass Studios, an extremely revolutionary CRPG title from 1992, which inspired them to create their own. Now, while Ultima Underworld was still in pre-development (in 1990), Carmack went to a demo and that was what inspired him to write an engine that would render things faster. That game engine was the one used in Hovertank 3d. Furthermore, Romero saw the texturing that was being done in Ultima, which is what drove id Software to make Catacomb 3d. The textures were simpler, but were rendered much faster for perhaps that very reason, plus they were successful in rushing these games out the door to beat Ultima Underworld. Of course, Wolfenstein was the next game to use that same engine made in Catacomb 3d. Basically, they wanted to improve on the speed, to make movement more smooth and to make the game more action-based. Wolfenstein and Ultima Underworld were both pretty big games in the early 90s, Ultima was the big CRPG that everyone wanted to copy as I said and Wolfenstein was the start of the FPS genre proper. Still, Wolfenstein was much bigger for the simple reason that Ultima Underworld was part of a long running Ultima series that is hard to get into while Wolfenstein is a game where you shoot Nazis and don't need much more story. Then of course Doom came out, everyone started loving the fast-paced action combat and the Deathmatch LAN games, and the whole FPS craze was born. Looking Glass was trying to build on their complexity, adding a lot of story elements in their next title that was extremely revolutionary for being one of the only shooter games of the time to have any degree of true story. System Shock used the same engine as Ultima, but it was streamlined in some fashions, plus the audio logs and text documents were unlike anything else seen before (and have inspired various games ever since to include this stuff as story-telling devices). Of course, System Shock never really got popularity outside of closed circles, everyone loved the streamlined simplicity of Doom more than the complex nature of System Shock, where you had to manage controls for leaning as well as deal with several different GUI systems. Many people that like System Shock refer to it as the smart-man's shooter and that Doom was just inane pointing and clicking. Looking Glass Studios started taking financial hits while id Software was one of the most well known companies of its time. Eidos started refusing to let Looking Glass make singular titles, they would have to make them in bundles, so we got some random flight simulators with a talking plane or something that nobody wants to remember. Pretty much, it was the falling of one of the most important companies in the history of 90s gaming, forced into obscurity due to other games making them outdated and releasing a lot faster. Thief was their way to try to build their way back up, but the whole "sneak and not shoot" didn't catch on as well as shooting things, especially since Thief lacked Multiplayer, which was the craze of the 90s. Eidos pretty much gave up on them, focusing on other promising people such as John Romero, who was making an amazing game known as Daikatana. The only problem is that Daikatana was a commercial failure and Eidos lost a lot of money. Their solution was to stop supporting Looking Glass Studios so they could bail out Ion Storm. This is why Thief fans often blame John Romero, though I feel that while he made the commercial failure it was Eidos' money to spend. They also had something against Looking Glass, like I said they pretty much forced them to make terrible packages nobody wanted so that they would lose money on games they didn't want to make. When the first two parts are a failure, talking plane #3 isn't exactly what you want to do, but it is what you do when they refuse to support you with another Thief game if you don't. So, yeah, a title trying to be an Ultima clone will be a lot like Wolf 3d.

Arena was designed as a game where you would travel with a team of fighters (hence why the box art shows a group of people instead of one lone fighter as the game ends up being) to various locations around the world. Note that the whole point of "Arena" was that you would go to various Arenas and fight for your glory, working your way to the top. There was some role-playing, but the main focus of the game was on the action. Spoils would include slaves and gold, there are a lot of sprites of naked slaves that aren't in the final game. You would work your way from locale to locale, eventually making your way to the Imperial City itself to face off in gladiatorial combat against an evil mage known as Jagar Tharn. Of course, that original idea was pretty boring and repetitive, so Bethesda's solution was to add a massive amount of side quests with role-playing aspects which would vary up the action. In fact, they started focusing so much on side quests that they didn't do much work on the main game itself. They realized that the dungeons were more fun and so completely dropped the arena concept, which is why you never see me going into gladiatorial combat. Instead of just gaining a skill after gladiatorial combat, you would earn skill points for fighting monsters. Jagar Tharn was reworked as the stories main villian instead of some random dude you face against in the final city. You also got free-roaming across a massive world instead of a linear combat based system. It makes sense, a lot of 90s games changed around their concepts a lot before being released.

The difference was that Arena already had been advertised and even had the box covers shipped out. They wanted to release this game quickly and didn't want to have to rework everything to fix the game. Somehow they came up with the idea that the world of the game, Tamriel, is an absolutely brutal and violent place to live where every day is a struggle for your life. Due to this, Tamriel itself has been nicknamed the "Arena". This is only mentioned in the beginning movie, then is never seen again, mainly because even Bethesda knew they were pretty much just shoehorning a reason this thing is called Arena. Furthermore, they decided to try to make it sound more like a RPG by adding "The Elder Scrolls" to the beginning. Pretty much, it was another shoehorn to say it was a RPG and that this story was written in the Elder Scrolls, plus a bunch of things you need to find can somehow read pieces of The Elder Scrolls, so it became used a plot point to remind people that this is a RPG.

Even rushing to get to stores by Christmas of 1993, they completely failed in reaching their deadline, which was devastating for this small company that didn't make any big titles. They finally got their game to stores in March of 1994, which is an absolutely random time to release a game, plus the fact of the matter that everyone had lost interest in the game didn't help. We also get a name that makes no sense, Arena, with a cover that is totally misleading and lead to bad reviews by anybody who actually bothered with the game. They sold an extremely low number of units, less than they even did making random add-ons for their Terminator game. Bethesda pretty much appeared to be doomed to fade into obscurity, especially with a title damaging to their company like this. Somehow, the Elder Scrolls Arena kept selling. Mainly through word of mouth, Elder Scrolls Arena became a cult classic, which built Bethesda enough to release a sequel to the game, Daggerfall.

As might be assumed from above, a lot of things in Arena were pretty rushed. While it does offer a lot such as a massive world to explore that is ridiculous in size compared to Morrowind or any later Elder Scrolls, we are talking about exploring an entire continent, we also get the main plot pretty much being a simplistic story that could be explained to anyone in a few sentences. Jagar Tharn, Imperial Battlemage, has captured the King Uriel Septum. Most loyal people to the king have been executed, while most believe Tharn to be the king due to being disguised as such. You are the only one left, mainly because Tharn didn't think you a danger, but nobody will believe you over the king. Your only assistance is Ria Silmane, apprentice to Tharn who was killed before she could warn anyone else, who has connected her spirit to your dreams and therefore communicates with you to aid you in your quest to save the king. To save him, you must first escape imprisonment, which is the first dungeon. The rest of the game, which by the way has taken over 50 hours so far, is to retrieve eight pieces of the Staff of Chaos, the only thing that can bring the king back from his imprisonment in some other dimension. So, basically, we are on the longest fetch quest of all time. Side quests give you pittance in gold, meaning the only real point is doing the main quest, which as you see takes long enough. The biggest selling point of the game is just how ridiculously big it is, it didn't do much otherwise unique and pretty much followed standard DnD rules (which makes it play a lot more like a DnD title than what people are normally used to when they think Elder Scrolls, I can imagine getting confused with THAC0 and other such archaic systems that nobody bothers with these days). Furthermore, the control scheme is entirely confusing, but luckily this is DosBox, where you can easily bind keys to what you want if you know how to do it properly. In fact, the whole complicated DOS setup and the struggle to get this game working exactly right means that most don't bother. You will see many struggle with extreme slow-paced lag that could be fixed by speeding up the cycles. Jumping with the default keys is a joke, Shift-J while using the mouse to attack what is on the other side so you don't fall down immediately into the pit below.

This is a very weird entry to call Elder Scrolls and is more appropriate to be called DnD, now with Elder Scrolls races. Seriously, the main reason the games are popular, the exploration and involvement with the world, doesn't even exist here. You get a world, but you only get a few head sprites to choose from and can't really do much more than the main quest, some side quests, and ask people for random rumors.

As they weren't exactly sure how people would take exploration versus the main story, they mostly focused on the latter, with everything else being totally random in generation. The dungeons for them tend to be more broken in design, as I said there is barely any reward, and there is only about two dozen side quests at the most which are thrown around completely at random. This means that anyone that bothers to explore the game will find themselves disappointed by doing the same few things over and over.

While the game offers such a massive amount of exploration, the biggest problem it suffers from is that everything ends up feeling the same. Elder Scrolls Arena is a massive randomly generated world that showcases a lot of lands and was designed to cover a lot of content in a very short development time from a small company. Needless to say, while it sounds amazing, the 50 hour fetch quest feels even more boring due to everything starting to feel identical to one another. To populate the entire world, they had to reuse the same assets over and over to the point where it is boring. Add in a +50 hour storyline and it becomes quite a lengthy and drudging endeavor that is normally only attempted by heavy fans of the more recent games that are willing to be patient with the older titles. I don't think I have seen anybody ever praise Elder Scrolls Arena since the release of the newer titles, even sitting through it longer than most I do not blame anybody for hating this game. It is a game that feels like it never wants to end, yet is the same note being played over and over.

Of course, most people don't make it far into the game because it is absolutely unforgiving and brutal. The game starts you off with absolutely no real instructions of what to do, meaning you have to do a lot of manual reading if you want to understand what is even going on, which requires reading from a massive book that I do not bother looking at most of the time. The book also tends to be completely incorrect and tells you a lot of wrong things that will get you killed more often than not. Getting past all the intro stuff, you will be thrown in a place, quickly told how to get out, then left on your own to wander aimlessly and escape from your prison while not being killed by rats and goblins. It is a pushover for me, but for some reason many that are used to easier gameplay will find themselves incredibly frustrated, in fact the developer of the recent Elder Scrolls titles could only escape the beginning area once. You also might get diseased, which will instantly kill you as you have no way to cure yourself, or will permanently drain your stats if you know how to cure disease. This game is pretty much a 3d roguelike, where you will die a lot. After 50 videos, you become so used to the death message, you just don't care and want to get on with it all. Remember when I mentioned challenge dragging games out? Well, this is the ultimate example, a game that is extremely boring and takes forever to complete made even longer due to being ridiculously hard with one shot monsters and clunky platforming. Also stat rewards are totally random, so while you may get a decent amount for leveling, generally you will get something very pathetic which doesn't help you in the slightest. Furthermore, all loot drops are random, so while you might find that sword that may be useful, overall it will be a lot of random junk which also gives no incentive to explore (yet I do such anyway and have explored every dungeon, why I have no idea).

Furthermore, this game has serious balancing issues. While I said it is brutal, people can still fight their way through by picking the right class and race. Redguard and Nord are pretty much what everyone will tell you to do, since Redguard gets amazing crit abilities while Nord has powerful strength to just take down anything. I picked a Khajit, my ability is that I can slightly climb up walls faster. Also, even though there are a lot of classes, they pretty much get combined into either Warriors, Mages, or Thieves. Warriors (well, Knights, aka all you should ever pick) get great abilities earlier on than the others, plus they are the only ones that can wear plate mail (which is the only enchanted armor, which is an insane bonus) and don't have to be concerned with repairs. Spellcasters can choose which spells they can cast, which later on turns out to be extremely OP to the point you can one shot anything, plus you can steal mana from anything attacking you instead of taking damage. My choice was for a Thief style character. They are good at unlocking doors, which you pretty much can do by bashing them down anyway. You can also pickpocket much better... which is totally pointless when the entire game is mostly spent in dungeons against foes attacking you. The single good benefit of being a Thief based character is crit chance. By the way, I am a Rogue, which means I don't have the ability to unlock things or do crits as much. Life is painful, you will struggle a lot, and pretty much everyone claims that it is impossible to survive as a Thief-based class. I am proving them wrong, I am three dungeons (if I am correct) from the end.

Oh, did I forget to mention how buggy Arena is? Arena is a very unstable game, since Bethesda was trying to rush the game to completion and therefore didn't bother to actually test it. If there is one thing you will learn from watching my videos, it is that Arena is frustrating and that Arena gets even more frustrating due to the massive number of bugs. The game could be nothing but bugs and it would probably feel the same. "Insufficient Base Memory" is an error you will see almost every few minutes to every minute and will crash the game, basically telling you that the game is incapable of handling that massive amount of stuff they threw in. The errors get more prevalent as you go along and more of the game is explored, meaning it is recommended to get through it as soon as possible before the game completely freaks out at you. Oh yeah, there are also times where random sound glitches occur and other random nonsense that makes no sense happens. Welcome to Arena, hope you like playing our unstable game. There is a very important rule to playing Arena. Save the game. Open a room, save the game. Kill an enemy, save the game. You will get used to saving over and over, not only because of the brutality of the game and its tendency to kill you outright, but also because when you do make progress it may just decide to crash. Oh yeah, you might also get a corrupted save game, but luckily this hasn't happened to me yet and I make use of all the save slots just so I have somewhere to work off of in the event that it does occur.

The game also has this little problem where it can only play one sound at a time. This means if ambient noise is playing, such as random drums in the dungeon, you won't be able to hear anything else that might be around. Add in the fact that you don't get much of a visual clue to the fact that you are getting hit and you better hope that you are paying attention to your health at all times. Of course, this is when the enemies aren't magic casters and just one shot you while rapidly firing like maniac machine gunners in the case one of the shots missed. Think the Chaingunner from Doom II, except that you need to be in melee range to hit it, even with spells (you are very inaccurate in this game), and that one shot will pretty much kill you.

Perhaps all this is made worse by the fact that the draw distance for enemies is ridiculously small, you can only see a few feet in front of your face, so you often will be walking down a corridor only to have something appear at the opposite end of that brightly lit room that you weren't aware of. Furthermore, they spawn in at times too, meaning you might be walking down a corridor and suddenly see nothing more than a Skeleton's ribcage as it appears right in front of you and immediately wacks you two or three times. Do I even need to mention how much worse all this gets when you add 1-shot rapid gunning enemies to the mix?

Another amazing thing that will drive you crazy early on until you just do not care anymore is the fact that you can move by fully using the mouse. By sliding to the edges of the screen, you can choose the direction you want to move, meaning having your mouse anywhere but the middle will cause to you go in a certain direction. This becomes annoying when you have to pick up something small off the ground, such as the important key to finishing the quest, and you need to get the pixel exactly right to pick it up since you cannot simply look down. I think I will add this to reasons why I like mouselook, keys don't take 5 minutes to pick up. Luckily, you won't need keys too much after a certain point.

Instead, most pivotal things are blocked with a riddle door. I mean a door that when you walk up to it will ask you a riddle that you are expected to know the answer to. If you don't know the answer, well you are pretty much doomed because the game doesn't give a single clue as to the answer and yet will expect you to know the answer. I have had moments where I pretty much expected I would never be able to make progress since I couldn't easily figure out the riddle without some thinking, luck, or having somebody around who could guide me in the right direction. It is cruel and a bit unfair to have riddles totally disconnected from the rest of the game that I am expected to solve, but that is exactly what this game decided to do.

Elder Scrolls Arena tries to promote its immensity a lot as well. Not only in the amount of options you have, but the fact of the matter that every dungeon will take a long time to explore. I usually do a dungeon a playthrough because I know it will take more than 5 hours. Add in the fact that it all looks the same and is mostly corridors with one-shot enemies and the entire thing becomes quite frustrating and dull. Quite quickly I become hopeful that we have made it to the final room of a floor just so I can make it to the next one and do the whole thing again. By the way, enemies respawn after you leave a floor, so there is no such thing as being completely free of them. Also loot respawns, so you better not leave anything behind that is valuable. Needless to say, a big part of the problem is just how random it all is, you get a sense of nothing really mattering which makes exploration tedious, which means it becomes a grudging 5 hours through a lengthy nightmare instead of something that is fun to explore.

What about the overworld that is intended to just get you prepared for the next dungeon? It is just a massive collection of buildings in a giant area that will pretty much require you to either ask around (which just gets you a general direction) from one of the hundreds of running around people or instead just wander around until you find something useful. As you mostly will spawn into towns at night, when everything is out to kill you (because the bad things walk the towns at night), you will have to wander around without help until you find an Inn anyway. Once you rest it is off to a weapon shop, where you can sell everything you find, though it must be sold 1 at a time and only has a limited number of tries before it resets itself. Needless to say, you will spend a LOT of time selling the random junk you found in the last dungeon, hating the fact that you ever picked it up. Gold is pretty meaningless in this game, since you just need a few valuable things to supply you for the rest of the game in potions. As for weaponry and armor, each town has around 10 or so shops to go to, and there are more than 30 or 40 towns per province. Needless to say, you will be spending a LOT of time if you want to get that one item in the game that is actually useful, unless you look it up or just happen to blunder across it (see my latest video).

After all of this torture, then you need to actually proceed in the main quest. Doing such is done by asking random townspeople where to go until you get told where to go country-wise, which has a 1/8th chance of being said. Then it is off to some random province in that country, where you are told specifically where to go city-wise. Making it to the city, you just have to question a third time to get directed to some random place where they will tell you the location of that dungeon you are looking for. Except that the person that will tell you will also have bad news, an object that would tell you where the dungeon you are looking for was just stolen and brought to some other dungeon! This means that each piece of the Staff of Chaos actually takes two dungeons to reach. Yes, it is always the same humdrum, it never deviates from the path or tries to get interesting in any way. I am currently on the eighth and final piece, but have to go get some random hammer first.

Whew, that was an essay to write. As for Ricky the Drunkard, that just is because I tend to like to play drunk people in RPGs for some random reason and Ricky was an interesting name. Pretty much it was the worst name to choose for an amazing hero, which is why I chose it. Plus the fact it lines up with the backstory of him wandering around pointlessly in the desert for years to the point that he believes himself to be a cat person (my own take on why the Khajit do not look like cat-people).

By the way, Wikia just ate my comment the first time. I am glad for copy-paste. Imagine trying to write all that again. Also, yes, I made a comment which featured being extremely lengthy to showcase something that mostly tries to show off how big it is.