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  The Elder Scrolls is a famous series of RPGs by Bethesda. Today, the series has five mainline entries, an MMO, and a few spinoffs nobody actually plays. The series has become famous for massive, open worlds where you can explore the content of the game in whatever fashion you please, with each entry in the series being able to keep you playing for a number of years if you choose to see everything there is, and that's not counting the fan-made content available through mods and additional content packages. But before all of that, things were different. Before there was Almsivi, before there were spears, before there were shouts, before there was Skooma, and Nirnroot, and Adoring Fans, and before outlander n'wah criminal scum were violating the law and stealing your Sweetroll, there was a company. That company made a game, based on a custom D&D setting. A game where players would form teams of gladiators and travel across a whole continent, gathering fame and fortune as they defeated other teams and explored dungeons... Then they realized they were having more fun with the sidequests and based the game around that, in spite of the fact that they'd already made the box art and promotional material with the gladiator theme in mind. Oh and there's a scroll of some kind. I guess? Thus, The Elder Scrolls: Arena was born. It wasn't a game where a prisoner rises from rags to become Dark Elf Jesus or finds out he's a dragon descendant for some reason nobody wants to question because it would make the player feel less special, it was about a guy (or girl) who goes on a quest to rescue Uriel Septim VII from hell by collecting eight pieces of a staff, ironically ripping off a game that probably ripped off another game (Zelda and D&D respectively.) Indeed, times were much simpler, and arguably, significantly less entertaining. But that doesn't stop modern gamers like myself from going back and finding something in these humble beginnings to enjoy. In the case of DOS Elder Scrolls, that's taking everything we know about the game and using it to smash the difficulty into tiny little pieces. Some say the DOS Elder Scrolls games are hard. I say they're only hard if you're the kind of person to actually bother with the "RP" in RPG. Join me, won't you? Contents: Arena Part 1: Character Creation, Intro Dungeon Part 2: Fang Lair Part 3: Labyrinthian Part 4: Elden Grove Part 5: Halls of Colossus Part 6: The Crystal Tower Part 7: The Crypt of Hearts Part 8: Murkwood Part 9: Dagoth-Ur Part 10: The Final Dungeon Daggerfall Part 1: Character Creation Part 2: Getting Our Feet Wet Part 3: More Stealing Part 4: VENGEAN-VENGEAN-VENGEANCE Part 5: We're taming a werewolf with a WHAT?! Part 6: Do Princes Sit On Stuff These Days? Part 7: Who Would Paint That? Part 8: Mages Guild Grinding Part 9: Year of the Daedra, part 1 Part 10: Year of the Daedra, part 2 Part 11: ENCHANTMENT Part 12: And I can't even equip it either Part 13: Freeing Medora and some other stuff Part 14: Clearly Sex Is Worse Than Child Murder Part 15: Double the Halthalthalt Part 16: VENGEANCE!!! Part 17: Nocturnal Emissions Part 18: Three In One Part 19: Castle Necromoghan. AGAIN. Part 20: The Crux Of Things Ephraim225 fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Feb 23, 2018 |
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Oct 9, 2017 04:46
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Oct 9, 2017 07:44
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Wow, this is a brilliant idea for an LP. I like it, esp. since I never played either game.
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Oct 9, 2017 07:56
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CptWedgie posted:this game seems pretty broken. Arena is a very broken game, and also nowhere near as broken as Daggerfall. It's been 20 years and I've yet to play a game that comes close to as broken as Daggerfall. Arena at least enforces classes, Daggerfall's unrestricted character creator allows you to start out utterly bonkers and scale from there. Navigating the bugs of Daggerfall isn't just convenient, it's a necessary skill to complete the game. Re: Passwall, it's a D&D spell and Elder Scrolls cribbed a lot of those. The Wizardries and Might and Magics both had teleport spells that likewise allowed you to skip parts of dungeons/floors that offend you so there's precedence.
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Oct 9, 2017 11:38
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An Elder Scroll did appear in Oblivion, but it was just a target for theft. Skyrim was the first game to actually talk a lot about how they work and show them being read.
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Oct 9, 2017 14:31
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That is the most stereotypical fantasy cover picture ever. I'm mildly surprised the bikini isn't chainmail. A torc is basically a metal necklace: 
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Oct 9, 2017 16:21
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For what it's worth, "abuse of glitches" seems like a pretty standard Elder Scrolls truism. And the "refund mana off of magic items' charges" just seems like an emergent mechanic of "absorbing mana from magic items", so I'm not complaining.
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Oct 9, 2017 21:48
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Also, one of the best parts of The Elder Scrolls is Bethesda desperately trying to figure out how to make all the weirdness from Arena and Daggerfall canon in the later games.
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Oct 9, 2017 22:09
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chitoryu12 posted:Also, one of the best parts of The Elder Scrolls is Bethesda desperately trying to figure out how to make all the weirdness from Arena and Daggerfall canon in the later games. Oh yeah, did you know the CD version of Arena retcons out a character from the floppy version yet this character goes on to write a book or two later in the series anyways??
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Oct 10, 2017 19:27
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Is it Lusty Argonian Maid?
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Oct 10, 2017 19:34
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I loved reading about the Warp in the West, since I came into the series properly with Oblivion and Skyrim so it just came off as some offhand mention of a past event that sounded like it would end up having a long political and/or military explanation. Nope, it's just their attempt at dealing with the multiple endings from Daggerfall: every single timeline happened simultaneously due to a little fuckup in the space-time continuum and took a while to get back to normal, and everyone just kinda forgot what happened and went "Huh, that was a weird day".
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Oct 10, 2017 20:18
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chitoryu12 posted:Also, one of the best parts of The Elder Scrolls is Bethesda desperately trying to figure out how to make all the weirdness from Arena and Daggerfall canon in the later games. where were you when the dragon broke? getting in on the ground floor of a great LP. If I could make one suggestion: edit out less of the walking around outside dungeons, and maybe at some point show what it looks like when you get outside the cities. You're doing a great job showing off the broken stuff, but you're not showing out the astonishing volume of procedurally generated content.
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Oct 10, 2017 20:31
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ulmont posted:That is the most stereotypical fantasy cover picture ever. I'm mildly surprised the bikini isn't chainmail. That is a Liefeld-rear end pose and outfit there, alright. I never knew the earlier Elder Scroll games cribbed so much from old D&D, or that it was originally workshopped as a new setting for D&D. The first game I played in the series, Morrowind, felt so fresh I never even realized, but it really shows in Arena. The spells even have spell levels. I'm gonna have a blast watching these entries in the series played out.
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Oct 10, 2017 21:06
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My main thought watching these videos is that the developers totally played a ton of roguelikes before/during development. Specifically of the *band family, because holy poo poo you're almost playing first-person ToME.
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Oct 10, 2017 21:17
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Arena is a pretty great game! Is the retcon the one other person aside from the, uhh, main goal at the end? (no real spoilers IMO) e: even fewer spoilers Private Speech fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Oct 10, 2017 |
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Oct 10, 2017 22:23
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Tuxedo Ted posted:That is a Liefeld-rear end pose and outfit there, alright. Everything is cribbed from old D&D. Everything. Arena has three different "base classes" - Thief, Warrior, and Mage, and these classes have different experience requirements to gain a level. Thieves level faster than Warriors, who level faster than Mages. There are "subclasses" which offer tradeoffs and/or increased versatility in exchange for slower level progression - Thief Subclasses level at the same rate as Mages, while Warrior subclasses are slower and Mage subclasses are slower still. Armor doesn't seem to reduce damage directly in Arena, instead reducing your chance to be hit. The difference between chain and regular plate armor is a -6 penalty to hit chance vs a -9 penalty, and there is no magical leather or chain at all. Only plate armor gets to be magical, and only Warriors, Knights, and Rangers ever get to wear plate armor - combined with their larger HP pools and better attack bonuses, Warriors can pretty much sleepwalk through the early game. Knights don't even have to pay attention to their durability, and Rangers get damage bonuses as they level up. This isn't to say that Mages aren't the most powerful category - as you level up, spells increase in power while decreasing in cost, so mages are mostly only weak in the early game, when their spells aren't very good, their AR isn't enough to stop things from hitting them all the time, and their melee ability is feeble at best. Late-game mages get to abuse the Spellmaker to render everything moot, and they just get increasingly more powerful the higher level they become, while Thief and Warrior characters improve their power in a more linear fashion.
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Oct 10, 2017 22:28
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Private Speech posted:Is the retcon the one other person aside from the, uhh, main goal at the end? That's the one. Olesh posted:This isn't to say that Mages aren't the most powerful category - as you level up, spells increase in power while decreasing in cost, so mages are mostly only weak in the early game, when their spells aren't very good, their AR isn't enough to stop things from hitting them all the time, and their melee ability is feeble at best. Late-game mages get to abuse the Spellmaker to render everything moot, and they just get increasingly more powerful the higher level they become, while Thief and Warrior characters improve their power in a more linear fashion. You don't even really need to be that high level to do some really fun stuff with the Spellmaker. The casting cost of a spell is divided by your level, so you can get weak spells with really low costs and rapid-fire them, or make a big spell you fire once or twice.
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Oct 11, 2017 00:11
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Even though it doesn't look great, this still looks a lot better than I remember it being when it came out. I wonder how much of that is the patch...
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Oct 11, 2017 02:40
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You have my attention, OP.
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Oct 11, 2017 04:14
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I have played the poo poo out of Daggerfall but I've never actually seen Arena at work, so I will be ALL OVER THIS tonight.
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Oct 11, 2017 13:14
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Scaramouche posted:Even though it doesn't look great, this still looks a lot better than I remember it being when it came out. I wonder how much of that is the patch... There are other texture mods out there but I never tried any, I think I'd have to get used to them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fVE3doI0tw Part 3: Labyrinthian
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Oct 14, 2017 00:24
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I'm glad Skyrim kept up the tradition of getting stupid drinking songs stuck in your head.
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Oct 14, 2017 02:19
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Watching character creation now, and it's nice to see that the stupid design decisions regarding your mana pool and HP on level up go back to the first game in the series.
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Oct 14, 2017 04:28
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Im only part way through the second video but I wanted to get my thoughts down. 1) Arena is somehow both much better looking and much uglier than I expected. I always assumed that Daggerfall started the Doom-ish 3D+Sprites look and that Arena, presumably, a less ambitious 2D only thing going on. I don't know why I assumed this, TES has always been a series of 'let's be so ambitious that even a 30% bug rate sells copies' 2) Dang, is this the same Uriel Septim VII as the guy who bites it in Oblivion? He's had a busy life 3) Arena and Daggerfall contain literally every stock sound effect. Sometimes I watch a horror movie or whatever and stop being scared because it's Daggerfall Creaky Door Noise #2. 4) That dungeon map isn't... great. The Daggerfall alternative is somehow even less great. Differently less great. 5) So you can vacuum mana out of your magic items, you can just pick up duplicate Key Items to skip plot flags, magic shields just accidentally last forever, and mages kinda sell a noclip spell. Yeah, that sounds about right. 6) That Tavern BGM is the catchiest song known to human ears. 7) It's nice that they give us access to the entire continent, do the other countries have cool poo poo or anything? 8) Christ that's a lot of voice acting.
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Oct 14, 2017 06:54
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YggiDee posted:It's nice that they give us access to the entire continent, do the other countries have cool poo poo or anything? Unfortunately, other than a change in building textures, I can't really say there's something cool and unique to each province. The various settlements and city-states all have different magic armor, weapons and items you can purchase out of the stores (Want a Steel Dagger of Frost Resistance? Head on over to Daggerfall in High Rock!) and the quests that lead to finding an Artifact can only start in certain provinces (Example: The Ebony Mail is found exclusively in Black Marsh) but that's really it. The Mage Guilds, Temples, and Taverns all offer the same service no matter where you are, and I haven't noticed any variance to the random sidequests or enemy types either. Admittedly, asking them to do something unique with every NPC, city and dungeon would be asking a LOT considering just how big Tamriel is.
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Oct 14, 2017 07:17
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YggiDee posted:1) Arena is somehow both much better looking and much uglier than I expected. I always assumed that Daggerfall started the Doom-ish 3D+Sprites look and that Arena, presumably, a less ambitious 2D only thing going on. I don't know why I assumed this, TES has always been a series of 'let's be so ambitious that even a 30% bug rate sells copies' The interesting thing is that Ultima Underworld had real 3D (though also mixed with sprites) in early *1992*. That's not to say that this game would have been possible with its engine, since the Wolfenstein 3D raycasting technology was specifically developed for high-speed, sprite-heavy gameplay with moderate hardware requirements, but 3D dungeon crawling was very much a thing (though a limited thing) at this time. I think there's an active UU LP going on in this forum, though I have avoided it since I still have ambitions of finishing the two games myself one day (ambitions I've had since 1992). Maybe check that LP out, much like a lot of Origins games from back then, UU is very high on the list of titles that were way ahead of their time. Plus because of it more focussed scope it's much less of a buggy mess (not that that's a bad thing for an LP).
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Oct 14, 2017 10:44
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My first experience of ever actually seeing any of Arena was in the last AGDQ in January of this year, when they did an Elder Scrolls block. The speedrunners did a good job of trying to explain what they were doing, but yeah, they did that first dungeon, grabbing that quest scroll over and over to "complete" the game very quickly. The main sound effect that sticks out to me that isn't from Daggerfall is the 'level up' fanfare, because that's the sound Everquest used for completing a quest. Ahhh, stock sound libraries.
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Oct 14, 2017 17:20
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YggiDee posted:2) Dang, is this the same Uriel Septim VII as the guy who bites it in Oblivion? He's had a busy life Indeed it is! He's 87 when he dies in Oblivion in 3E 433, and this game canonically takes place in 3E 389-399. Yes, you read that right. This quest takes 10 loving years to accomplish.
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Oct 14, 2017 22:03
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chitoryu12 posted:Yes, you read that right. This quest takes 10 loving years to accomplish. Canonically, or is does it really take 3600 days to travel between all the necessary towns and dungeons? Hm, I guess we'll find out at the end of the playthrough.
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Oct 14, 2017 22:40
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Ephraim225 posted:Canonically, or is does it really take 3600 days to travel between all the necessary towns and dungeons? I think it's canon. So far we've had trips from one side of a province to the other take roughly 2 weeks in-game, so presumably a savvy player could beat everything within an in-game year or less.
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Oct 15, 2017 00:24
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Ephraim225 posted:There are other texture mods out there but I never tried any, I think I'd have to get used to them. Oh! I didn't even mean graphically, I meant lack of crashes and overall playability. When I tried it it felt like running my head into a brick wall.
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Oct 15, 2017 04:34
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The events of Battlespire also take place within the 10 years this game canonically takes to complete and given how huge High Rock and Hammerfell really are when you get to Daggerfall and how long it'd take to journey from one end of Daggerfall's map to the other, it probably isn't entirely unlikely that it'd take a few years for the Arena protagonist to complete the main quest.
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Oct 15, 2017 08:44
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Also the Arena protagonist probably isn't exploiting glitches in reality, using a walkthrough, or remembering previous play-throughs, so at any given moment they're either lost or bleeding profusely.
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Oct 15, 2017 09:05
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YggiDee posted:Also the Arena protagonist probably isn't exploiting glitches in reality, using a walkthrough, or remembering previous play-throughs I wouldn't be so sure. (Elder Scrolls metaphysics are weird)
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Oct 15, 2017 11:43
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So what happens if you try to passwall through the outer edge of a dungeon?
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Oct 15, 2017 23:22
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Sum Gai posted:So what happens if you try to passwall through the outer edge of a dungeon? All dungeons have an outer edge you cannot passwall through. Certain other walls also can't be removed with passwall.
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Oct 15, 2017 23:52
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Cue the Lost Woods music, we're going to a forest! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHIj3NqWLYk Part 4: Elden Grove
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Oct 19, 2017 22:58
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I dig this. Arena was the one I never played, I'd happily take a HD remake of Daggerfall, it's nice to see where everything began, how deep things were. Morrowind rocks.
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Oct 20, 2017 02:12
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MrLonghair posted:I dig this. Arena was the one I never played, I'd happily take a HD remake of Daggerfall, it's nice to see where everything began, how deep things were. Morrowind rocks. An HD remake of Daggerfall would probably be vastly different from the original. But I'd love to see the early games get a modern touch myself.
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Oct 20, 2017 06:15
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Ephraim225 posted:An HD remake of Daggerfall would probably be vastly different from the original. But I'd love to see the early games get a modern touch myself. There is a (very) early in development open source recreation of Arena in the works here. https://github.com/afritz1/OpenTESArena And Daggerfall being ported to Unity is making some nice progress too. http://www.dfworkshop.net/dragonbreak-builds-daggerfall-unity-now-playable-start-to-end/ These are probably about as close as you'd get to HD remakes I'd think.
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Oct 20, 2017 19:14
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