Are the old Elder Scrolls games worth experiencing? I'm talkin' Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire and Redguard.
Experiencing?
Sure.
Completing?
Maybe not.
>>3180342
Arena - not really. Daggerfall and Redguard - definitely. Battlespire is hit or miss depending on your preferences and tolerance.
>>3180342
I had more fun with arena and completed if, dagger fall is too much of a buggy mess. Never played the others.
Yeah I agree, worth playing not often worth completing
I played thru GOGs redguard recently and it runs like shit on most machines. However I stuck with it and it was great! Classic Tomb Raider in the elder scrolls lore! With an element of Broken Sword 3! Great!
Battlespire looks great and has a great premise, but its very very hard and intense. A real slug match. It's similar in style and hardware to Daggerfall which is also fucking great. So if you were gonna skip one I'd say BS for its similarity to DF.
Arena is a fun and funny old skool romp and I'd recommend it to anyone. Surprisingly accessible
>>3180672
Please. Arena easily has the best gameplay out of these. Daggerfall and Battlespire are buggy trash and Redguard is an adventure game of small scope.
>>3181190
>Arena easily has the best gameplay
Trying way too hard to be contrarian
Daggerfall improves on Arena in absolutely every aspect
>>3181190
Dungeons are much more fun in Daggerfall, and since you spend 90% of the time there, Daggerfall wins IMO.
>>3181246
While it adds more to the game, youncould cut 90% of the game and it would feel the same disregarding visually.
>>3181443
I absolutely disagree here, the generated dungeons almost always look horrible and there are many occasions were half the dungeon doesn't fit together. Arena has dungeons that are very interesting and are decently thought out for a Tes game can be expected to be.
Daggerfall is still much more ambitious than the recent Elder Scrolls games, a 1:1 map instead of a reduced version, the chance to climb (kinda buggy), the possibility to buy hundreds of houses and live like a king just for the sake of it.
>>3181617
>much more ambitious
Wait until DaggerfallXL is finished.
Pic related.
I heard Battlspire is so unoptimized that it runs lile dogshit on both contemporary PCs and modern powerhouses, is that true, and if so, why?
>>3183521
Contemporary and modern are synonyms, anon.
>>3183526
Well, yeah, I mean, I know, I fucked that up, but like, the question still remains
>>3180342
Daggerfall was absolutely amazing when it was new. I haven't tried to replay it in probably ten years or more, so I can't really say if it is worth trying now. It's quite different from the modern Elder Scrolls games though. More skills, more freedom, and the map is unbelievably vast.
>>3183601
It was an amazing tech demo, you mean.
What can loosely be described as Daggerfall's "gameplay" is markedly inferior even to other games from the same era.
Morrowind is one of my all time favorites, would I enjoy Daggerfall?
>>3183206
How are these measured?
I've always felt Skyrim was bigger than oblivion.
>>3180342
I've played them all in order of release and enjoyed some aspects of each of them. Here's what I liked and didn't like about each game:
Arena... well, there's just not much to it. It's got a completely linear and largely uninteresting main story, a very small handful of side quests that you can repeat over and over, and a simple class system with many mechanics specific to certain classes. It doesn't really do anything that every other first-person dungeon crawler in the world doesn't either, but it does have a large world with varied environments, and the plus side of the lack of depth is that you can just turn your brain off and crawl dungeons or walk around the wilderness and check out the villages. The spellmaking system is very fun to abuse if you pick a class that can actually cast spells, there are some neat artifacts to discover through rumors, and the wilderness is much more dense than other TES games. It's hard to walk 5 feet without finding some temple, village, graveyard, or dungeon. But the lack of anything to do in these locations or any significant role-playing choices to make in any part of the game besides character creation means there's not much to sink your teeth into. I find that it's best played in short bursts where you explore a little, do a dungeon or two, make some spells, buy some enchanted equipment, and call it a day.
One other thing I liked was how each villager had their own random background you could ask them about. It's pure fluff and doesn't change anything or affect gameplay or quests, but at least it gave you a reason to talk to different NPCs just to hear a little bit of flavor text. This was removed in Daggerfall, though Morrowind brought it back without the random part.
>>3185854
There aren't really any other games that can offer the experience that Daggerfall does. Or rather, the experience that Daggerfall is SUPPOSED to give you. You have to look past the insane number of bugs and quirks in the game if you want to enjoy it, so it's really up to your patience and tolerance for that kind of shit and whether you like mostly aimless open-world games in the first place. And even if you do end up liking it, you'll probably get tired of the dungeons pretty early on.
The core of Daggerfall is its reputation system, and pretty much everything you do in the game will be motivated by your character's reputation with the various entities in the game. You do jobs for factions because you want to rank up and use their services. You avoid getting caught committing crimes because you want to keep your legal reputation in good standing. You make choices on how to complete certain random quests based on which of the involved factions you want to like you more.
The world itself is bland and mostly empty, especially compared to Arena, but the world systems are much more compelling. You're always trying to manage your time so that you can complete quests efficiently and avoid failing them. You want to make sure you're in the right place to take advantage of holidays such as the Daedra summoning dates to earn their artifacts. Missing one means it'll be an entire in-game year before you can try again, and forcing that much time to pass on your own by fast-traveling or resting will will hurt your reputation with the factions that like you, since all reputations gradually drift towards neutral. And of course you want to keep track of where your gold is stored, since each region keeps track of their bank system and many other things individually.
Daggerfall's the game that has made me the most frustrated at times, and yet also made me feel the most satisfied. It's a game that I enjoy playing simply to "live" in as my character would.
>>3185858
Battlespire is an interesting little game. It's not an open-world RPG but rather a linear dungeon crawler which borrows some of Daggerfall's class mechanics. It's a poorly balanced game, and the first few stages are quite difficult for most characters. You can make many kinds of classes, but if you don't specialize early on in a good weapon or offensive magic you'll have a very rough time. If you do, however, the mid-late game becomes a breeze. The stages feature many puzzles and have a nice amount of verticality, and overall I'd they feature the best level design of any Bethesda game. That's not especially high praise when you consider that it's the entire focus of the game in the first place, and there's not that many levels anyway. There's fully voice acted dialogue with every creature and NPC in the game, though the acting and writing are extremely hammy and intentionally silly. Most of the dialogue is pointless, but sometimes you can convince a monster to stop fighting you or even start fighting other monsters.
As a side note, there are multiplayer modes to this game, including one where you can play each level from the single player modes with your friend(s). The dialogue system is missing in this mode, so you'll be missing out on most of the story and a few mechanics, but you don't play co-op to replace the single player experience; you play it because it's great chaotic fun to cast bouncy spells everywhere and clear dungeons together.
Oh right, and you can't "rest" to heal or replenish magicka. Only consumables, certain enchanted items, and tiny blue gems found throughout the levels can restore them for you. The regenerating magicka advantage you can pick when creating a class is expensive but, in my experience, very much worth it. With that and a cheap restore health spell, any character can become fully self-sustaining and will never get "stuck" in some unwinnable situation as long as you don't mind waiting for your magicka to slowly fill up.
>>3185862
Redguard is something else entirely. It's open world and not fully linear, but it's definitely not an RPG and the gameplay is all action. The world is much smaller than any of the main series games, but it's still fun to explore and the overworld and dungeons have lots of little secrets and details. You are Cyrus, the titular Redguard, and the game is fully voice acted. The voice acting for main characters like Cyrus, Richton, Tobias, Dram, etc. is really good, but it's a different story for the side characters. While there are a couple standouts, most of them have really campy or annoying voices. Especially fucking Mariah. There's also that one elf in the observatory whose voice you will instantly recognize as the imps from Battlespire. That's Ken Rolston, who later went on to become the lead designer of Morrowind and Oblivion.
Redguard's probably the most cinematic game Bethesda has ever made. It's an adventure game that could be compared to Tomb Raider or the 3D Zeldas, but has its own distinct flavor. The story is great (DEFINITELY read the short comic first, and maybe read the much longer Pocket Guide to the Emprie too if you're into the lore of the series), and like Daggerfall you have a bit of freedom in deciding which parts of it you want to do in what order. The controls are awkward and movement feels clunky, but the combat system isn't too bad when you get used to it. It's all based on timing, enemies have attack patterns to learn, and there's a few sword techniques to use with different hitboxes and animations allowing for tactical variety. Positioning is important as enemies will try to surround you and take turns fighting. I recommend disabling "Auto Defend" so you must time your parries, but keep it enabled if the frame rate drops too much to time them properly or you're just not having fun in combat and want to make it easier.
Finally, Redguard is best played with a gamepad in my opinion. Map the inputs with your favorite macro software.
>>3185863
There won't be a TL;DR and I'm not going to rate or rank the games. You'll need to read a lot to enjoy Arena or Daggerfall anyway, so this shouldn't be too much for anyone who's interested enough to try them. The short answer is yes, I think they're worth experiencing, but they all have different strengths and flaws that could easily ruin them for the majority of players. Still, there's no excuse to not at least try them, especially since the first two are free. They're even very easy to set up with everything you could possibly need with these installers:
http://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Arena_:_ArenaSetup_EN
http://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN
Battlespire and Redguard aren't too hard to get running either, thanks to GOG. Just pirate their versions of them and they should work out of the box. The actual performance will vary depending on a lot of factors, though, and there's no guarantee you'll be able to run them well even on your modern PC.
>>3185728
Not necessarily. They have a lot in common but if you liked Morrowind primarily due to its lore and handcrafted world, then you will be disappointed by Daggerfall. But if you liked Morrowind for its role-playing freedom, class system, and mechanics then you'll find a lot of similar things to enjoy in Daggerfall, just on a much larger scale.
>>3185773
TES games from Morrowind onwards are composed of cells so making a calculation isn't that hard. And I believe Fuel had an in-game meter.
Skyrim probably felt bigger because it isn't a basin-shaped land like Oblivion, where you can see from one side of the map to the other.
Are there any other /vr/ games, like TES in terms of openness, especially for DOS?
>>3186292
Legends of Valour is a game, which (along with Ultima Underworld) directly inspired TES.
>>3186292
MANDATE OF HEAVEN
>>3183521
i don't think so, when i tried to play it last it ran fine
maybe it was redguard you were thinking about, i heard that had some issues
>>3183521
Yeah, you're thinking of Redguard. It's not about optimization; it ran well in its time and can be made to run smoothly even on something as recent as 32-bit XP with the right software, but playing it through DOSBox (which the GOG version is set up for) can be very choppy due to the emulation of 3DFX, which at the time of Redguard's release was popular but was very soon to be overtaken by Direct3D.
Battlespire runs alright. It's doesn't require as much reflexes as Redguard so the occasional dips aren't an issue, and I only ever noticed lag in the island level. If Arena and Daggerfall run well for you then Battlespire shouldn't be much worse.
>>3181617
The climbing bug only happens when the CPU cycles are too fast. DOS vidya programmers never put fixed gameplay framerates in their vidya. So once the faster PCs started coming out, all the old DOS games got fucked hard.
