Arena: Quarterstaff

The second piece of the Staff of Chaos waits behind a ghost.

         

During this session, I found my first (perhaps only) artifact and found the second piece of the Staff of Chaos. In the process, the game's overall approach to quests became clear, and comments from readers suggest that it will be unvarying over the course of the game.

   

Whether a stage of the main quest or a side quest, the steps are always these:

    

1. Identify the province and city where you will get the location of the quest. This might involve several stages depending on where you start.

        

For instance, I got this clue in High Rock.

        

2. In the correct city, find the quest-giver. This will involve asking the man-on-the-street about the place you're trying to find.

 

3. Go to the quest giver. The first quest you will get will be to the dungeon containing a map to the thing you're actually looking for.

 

4. Explore that dungeon. For the Staff of Chaos quest, the dungeon will be two hand-crafted levels. For side-quests (including artifacts), it will be four small, procedurally-generated levels.

      

I'm glad there were no maps to the maps to the Necromancer's Amulet.

      

5. Bring the map back to the quest-giver, who will interpret it and give you the location of the dungeon holding the actual object.

 

6. Explore that dungeon. For the Staff of Chaos quest, the dungeon will be two hand-crafted levels. For side-quests (including artifacts), it will be four small, procedurally-generated levels. Find the item, and the quest is complete.

         

Finishing this artifact quest.

       

How you feel about this will depend on how much structure you like around your entertainment, I guess. You could describe the basics of football (either one) or basketball using similar rules, but people still watch them for all the variation that occurs within that structure. The same thing is true about an episodic television series like Law and Order or really any situation comedy. But as someone who does not really enjoy sports or overly-structured television shows, I find Arena's approach a little flat, and although I didn't have a bad time during this session, I'm not really looking forward to repeating this another six times.

   

I started this session in High Rock, where I had been told that the map to the dungeon containing the Necromancer's Amulet would be found in the Fortress of Drunora. The best I can figure, the process for creating dungeon levels is based on blocks of around 10 x 10 squares, with six blocks on the horizontal and three on the vertical. The blocks are designed in such a way that there is always enough space to get into them from at least one direction. This creates an openness to the random dungeons that you don't see in the handcrafted ones. The choice of texture for a particular level is randomized independently from the layout; certain textures come with certain furnishings and decorations. 

             

Most of a Drunora level on the automap.

        

The entrance and exit from each level (stairs up and stairs down) are in fixed locations at the intersections of four regular blocks. They are surrounded on three sides by walls which override the walls that the surrounding blocks would have contained, leading to some weird shapes sometimes. I might be wrong about some of these elements; my analysis is based on a relatively small sample.

  

As for monsters, the game seems to populate dungeons randomly based on the character level. In Drunora, I faced ghouls, minotaurs, rats, rogues, lizard men, giant spiders, skeletons, mages, orcs, spellswords, and zombies. Their appearance in the random dungeons is much more annoying than in the crafted dungeons because they spawn behind you a lot more often. At least 50% of the time, I first learned about the presence of an enemy when he started swatting at my back.

        

Encountering a rogue in the featureless corridors of Drunora.

        

A few new notes on enemies, combat, and dungeon exploration:

   

• Ghouls remain the most feared creatures. I still haven't gotten to the point at which I can defeat them with any ease. I later met some harder ones (e.g., hell hounds, zombies, ghosts, maybe trolls), but they were rare and ghouls have been common since the second dungeon.

• I like human enemies best because they invariably drop stuff. Rogues and nightblades always have full sets of leather, the only armor a battlemage can wear, so I can replace new pieces for my damaged pieces.

• Giant spiders are capable of paralysis, but I found I can still cast spells and use magic items while paralyzed. Until I spent the money on the "Free Action" spell, I found that a good use of this time was to use an item that cast "Sanctuary," which caused the enemy to stop attacking long enough for the paralysis to wear off.  

      

We're knocking on heaven's door?

         

• Despite my misgivings about where they spawn, I wouldn't have minded if more enemies had spawned in the random dungeons. It would make them a more viable place to grind. As it is, you may as well just wait for night to fall in one of the cities. 

• There are four types of attacks: a left-to-right slash, a right-to-left slash, a top-to-bottom slash, and a thrust. You drag the mouse in the appropriate direction for the attacks. I guess the different types of attacks have different levels of damage and accuracy, but it's not really palpable in combat.

      

I bring back my sword to slash the minotaur in the Fortress of Ice.

             

• In addition to keyboard shortcuts for these attacks, I would give a lot for the ability to hotkey certain spells. Scrolling through the list gets old.

• And while we're talking about wishes, I would love it if any of Morrowind's fast-travel spells made an appearance here, or if the game simply offered you the ability to go directly to the exit after recovering the quest item. 

• Ever since I found the first piece of the Staff of Chaos, Jagar Tharn appears to taunt me when I die. He says that his servants will find my body, and that he will resurrect me as one of his servants, perhaps allowing just enough of my mind to remain intact to know how badly I failed. That's cold. 

          

Nice fingernails, Elvira.

        

As per the system outlined above, in the Fortress of Drunora, I found the map to the location of the Necromancer's Amulet (there was no talk of "robes" this time): the Hole of Annodred on Summurset Isle. That's a long distance, but of course distance means nothing in this game, so 37 days later, I wandered into Cloudrest to identify and sell my items and buy a few new spells.

   

It was dark when I arrived, and I had trouble finding an inn, so I went around killing enemies until dawn broke. Around this time, I decided that I'd occasionally do a random quest when visiting a town. Some random quests involve dungeon exploration and use the template above, but others are just a matter of carrying an item from one location in a town to another location. In this case, I was asked by Sarunar of the House  of Lovimon to go to the Concave of Blood (a temple) and bring a book back to Saurnar at the Howling Goblin. The temple was literally two buildings away, and the whole thing took me less than a minute. For my trouble, I received 190 gold and 500 experience points. I think perhaps all of these fetch quests deliver 500 experience points. It's better than a poke in the eye, as my wife's grandmother would say, but killing a ghoul is worth something like 3,000 experience points, so fetch quests are definitely not the key to leveling up.

      

I encounter my first troll.

        

A quick additional note: In two cities in a row, I was told that the king would have a special quest for me. But in both cases, when I went to visit the king, he just gave me a generic welcome and shooed me out of his throne room. 

      

I'm told that the king has a quest.

 

He did not, in fact, have a quest.

                     

The Hole of Annodred was four more procedurally-generated levels with the same types of enemies as the Fortress of Drunora. On the fourth level, I found the Necromancer's Amulet in a chest.

   

The amulet was worth the trip. It subtracts 9 points from the armor class of every body part when you wear it. When used, it adds 50 points to the maximum number of spell points, absorbs magic attacks, and (slightly) regenerates health. I haven't used it enough to get a sense of how long these benefits last. Unlike other magic items, it doesn't have an explicit number of charges. Its description indicates that it might just decide to disappear on its own someday, but I don't know how seriously to take that. I did note that after I'd used it a couple of times, it became available to "repair" in stores, but I don't know if that process restores the charges.

       

A description of the Necromancer's Amulet. Note the low armor class for my head and right arm in the background.

     

I stopped getting artifact rumors after finding the Amulet, and my understanding from the comments is that the player isn't meant to find more than one. In that case, I'm reasonably happy with the Amulet, although I don't know all the other possibilities. However, a commenter alerted me to a work-around that I might have figured out on my own: If you leave the artifact with a smith to repair, the game no longer reads it in your inventory and thus gives you additional artifact quests. I might do another one later in the game depending on how things go. I'm sure some players use this exploit to acquire all of them, but that would be more Arena than I really need. 

       

Maybe later.

        

After obtaining the Necromancer's Amulet, I decided to go for the second piece of the Staff of Chaos at Labyrinthian in Skyrim. I knew exactly where it was, of course, but I had to go through the motions. My first stop was at Whiterun, where the rulers are not yet called "jarls." The city of course looked nothing like it does in Skyrim, although I must say that its size in Arena is more realistic than the half-dozen NPC houses that exist in the newer game. (Here's a sobering thought: if the next Elder Scrolls game is not released by 2028, which frankly seems likely, it will have been longer between Skyrim and its sequel than between Arena and Skyrim.) Anyway, I wasn't in Whiterun long, as the first person I asked about Labyrinthian told me I'd learn more in Winterhold.

         

My brief time in Whiterun.

      

In Winterhold, NPCs directed me to the mage's guild. (There was no hint of the College of Winterhold.) There, I learned that "knights from the Fortress of Ice" recently attacked a caravan and stole a tablet "that would decipher a part of the Elder Scrolls." The tablet also had a map to Labyrinthian. I took the quest and got the location of the Fortress of Ice.

   

The Fortress of Ice was aptly named, with ice walls and occasionally ice floors. The enemies here were mostly new, including snow dogs capable of spitting magical snowballs (I needed to keep magical defenses activated), ice golems, and knights in armor. They were much harder than previous enemies, and I mostly survived them by making use of a Longsword of Life-Stealing with dozens of charges that I had found in some previous dungeon.

     

A wolf waits menacingly around the corner in the Fortress of Ice.

        

The tablet was behind a door with an easy riddle (WIND):

       

MY WIFE'S ITALIAN GRANDMOTHER also would have worked, but she's passed.

     

The tablet was about as hard to pick up as keys elsewhere. I took it back to the mage's guild in Winterhold (presumably it's part of the city that later falls into the sea) and got the location to Labyrinthian.

        

Just where it ought to be.

       

I wasn't really expecting any connection to Skyrim's Labyrinthian, so I was surprised when the cut scene showed multiple buildings on a raised stone platform just like the Labyrinthian "complex" in the later game. 

     

The Labyrinthian complex, looking neither the same nor implausibly unlike its counterpart four games later.

         

When I entered, I was immediately confronted with three gates, something that Skyrim pays homage to by showing three (inoperable) grates shortly after the player enters that version of Labyrinthian—although it would make more sense if the Labyrinthian dungeon in Arena were the Shalidor's Maze dungeon in Skyrim.

     

This shot was from when I was on my way out, with Jagar Tharn's nightblade assassin attacking me.

           

As I approached the three gates, a message told me to go down the center path first. Of course, I was contrary and followed my usual "rightmost wall" pattern for a while. But here, the game isn't lying. The center path has several messages relating the tale of two brothers, Kanen the Elder and Magrus the Dim, who entered Labyrinthian for their own purposes. They ended up dying on two different areas on the second level, each holding one of the keys necessary to enter the area on the first level with the piece of the staff. There's a lot that doesn't make sense chronologically here (even more when you combine this game's lore with Skyrim's), but we'll go with it.

      

Is this written on the walls? Is someone speaking? The game never really tells you.

     

The first level of the dungeon is as maze-like as its name suggests, but it's nothing compared to the two unconnected halves of the second level. They're nightmares of corridors, lakes of lava, and tunnels both raised and sunken. That the automap keeps it all straight is a testimony to its quality. 

          

I found this lucrative treasure room in one of the dungeon's corners. Note the ghost about to attack in the lower-right.

       

Since you can only have one key "active" at a time, I had to find Magrus's first, return to the upper level, unlock the first door, and then go back down for Kanen's. Both keys were in rooms with two cells barred with gates, one cell containing the key and the other containing the ghost of one of the brothers. Each ghost offered a riddle to unlock the gate to his respective key:

    

• Magrus: More beautiful than the face of your God / Yet more wicked than a daemon's forked tongue? / Dead men eat it all the time / Live men who eat it die slow (NOTHING).

• Kanen: Two bodies have I / Though both joined in one. / The more still I stand / The quicker I run (HOURGLASS).

       

The shape of Shalidor's Maze in Skyrim makes reference to this riddle.

    

I had heard variants of these riddles before and thus didn't have any trouble with them. Soon, I had unlocked the doors on Level 1 and had obtained the second piece of the Staff of Chaos.

        

As before, the next time I rested, Jagar Tharn appeared in my dreams to threaten me and sent a nightblade to attack me. The second time I rested, Ria Silmane appeared to tell me that the next piece would be found in the Elden Grove, an ancient home to Elves and location of the sacred First Tree. It must therefore be in one of the provinces in which elves live. This sounds exactly like the type of place you'd find in the forests of Valenwood, so I think I'll head there next.

     

I don't remember hearing about this in any later Elder Scrolls game.

     

I was going to talk more about inventory and the economy, but this entry is already reasonably long, so I'll save it for next time. I gained exactly one level in each dungeon I explored during this session and am now Level 13.

   

I'm not feeling as positively about Arena as at the end of the last session, but it still works reasonably well in juxtaposition with Star Trail: low complexity versus high-complexity, action-oriented versus tactical, can-play-it-while-watching-a-lecture-series versus requires-full-attention. If I had to put down Arena for a couple of months, I could pick it up again without having to re-orient myself. I don't mean that as high praise, but there is a place for such games, and Arena fills that niche well.

   

Time so far: 14 hours