Like most people who found the series before town guards began mysteriously taking arrows in the knee, I came in to The Elder Scrolls circa 2003, when Morrowind had won so much acclaim as to be impossible to ignore. That cRPG, despite its lack of balance, simplistic animations and clunky chore of an inventory system, was a delightfully free and immersive adventurer's realm of adventure set against an intriguing high fantasy take on European incursions into Asia with quaint discoveries (and those damnable cliff racers) lurking around every corner.
This is not that cRPG.
Arena manifests primarily as a Might and Magic clone, and a not particularly creative one at that. It's basest Dungeons and Dragons hack and slash crossed with an untamed randomizer. As you trot about town at night, figures jump out of the shadows at you: rats, goblins, thieves, wolves, orcs, swashbucklers, mages... it doesn't particularly matter, as excepting the odd fireball toss, they'll all perform identically. If you're lucky, you might see a two-frame weapon swing animation as chunks of your HP start disappearing. Lather, rinse, repeat. Don't ask me why the imperial dungeon is patrolled by random goblins instead of actual gaolers. Must've gotten privatized. In the case of rats or even goblins, sometimes you won't even be able to see them as they're short enough to be obfuscated by your skill bar at the bottom and apparently nobody foresaw that problem! And no, in classic 2.5D shooter fashion, of course you can't look up or down. That's crazy talk.
In some ways I'm impressed by how many Elder Scrolls elements were already in place, albeit very awkwardly implemented. The series' directional melee attacks were already in place in 1994, though carried out by swiping your mouse across the screen while holding down RMB. It feels about as weird as it sounds. Luckily your input bears only a slight suggestion to your character's on-screen swishing or your chance to connect a blow, so there's not much in the way of a learning curve. By the by, that thing I'm fighting is a lizardman, which is completely different from an Argonian, which are also in the game, including scales yet seemingly sans their stylish tails. The provinces of Tamriel are pretty much all there, despite Cyrodiil being The Imperial Province and my High Elf hailing from a place inconsistently rendered as Summurset Isle.
And yes of course the various dialogues and texts slingshot randomly between anachronistically modern colloquialisms and cheesy Merrie Olde Englishe. Dude, dost thou not understandest yon game was madeth in the nineties-eth? Don't get me started on the cringe-worthy amateur narration -
- sending me to kill the imperial battle-mage of Tam Real. Aside from that, the plot could be retold on a bar napkin. Add some inexplicably bizarre design decisions: "You cannot save in a tavern, store or temple." WTF? These are precisely the places where I should save! If there were no other save points in the entire game, you should still be able to save at a damn tavern, store or temple!
This is a classic example of a game made on the assumption that games don't need to be good to sell; you were supposed to be enthralled by simply being given the ability to watch pixels roll past and swipe your mouse across the screen. Its main draw seems to have been the infinite redundancy of its absolutely gigantic (but randomly generated) world. Even towns look like endless expanses of the same squarish buildings, with fifteen different inns in my starting location of Cloudrest alone... all showcasing the same fat innkeeper and the same bards and the same randomly generated half-dozen barflies. Copy/paste the same redundancy for temples and stores to supply locations for the simple fetch quests filling your time between hacking and slashing. Beyond being a repetitive chore, Arena simply has nothing to recommend it. No wonder Bethesda keeps taking it and Daggerfall off the market.
Oh, well. I made it to level 4 in a level 2 game... good enough for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment