Arena & Daggerfall Vs. Oblivion

[Daethar]

I've actually had quite a few friends who have never played Daggerfall, and when I tell them about such-and-such feature, they are astonished and amazed at why Morrowind, and now Oblivion, do things differently. Sooo for all the people that are not Elder Scrolls veterans, I decided that I would give you an account of how things were 'back in my day' as they say.

 

 

Let's start with a summary of how the engine for Arena and Daggerfall worked. Now, I have not played Arena as much as Daggerfall, but I think I have enough understanding to comment here:

 

-It was a 3d world with 2d critters. There were monsters, and there were backs of the monsters. The worlds, they were sorta like DooM, which for an RPG was pretty nifty.

 

-Rows of buttons. You didn't have the UI relying on hotkey only, or a right click like in Morrowind. Basically, every button could be clicked with the mouse and it had a shortcut on the keyboard for the people that got really good.

 

-Combat was frenzied and had different "strokes" with every weapon. 6-way, you could slice down, right, left, diagonally down from right or left, or stab. Strokes that did more damage took away from accuracy.

 

-Things were filled with text, in Arena almost every menu was text based. Daggerfall introduced item icons, and everything required a click of an info button to figure out exactly what you were looking at. There were tons of buttons everywhere.

 

-Faces for races came in a set like Morrowind, every race had options you could choose from. Bodies were default for the male or female of that race, which really hasn't changed since.

 

-There was a list of monsters, and you would just increase the number available to be found randomly based on area and level. Very easy monsters would always be POSSIBLE, and ones that were impossibly hard would not occur until you were ready.

 

-Lots of things were random. Actually, almost everything was random, save for things tied DIRECTLY to the main quest, and major cities.

 

-Werewolves and vampires were a part of both. I think. 100% sure for Daggerfall.

 

 

 

PROS (or, things I liked and prefer compared to now)

1) The size! I know it was not consistent, but it was big. Want money? Go to another country and take a loan from the bank, and never pay it back. And maybe later you would be forced to go there for a quest and tangle with the guards. There is a small con side to this, but the size of these games compared to you felt more like a real world. Cities were packed with buildings and people. Not just the 10 residents of the town and the castle guards. Vivec and the Imperial City are the only things that are even close to being a city size, and they are small in comparison. Extra bonus: Arena let you go all over Tamriel.

 

2) The skills! You could choose everything you wanted and then some. Do you want to heal faster? Get medical. Want to climb fast? Choose climbing, fool! Want to have a chance Centaurs won't attack you? Choose a proficiency in their language! There have been some skills added, mostly to cover for the large amounts that were taken away. E.g. rolling them into one.

 

3) Stealth. Ok, here's one I like. Stealth was exactly stealth, not how well you could go into sneak mode. Now, granted the game NPCs and AI didn't need a separate function, but you could come right behind a monster and thwack it. If you weren't stealthy enough, it turned around and hit you first. I personally do not like going into "sneak mode" and being able to see whether or not I am hidden. How the heck would I know if I am hidden or not? You could not sneak up from the front either (which I have done in Oblivion...eh wtf) And if you are a sneaky character, would you not be adept at being sneaky everywhere, instead of only when you wanted to sneak attack or steal something?

 

4) Crouching! Enough said.

 

5) Daggerfall let you fight from horseback. Nyah nyah.

 

6) Vampirism and lycanthropy rocked in Daggerfall. You could become a vampire, and then your face changed right off the bat. You got permanent stat and skill increases, and to get powers you had to join a specific clan who would teach you different things. Werewolves jacked your hand to hand damage up to actually be useful, and you turned into a werewolf or wereboar, depending on what bit you. You had to feed as both (actually you had to kill to sate bloodlust as a werebeastie, but same thing) in which you went in town, whacked some villagers, and sorted the consequences out with the city guard (which often could not kill you cause they didn't have silver). You got separate quests from your vampire clan, and people went out to hunt your evil butt down. Occassionally, you would get an offer to cure yourself. Pretty well incorporated into the game, I find the current vampire power/feeding exchange to be sort of odd.

 

7) Full customization. The races offer a few bonuses, everything else you could change. You even had dice to change your starting stat scores with. You had lots of skills to choose from, you could choose class disadvantages and advantages, change your name in game, make your own spells do whatever the heck you wanted (because you are in the mages guild, you want to make a spell you don't know? hunt down the books for it!), buy a house or boat, get a wagon, horse, etc.

 

8) You could talk to anybody about anything. Find a townsperson in the street, you can ask them their opinions on the Blades. Or try to find the person you are looking for for the quest. Or ask directions to the nearest guild.

 

9) random quests. I don't see how this is a downside, this lets you keep doing stuff and getting rewards even late in the game.

 

10) With the exception of the bow and arrow, combat was better. How it worked, like mentioned above, is certain strokes did more damage but were harder to hit with. Your skill was to hit, damage of the weapons was set and standard, I don't know how a sword does more damage after your skill increases. Armor, by the same good reasoning, had set values. While there may be excuses for weapon damage increase, I don't see how someone can improve on how they wear armor...

Also, the way the swings worked, if you were careful, you could pick and choose the hits you wanted to try and take combat from a tactical approach. But often, when things went to hell and you got low on health, you started going into a panic and slashing all over every which way. Which makes sense IMO, when you're in a tough fight and near death, I can definitely see you just trying to get any hit you can as fast as you can. If you are skilled, you can back up, ready, and gamble with the less accurate swing to try and kill the monster before you die. It made sense.

 

11) Quest time limits. Really, in Oblivion my first char walked away from NPC helpers waiting to go on an assault on a castle, and the guys wait forever for me. In Daggerfall, the key was not to have a billion active quests, but one or two. Three for the truly brave. They always gave you enough time to do the quest in, if it was the only one. And main quests often had obscenely large time limits, if at all. But I do like how the merchant who wants me to go pick up his item won't wait years instead of just doing it himself.

 

12) Oh right, gold actually weighed something. With all the rest of the realism in these games, weightless gold is odd. Convenient, but odd.

 

 

 

Of course, there were the cons of these games.

1) crashes. Daggerfall had more bugs than an anthill. I recall there being an article on how Bethesda had to change the game code to no longer have error "666" because people were complaining. On the upside, things didn't go awry in game, the game crashed. On the downside, well, the game crashed. A lot.

 

2) Implementation. Lots of the coolest features didn't really work. The languages, for example. You could take, say, draconic language as a skill. But it didn't let you talk to talk to them. And in shops, there was this little button labelled "steal", so you would steal the items you had selected. Some guy found the formula within the code and apparently, you could actually steal a piece of paper. If you had full stealing skill. And agility. And were naked. Basically, this was a "call the guards cause I want to kick ass" button. Lots of the items didn't work, like say oil for lamps, but hey Morrowind and Oblivion are the same so...

 

3) it was a bit oversized, because you didn't even touch most of the world. But hey, you don't visit everywhere in the real world. So I consider this a small downside. This did help contribute to bugs and crashes.

 

4) Advancement. I like the amount and choice of skills. I do not like how it took forever to get a dang level. The formula was complicated, and solid, and worked. It just took a long long time. Made it feel like you didn't progress, and in most cases it was fun to just run around town and get small quests for the gold.

 

5) low graphics. But they are older games, so this isn't really a valid complaint.

 

 

 

So, what do I have to say about these new Elder Scrolls games? Well, they are better games. No doubt. Oblivion has even more features and seems closer to Daggerfall style of game, with amazing graphics. And, most importantly, they are stable. Or significantly more stable.

 

But, if I were the head of development at Bethsoft, my goal would be to get the game to include all of the features Daggerfall had while still being stable and graphically nice. Now, mind you, I do not mean how it worked. I mean, horses and fast travel are huge steps in the right direction. All you naysayers, can you honestly tell me that you want to walk to the imperial city to buy a mage staff just to walk back again within the same hour? I do like exploring, and I think how Oblivion does fast travel is good: you can go to cities, you have to walk to new locations. Horses can be improved if you can fight from them, but it is getting there.

The world keeps getting bigger. Morrowind had you playing in a penninsula in a province, now we are able to go through all of Cyrodiil. That is good. But I would like to have the skill options that didn't happen. It would be nice to talk to monsters if you knew their language. It would be nice to have short sword and long sword separate, as well as etiquette and streetsmarts (polite talk and slang). I liked how the skill layout worked in Daggerfall opposed to now, I like how now the chosen layout works. Put random quests back in, just not all random. Do you expect me to believe that problems do not occur dynamically except in guilds? A man has rats break into his house. You go play pest control. And suddenly this man has no more problems, his life is perfect, go on to the next town. Huh? No thanks, I would like the possibility of say, his wife getting kidnapped, or him needing to have a proxy for a duel, or heck even the rat problem mounting again. Not regularly occurring random quests, mind you, just the possibility. This goes for monsters too, Morrowind's encounter rate was lame. And most monsters were in set places and respawn after some time, and so while static dungeons and features are nice, I find it odd how creatures only show up in the same spots ever, or for quests. I have already shared my views on levelled monsters.

 

I am sure Bethesda will keep improving their games, but I have to say this sort of XBox leanings is disconcerting. And I am not talking about the inventory as a whole, the tab system works well and is like Daggerfall, but I would like it to take up the screen and make more efficient use of that screen. What I refer to is the "left stick, right stick" in the PC control menu, as well as the quick-key wheel. And I find levitation being taken out as disappointing, but it's the same as horses taken out for load times in Morrowind.

 

In any case, if any Bethsoft employees happen across this, you're doing good work, and while I don't think these games are perfect, they are probably the closest an RPG has come.

[DemonFire9842]

Well said! I have never actually played Daggerfall or Arena, and from what I have heard, Bethesda seems crazy to leave out some of the features they did. Some are understandable, but others I can't see taking very much time or effort to program in. My biggest peeve with Oblivion is that it makes use of a physics engine, obviously trying for reality, yet combat is in some ways ridiculously unrealistic.

For isntance, when the player is hit hard and stumbles backwards, what is preventing them from raising their shield until they have had several seconds to make sure that they are solidly back on balance? I find it annoying that when I am hit by a power attack that enemies use so often and stumble backwards that a crowd of them can take away half my health before the game decides that I should be allowed to raise my shield again.

The other thing I find annoying is on the other end of the scale. When attacking, why is it that a power attack takes so long to recover from that my enemies get a hit in, EVEN IF I'VE MADE THEM STUMBLE. I don't even use power attacks because I find them so dangerous and risky. I realize that a power attack needs to have certain risks associated with it, otherwise it's just cheap, but by the time I'm an expert in the use of a blade, I would expect that I could put power into an attack without having to swing it like a baseball bat. For emphasis, I am a fairly knowledgeable martial artist, and anybody who has seen a martial artist of any style with any real skill put their craft into practice would see that they do not use large swinging attacks. The most effective way to attack with any weapon is not to swing, as that puts you off balance. So why is it that a so-called "expert" in the use of a blade would swing like the game depicts.

The only other problem I have is that I can easily destroy a minotaur lord twice my size, yet two goblin warlords who are smaller than me and jumping around like they're on prison quality crystal meth wipe the floor with me like a cheap second-hand mop. I like the idea of levelled creatures, but realistic limits should be imposed too so that once I've taken out several daedric gates that most others couldn't, the sewers under the safest city in Tamriel no longer make me jump in fear at their mere mention.

Sorry if I've been long-winded or tiresome or some such. Has anybody else encountered this, or am I just being anal? Seems to me like Oblivion has incredible potential, and a few fixes could make it even better than I hoped it would be. But Don't get me wrong. Oblivion as it stands now is a huge improvement over Morrowind, and an awesome game already. I am just pointing out some things that I think need work. The combat system could definitely be much, MUCH worse.

[Stampede]

I found combat in Daggerfall very tiresome and tedious. Especially in comparison to Oblivion.

 

Yes, that's true. Also Daggerfall still has the best looking Argonians in any of the Elder Scrolls games. Including Oblivion. However, orcs were not yet a playable race (and were in actual fact still at war with the Empire.)

 

I would disagree that impossible hard monsters would only occure when you were ready. I remember getting killed instantly by a Daedra more than once.

 

 

The quests were random and bug-ridden. I got tired of going to house X and killing the same old bears over and over and over again. Or having to travel to the very bloody depths of dungeon Y (and also saying goodbye to my chances of ever seeing the sun again) and then not being able to find person C because of the horrible bugs in the game.

 

Don't forget Wereboars in Daggerfall!

 

Yeah, it was huge. But most of the cities were just copies of each other. The people were represented by the same boring 2d-models (though the girls had nice cleavage) and when you hit one, they would just vanish in a little splat of blood and what was with every single woman wearing a hood? The citizens had even less life than Morrowinds....however the static 2d images inside buildings were interesting sometimes.

 

Yep, there sure were a lot of skills. But some really were useless and never got used, only some though.

 

Stealth in combat was handy. A good combination of critical hit and backstabbing meant death for an unsuspecting opponent.

 

Daggerfall did let you ride a horse into combat, but while riding a horse was cute. ("Whinny" clop clop clop) It was little more than a disembodied head which floated in your viewpoint and made you go faster. I found horseback combat just as tedious as regular combat. Though it was good against guards.

 

It was damn hard to catch vampirism or lycanthropy, but the results were always impressive yes. The vamps had very gory faces, their mouths becoming fanged smiles dripping with blood. (Oh but only on your portrait picture as you never actually saw your character in the game.)

 

Yeah talk to NPCs about anything and get pretty much the same responses all the time. If there was a different opinion, it would be repeated a couple of hundred more times anyway. Did get some interesting trivia sometimes. Thank you meaningless signboard. *splat*

 

The crippling bugs in random quests sometimes meant that the quests were beyond completion.

 

Going to have to agree to disagree with regards to combat. Dragging the mouse to achieve a specific hit was a pain sometimes and combat often degenerated to a click fest. Also, just out of interest, there was no blocking. Bow and arrow was lots of fun if you wanted to snipe hapless signboards from the top of a building. *splat*

 

Again, I have to disagree there regarding the time limits buddy. You know why time limits were removed? While doing the main quest in Daggerfall I was given a location to travel to. I had to make a delivery to a certain dungeon denizen...however the date of completion was too short in comparison to the time it would take me to travel there. Thus I was doomed to failure.

 

Yep, Daggerfall was bug-ridden. Believe me, things did go awry....npcs vanished....main quest broke...faction advancement was impossible...

 

Yes well, I mentioned useless skills, but while we are on the subject of stealing. All you had to do was hang around the shopkeepers place until closing time. He of course would still be standing there, static as ever. Then you just take all his stock from him and sell him the stuff you don't want.

 

 

Yeah. I remember being really impressed by screenshots of Daggerfall. 12 years ago of course.

 

In closing I would say that Daggerfall was a very impressive title and I have fond memories of it...but pales in comparison (not in terms of graphics that would be dumb) but in replay, immersion and detail.

 

And I agree that there are more features from Daggerfall in Oblivion than what people think.

 

EDIT: Sorry, had to edit my posts after I buggered the quoting it seems.

[Daethar]

Well said. I think this topic pretty much covers all the ups and downs of the prequels from different viewpoints.

 

I will say that a lot lot lot had to do with technological limits, and really a major reason features have been dropped is that you cannot make a game look better and have more features and avoid the same crash prone game. Look at fps, hasn't changed much, and new features in the games have made them more buggy than the predecessor.

 

However, I feel I must make a small rebuttal in that many of the flaws pointed out with Daggerfall, by most people I've talked to on the subject, tend towards the world being over randomized, repetitive, and interactions being boring. And this has not changed as much as some think/as much as I would have liked.

 

Basically, Oblivion and Morrowind had people saying the same things about every topic. In Morrowind, there were just a ton of useless topics. What I liked about Daggerfall was, since people said so much of the same, it didn't pretend that you were engaged in original dialogue. And the "rumors" and personal opinions had a limit of one response per conversation, so it was much less repetitive. Morrowind and Oblivion, while having nifty responses and voices to go with, have the same nifty responses and the same voices.

To their credit, though, learning about things through conversation topics is very much more fun than D-Fall, and I love how characters have conversations independent of the player. This, too, can get repetitive (go stand in the Arcane University garden for a bit) but its infinitely better.

 

So, I end again with my summary opinion: Elder Scrolls 3 was better than 2, and Oblivion is the best yet. But looking back there are still goals to shoot for.