Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-1496755-20190612203933

Funny thing - birds wake up awfully early. Once I got up to pee at around 4 AM (still dark) and the birds outside were already chirping. In full force. It was surprising.

Heh, Daggerfall’s dungeons were both large and same-looking, which made memorizing things pretty hard. It was considerably easier to remember where to go and what to do in Arena. For me, the focus of Daggerfall’s replayability is guilds and gaining ranks in them. Their dungeon quests generally have a generous degree of randomness… although you still can’t escape from those monotonous dungeon walls. I definitely will check out Morrowind sooner or later - it has value both as the next chapter of the series, and as a famous classic game from the early 2000’s.

Roleplaying opportunities are pretty simple in the older games. Usually boil down to choosing the more honest or more shady course of action. An Assassin is supposed to be shady, so I tried to do that in my playthrough, the most notable example being murdering people for no other reason than to get the attention of the Dark Brotherhood. “My ends justify my means” indeed.

Well yes, Blood is a sprite game, unfortunately. In an age when developers had to choose between true 3D or greater interactivity, Monolith went for the latter. Something else that comes to mind is the classic Aliens vs. Predator from 1999. True 3D, very dark and dismal, and challenging to the point of sadism at times. And in case you’re thinking it’s another save-scumming game - nope, it only gives you a limited number of saves per level. In fact, the game didn’t even have a save feature originally, it was only added in a patch. Despite its difficulty, I remember enjoying it, feeling great satisfaction when I beat it on the top difficulty. But the best thing of all is that it’s like three games in one, since playing each species feels quite unique, requiring different tactics and skills.

Yeah, Arena had a good flow - the pacing was neither too slow, nor too fast. Daggerfall feels sluggish at times, and this is only made worse by the immense size of the dungeons and cities. WoW’s pacing highly depends on the version - the older ones (vanilla especially) are slower to progress and harder to play, while the newer ones are faster and considerably more lenient on the player, being able to do things alone that used to require group effort in older versions. Expectedly, many players felt the game was dumbed down. I tend to agree.