Older Elder Scrolls?

[Secchan]

I'm interested to know about people's feeling and thoughts toward the older Elder Scrolls games.

My first TES was Skyrim and I loved it. Love it*. I played through Oblivion and I loved that too. And I'm working on Morrowind, but I find it harder than the other two. I'm working my way backwards as I really want to have played all the five games before TESO is released next year.

Are Daggerfall and Arena still worth playing? What are your thoughts on these games?

And for a more personal question - if I find Morrowind frustrating, will I be able to play Daggerfall and Arena?

[ρоѕιтяои_]

I'd like to know this as well.

[[DFnatic]Gamer]

Morrowind truely is a grand-scale Elder Scroll game since the storyline questing felt measuring and intedious towards an extent where it feels like a strong burden the player must carry to the satisfaction of finally accomplishing their missions-during quests you relied heavily on the information written upon things noted taken in the journal without the aid of a compass marker, hell even melee and magic combatant system induced several realism controls that make the fight endeavoring enough.

As far the previous games goes, I wouldn't believe Daggerfall and Arena are too difficult considering it's the first two games of their Elder Scroll predecessors, I only played Morrowind through Skyrim though so it's indifferent of me to give a good opinion on the two. If you enjoy Elder Scrolls- then by all means go play the first, I probably would end up download Daggerfall later on. ;]

[Secchan]

I have The Elder Scrolls Anthology so I have both Arena and Daggerfall on PC-DVD :) So I will probably try them out at some point. I'm just curious what people think of the two first games since no one seems to mention them at all. Discussions always start at Morrowind and end at TESO :o

[ectoBiologist]

Discussions probably tend to start with Morrowind because it was the first game in the series to a) feature fully 3D characters in a fully 3D world, b) get released on a console and c) scale back the scope of the game in order to create a more detailed world. There are many other reasons why Morrowind gets so much attention from series fans, but those three points are big factors. Daggerfall and Arena were both good games, and had healthy fanbases, but if you play them, you'll notice a rather fundamental shift in design philosophy. I'll just go in order...

A) Arena and Daggerfall are both 2.5D games. The environments are 3D, and they both feature first-person views, but all characters/enemies/decorations/etc are 2D sprites. Daggerfall looks quite a bit better than arena, but neither stand up well to modern games, and weren't really considered graphical powerhouses at the time of release. I don't ever remember a 3rd person view being available, but I played Daggerfall when it was new so... yeah, memory is a bit hazy there, but I'm pretty sure it's first-person only. Not a big deal unless you really enjoy playing from 3rd person view in the newer games.

B) Neither Arena nor Daggerfall were intended to be played on anything other than a desktop PC, so the interface and controls focus heavily on keyboard shortcuts. I don't think you can use the mouse to look in Arena, and you might not be able to use it in Daggerfall either. Instead, you'll have a mouse pointer that you'll use to click interface elements in order to interact with the game world. Daggerfall is unique in that it uses the movement of the mouse in order to determine the direction of your attacks - i.e. click and drag the mouse from left to right and you will slash with your weapon from left to right. Aside from the old school controls, you can also expect some old school inconvienences. No autosaves, no quest tracking, no instant fast-travel (outside of mage's guilds), unintuitive menus, etc.

C) Arena and Daggerfall are both MUCH LARGER games (both in terms of scope, only Daggerfall in terms of landmass) than anything other than TESOnline (possibly). Arena allows you to travel all over Tamriel, though the game world itself isn't that big. It mostly focuses on the major cities of the different provinces as the terrain outside of cities is randomly generated, and travel between cities is limited to teleporting from town to town (in other words, you cannot step out of Solitude and walk to Winterhold - the areas outside don't connect to anything). Daggerfall, on the other hand is positively MASSIVE. Daggerfall focuses only the province of High Rock and the northern coast of Hammerfell. All in all, Daggerfall's game world encompasses more than 88,000 square miles of terrain (Morrowind is about 10 square miles, Oblivion is 16 square miles, Skyrim is less than 16 square miles but not noticeablely so). This makes the world of Daggerfall bigger than Great Britian.

Unfortunately, point C is what ends up making Morrowind so much better in many people's minds. Arena and Daggerfall are huge, but there really isn't anything interesting to see. Sure, it's nice that cities and towns have large numbers of buildings and NPCs, but assets are reused frequently (remember, this was 1996, so storage space was the big limitation here) so things can start to look bland pretty quickly. The countryside outside of city walls was again randomly generated, though the generation took into account certain parameters such as what sort of climate/region you were traveling in - no mountians shooting straight up from what should be coastal plains, for example - in order to fill the space between cities. Unlike Arena, Daggerfall allows you to travel in first-person from city to city. If you want to walk from Daggerfall to Wayrest, you certainly can. Just make sure to pack a lunch. And a dinner. And a couple more lunches.

Aside from that, Arena and Daggerfall are both more difficult than the more recent TES games. Both start you in a dungeon, and both starting dungeons feature enemies that can (and probably will) kill you rather easily. There are also many features that make Daggerfall more "realistic" than some of the later games, but also make it harder. For example, you'll find that some odd skills can come in very handy - skills that don't exist in later games. You might not think much of the "climbing" skill at first, but when you show up to a city in the middle of the night with werewolves hot on your heels only to find the gates locked... well, climbing the walls suddenly becomes a terribly important thing to be able to do. Other small things add to the challenge as well. Health, magicka, and fatigue only regenerate after resting, so sleeping in a warm bed on a regular basis is important (potions aren't as common as they are in later games). High quality gear, like daedric, is very rare as well, so it is harder to overpower enemies through gear alone. The world isn't leveled like Oblivion and Skyrim, so it can be easy to find yourself outmatched by enemies. It also has some rather awesome features that don't exist to the same extent in the newer games either. You can buy horses and carts to haul your inventory around, houses to store it all in, and even ships to sail across the bay between High Rock and Hammerfell. Some of those options are prohibitively expensive though. Ships can cost anywhere from 100k to 200k gold, and houses are more expensive than those found in Skyrim. If you can't muster the coin, though, you can always go to a bank and try to get a loan. Seriously.

[Minor spoilers ahead]
As for story content, both games fall short of the three newer TES games. Arena's main story is pretty simple and centers around a quest to find eight pieces of a powerful artifact so that you can save the emperor from an imposter who has imprisoned him on a plane of oblivion. Daggerfall is a bit better, though. It starts off with you investigating the ghost of a dead king and trying to put his spirit to rest, but by the end of it you'll be at the center of a political power struggle that could plunge the whole region into civil war. Daggerfall is also the only game of the series to feature multiple endings, which has caused the canon for that time period to be a little... weird. Basically, the canon lore is that all of the possible endings happened simultaneously. It shows up as "The Warp in the West," or "The Miracle of Peace" in the in-game books in Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. Interstingly, both Arena and Daggerfall take place during the reign of Uriel Septim VII, the same emperor who frees you from prsion and promptly dies in Oblivion. This makes Skyrim the first game to take place outside of that time-period by any significant margin since it takes place about 200 years after Uriel Septim VII's death.

The side quests you'll encounter in the first two games of the TES series are all pretty generic stuff. You can join the various guilds, earn reputation with the different city-states (in Daggerfall), and crawl through as many dungeons as you can find. Again, though, the size and scope of the two games, coupled with the limitations of the hardware available at the time they were made, means everything will start to blend together. The types of quests you get from each faction will generally feel different, though. Fighter's Guild quests and Thieve's Guild quests won't feel the same, but each quest you do within a single guild will likely feel a bit repetitive. The later games (Oblivion and Skyrim in particular) do a much better job of creating proper stories for these organizations with much more interesting and memorable characters. This isn't to say that the side quests in the older games are no good, just that they are a product of the time period in which they games were designed.
[End of Minor Spoilers]

I know this sounds like I'm slamming these two games, but I'm not... not really, anyway. Just trying to give you an idea of what to expect. I loved Daggerfall when it came out, and spent countless hours with it. It feels very much like a single-player version of a traditional pen & paper style RPG, and if you're open to that idea you might really enjoy them. They're both completely free to download and play, so there's really no reason not to give them a try.

[Casul Gamer]

There seems to be a lot of people who really like Morrowind, but having played both Morrowind and Skyrim I much prefer Skyrim. I never played Oblivion and unlikely never will.

[5n4k3d0cToR]

Nothing will ever beat Morrowind for me (even nowadays with mods), though Skyrim revolutionized teh game i thought.

[Secchan]

Thanks a lot ectoBiologist! :D That was exactly what I was looking for. I love traditional pen-and-paper RPGs so if that's what to expect then it'll go great. I had no idea that Daggerfall was that huge though O_o You're sure there's no easy way to fast-travel? I also read on the Elder Scrolls wiki that there was fast-travel in Arena, due to the game being so big. But it's only from between the Mages Guilds?

The download versions are still DOS-based as far as I know and I have never been able to get a DOS-emulator to work xD However the discs from Elder Scrolls Anthology says PC-DVD on them and since they didn't have DVDs back in the day I assume they've been modernized to work on modern computers.

[ectoBiologist]

There *is* fast travel, it just doesn't work quite the same way as in the newer games. In Daggerfall, for example, you can fast travel across the map but there are several options that will pop up when you do. You'll have the choice of traveling recklessly or cautiously, by foot, horse, or boat, and whether you want to stop at inns or camp out. All these choices determine how long your trip will take, how much it will cost, what time of day you'll arrive at your destination (cautious travel will ensure that you arrive during the day), and whether or not your health, magicka, and fatigue will have regenerated. Arena has similar fast travel from what I remember, but I didn't play it nearly as much as Daggerfall, so I don't remember it quite as well.

It's important to note the part about how long your trip will take. Many quests will have an in-game time limit associated with them. It won't be hidden from you, though, as the quest givers will generally tell you how long you have to complete the task. If you fail to complete the quest in the given amount of time, then the consequences could range anywhere from losing reputation with that faction to being completely barred from ever joining certain guilds. It's even possible to cause the main story quest to fail (in Daggerfall) by ignoring it for too long. It's another little detail that makes the game more "realistic," a little more difficult, but it also feels a little more alive as some of these NPCs simply won't wait around for you forever. This is why I said instant fast travel only exists from Mage's Guild teleporters (and the teleport/recall spell that you can learn). It's the closest thing to fast-travel as it exists in the current games where time doesn't really matter so much.

I've never tried using the anthology discs to play Arena or Daggerfall, so I have no idea what's required to run them on a modern machine. I would assume that they are the fully patched versions (which is a godsend, but you'll still encounter bugs, just not as many) and that they're wrapped in some kind of launcher/emulator package that will allow them to run in windows without the need for stuff like DOSBox. I hope that it works smoothly for you, and I'd be interested in hearing how it works out.

I'm happy to hear that you're interested in giving these older TES games a spin, though! They still have surprisingly active communities and modders, so if you end up liking them you'll find options for tailoring it to your particular tastes just like the newer games. Either way, you'll want to remember this one tip: save early and often! There are no autosaves, so you'll want to manually save... pretty much all the time. Save before you enter buildings, save after you accept quests, before you turn in quests, after you acquire any really awesome loot, before you kill a quest target, after you kill a quest target (mobs can, on occasion, fall through the world geometry, and if that happens to a quest target, you'll end up failing whatever quest it was associated with). Saving will save you a lot of headaches if you do it frequently.

Hope that helps to clarify what I meant ^^