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| It's a good thing this is a single-character game, because three of these people would be fatally distracted in combat. |
The Elder Scrolls: Arena
United States
Bethesda Softworks (developer and publisher)
Released 1994 for DOS
Date Started: 9 March 2026
Date Ended: 29 April 2026
Total Hours: 43
Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)
Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) Summary:
The first Elder Scrolls game lays out a surprising amount of the series' geography, history, and lore, including the races and provinces of Tamriel and the basic history of the empire united hundreds of years ago by Tiber Septim. Now, Emperor Uriel Septim VII has been kidnapped and sent to an alternate dimension by his evil BattleMage, Jagar Tharn. To rescue him, the player has to find the 8 pieces of the Staff of Chaos, each hidden in a dungeon in a different province, then confront Tharn in the imperial palace.
The game has all the trappings of a modern CRPG, including attributes and leveling, a full set of weapons and armor, a detailed spell list (and the ability to craft your own spells), monsters with various strengths and weaknesses, NPCs, side-quests, and a robust economy. Despite these assets, the experience mostly falls flat, likely because the developers relied too much on bland procedural generation of most dungeons and NPCs and all cities and towns. The first-person graphics and free movement are decent for the era, but alas they don't age well. Overall, Arena tries to build on its famous predecessors—primarily Ultima Underworld (1992) and Legends of Valour (1992)—but fails to equal them, let alone surpass them.
****
I'm glad they didn't give up after one game, but Arena is a bit of a misfire. It is more impressive (from a programming standpoint) than fun. Roguelikes show that procedural generation can work when done well, but it has to be coupled with solid mechanics and logistics. Bethesda made a good effort at both but didn't quite clear the bar. The company will continue to struggle with the balance between handcrafted content and generated content straight into the modern age, and many of the complaints I have about Arena are the same ones I have about Starfield (2023).
Arena's handcrafted content is limited to its 18 main quest dungeons. The problem is that few of those dungeons are terribly interesting. Even the "handcrafted" locations feel like they started with a procedural base and then just added title cards, welcome messages, furnishings, and riddle doors. Even in this regard, I feel like they got less interesting as they went along. The cities and NPCs, meanwhile, have no character at all beyond some skins specific to their provinces. If I had been a consultant on Arena, I would have advised them to handcraft at least the capital cities of each province, and to sprinkle them with a dozen or so non-generic NPCs.
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| This, for instance, is a "handcrafted" level. As far as I can tell, it may as well have been procedurally-generated. |
On the other hand, if the mechanics had been better, it might have been a pleasure to explore a few more side-dungeons, gaining a few more levels, finding a few more artifacts. There are modern games for which I wouldn't mind the occasional procedurally-generated level at all. The Infinity Engine games come to mind. If Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale had featured some optional, repeatable dungeons with random selections of enemies, particularly ones that you don't get to fight often in the main campaign, I might never have started this blog.
As for those mechanics, Arena almost always has a good base but doesn't go far enough in some areas and poorly balances others. The equipment system (likely influenced by Might and Magic III-V) offers not quite enough variety, particularly for certain classes. The economy is just a bit too generous. Combat goes on just a bit too long against not-quite-enough enemies who are not quite interesting enough to hold my attention. The combat interface is innovative but gets a bit exhausting. Graphics occupy that unfortunate valley between the best of the previous primitive age and the worst of the forthcoming immersive age.
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| I meant to include this shot from Ebonheart in my last entry. That volcano is visible in the distance from everywhere in Morrowind. |
My repetitive uses of "a bit" and "not quite" are poor English, but they work for a game that landed just shy of the threshold of victory. I've always tried to follow Strunk & White's recommendations to eschew negative verbs and adjectives (e.g., "did not respond," "not unattractive") in favor of positive ones (e.g., "ignored," "pretty"). But Arena almost begs for the former. It's not a bad game; it's just a not good one. I don't necessarily not recommend it, but I don't really recommend it, either.
In the 1980s, I established a rating of about 35 as my "recommended" threshold, but by the mid-1990s, I think it needs to be up to 40. A score of around 40-43 would reflect the way I feel about the game. Let's see what happens.
GIMLET
| Category | Assets | Liabilities | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Game World | A detailed backstory with history and lore. An intriguing map with interesting place names. Evocative names and historical tidbits dropped into conversation, quest messages, title cards, exploration messages. | A laughable explanation of the game's name. Most of the name drops are just names; later games will flesh them out but Arena doesn't deserve that credit. Races in this early game are mostly fantasy archetypes. Outdoor areas completely wasted. Forced fast-travel. | 4 |
| 2. Character Creation and Development | Fun, Ultima-like character creation process. Character classes are well-differentiated and create unique gameplay experiences. Class-based roleplaying options for thieves and spellcasters. | Leveling is boring, involving a simple allocation of 3-6 attribute points with consequent increases in health and mana. Awful character portraits. No roleplaying options for fighter classes. | 4 |
| 3. NPCs | Towns are full of them and you learn a fair amount from them. | They're almost all randomly-generated with no personalities. | 3 |
| 4. Encounters and Foes | About 20 monsters with some strengths and weaknesses. I found the riddle doors a fun diversion but others will want to subtract more for that. | Monsters are a bit boring. No major variance in tactics necessary to defeat them. No other special encounters. | 3 |
| 5. Magic and Combat | Spell variety offers most of the tactics in combat. Other tactics found in use of terrain. | Combat is otherwise a bit boring. Different types of attacks don't seem to make any difference. Ranged combat under-developed. Most of the "use of terrain" tactics feel like exploits. | 3 |
| 6. Equipment | Lots of equipment slots. Easy to understand relative offensive/defensive value of items. Items mostly randomized in game world. Almost anything can be enchanted. Variety of potions serve as a money sink. Powerful artifact items. | Not quite enough variety in equipment to put in those slots, particularly for certain classes. Limited to one artifact item at a time unless you use an exploit. | 5 |
| 7. Economy | Several ways to make money: selling looted items, side-quests, thievery. Lots of things to spend money on. | Economy gets a bit generous by the halfway mark. Silly haggling mechanic. Treasure in dungeons weirdly limited to 99 gold pieces. | 5 |
| 8. Quests | Clear main quest. Artifact quests. Side-quests with various levels of complexity in each town. | Main quest stages are overly repetitive and predictable. Side quests are boring and don't reward enough to bother. No different main quest outcomes. | 4 |
| 9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface | Almost everything on the screen has a keyboard backup. Decent sound effects. Limited voice acting is good. 3D continuous movement. Nice automap and journal. | Graphics are good for the era but ugly by the standards of even 5 years later; do not age well. Dragging mouse to swing weapon in combat gets a bit old, particularly where precision isn't required. No ambient sound. | 4 |
| 10. Gameplay | Geographically nonlinear. Replayable to experience different classes. | Narratively linear. Otherwise not replayable. Repetitive nature of main quest process gets old. Game is a bit too long. | 3 |
| Other/Total | Lots of procedurally-generated content | Lots of procedurally-generated content. | 38 |
That final score is a bit lower than I expected, but not so much that I think something's wrong with the rating. I really wanted to like Arena, which infused some of the enthusiasm of my early entries, but it showed all its cards early. By the time you've found the third piece of the Staff of Chaos, you've really experienced all the game has to offer.
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| Why would you not include a single shot of combat? |
Scorpia's review in the May 1994 Computer Gaming World echoes many of my own thoughts about the game. "Everything eventually becomes mechanical and repetitious," she says, referring to the interchangeable towns, NPCs, and dungeons, as well as the limited number of enemies. She points out, more than I did in my coverage, how utterly useless the entire outdoor experience is. Bethesda spent a lot of time on pretty outdoor maps with structures, dungeons, monsters, even weather effects, and there's no reason whatsoever to ever experience these things.
On the other hand, she liked the combat a lot better than I did: "It's the most natural way of fighting that I've seen in a first-person game." She also spends more time talking about the side quests (I guess some had unachievable time limits) than I spent playing them. Her final comments are almost prescient:
The game is impressive as a first effort. Most of the pieces of a good CRPG are there. What is needed now is a tightening of the code, a little polishing up of the basic engine, a little scaling back of the size, and the inclusion of some real role-playing elements . . . with a solid storyline. These are well within Bethesda's abilities, and their addition to future products would make The Elder Scrolls a dynamite series.
I'm glad she was still around to review Daggerfall two years later. Despite her misgivings, the Arena won CGW's "Role-Playing Game of the Year" award.
According to MobyGames's roundup of reviews, the game's best review (in its age) came from the March 1994 Joystick (a French magazine) at 91%; its worst from the May 1994 PC Zone at 62%: "The cities are dull. The interaction is dull. The playing area is too large. The quests and money-earning too laborious. There is no wit." The mode is around 80%, or a B- in my profession, which makes sense to me.
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| Just a shot of me fighting a fire daemon. I liked it, and I didn't get to use it earlier. |
What strikes me about almost all the reviews is the mention of size. None of them seem to have caught on that Arena's supposed vastness is completely illusory. Maybe some of the European magazines that I can't easily translate covered it, but nowhere in the English reviews did I see any acknowledgement about the extent of procedural generation. Maybe they weren't aware of it. Maybe the idea was just too new to them.
A ton has been written about both the game and the Elder Scrolls series. I like to try to synthesize everything in these "Summary and Rating" postings, but this is one of those games for which there is far more content out there than I have time to assemble in a single entry. Here are some highlights of what I've found elsewhere:
- The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages confirms what commenters contributed to my last entry: The original conception was for the PC to be the ward of General Talin Warhaft, leader of the imperial guards, also confusingly named "Talin." This explains why in the manual, Ria refers to the PC as "Talin" while the cinematic shows Talin Warhaft being captured along with the Emperor (and the original endgame cinematic shows him being returned). There's even a cut slide from the opening narration that explains this.
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| The cut content. |
- I only experienced a small percentage of the types of random quests available. They include delivery, retrieval, and escort quests (which always take place in towns), and dungeon quests in which you rescue a captive, capture a criminal, or slay a particular creature. I didn't experience any of these and indeed questioned whether they existed. I suppose you could have fun with the game without ever doing the main quest. Although the times I was given were always generous, apparently you can be given a deadline that's impossible to achieve.
- If you fail a palace quest, for some reason the game changes the entire palace and ruler, with males always switching to females, and vice versa. Those are some serious consequences.
- There are plenty of people online who claim that if you're willing to put in the time, you can walk from one city to another. They claim it takes dozens of hours. I'd like to have some confirmation of this, but I'm not willing to put in the time.
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| Any volunteers? |
- The full list of artifacts are Auriel's Bow, Chrysamere (two-handed sword), Ebony Blade (katana), Staff of Magnus, Voldendrug (hammer), King Orgnum's Coffer (gives gold once per day), Necromancer's Amulet, Oghma Infinium, Ring of Khajiit, Ring of Phynaster, Skeleton's Key, Warlock's Ring. They all appear again in subsequent games. I think Skyrim has them all except the Warlock's Ring and King Orgnum's Coffer.
- Bethesda began an expansion pack to Arena set in Mournhold in Morrowind. It morphed into The Elder Scrolls II before its setting was for some reason changed to Daggerfall.
- Unused or cut content for the game includes art for beholders and balrogs, a slave market, and support for up to four party members at once.
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| I'm sorry we didn't get to see this guy. |
The official cluebook for Arena was called Codex Scientia, written by Judith Weller and Ted Peterson. I didn't learn a lot from it, but here are some tidbits:
- "Resist Fire" lets you swim in lava. I suppose I should have guessed that, but I never tested it.
- Different classes have different casting costs for different spell types.
- The experience table in the cluebook goes only to Level 20. From what I read on various web sites, if you make it to Level 27, you get enough attribute points to max out all attributes at 100, which makes further leveling impossible because you can't leave the "level up" screen until you've distributed new points.
- There are apparently 16 annual holidays in Tamriel, each with effects on the local economy. For instance, on the New Life Festival (first day of the year), ale is free in the taverns. On Second Planting (7 Second Seed), temples heal for free. These are cute bits of world-building, but the odds that you'd be in town to enjoy the benefits of a particular holiday are lower than the likelihood you'd even need their benefits, given the generous economy. It's impossible to imagine a player saying, "Well, I need to buy a new sword, but I think I'll wait until the Merchant's Festival" (when all prices are discounted 50%). It's too bad that later Elder Scrolls games didn't implement them, though. It would have been fun to enter Whiterun or the Imperial City and find a different arrangement of NPCs, as Jester's Day would have required, or to find all NPCs mute, as Tales and Tallows requires.
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| Shots from the hintbook. The emblem on the cover reminds me of something I've seen before, but I can't place it. |
I struggled with whether to include the game in my "Must Play" list despite the low score. The list includes the first games in a large number of series, including Ultima, Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, Pool of Radiance, and Hero's Quest. I have so far not included any sequels in series whose first titles were not on the list. I think The Elder Scrolls is going to be a "first" in that regard. While it undoubtedly had a certain legacy for its own series, it's hard to detect a general legacy for Arena. Please let me know if you know of any games directly inspired by it, but my own search came up short. (There was notably no explosion of procedurally-generated content in the later 1990s.) Finally, in those earlier cases, I honestly think the first game of the series was a superlative example of that series. This is not true with Arena.
But I am certainly grateful for the series it spawned, which we'll have a chance to re-engage in a short time with The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall in 1996. And we might have a little more follow-up on Arena specifically. I have been in touch with developer Ted Peterson, who didn't have a chance to answer my questions for this entry. When I receive his contributions, I'll post a follow-up.
***
For Further Reading:
The two primary influences on The Elder Scrolls: Arena:
- Ultima Underworld (1992)
- Legends of Valour (1992)
05/06/2026
Arena is a type of game that was common in the early to mid 90s that I call "border games". The tech started to allow for great ambition, but was short of what was required to fill that ambition. Or they hadn't quite nailed down what this new fusion of game was going to be.
ReplyDeleteTo use an analogy, we can look at action games. A whole mess of top-down shooter-type games from the late 80s and early 90s still have fans today, because they're comfortably on the far side of the technological border. Meanwhile, Doom is still regularly sold and played today, because it is comfortably on the near side of the technological border. Wolfenstein 3D? That's right on the border and is almost entirely forgotten today.
There's plenty of great first person RPGs before Arena, both blobbers of the Might and Magic III-V type and the forward-thinking but very scope-constrained Ultima Underworld games. They're on the far side of the technology border and can be appreciated for what they are. Plenty of games after Arena have successfully blended FPS and RPG - starting with Daggerfall (there's a reason that Daggerfall Unity is essentially complete and OpenTESArena very much is not). Arena's on the border.
As an example of border games, in terms of graphics, mid-nineties pixel art games tend to hold up well today (a prime example being Rayman); whereas mid-nineties 3D games often don't (e.g. the first Tomb Raider).
DeleteThis is funny because a major trend in the nineties was that every franchise "must" jump to 3D and that 2D was considered obsolete. Tvtropes calls this the Polygon Ceiling.
I think the reason nobody really remembers free roaming first person RPG's from that era is that the controls didn't work really well for hand-to-hand combat.
DeleteI also think that this limitation will become more apparent once more free-roaming 3D games will appear on the list.
I also thing that first-person hand-to-hand combat could not be made right until the view switched to 3rd person behind-the-shoulder, which means that sprites wouldn't do it, which means fully 3d characters. While I am aware that some PS1 gamed did manage to pull this off, for the most part technology wasn't there until after Voodoo Grafix era (and PS1 didn't come out until December 1994).
Counterpoint: some free-roaming first-person non-RPGs from that era do it just fine, such DOOM's infamous chainsaw, or Hexen's melee characters.
DeleteA notable distinction is that they let you press a button to attack, instead of drag the mouse. Chet already noted that he found dragging the mouse annoying.
The polygonal shift era was such a frustrating time to be a PC gamer. We had boundless evidence that pixel art games could be some of the greatest games around and yet it was suddenly time for everything to look like garbage and for the magazines to gush over how THESE polygons look SLIGHTLY LESS GARBAGE than the ones from six months ago!!!
DeleteI'm not sure what PC gaming magazines were saying that 2-D games looked like garbage. Many of the most highly-acclaimed PC games of the late '90s were 2-D (such as Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Heroes of Might & Magic 3, Starcraft, Age of Empires 2.... )
DeleteThe whole "everything must be in 3-D" attitude was exclusive to consoles.
completely agree with Gnoman including that Daggerfall was an early success in first person RPG. I picked it up in an Electronics Boutique while looking for another FPS. It blew my mind so much that a few days later I bought a copy for a friend. The bones are there in Arena but we had yet to see how free and open a world could be. Daggerfall and Morrowind may have been the peak; much like Passwall disappearing, Oblivion may be the last Elder Scrolls with a game breaking spellcrafing system.
DeleteDisagree that controls are an issue. Daggerfall supported mouselook and the original game can be played comfortably with AWSD + mouse. Yes the weapon swinging schema is cumbersome and die rolls behind it frustrating, which is why they were removed after Morrowind -- to some saying the following games weren't true RPGs. If you thought some of the arguments here were silly...
Thanks again for the writeup on the first in one of the, of not the, most notable RPG series of all time. Hope to be here when the blog gets to Skyrim.
"Disagree that the controls are an issue" ... "but it's cumbersome". Yes it is, that is why it's an issue :)
DeleteAt least here in Germany and from my memory there was a tendency to gush over "fantastic new 3D graphics" in all magazines during the mid 90s. By the end of the 90s that might have changed a bit and some reviewers were more inclined to acknowledge outstanding pixel art efforts like Diablo, Starcraft, Baldur's Gate etc. But there definitely was a time when many 2D games were often criticized as being outdated in magazines, PC and consoles alike.
Delete@Static, plenty of PC mags were pushing polygons *hard*, even when they didn't quite work yet. I never understood the dynamic, particularly when it came to games that objectively looked and played shittier because of polygons.
DeleteResponding to Static4444
DeleteThe cancelled Fallout 3 project was supposed to move to 3D because 2D was considered obsolete. Most RTS games after Starcraft went 3D.
The original Fallout and the Infinity Engine games didn't explicitly get criticised for being 2D, but (unlike the 3D games of the same era) didn't get much praise for the graphics either - the most qualitiative statement in the CGW reviews was that Fallout had "great art direction", which is a textbook case of damning with faint praise. Meanwhile in the same issues games in 3D got gushing reviews for their graphics.
There were more 2D-based games on PC than there were on consoles, because the consoles were walled gardens and the console company could say "No. We won't allow that." But that doesn't mean the attitude wasn't there, and the fact that a number of titles generally considered to be some of the best ever made succeeded without 3D mean that the "dated" graphics weren't considered a handicap.
@Gnoman, AFAIR, Starcraft bucked the trend somewhat, since it competed against Total Annihilation, which got raving reviews for 3D graphics that it had. At the same time, VtM: Redemption got raving reviews for graphics while looking completely awful.
DeleteI also think that BG2 and Diablo 2 included some features that required a 3D accelerator (lighting, mostly) to shut up the "3D crowd".
You can see it in NWN. I love that game and it has beautiful lighting, effects and shadows... But I felt let down coming from BG, because the tech wasnt quite there yet.
DeleteWhen I leafed through a gaming magazine in those days, I often wondered what I was even looking at. Looked like some triangles and ...other shapes? ...mashed together, depicting some ...monster? I think?
DeleteInteresting that there were also in 1996 plans by japanese company Soft Bank for Arena Saturn and PlayStation ports! Sadly, ports were cancelled.
ReplyDeleteMorrowind was first game to come on consoles in 2002. - Xbox version
Those consoles had so little RAM that such a port was probably impossible.
DeleteThere was Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant for PlayStation in Japan released in 1995 and Ultima Underworld released in 1997 for PlayStation in Japan.
Deletehttps://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/PSX-port_of_Ultima_Underword about differences from PC
https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/PSX-port_of_Ultima_Underworld here is right link
DeleteOne upshot of procedural generation is that you don't necessarily need to hold as much of the environment in memory at once; you can just hold onto the state of the generator and rederive the content as needed. Though a disc-based console would obviously be more amenable to a design with pre-generated content it could load off the disc as needed.
DeleteArena requires double the memory as Ultima Underworld, and the more constrained design in UU means there's more places they can reduce memory usage by loading and uoading data from disc.
DeleteArena sold relativley well, so the most likely reason to cancel the console ports is "this doesn't really work".
This is a red herring, though. The map data takes up only a negligible amount of memory compared to textures, sprite animations, and music.
DeleteBoth PS1 and Saturn had 2 megs of RAM, while Arena wanted 4 megs minimum; but I think that was doable, particularly given 3d capabilities of both.
DeleteI think that whatever the showstopper was, it was unlikely to come from hardware specs.
@Ross, if I look back at the early 90es, the "procedural nature" hurts more than it helps, since a lot of stuff in scene rendering was optimized and pre-chewed for faster calculations, and having generally arbitrary world architecture prevented that.
DeleteGiven that this was by far not the first Bethesda game with something similar, I bet they had optimization algorithms; but I wonder how well they translated to consoles, which had their own algorithms built-in.
This being said, I doubt that memory was the issue.
Since Chet is in touch with one of the developers, that would be an interesting question to ask. I'd say a likely possibility is that they had only a few programmers available, and prioritized the next game over porting the previous game.
DeleteIf you poke around, there are Japanese previews of Arena on Saturn. The developer was Something Good which mainly made shogi games and still exists seemingly as an educational software company. SG did mention technical challenges which is probably what killed it. I think they could have made it work, but the Saturn was too much of a flop to put serious effort into the port. There’s also an off hand comment about plans for a PS version, but that seems more tentative.
DeleteWhat’s a little more interesting is in leaked SEGA docs for the US. In one dated 03/15/96, Arena would have been a Saturn exclusive and published by Bethesda in the US. What is a little odd is that the release date was given as August 1996 and that it was a key title for the fiscal year so it was a late cancellation.
Finally, there’s a Japanese informational brochure from late 1994 that gives a Japanese release date of 11/95. A preview from an 11/95 preview lists it as only being 10% complete and one from late December as 20%. I get the feeling that Softbank announced the game way too early, gave it to a partner company without the right experience and the project fell apart from that.
dsparil, that's where some links would be helpful
DeleteI thought I included them but seem to have left it off. The documents and scans are on Sega Retro's page for Arena. The Japanese magazines mainly establish that the port was officially announced, and all the screenshots look to be from the DOS version.
Deletehttps:// segaretro.org/The_Elder_Scrolls:_Arena
To complement this, there are articles about the planned Saturn port in the Japanese Sega Saturn magazine in the summer of 1995. Extracts I managed to get translated and found interesting because they indicate potential differences to the PC original (if anyone reads Japanese, please feel free to check if I'm writing any BS here):
DeleteFrom the August issue:
"Choose one character from a total of 10 and begin your own adventure in the world of Arena."
"The “Tamriel World,” the setting for the adventure, is packed with beautiful visuals that are even more vivid than those in the PC version."
And in the September issue:
"In 'Arena', you select one character from the 10 available."
"Depending on the character you choose, the starting location for the adventure ..."
"The game’s setting changes depending on the character you choose, and the story along the way also changes slightly."
Both can be found here as well.
The leaked SEGA document dsparil mentions is also on the Internet Archive and even already contains cost/price calculations for the Saturn port.
As for the Playstation version, it seems it would have shared the same different characteristics - from the Japanese PlayStation magazine August 1995 (same caveats as above apply):
Delete"While this 3D RPG is known for its beautiful visuals and unique combat system, the port to the PlayStation features more vivid colors and newly illustrated characters."
"For the PS version release, the graphics for the characters were also revamped by Yoshitaka Tamaki, and players can now choose their protagonist from among ten men and women representing various professions."
"In the PC version, character creation was required, so players had to painstakingly adjust numerous parameters, which demanded a great deal of patience. However, in the PS version, the characters are pre-determined to a certain extent."
In September 1995, the port was also mentioned in the French CD Consoles magazine (without a release date) as shown in this forum post (separate download links magazine issue and respective page only on the Internet Archive).
Finally, in an April 1996 Usenet post, the PSX version by Softbank was still announced as being planned for a Summer 1996 release in Japan, for a price of 5,800 yen.
Also good thing is that game is free for download on Steam and GOG.
ReplyDeleteI love the Gimlet table in this entry!
ReplyDeleteAlso, Planescape Torment is an Infinity Engine game that does, in fact, have an optional, repeatable dungeon with random selections of enemies,
Also also, for marketing purposes I'm not surprised they named the sequel "Daggerfall" instead of "Mournhold", because it's just much catchier.
Re: the Must Play list, my suggestion remains -
ReplyDeleteAll indications from your post and Matt Barton's interview point to that Oubliette was a groundbreaker which belongs on the Must Play list.
Or at minimum, the Earliest CRPGs page should be updated to say Oubliette, not Moria 1975, was the first to have a 1st-person view.
https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2011/12/earliest-cprgs.html
My deep apologies if it sounds like I'm imperiously strongarming you, but this was based on my experience:
Last month I searched the Addict blog to answer the question about the 1st-person view's origin. Because the Earliest CRPGs page isn't updated, it told me Moria 1975 was the first. Had I stopped there, this would be the answer I received; I had to click through to the Moria article to see an addenum that Oubliette launched with the POV first.
I then had to read the Oubliette entry, and find the Barton interview, to confirm the significance of that game.
Since this blog has and will be used as a resource for CRPG history, I think it'd be better to make these info items more accessible.
Love the additions to the format here (and definitely prefer this GIMLET style over the Star Trail one).
ReplyDeleteI'm very curious about the outdoor areas. Everyone I've heard talk about in detail seems to agree that it's mostly smoke and mirrors (and this stuff about being able to walk to another city sounds like horse apples, although the manual does claim that it's possible). On the other hand, people at the time seem like they couldn't get enough of it: even Scorpia gushes about how "the wilderness isn't just empty space as in other games. There are roads, farms, wayside inns and temples, as well as mysterious place to explore." (It does remind me of the very different views people have on Starfield too!)
I am reminded of Quest for Glory 2, that has a (practically infinite) desert area with random battles where you largely don't have to go; and Ultima 2 that has its whole 3D wireframe setup for dungeons where you never have to go at all.
DeleteTo be fair, players may well enjoy such areas because they don't know there's nothing there (and internet analysis pointing this out was not so much available back then).
In the Japanese ports of Ultima II, they made the rocketship fuel only available on the lowest levels of the dungeon, giving a reason to actually go there.
DeleteYou can definitely wander outside of towns in Arena, there are sometimes farms and castles and dungeons there. It is quite novel, at least at first.
DeleteThere's just not really much point in actually doing it, since you're gonna get the exact same random loot that you would anywhere else.
As for walking to another town, I agree this seems highly unlikely. There's a known bug where if you wander too far from the town you left, if you try and retrace your steps the town is gone and the only way to get back is to fast travel. This makes me think walking anywhere would be a fool's errand.
"Emptiness" seems to be in the eye of the beholder. I am reminded of Zelda: Wind Waker. Technically speaking, it has about the same amount of things to do in the overworld as Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess. It also takes about the same amount of time to cross the entire map sailing as it does the other Zelda games walking. But it somehow strikes many people as boring and empty, and the distances interminably far.
DeleteAnother game I am reminded of is Faery Tale Adventure. I found the game world fascinating, but Chet complained it was empty and it took too long to get around.
Video game worlds are, essentially, a bunch of numbers, and the representation on the screen is an illusion in any case. Different representations seem to have different levels of effectiveness to different people.
Hello. As someone who played Wizardry on an Apple II not long after it came out, I have been reading your blog for years with interest but not comments. You mentioned a Must Play list without a link and I can't seem to find it. Could you provide a link and possibly make it easier to find from the home page? Thanks for doing this!
ReplyDeleteI was using the Mobile view and when I switched to the Web view, the Must Play list is visible. Not sure how you could make it visible in the Mobile view (maybe make it its own page?) but that would be nice.
Delete"Arena" is the RPG equivalent of the first Genesis album "From Genesis to Revelation": fans know it exists, they just refuse to publicly admit it's there. ;)
ReplyDeleteIt's not the worst rated Genesis album on progarchives. I personally quite like it for what it is (late 60s pop).
Delete(Does that make Oblivion the "Invisible Touch" of Elder Scrolls?)
In fairness progarchives users rank things in terms of "progginess". I for example find Invisible Touch to be a great album, just not a very good "prog" album - I guess I'm agreeing with your metaphor, Oblivion is a very good game, just not a very good RPG ;)
Delete@Buck Quite nice at the beginning but it goes on WAY WAY TOO LONG?
DeleteOwlcat Games discovered that an endless dungeon is very much appreciated by some players in an otherwise bounded game, so you can play almost-Infinity-Engine game with this feature with Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous :) Personally, I don't like the idea very much: without story, endless dungeons begin to bore me after a very short while, especially as the levels grow harder, and I just don't see a reason to push myself without a plot reward: it's one thing to replay a battle 5 times when you know there is some downtime in town on the other side of it, with quest rewards, new equipment, and plot advances, and it's quite another thing to replay it when you know that all that follows it is another hard battle. But that's just me.
ReplyDeleteWhat that mode works well for in those games is as a build tester! You have all the crunchy of DND(the rules and builds) though little of the fluff(story, setting etc).
DeleteBut good grounds for resting what builds you want to play!
Yes, that's true. I just suck at build planning, so I mostly get through RPGs by just taking whatever feats/spells/items seem most powerful/necessary at the time :)
DeleteA recurring idea in some D&D campaigns is the “tentpole megadungeon”. A possibly endless dungeon-like environment that PCs can repeatedly return to for XP, treasure, magic, etc, needed to overcome obstacles outside the dungeon. In a sense, a place to grind, but in an engaging way, and typically the central source of power and mystery in the campaign, hence the tentpole label.
DeleteThat megadungeon may have a fully rationalized existence with designed plot opportunities, or it may be something like procedurally generated content with enough regional theme and custom areas to deepen the mystery and invite exploration.
Not sure if this resembles how the endless dungeons are used in Kingmaker. Do any CRPGs use a megadungeon like this?
@DustyCastles the first thing that pops into my mind is the dungeon under your castle in Pillars of Eternity. Of course, that dungeon isn't endless (iirc), but it is quite large and intended to be returned to repeatedly throughout the campaign. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass also has this sort of incremental dungeon that has to be returned to throughout the story and beaten in stages. Additionally, it's not a single megadungeon, but the action RPG Bloodborne features the Chalice Dungeons, which are an endless series of procedurally-generated areas that the player can enter to level up and find exclusive loot.
DeleteIt's not infinite, but the first Pillars of Eternity game by Obsidian has a mega-dungeon you come across somewhat early that has its own plot separate from the main story, so you can always go there and run through a few levels whenever you get bored of the main plot.
Delete(that said, I got bored of both the main story and the mega dungeon and never finished either, so YMMV on how well that works.)
Oops. and I see Sabbacc beat me to it (that's what I get for leaving tabs open and not refreshing before commenting).
DeleteThe #1 thing I appreciate about Arena is the atmosphere that those bits of well-written descriptive text (and the music) create. It's the sort of thing that wouldn't make sense as graphical fidelity increases but at the same time are evocative in ways that graphics can't handle.
ReplyDeleteI don't care for visual novels but there are a few throwback rpgs that make great use of the same sort of literary flavor (particularly the amazing Roadwarden).
I'd like to request a detailed gimlet analysis like this for Realms of Arkania: Star Trail :) Please!
ReplyDeleteno
DeleteYes!
Delete> As for those mechanics, Arena almost always has a good base but doesn't go far enough in some areas and poorly balances others.
ReplyDeleteI'd be shocked if a reference to this line does not appear in Daggerfall - it fits so perfectly. Not that it is a perfect game, nor even good. But to Arena's tech demo, Daggerfall fleshes out some aspects.
But in a way, I super appreciate this game through your writing. My own style in making DND campaigns is to shallowly seed cool sounding hooks, only to later flesh out those that capture the players interests. While TES has ret-conned, it's mainly worked in an additive format from here. Agree it's not Arena's credit, but happy to see how they grew from here
Your comment re Starfield... Sums up the reasons I will never play it though
"It's a good thing this is a single-character game, because three of these people would be fatally distracted in combat."
ReplyDeleteAt least proof that clothing most unfit for the profession isn't a japanese invention.
Boris Vallejo's poster art for the film Barbarian Queen provides a much earlier (and even more dramatic) example!
DeleteYes, what TVTropes calls 'Stripperiffic' ('Clothing for characters will often be impractically sexy for their chosen application.') has a long history in Western art and media as well.
DeleteWhile the Japanese cover art for Arena is different, it's just an adapted version of the same image. Ironically, the French didn't have any 'lingerie-style lady' on their cover (as part of a gladiatorial team), just a dungeon scene. Guess this was created after the actual final character/content of the game was known, same as the also unrelated concept cover art for the planned console ports which never came to be.
All of them can be seen here on the UESP.
PS: Speaking of different concepts of / variations on that cover art, the one Bethesda published on X/Twitter for Arena's 27th anniversary in March 2021 (found here on the UESP) is NSFC (Not suited for Chet), i.e. the four characters were rendered somewhat anime style, looking rather youngish and with big heads and eyes.
DeleteWhat surprises me is that there's a signature on the French cover with the number 93, which implies that the distributors there just took some stock art and slapped it on the picture.
DeleteWere there some hickups with getting a production cover in time for a release or something?
"What strikes me about almost all the reviews is the mention of size. None of them seem to have caught on that Arena's supposed vastness is completely illusory. Maybe some of the European magazines that I can't easily translate covered it"
ReplyDeleteSo checking Joystick in French (91% rating), I think you're right. There's a mention of the massive game size (10 millions square Km2, 400 cities..) but nothing about its procedural nature. The review seems to focus more on the sandbox aspects of the world and mention that there's "no real story". They mention a lot of side quests and activities, with monsters roaming the wilderness and random dungeons. They also mention that the monsters are more dangerous at night.
"There are plenty of people online who claim that if you're willing to put in the time, you can walk from one city to another. They claim it takes dozens of hours. I'd like to have some confirmation of this, but I'm not willing to put in the time."
The Joystick review mentions it as well: "In theory it is possible to travel from a town to another by foot, but the distances are so enormous that, according to the manual, it would take 10 to 12h real time to achieve".
Regarding the game world "illusion", it was 1994 after all. I think it's likely that the game world size was impressive enough that they didn't consider it an issue. What else was there in 3D engines around this time, Ultima Underworld and Krondor? The world sizes in those are both very limited in comparison.
DeleteBaK had a limited world, but it was much better populated and definitely felt much more alive, so to speak. It was also big enough for one game: if you look at how much time Chet spent up to Chapter 5, you'll get the idea, because the game world up to that point was relatively open.
DeleteGenerally, unless your very specific itch to scratch was roaming through big game world populated with 1994 3D graphics, then the game was unique; but I think that most people wanted something different.
I scanned over a few German reviews and it's the same picture - they mention the impressive size, but do not dwell on its repetitiveness and relative emptiness as to unique content.
DeleteHowever, Emanuele Sabetta, in no. 60 (April 1994) of the Italian magazine K ('Kappa'), had some critical observations in his review - translated extract:
"This detail [no 'use' icon, as few occasions for it and 90% is inserting keys in doors] speaks volumes about Arena’s true depth: you’ve probably already guessed that such a vast setting must have required some compromises. In fact, behind all this smoke, there’s very little substance in Arena: we’re light-years away from the perfection and depth of the world-building found in Origin’s games, from the incredible depth of titles like Ultima 7 where the deeper we dig, the more elements we find that enrich the game — unlike Arena, where all the people crowding the streets and inhabiting the houses are really just puppets barely capable of saying two words about themselves (they might as well just say their first and last names!) and respond according to a database shared by all characters.
The world designed by Bethesda is a huge farce and, in a certain sense, is more two-dimensional than that of Ultima 7, which at least boasted a different kind of depth — one I prefer without reservation — namely that of realism and narrative richness.
[...]
What’s more, paradoxically, while the locations the player doesn’t necessarily need to visit — such as city mansions and private homes — are carefully furnished and filled with objects and furniture (all of which are two-dimensional, meaning they look the same no matter which angle you view them from), in the dungeons and the places where our actual “quest” takes place, there is total neglect: enormous corridors, vast rooms, and lightless caverns where you wander for hours in search of an item, which is usually found at the very farthest point on the map: if you start in the northeast, you’ll most likely find it in the southwest, and so on.
In short, Arena’s dungeons suffer from the same problem as those in Terminator Rampage: they are enormous, empty, and decidedly meaningless, were it not for the riddles that appear on the screen every time you reach the sought-after object — riddles that, moreover, annoy the player trying to immerse themselves in the adventure, as their presence is hardly realistic. Monsters appear suddenly with no apparent logic [...]."
It does take some time for a player to realize that the size IS an illusion, and game reviewers don't necessarily have that amount of time to spend on any one game. They have a magazine to fill, after all.
DeleteThis GIMLET breakdown is perfect, at least as far as I'm concerned.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing I would add is the fact that the role-playing system here is hampered by the lack of skills, which would be fixed in the next game in series.
I like the new GIMLET formatting!
ReplyDeleteHeartily agreed! Maybe it's the TTRPG player in me, but I do love a well-formatted table...
DeleteNot that I disagree, but I wonder what's so silly about the haggling mechanic? I don't think your earlier posts mention any details about it.
ReplyDeleteYou save a few gold pieces in a game where gold is plentiful.
DeleteFor almost any shop interaction, you can haggle the price, including buying and repairing weapons/armour, and paying for rooms at an inn.
DeleteOddly I think you can't haggle at a mage's guild for anything.
The best use of the haggling is with the repair mechanic, where you can pay more for a quick repair and pay less for a slow repair (for very expensive items like artifacts, if you ask for it to be repaired for a single gold coin you'll be told it'll take thousands of days to repair, but if you say that's OK it will turn out to be about 12 days).
By the end of the game, I was selling most stuff for whatever the initial offer was, it wasn't worth haggling for a few gold. Swords of firestorm were more worthwhile, where you could haggle up from 18,000 to 22,000 or so.
The biggest problem with the haggling mechanic is that it is an extra dialogue that you always have to click through on every sale.
DeleteI cannot think of a CRPG game with a haggling mechanic that is really worth spending time and/or skill points on, as opposed to simply making more money. Maybe Fallout barter system.
DeleteQuest For Glory 2 has a pretty good one, largely because it doesn't require extra time (you type "bargain item" instead of "buy item") and because it has skills that increase by usage.
Delete@Vince, in Arcanum high bargaining (or, should I say, being a master in it) would allow you to buy stuff ordinarily not for sale. I think some other games adopted a similar system.
DeleteOblivion has perks for increasing Mercantile that seem useful, but as in other games, usually by the time you get there you don't really need the extra money they give you anyway. Rolling that into the Speech skill is one of the simplifications that I thought really worked in Skyrim.
DeleteThe bigger issue with skill-based discounts for me is that they're completely invisible. Unless the game tells you that "you haggle with the merchant, reducing the price from 800 gold to 686" or the like, it can be very hard to tell just how much difference the skills are making.
DeleteOut of curiosity, how long did this playthrough take on the ingame calendar? Comments on one of the previous entries mentioned some deleted background text in Daggerfall that suggests the canon version took "nearly ten years". It doesn't sound like it makes any mechanical difference (except getting ten cracks on those holidays, I guess) but that sounds like a long time!
ReplyDeletetravel times can take several days, there's lots of waiting and resting, it probably could take you that long! I didn't note it myself, I'm curious if Chet knows.
DeleteI started on 1 Morning Star 389 and ended at 12 Mid Year 392. So about 3.5 years. I could see the player getting up to 10 if he did a lot of side-quests that involved traveling. You can easily spend a month going from one province to another.
DeleteIt does sound kind of epic to have it take ten years.
DeleteThe game could have included a high score list based on elapsed in-game time, but since it’s linear, there wouldn’t be much point in trying to finish it faster. If it had been nonlinear like Pirates!, with a shorter playthrough, trying to achieve a better time would have been more interesting.
Frankly, I'd say not enough happens in the story to warrant this taking ten years, especially when in comparable games doing similar tasks takes just weeks.
DeleteWhen I think of a quest taking ten years, all I can imagine is the hero(es) bursting in on the big bad, saying "I've come to stop your foul deeds", and said big bad replying with "You mean that thing I did nine years ago?"
Delete> The emblem on the cover reminds me of something I've seen before, but I can't place it.
ReplyDeleteAt this level of zoom, color and shapes remind me of the royal French coat of arms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleur-de-lis#/media/File:Arms_of_France_(France_Moderne).svg
Yeah, that works. I was thinking it was something out of Warlords, but I looked at my entries on those games and couldn't find an analog.
DeleteIt's not miles away from looking like the shield on the right side when you start a new game in Warlords. I had the same tickle and the same "is it Warlords?" response.
DeleteIt is also pretty similar to King Arthur's attributed coat of arms, which is three gold objects on azure (in Arthur's case, crowns; in this case, they're probably quatrefoils but sort-of look like crowns from a distance).
DeleteSo Arthur was King of Sweden, then? I mean, "three gold crowns on azure" is exactly the description of the Swedish coat of arms.
DeleteSpeaking of King Arthur, it does rather remind me of the cover designs of the current Pendragon edition.
DeleteI suppose it's not the most imaginative crest, but then some symbols (such as lions) are very common on crests. For any region that's the merger of three kingdoms or duchies, a crest with three crowns makes sense.
DeleteExamples include Pabianice (a city in Poland), Tegernsee (in Germany), Burriana (in Spain), and others listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Crowns; I simply estimated that Chet would be more familiar with Arthurian heraldry than with Swedish.
"Even the "handcrafted" locations feel like they started with a procedural base and then just added title cards, welcome messages, furnishings, and riddle doors."
ReplyDeleteIn Daggerfall it is the other way around. The procedurally (pre-)generated dungeons are made out of hand-crafted modules, connected with each other via interfaces (doors, paths, ...). Since these modules are themselves rather large, the generated dungeons still have a very hand-crafted feeling to them. Of course, eventually you'll get a module that you've seen before.
"There are plenty of people online who claim that if you're willing to put in the time, you can walk from one city to another. They claim it takes dozens of hours. I'd like to have some confirmation of this, but I'm not willing to put in the time."
I'd call UESP the much more reputable source, especially since they describe the detailed wilderness generation algorithm, and what happens when you get to the boundary. It's certainly not possible to walk between cities in Arena. I think people who claim otherwise confuse Arena with Daggerfall, repeat wrong information they read somewhere, or are making things up.
You definitely could,at least upon release. My initial version on the 3.5" floppy allowed me to travel between my initial city and several side quest dungeons, several times, before I figured out how to fast travel
DeleteThat's because the wilderness around a city contains dungeons. But that's different from travelling from one city to another.
DeleteYou definitely could,at least upon release.
DeleteAre you sure?
According to the UESP page, each settlement is at the center of a procedurally-generated map of 64x64 tiles, and if you reach one of the edges it just repeats the last two tiles in that direction forever. The page seems detailed enough that it's hard to believe they made it up, and it seems odd that they would have coded this behavior in to a later version, removing the intercity travel functionality.
There's a YouTube account called "How Big is the Map?" (which is devoted to exactly the subject you'd expect) that uploaded their multiple attempts to walk across the map—one clocking in at six hours and 35 minutes—and they were never able to progress beyond the current area. There's actually a much easier way to confirm that the terrain starts repeating after a certain point: spend around 10-15 minutes walking away from a settlement, then turn around and start heading back in the exact direction you came—you'll find yourself back at the settlement in much less time than you spent walking away from it in the first place.
DeleteConsidering some of the stronger criticisms of Arena and the glowing accolades for Morrowind (even today), it seems odd that Bethesda took another crack at procedurally-generated content with Fallout 4. I started Bethesda's library with Morrowind and the Fallout series from the first, but Fallout 4 was the first time I bounced off either when I realized that the majority of the game's locations were meant to be generic destinations for equally-generic quests (after WAY too many hours of trying to convince myself I wasn't disappointed). Was it a matter of someone at Bethesda thinking that they could do it right this time, or did they think that the gaming audience had become more receptive to it?
ReplyDeleteProbably because people seemed to go on about the radiant system in Oblivion and Skyrim
DeleteI've played Fallout 4 several times, and none of its locations feel procedurally generated to me. SOME of the repeatable quests are procedurally generated, but they certainly don't make up "the majority" of those quests. I'm not sure you and I played the same game.
DeleteDaggerfall and Morrowind represent the two different possible responses to criticisms of Arena’s procedural generation. Daggerfall expands and improves on it, letting them actually simulate an entire country, but still feels a little empty and pointless despite the massive scope. Morrowind goes in the opposite direction, putting in an obscene amount of work to make a fully bespoke, handcrafted world, but while that means there’s a lot of cool stuff, the overall scale is a lot smaller. I actually don’t think it’s surprising at all that Bethesda has been trying to figure out ways to combine those approaches to get the best of both worlds—or that they haven’t really figured it out yet.
DeleteI think the overworld of Daggerfall gets way too much attention. There's nothing in the game that points towards exploring the overworld being a serious gameplay element, and all developer interviews I've read point to it being there for a sense of scale only. The relevant pre-generated content in Daggerfall are most cities and the non main quest dungeons.
DeleteSorry Chet, I didn't mean that the locations themselves seemed procedural, but rather that exploring them on my own initiative turned up a whole lot of map markers with little content of their own to distinguish them. At the very least, none of them made the same impression on me as the weird landscapes and architecture of Vvardenfell, or the disturbing environmental storytelling of the D.C. wasteland.
DeleteI do want to go back and give it another try though, especially with all I've heard about the Far Harbor expansion, but I've got a huge backlog of dungeon crawlers to get through first. :p
I don't think it is odd. It is cheaper to have a computer program do something than to have a person do it. It's a tradeoff of quality versus quantity, as we are seeing with the current "generative AI" craze.
DeleteThis may be a personal experience thing, as someone who lived in the Boston area for a decade I thought the locations in Fallout 4 were great and I had a blast exploring them and noting all the little nods to local culture, history, etc. But I could see if you didn't have that background you might be saying "who cares about references to Newbury Comics or the Fish Pier".
DeleteBack when I played Arena for the first time in the spring of 2016, it was around the time that No Man's Sky was gaining a lot of hype but still wasn't out yet. I remember one of my students getting really excited about the sheer scope of the game, but having played Arena and experienced how empty the world is relative to its size, I was admittedly cynical about it. Lo and behold, he ended up being disappointed with how it turned out when it first launched; I was hesitant to tell him "I told you so," but I was certainly thinking it.
ReplyDeleteChet mentioned that in roguelikes, "procedural generation can work when done well, but it has to be coupled with solid mechanics and logistics." Although I'm not a huge fan of roguelikes myself, I think I kind of agree... but what is it specifically about the mechanics of a good roguelike that makes the procedural generation work? Arena handles the generation of rooms and areas just fine, but it lacks the complex item interactions of something like Nethack, which give a player more ways to approach the world—and perhaps it's the possibilities that come out of that, as well as the fact that a skilled player with accumulated knowledge of the mechanics can learn to "improvise" with whatever's thrown at them and mitigate the randomness that's thrown at them. That, and perhaps the tension of real consequences of progress lost from losing a run. (I feel like some of this may also apply to newer titles that use the "roguelike" label but don't fit the traditional mold of the genre at all, like The Binding of Isaac and Slay the Spire.)
Maybe there's more to it than that, though; I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this.
I've put hundreds of hours into NMS (twice now, many years apart) and enjoyed it, but I do feel like the infiniteness of it works against it after a point. (I also wish the animal behavior were a bit more true-to-life, but I imagine most people don't care much about that aspect)
DeleteThe reason procedural generation works for something like Nethack better than for Arena is sometimes called 'emergent gameplay'. It's because the procedural generation in Roguelikes tends to stack a ton of simpler systems that interact with each other in unanticipated and much more complex ways. You've got tons of items, item effects, monsters, monster effects, locations/events, and ways to interact with the environment and monsters (including eating them).
DeleteArena on the other hand is like a million iterations of a few lego modules that combine and recombine in a giant sandbox, but otherwise don't really interact with each other in novel ways. What are the 'blocks' used for generation in this game? Name chunks, weapon/armor modifiers, outdoor architecture, interior architecture, dungeon architecture, and a relatively limited set of monsters with a limited set of abilities. Is that about it? None of those things interact with one another. Only the scale of the generation is impressive.
That's a good point. I'll add Spelunky as an example of procgen done really well (although it's not an RPG).
DeleteThe current wave of roguelikes/roguelites often do this well, yes. When the simulationist compounding complexity is done right it creates nearly endless entertainment value, because there are so many possible interesting and unexpected combinations.
Delete@Shaun: I've heard that a lot of stuff has been added to No Man's Sky since launch, and even in the early days I know it had its fans, so imagine there's something there to like for the right audience. My main criticism, I suppose, was how over-hyped the scope was, and the fact that there were so many people before launch that seemed to be excited about it for the scope specifically. (Similar thoughts were going through my head about Starfield, which Chet mentioned as well).
Delete@Bruce: That's a good way of putting it—I think, as you mention, that the interaction element is key to both traditional and "neo-"roguelikes/lites. With Arena, on the other hand, certain issues, like the fact that loot piles respawn upon leaving and returning to a floor, it can actually work *against* the desire to explore that near-limitless space. I think that's why, after a certain point, I basically treated Arena as an early level-based FPS with RPG elements and mild busywork between levels—and for that, it was kind of okay, but still missing a lot of what I go for in an RPG.
The elements compounding in unexpected ways really is key. When No Man's Sky first came out, many people quoted Kate Compton: "I can easily generate 10,000 bowls of plain oatmeal, with each oat being in a different position and different orientation, and mathematically speaking they will all be completely unique. But the user will likely just see a lot of oatmeal." If the individual components don't do anything interesting when they interact, the number of combinations don't really matter.
Delete[Compton was talking about aesthetics rather than mechanics, but the lesson applies even more for mechanics.]
Slay the Spire is a great example of this, because in important ways it doesn't have that much procedural generation. There are a limited number of battles with absolutely fixed composition, and the world maps that take you from event to event are 100% oatmeal. But the cards and artifacts you get are random, and they have complex enough interactions that the game is endlessly replayable.
I raise a glass to the textual GIMLET's stay of execution
ReplyDeleteI wasn't expecting Asset and Liability Management to show up in your GIMLET rating. I love this format!
ReplyDeleteSince there have been several people praising the gimlet format, I'd like to throw a spoke in the works and say I don't like it. I preferred the more written prose you usually do, and am less keen on the stale bulleted lists.
ReplyDeleteMoreover the tabular format is pretty horrendous to read on phone screens.
Seconded, but I takes what I gets.
DeleteI don't mind the new format but yeah, the text inside the table in mobile view is tiny and I had to switch to the web view to parse it.
DeleteI like the content and don't mind the bullett point nature - it must be challenging enough to whip up a well-formulated entry in prose every couple of days based on the gameplay experienced.
DeleteIt's true that the table format is hard to read on mobile view, though. Don't have a solution to that, however, unless maybe it's converted to an actual vertical bullett point list instead with pros, then cons, then score.
I'll absolutely second this. I was very much looking forward to a "real" Gimlet for Star Trail and was very disappointed to just see a list of numbers. The table here is a slight improvement, but prose just works soooo much better with the rest of this blog. Moreover, the table is really hard to read on a phone screen IMO (I usually read my dose of CRPGAddict in bed before going to sleep).
DeleteWhat's with that magazine add, "They're Not Just Games"? Who is "they", and if they aren't games, then what are they?
ReplyDeleteIt's half of a two-page spread for Bethesda games Arena and Delta V. The half with the Delta V ad continues "...They're a way of life." See here.
DeleteSo, the next game is "Al-Qadim : the Arabian Legend of Zelda", and you started playing it already. It is material for a Brief.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty much convinced it's an RPG under this blog's rules.
DeleteThat was briefly discussed in the context of the 1994 games list.
DeleteI assume there will be another "Upcoming games" post soon to address this and other questions of the next games on the current schedule.
What can I say except Congrats!
ReplyDelete"I really wanted to like Arena, which infused some of the enthusiasm of my early entries, but it showed all its cards early. By the time you've found the third piece of the Staff of Chaos,"
=> Just like you, I wanted to like the game but was bored by the second dungeon. I also wanted to love but still got bored with Daggerfall (which I played roughtly at release, unlike Arena), though it held my interest longer.