Arena Unity mod... Is it possible?

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Jay_H
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Re: Arena Unity mod... Is it possible?

Post by Jay_H »

Thinking about this again, I'm gonna send it off to Community since it really does deal with a different game than Daggerfall Unity :)

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MrFlibble
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Re: Arena Unity mod... Is it possible?

Post by MrFlibble »

Hipnotic Rogue wrote: Tue Nov 30, 2021 7:04 pm What does Arena offer that Daggerfall lacks? Could that stuff be made into a mod for Daggerfall or is that just too much for a mod?
IIRC there are already mods that adapt much of Arena's flavour text -- rather regrettably dropped in DF -- like the town/city greeting messages.

One thing that Arena shines in IMO is the way more functional wilderness compared to DF. Even though it is randomly generated around each town or city (IIRC) and you can't slow-travel anywhere, it does a very good job at pretending to be a "realistic" world outside city walls. You have villages and roadside inns, stand-alone temples and various dungeons. Some of these actually look like castles or fortified manors, and have matching interiors, while in DF your average dungeon is always pieced together from random prefabs, with little relation to what the place looks from the outside -- a mound or a castle or whatnot. And there are roads.

Conversely, DF's stand-alone inns and temples are basically small towns with a central square that has three inns or three temple buildings, and no roads in the wilderness at all. In fact, one could also argue that DF does not have proper villages, only very small towns and one-building farmsteads. BTW, I was thinking that it could be a nice feature to have separate "rural" quests with more of country life theme, to play on the juxtaposition of city life and country life.

apprihensivsoul
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Re: Arena Unity mod... Is it possible?

Post by apprihensivsoul »

Yeah, the roads we've seen done with mods, as well as the flavour text, if we can figure out a way to work around Passwall, a spell which certainly would cause problems with DF dungeons, that's most of Arena's unique features. Especially with the Wilderness Overhaul that's in the works, that's alot of the stuff brought over. After that it's just a case of the unique quests/dungeons, which Arena has very few of, and should probably be reinterpreted anyway into the new system (rather than doing a straight port of content.)

Of course, the Wilderness Overhaul only applies to the Iliac Bay region, no idea how much work it would take to expand it to all of tamriel, but if that's plausible without downscaling Tamriel that would be really something.

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MrFlibble
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Re: Arena Unity mod... Is it possible?

Post by MrFlibble »

One thing that captivates me about Arena is how the cities look completely different to Daggerfall. Somehow, they seem to better capture the "feel" of a mediaeval city, with narrow side-streets, big squares and more urban-looking buildings. Daggerfall's cities too often look like oversized villages or towns at best, due to the modular random generation procedure used for all locations.

Of course, neither portrayal is particularly realistic, and both games have their charm.

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Zavi
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Re: Arena Unity mod... Is it possible?

Post by Zavi »

I was wondering about this too. Hopefully it does become a project as big as DF Unity one day.

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