The Altered Scrolls, Part 3: Last Notes and IPISYDHT#1

By Rutskarn Posted Friday Aug 21, 2015

Filed under: Elder Scrolls 75 comments

(Questions answered as of August 21, 2015)

For all my joking around in Part 1, I recognize the significant time investment required to play Arena and Daggerfall. Not only does a would-be videochrononaut need to get DOSBox working (not always a trivial feat), but someone unused to older titles will need to scale sheer walls of obsolete mechanics and old-school sensibilities to get far enough to really experience the thing. It’s by no means impossible to do so, but it’s certainly cumbersome. That’s why this post isn’t just an essay; it’s an I Played It So You Don’t Have To. I’m doing one of these for Arena, I’ll do one for Daggerfall, and I might well do one for Morrowind depending on reception.

Directly below the fold will be my final reflections and notes on Arena. Beneath that will go the answers to questions you pose about the game in the comments. These can be simple factual questions, subjective considerations of tone and effect, or, I suppose, more abstract queries. I’ll post responses to each question I get over the remainder of the week.

Then, next Friday, we’ll begin my essays on Daggerfall.

I can't sleep on town streets at night, so I broke into this house, but a golem started attacking me in midnap. This does sort of make sense plotwise, but it still feels a bit silly.
I can't sleep on town streets at night, so I broke into this house, but a golem started attacking me in midnap. This does sort of make sense plotwise, but it still feels a bit silly.

It’s interesting to look the mechanics various TES games introduce, but even more interesting to note which are introduced and then immediately abandoned. It’s actually a testament to how individualistic entries in the franchise are that this happens all the time, but it’s also a bit of a pity. Many an Elder Scrolls fan has eagerly waited to see how their favorite features will look expanded and improved on next time around–only to find all of them unceremoniously binned come next E3.

Arena was the first game in the franchise, and it’s not surprising that the template was altered quite a bit for the sequel, but there are two features which are prominent enough that their removal from Daggerfall is noteworthy.

For one thing, riddles. In classic old-school gaming fashion Arena contains quite a few areas where you can’t progress unless you answer a classic, “I am X and Y, what am I?” sort of riddle. They’re not multiple choice, either–a text box appears and you’ve got to type in your response. I found this terribly novel. It’s easy to see how this is antithetical to more modern RPG game design–and surprisingly difficult to articulate why. “Because games assume players are thick” hardly seems satisfactory.

A few other obvious answers: it tests a different and arbitrary skill than the rest of the game and makes progress dependent on that skill; there’s a tonal discrepancy between answering a riddle (seen as a frivolous activity) and the enormity of bloody, polygonal, viscerally-realized slaughter; and then, there has, of course been a general movement of the genre towards kinetic proficiency as a problem-solving tool. All of those are decent reasons to minimize the role brain teasers have in the franchise. I have to say, though, that after a few dozen dungeon floors full of samey grindy obnoxious monsters every chance to jut sit down and solve a riddle was like a glass of ice water on an August afternoon. If riddles became a mandatory alternative path through every dungeon in TES6 I’d welcome the change, I really would.

No less prominent–or abandoned–is the game’s curious approach towards its magical artifacts. Later games place these throughout the gameworld for players to collect, either through random exploration or directed questing. Since Arena‘s dungeons are self-contained, and wilderness nonexistent, this approach wouldn’t have worked back in The Day. Arena‘s approach is a bit more obtuse.

Pictured: one of approximately two kinds of sidequests in this game. I talk about the other kind below.
Pictured: one of approximately two kinds of sidequests in this game. I talk about the other kind below.

To find an artifact in Arena, you have to: ask around various cities until you discover somebody’s looking for an artifact, go to the tavern they’re waiting in, learn the location of a nearby dungeon, fast travel to that dungeon, fight to its bottom, find a lead on the actual location of the actual artifact, head to that dungeon, and slog through additional monotonous tunnels of bloodshed and carnage until the damn thing’s in your hands. But that’s not the weird bit. The weird bit is, you can only have one artifact at a time and you can’t sell them once you’ve got them. So the only way to get rid of an artifact and get another one is to use it up (because eventually it will disappear from your inventory) or throw it into a ditch like an empty bag of tacos. It’s a bit frustrating to scrounge around looking for leads on an artifact only to discover it’s one you’ve no interest in, and I imagine that’s why they changed their minds down the road.

Now: post your questions below. I’ll get to them in the order they’re received.

Ian asks:

“What is the sound design like at the start of the series?

Are we still in the land of a couple of swishes and grunts for combat and a few bars of midi music for occasional reminders that you have a sound card?”

You nailed it. Copious midi music–classically foreboding and faux-medieval, if you’re familiar with older games of the stripe–with triumphant pipings for taverns and low dum-dums for dungeon scavving. Attacks make sound effects as broad as possible to cover as many bases as possible. It could really be the sound design for any RPG of the era.

Primogenitor asks:

“How much of the weirdness of Arena could be a product of the era in which it was made?”

All of the Elder Scrolls games are very much products of their age. I’ll defer a more thorough answer, since this essay series will very much prove this, but the short version is that Arena is not a subversion of any particular or gameplay tropes of the era but a reconfiguration into a product that, given the circumstances, is surprisingly novel.

Zagzag asks:

“The dungeons seem to be built on a square grid, like the graph paper dungeons many tabletop players will be familiar with. Do monsters (and the player) occupy squares on the grid or do they occupy actual 3d space?”

Players move freely. The dungeons are heavily gridlike, which is one of the reasons they’re so repetitive and monotonous, but the player can at least move freely. Technically, they can even move along a z-axis, although the only levels are “even” and “trench.”

MrGuy asks:

“You've complained a few times about the combat mechanics. What do you think would have been the best way to improve them in the context of Arena? Going click-to-hit like Diablo? Going turn-based like Final Fantasy? Going ‘swing based’ like later iterations of the series? Something else?”

All of this is with the benefit of hindsight, but the game’s ponderous turning and moving controls and needlessly clumsy melee mechanics are the most serious offenders. The game would have benefited massively from more fast-paced and responsive keyboard movement (tricky to get right, doubtlessly, with the variable player speeds) and one-click combat that varies damage based on skill, not hit chance. This game could have done with a LOT more Doom in its DNA, and I can’t think of any obvious technological reasons it couldn’t have been so–chalk it up to different fantasy RPG precedent and developer experience, or, possibly, to some vagary of the stats system I’m not considering.

Da Mage asked:

“Though it wasn't mentioned in your essays, how did you find the level scaling in Arena? It's really no different from the Oblivion level scaling, however I felt when playing that it felt fine, rather than in Oblivion where it wasn't much fun.”

I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself by getting into Oblivion, but I found the level scaling in Arena to be largely inoffensive. The game’s linear enough that it barely matters. It does, however, exacerbate the monotony of the game’s combat.

 


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75 thoughts on “The Altered Scrolls, Part 3: Last Notes and IPISYDHT#1

  1. Da Mage says:

    A few things I feel should be noted.

    In Morrowind there is a Tribunal quest where you must answer three riddles, the answers to which can be found in one of the many riddle books that are in the game world.

    Link: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Pilgrimage_to_Mount_Kand

    And for artifacts, you can have multiple at once if you put it in for repair and then search for another. Also, each artifact has it’s own rumor message, if you don’t get the rumor for the artifact that you want, you can keep trying. Obviously it depends on what regions you are in for what artifact quests that you can get.

    1. MrGuy says:

      Both interesting points about artifacts, and new news to me. But they don’t really address the heart of what (I think) Ruts is complaining about, which is that it’s not obvious (in the pre-GameFaqs world Arena launched in) what the artifact-to-rumor mapping was. And since you can’t sell artifacts, you’re highly at risk for putting in a massive slog and getting a reward that’s of no gameplay use, that you can’t even convert into gold, and so all you can really do is waste or throw it away.

      1. Da Mage says:

        Oh, I’m not defending the system….the repairing system is a bug and the rumor system is downright painful to get the right rumor (just hitting the keys for general rumor over and over). Just thought I’d mention those things as the system can be exploited to make it a little more bare-able.

      2. Felblood says:

        Wait. Let me see if I’ve got this straight.

        To get an artifact, you need to find someone else who also wants it, and agree to find it for them. However, once you find the artifact, the game never even gives you the option to make good on your agreement and sell the treasure to your contact.

        I can’t be reading that right. That isn’t game design, that’s the developer admitting to being a sociopath.

  2. Ian says:

    What is the sound design like at the start of the series?

    Are we still in the land of a couple of swishes and grunts for combat and a few bars of midi music for occasional reminders that you have a sound card?

    1. Joe Informatico says:

      Check out this playthrough: The MIDI is overpowering!

  3. Primogenitor says:

    How much of the weirdness of Arena could be a product to the era in which is was made?

    This was 1994 – 5 years before Baldur’s Gate and back when Ultima Underworld was new – Lands of Lore and Realms of Arkania are my personal memories from those times. All of the games I remember from then had tedious combat and exploration – so is Arena merely “average” in that respect?

  4. Zagzag says:

    The dungeons seem to be built on a square grid, like the graph paper dungeons many tabletop players will be familiar with. Do monsters (and the player) occupy squares on the grid or do they occupy actual 3d space?

    1. Ilseroth says:

      Actual 3d Space: the grid layout was a) for fast dungeon development and b) so that Passwall (spell that destroys walls) would actually work.

  5. Hydralysk says:

    One reason I think riddles don’t work outside of multiple choice answers is the fact that the game doesn’t always account for the different ways you could choose to describe the answer.

    In Danganronpa for example, there’s a section where you need to say that a person has multiple personalities in order to progress the game. However, the only ‘correct’ way to answer the question is to spell out DID (for Dissociative Identity Disorder), so I was constantly losing and having to restart despite knowing the answer until I gave up and googled the answer the game wanted me to give.

    1. Lachlan the Mad says:

      Here’s a fun idea:

      – Write an incredibly vague riddle

      – Give the player about twenty possible multiple-choice answers, and no “I don’t know” option

      – Regardless of which answer the player chooses, the PC is able to bullshit an explanation of how their answer applies to the riddle and pass the test

      1. MrGuy says:

        Riffing on this…

        Have it be something like the GOAT in Fallout 3. Present a sequence of riddles, each with a number of answers, all of which you could twist into being the “right” one for different reasons. The answer (and the corresponding “reason”) change the way the player interacts with the game going forward (traits or stats, etc.)

        “I cost but a few coins, but I am the most valuable thing you carry. What am I?”
        * A watch
        * A sword
        * A pair of glasses
        * A book
        * A sandwich

        A watch – time is fleeting and precious. Sword – you need to rely on yourself. Glasses – the ability to see more clearly than others. Sandwich – life is the valuable gift you were given, and food is the ability to sustain it. Etc.

        1. Lachlan the Mad says:

          You’re pushing periously close to questionnaire-based character building… which I don’t mind as long as you have the ability to retcon your abilities afterwards. Fallout 3’s system is fine but I’m not starting a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon file without looking up which answers I need to get Torchic.

        2. Syal says:

          ‘Sword’ is always a riddle answer, and the explanation is always “*Draws sword* What did you say about my answer?”

          1. evileeyore says:

            Ah, the Riddle of Steel…

            The answer is not to be riddled with steel.

    2. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

      Syntax error…

      Police Quest gave me headaches until google came along. Towards the end of the game, you do a drug sting on the bad guy at a hotel poker game. You need an in, provided by “Sweetcheeks” Marie, and old high school flame of the protagonist.

      So Sonny Bonds is sent to get Marie to help. She’s been arrested for solicitation, and if she helps on the sting, they’ll drop the charges.

      “Help with the drug bust.” Nope. “Ask for help.” On what? “Ask for help on drug bust” Don’t understand ‘on.’ “Ask for help with drug bust” don’t understand ‘drug.’ “Ask for help with hotel.” On what?

      On it goes.

      You have to specifically “ask for help with hotel delphoria”

  6. Mattias42 says:

    To be fair, riddles can be really damn frustrating even if you normally have an aptitude for them since their so pass/fail with nothing in-between.

    With things like combat you can get your ‘answer’ partially right, IE take a beating but need to heal yourself, presumably using up resources to get back to 100%.

    That, and an outright word-parser? Even not counting riddles with multiple answers equally as valid (like that bugged math puzzle in KOTOR 2 that can be solved two ways and thus flipp-flopps on which the right answer is, no joke) spelling-checking stuff like that is a nightmare for both programmer and player alike.

    Color, color, colour, Colour, for example, and that’s just with correct if regional differences in spelling plus capitalization.

    So, yeah, I do get why that feature got the axe, even if riddles are such a fantasy staple.

    1. Abnaxis says:

      The “color, colour” issue has actually been a solved problem for a long time. There are plenty of packages out there for word stemming, which I’m sure are a fraction of the cost when compared to any graphical subsystem of any game, even back then.

      The real issue is with multiple answers–determining if “red-breasted bird” and “robin” should count the same. Even then, we have algorithms for finding close synonyms to the correct answer, but it would take a massive amount of work, testing, and fine tuning to teach the system when an answer is “close enough.”

      Which is to say, it’s quite possible to do, but it would take AAA-level money to do it and nobody is going to spend that much cash on something that can’t bling in a screenshot.

      1. Dr.Plonk says:

        The other big problem in this modern world of gaming is that your Blockbuster has to be translated in at least five other languages, has to account for different cultural backgrounds and for the horrible, horrible experience that is inputting text with a controller. Riddles may be fun, but they are a really difficult thing to get right, and once the tools are in place, are probably more difficult to develop than another combat encounter.

    2. MrGuy says:

      Meh. Adventure, Zork, HHGG, and the like were all strong word-based puzzle games, and they only parsed the first 5 letters of every word. Sure the syntax was a little quirky, but they worked and the puzzles were fun.

    3. Wide And Nerdy says:

      In addition to what Abnaxis said, its downright trivial to solve case sensitivity. Even if your library doesn’t support it, writing a function for that is something anybody could do in an hour or so. It doesn’t even have to be optimal.

        1. Daniel says:

          Thanks for posting that link. It was an interesting issue I didn’t know existed.

          1. Retsam says:

            As a programmer, I’m pretty sure Turkish was invented by a time traveller who had a serious grudge against programmers.

        2. Daemian Lucifer says:

          See,the first thing that comes up in that post is the one that always confuses me:Who the hell thought that its a good idea to have month/day/year?It makes no sense.You would never say “Its 9 hours,17 seconds and 23 minutes until XYZ”.So who was the genius that flipped the date format in this fashion?

          1. MichaelGC says:

            The best excuse reason I’ve heard for the Medium/Small/Large formulation is that some folks do say e.g. “January 9th” rather than “9th of January.” So there is the ghost of an idea which made some sense in there somewhere. Exceptionally well hidden.

            1. Syal says:

              Starting with the year would fit the standard “Large/Medium/Small” pattern perfectly. My guess is people kept putting month and day, and haphazardly adding the year to the end once they decided to include it, so it just became the standard to put it at the end.

              1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                Starting with the year would fit the standard “Large/Medium/Small” pattern perfectly.

                Ive seen that pattern a few times,and it makes sense.

                1. MichaelGC says:

                  That’s apparently the ‘agreed’ international standard, although the only reason I know there is such a thing is:

                  https://xkcd.com/1179/

    4. Joe Informatico says:

      The ancient point-and-click game Shadowgate got around this by having the answers to riddles be actual inventory objects. So to answer the riddle, you had to find the object that represented the answer, and gave it to the questioner (which was some kind of shrine, I think). E.g., I’m pretty sure they used that old Tolkien staple, “I don’t have eyes, but once I did see. Once I had thoughts, but now I’m white and empty”. The answer is “skull”, so you had to find a skull and place it on the shrine.

      I mean, ultimately it’s just the usual point-and-click game of “rub everything in your inventory against everything you encounter until something happens”, but it’s an option.

  7. MrGuy says:

    You’ve complained a few times about the combat mechanics. What do you think would have been the best way to improve them in the context of Arena? Going click-to-hit like Diablo? Going turn-based like Final Fantasy? Going “swing based” like later iterations of the series? Something else?

    1. Ilseroth says:

      Not Rutskarn but I did play through Arena/Daggerfall/Morrowind

      it is an issue that sticks around until Oblivion (which they handily add the issue of awkward level scaling to make the combat remain boring) but in short, the issue is primarily the disconnect between character and player that happens when you have an active combat system (swinging a weapon) and dice rolling. There were already games that handled melee fine with a similar engine (Hexen)

      The whole first person dungeon crawling and missing when looking directly at an enemy works in turn based (especially party based) games because there is a distinct lack of direct control. It isn’t the player missing the attack, it is the character the player is directing. When you play TES:1-3 you have control, you swing the weapon, but you miss, despite the fact that you clearly didn’t. This is what makes the games lack a distinct enjoyable combat system.

      1. Andy_Panthro says:

        I would argue for a stat-heavy RPG, the character skill should make a difference, and I’m fine with it being to-hit as well as damage. The game even plays a “whoosh” sound effect when you miss, or a metal-on-metal sound effect when you get parried. I feel like this is feedback enough.

        The changes for Oblivion didn’t work at all for me (haven’t played Skyrim though, so can’t comment on that). It certainly didn’t feel any better, and my main grievance against TES combat is that there’s far too much of it.

        Ultima Underworld had a similar sort of system to TES1-3, but I felt it was much better. It also helped that there wasn’t vast amounts of combat, so it didn’t get so repetitive and dull.

        1. Blue_Pie_Ninja says:

          I don’t like the old style mainly because their isn’t any visual way of showing you missed and you have to rely on audio cues and stats, which isn’t very immersive at all considering humans use sight as a main sense. If they did have a ‘miss’ animation, then the older games would’ve been vastly improved in my eyes.

  8. Darren says:

    You might as well post the Morrowind essays, since they are already posted on your site. When’s the next Oblivion essay going up?

    1. evileeyore says:

      It’s like Ruts expects us to believe that cribbing from his old notes is all that hard…

      We’re on to you mister!

    2. Rutskarn says:

      I went back and forth on this for a while. I decided to do it this way for a few reasons:

      1.) Shamus has been steadily customizing, knocking-through, and Frankensteining his site’s suite over the course of ten years. While his alterations are actually really useful, there’s also been a serious learning curve even getting my posts formatted and published. I’m very much a babby-default-code-push-the-buttons level of user, and it made sense to provide myself a few weeks buffer to just figure this out. We actually still haven’t resolved an issue with our FTP uploads, and as direct consequence, if I actually did go through and upload 20 essays tomorrow the person it’d be making the most work for would be Shamus.

      2.) The comments aside, I really don’t know how many people on this site read the old posts (or, having read a few, kept up to date). My site was updated sporadically enough that I wouldn’t blame people for missing the occasional update even if our readerships were shared 1-to-1, and they’re not. I really didn’t want people jumping into the middle, since these essays build on each other–and it would be catastrophic to Shamus’ schedule and front page if I dumped some twenty thousand words of text, either all at once or over the space of a week. I’m very concerned about crowding out his native stuff, since I’m a guest here.

      3.) I’m currently recording buffers of video content. This lets me catch up a little.

      Honestly, I’ll probably start getting impatient and triple-posting once we get to Morrowind, and there’s some stuff there I’d actually like to cut anyway. But for now, I’m sticking to an editing/reposting schedule and taking some extra time to make sure my voice is consistent throughout the series.

      1. Darren says:

        I was referring to the implication that you might post a Morrowind retrospective, not urging you to work faster. Per the post: “I'll do one for Daggerfall, and I might well do one for Morrowind depending on reception.”

      2. evileeyore says:

        “2.) The comments aside, I really don't know how many people on this site read the old posts (or, having read a few, kept up to date).”

        I just went back and reread them to see how closely you were plagiarizing yourself. New articles are indeed new.

        “My site was updated sporadically enough that I wouldn't blame people for missing the occasional update…”

        I still check your old site every couple of months to see if there’s anything new… I am ensaddened.

        “I'm very concerned about crowding out his native stuff, since I'm a guest here.”

        Just worry about finishing your opus before Josh posts another update to his decade overdue Shogun Playthrough…

        1. Benjamin Hilton says:

          I’ve been comparing to his original posts as well. This inevitably led me to re-reading the Saga of Cahmel.

      3. Daemian Lucifer says:

        The comments aside, I really don't know how many people on this site read the old posts (or, having read a few, kept up to date)

        I havent.I mean,I read the first two,but then stopped because of your slow updates.I prefer steady trickling content to binging on a huge archive.So I for one am grateful for you doing this.

  9. Naota says:

    I’ve got one, certainly:

    At the risk of finding a bomb (or worse, puns) in a future Good Robot repo commit: what is up with the Man-Khajiit dressed as Gambit, and how deep does Bethesda’s dedication to his retcon really go?

    Or alternately, assuming you were for some reason not brazenly lying when you said the above question was outside the realm of discussion: are there any vestiges of this game’s boilerplate Tolkien-derivative lore still left in the Elder Scrolls lexicon come Skyrim, or even Daggerfall? The series has clearly reinvented itself for each installment, but aside from race names what parts have been carried forward from Arena, and how far?

    1. Raygereio says:

      what is up with the Man-Khajiit dressed Gambit, and how deep does Bethesda's dedication to his retcon really go?

      It’s a repeat post, but whatever:
      To explain the difference in appearance over the games, someone (probably Kirkbride when he on the good stuff again) came up with the idea that there are several “breeds” of Khajiit and the phase of the moons at the time of birth determines what Khajiit will grow up as.

      So you have Khajiit that are basically human in appearance (Arena). Ones that are still human in appearance, but with a tail & fur (Daggerfall). Ones that look like bipedal cats with digitigrade legs (Morrowind). And ones that are essentially a cat head on a humanoid body with fur & a tail (Oblivion & Skyrim).
      To make it weird (because Kirkbride never knows when to stop), you also have Khajiit sub-species that look like housecats, or as huge tigers (who are used as steeds by other Khajiit).

      Argonians have a similar thing in the lore where their appearance can range from lizard-like to practically human depending on how much hist sap they drink on their naming day.

      1. Ilseroth says:

        Actually, just a small correction. The Khajiit in Morrowind are the same as Oblivion and Skyrim, they retconned the digitgrade legs due to the animation and modeling issues. (Too lazy to set up a secondary animation rig in Oblivion, and just keeping the standard in Skyrim)

        1. Raygereio says:

          I though the Morrowind sub-species was Suthay-raht and the Oblivion & Skyrim ones Cathay?

          1. Ilseroth says:

            Oh you’re right, I got confused because Cathay-Raht are the bigguns.

            Goddamn they would be totally screwed if they ever did a proper elder scrolls game in Elswyr

            1. Da Mage says:

              I’m pretty sure at that point they would just retcon the whole thing and make up some new lore. Other then Morrowind to Oblivion, the lore has been retcons pretty drastically every game.

              At this point, Arena’s lore is nearly non-canon and many facts in Daggerfall are ignored (though since the current lore started there, much of it still fits). Hell, until Morrowind Orcs were just monsters that lived in caves and Imperials didn’t exist. Since Morrowind you have to get into the deeper lore to find the inconsistencies. They seem to like ignoring events from previous games when creating new Elder Scrolls games, even the scrolls themselves seem to be redefined EVERY game.

      2. Mephane says:

        This solution sounds so convoluted and arbitrary that I’d rather mentally retcon them to whatever the latest iteration looked like, and pretend the older designs were due to a limit in technology, artist skill, or whatever.

        I generally dislike these kinds of theories that try to embed what clearly stems from out-of-character reasons into the lore and then try to explain around all the absurdities that arise from that. For me, trying to integrate that stuff into the lore is worse than just pretending it doesn’t exist/didn’t happen.

        1. Raygereio says:

          If you don’t like convoluted crap, then I have bad news for you. Because calling TES lore convoluted is somewhat like referring to the Tsar Bomba as a firecracker.
          Once you get deeper into the lore, the whole thing gets weird and also kinda stupid.

          I generally dislike these kinds of theories that try to embed what clearly stems from out-of-character reasons into the lore and then try to explain around all the absurdities that arise from that.

          Yeah, I’m with you on that one. Sometimes a change in art design, is just a change in art design.

          1. Mike S. says:

            See also Trek Klingons, where it’s clear that the original intent was post-forehead-bumps was “they always looked like that, we just didn’t have the effects budget”. (Though John M. Ford introduced a clever explanation in his novel, The Final Reflection.)

            Then came DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations”, where Worf was matted into TOS scenes, and they handwaved it away. (“We do not talk about it.”)

            And that would have been fine… but worrying away at the details is what geeks do. And so in Enterprise, there was a whole plotline (tied in with Khan!) to explain how they went from bumpy to bumpless and back again.

            I’d say it was the definition of answering a question no one asked, but clearly lots of people were asking.

            (And then there’s 90s Hawkman continuity. But staring into that abyss has driven men mad.)

            1. Raygereio says:

              I still think it would have been perfect to have Worf show up in TOS style Klingon make-up in Trials and Tribble-ations and have no one comment on it.

            2. MikhailBorg says:

              To be fair, the headbumps episodes weren’t at all bad, especially by “Enterprise” standards, and did explain several things – such as head-bumpy Klingons seeming so much STUPIDER than TOS Klingons.

  10. Neil D says:

    “If riddles became a mandatory alternative path”

    “mandatory alternative”?

    Select from one of the one following option:

    1. riddle

    1. Neil D says:

      OK, I see it now. It is required for each dungeon to have an alternative riddle-based path. Pay me no mind.

      1. MichaelGC says:

        Aha! – no, I had the same question: I knew it would make sense – trusting the author, innit – but my brain was phasing on exactly how. So thanks! :D

    2. Syal says:

      That would be kind of great. “Don’t like the riddle dungeon? Solve this riddle to avoid it!”

      1. MrGuy says:

        Thank you for riddling the riddle dungeon. Your riddling of it had been riddled.

        1. Peter says:

          Who wants to guess whether these comments will now be riddled with puns?

        2. Esp says:

          Yo dawg, we heard you like riddles, so we put riddles in your riddles so you can riddle while you riddle.

    3. Nidokoenig says:

      Presumably he means that every dungeon/quest could be solvable through riddles, similar to the Deus Ex rule of things being solvable through direct combat or stealth. At the very least, if a skill check is going to be crucial, it should be something you can practice throughout the game.

  11. Da Mage says:

    Though it wasn’t mentioned in your essays, how did you find the level scaling in Arena? It’s really no different from the Oblivion level scaling, however I felt when playing that it felt fine, rather than in Oblivion where it wasn’t much fun.

    The loot system felt exciting, and the change in monsters as I levelled up never felt forced.

    1. mhoff12358 says:

      I’d guess it’s that arena is more abstracted. When you go to a new randomly generated hole in the ground dungeon it feels right for it to be generated to fit you. But in oblivion you’re entering /the/ sewers. They have a confirmed reason for existing and you might have even been exactly there before. Then when it’s suddenly filled with vampires and no one seems to care it doesn’t fit and feels forced.

      1. Andy_Panthro says:

        At least in Arena the loot-levelling is way off. I think the shops are level appropriate, but the loot in dungeons seems completely random. If you don’t mind spending ages save scumming, you could get loads of dwarven/elvish/magic/etc. gear from the starting dungeon.

        Of course my favourite example of Oblivion’s broken levelling is with Kvatch. If you go there early (when you’re supposed to, I guess?), the city is burning but there’s only a few low-level daedra and it feels so odd that they need a hero to help. Go there at a high level though, and all the NPCs that can help you out will die almost instantly because they didn’t level up but the monsters did.

    2. WarlockOfOz says:

      Please talk a bit more on the vast disparity in power between classes (especially the roll-your-own class option) and the ways in which the player can control the benefits of levelling. I’ve felt this is one of the key weaknesses of the TES series throughout, so interested in seeing your take.

  12. noahpocalypse says:

    I have a question regarding the ‘throw into a ditch like an empty bag of tacos’ line…

    If the bag is empty, is it really a bag of tacos?

    1. Hermocrates says:

      An empty bag ‘of the taco’, maybe?

      1. MrGuy says:

        A bag, empty of tacos?

      2. mhoff12358 says:

        So a del taco bag?

    2. MichaelGC says:

      Aye – ’empty’ is doing a lot of work, there, but it’s allowable work: it could mean ‘was’, ‘is currently intended to be’, or ‘is the kind of bag which often is’ filled with tacos but right now isn’t. I reckon ’empty bag of tacos’ is somewhere on a spectrum with ‘broken calculator’, and I’d certainly want to say that a non-calculating calculator is still a calculator if it previously was a calculator, or is or was intended to be a calculator, or looks like a calculator. Er, so I hope this answers someone’s question about calculators.

      1. tzeneth says:

        This sounds like a philosophical paper in the making: “Is an empty bag of tacos really a bag of tacos or just an empty bag? When does a calculator stop being a calculator? If it has no power and cannot calculate, is it still a calculator?”

        I really think I should have chosen another major for my degree…(BA in Philosophy).

        1. Bubble181 says:

          One is a bottle of wine, the other is a wine bottle. By extension, one is a bag of tacos, one is a taco bag. Not the same.

    3. Esp says:

      The bag is a dynamically typed data structure, initialized holding objects of type Taco. Even when all entries have been removed, it retains typed as Bag(Of Taco) until an object of some other type is added.

  13. Dev Null says:

    For one thing, riddles. In classic old-school gaming fashion Arena contains quite a few areas where you can't progress unless you answer a classic, “I am X and Y, what am I?” sort of riddle. They're not multiple choice, either”“a text box appears and you've got to type in your response.

    Contrast this with the riddles in Arkham City (which I just got around to playing this week, so it’s on my brain.) Here we have riddles crafted by a self-styled Suuuuuuper-Genius, who actually calls himself “the Riddler”… and you answer them by rotating two wheels until you figure out which of 25-or-so possible combinations makes a word. Read the clues if you’re particularly interested.

  14. Soylent Dave says:

    The problem I have with riddles in RPGs (and this really applies whether we’re talking about videogames or pen & paper), is that they aren’t testing your character’s ability to solve the riddle; they’re testing the player’s.

    And when we have games that systemise character intelligence, that always seems a bit off – if my character has an Intelligence of ‘duhhh’ then I shouldn’t be able to solve riddles for him (and vice versa – my genius character shouldn’t be held back by my own mediocrity).

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