Things that Arena did better then Daggerfall

[MrFlibble]

I agree with many of the points voiced here, and I've made similar observations myself some time ago. On the other hand, I've always loved Daggerfall for having infinitely more content and playing variety than Arena.

I don't believe that limiting potions to guilds is a bad choice -- it's certainly a thing that is not obvious for new players, but it is a big part of the playing strategy in how you build your character. In short, joining a temple and progressing there to get potions is one of the priorities that you need to manage, making the game a more non-linear experience. Arena on the other hand is generally way more linear for the lack of factions/guilds and limited side-quests.

I do agree that Arena is more coherent both in the world that it presents and the visual art style. One can only blame Daggerfall's extremely turbulent development history for all its shortcomings, including the mishmash of art styles (e.g. three different types of NPC spites), loads of randomly generated content and game mechanics that may have sounded good on paper but did not work out well in practice. Concerning the art style, there have been various community attempts at re-drawing Daggerfall NPC sprites at higher resolutions in diverse art style, I wonder what Arena's art would look like with a similar approach. However, to complete this, additional frames would be needed for mobile enemies (they only have one direction facing the player in Arena) and their variations with different weapons etc. as mentioned above.

[Werewolf]

I agree with many of the points voiced here, and I've made similar observations myself some time ago. On the other hand, I've always loved Daggerfall for having infinitely more content and playing variety than Arena.

I don't believe that limiting potions to guilds is a bad choice -- it's certainly a thing that is not obvious for new players, but it is a big part of the playing strategy in how you build your character. In short, joining a temple and progressing there to get potions is one of the priorities that you need to manage, making the game a more non-linear experience. Arena on the other hand is generally way more linear for the lack of factions/guilds and limited side-quests.

I do agree that Arena is more coherent both in the world that it presents and the visual art style. One can only blame Daggerfall's extremely turbulent development history for all its shortcomings, including the mishmash of art styles (e.g. three different types of NPC spites), loads of randomly generated content and game mechanics that may have sounded good on paper but did not work out well in practice. Concerning the art style, there have been various community attempts at re-drawing Daggerfall NPC sprites at higher resolutions in diverse art style, I wonder what Arena's art would look like with a similar approach. However, to complete this, additional frames would be needed for mobile enemies (they only have one direction facing the player in Arena) and their variations with different weapons etc. as mentioned above.

Daggerfall had three different sprite styles? Either way I found Arena’s brighter and more vibrant colors to be more appealing, Daggerfall was a little inconsistent where the cover art and cutscenes are dark and gothic and the enemy sprites are also darker but the actual game ends up being just as adventurous as Arena. The linear side game Battlespire however had a genuinely dark and eerie atmosphere, that game is not great but the atmosphere is top-notch. Personally I prefer hand-drawn sprites, I love the bats. Also someone should redo the werewolf sprite, that one is easily the worst sprite in the game, as it just looks like this weird hairy thing and nothing like a werewolf. Even the werewolf portrait if you yourself become a werewolf doesn’t look great and I wouldn’t mind it being redrawn as the modern Elder Scrolls werewolf design. I mean realistic hands but cartoony feet?

Most of Daggerfall’s flaws were clearly due to time constraints. Someone should create a dungeon generator and with modern procedural generation techniques hopefully the dungeons could become better. I notice in Daggerfall the dungeons are just “blocks” where a block that is always the same in every dungeon is connected to other blocks that are always the same. In modern procedural generators there is a lot more variation. Only complaining in hindsight though, Daggerfall is in many ways still ahead of our time in concepts like procedurally generated quests, which was extremely basic in 1996 but in the future could become used to generate endless epic adventure stories you play through in real time in a future RPG decades from now

[dutchovenfarts]

I agree with many of the points voiced here, and I've made similar observations myself some time ago. On the other hand, I've always loved Daggerfall for having infinitely more content and playing variety than Arena.

I don't believe that limiting potions to guilds is a bad choice -- it's certainly a thing that is not obvious for new players, but it is a big part of the playing strategy in how you build your character. In short, joining a temple and progressing there to get potions is one of the priorities that you need to manage, making the game a more non-linear experience. Arena on the other hand is generally way more linear for the lack of factions/guilds and limited side-quests.

I do agree that Arena is more coherent both in the world that it presents and the visual art style. One can only blame Daggerfall's extremely turbulent development history for all its shortcomings, including the mishmash of art styles (e.g. three different types of NPC spites), loads of randomly generated content and game mechanics that may have sounded good on paper but did not work out well in practice. Concerning the art style, there have been various community attempts at re-drawing Daggerfall NPC sprites at higher resolutions in diverse art style, I wonder what Arena's art would look like with a similar approach. However, to complete this, additional frames would be needed for mobile enemies (they only have one direction facing the player in Arena) and their variations with different weapons etc. as mentioned above.

Sprites face all directions in Arena. They are rarely seen in the other directions unless using sanctuary or invisible. there was plans for sneaking at some point for the thief classes using the mouse movement, but it wasn't in the game.

I think there's someone in the process of porting some of the Arena monsters to Daggerfall, but more in Daggerfall's palette/style.

[Werewolf]

I agree with many of the points voiced here, and I've made similar observations myself some time ago. On the other hand, I've always loved Daggerfall for having infinitely more content and playing variety than Arena.

I don't believe that limiting potions to guilds is a bad choice -- it's certainly a thing that is not obvious for new players, but it is a big part of the playing strategy in how you build your character. In short, joining a temple and progressing there to get potions is one of the priorities that you need to manage, making the game a more non-linear experience. Arena on the other hand is generally way more linear for the lack of factions/guilds and limited side-quests.

I do agree that Arena is more coherent both in the world that it presents and the visual art style. One can only blame Daggerfall's extremely turbulent development history for all its shortcomings, including the mishmash of art styles (e.g. three different types of NPC spites), loads of randomly generated content and game mechanics that may have sounded good on paper but did not work out well in practice. Concerning the art style, there have been various community attempts at re-drawing Daggerfall NPC sprites at higher resolutions in diverse art style, I wonder what Arena's art would look like with a similar approach. However, to complete this, additional frames would be needed for mobile enemies (they only have one direction facing the player in Arena) and their variations with different weapons etc. as mentioned above.

Sprites face all directions in Arena. They are rarely seen in the other directions unless using sanctuary or invisible. there was plans for sneaking at some point for the thief classes using the mouse movement, but it wasn't in the game.

I think there's someone in the process of porting some of the Arena monsters to Daggerfall, but more in Daggerfall's palette/style.

Arena I think had better monsters overall. Daggerfall’s spiders and scorpions were disgusting, werewolves had awful sprites, there were way too many human enemies, vampires looked like human enemies unlike in Arena. It almost seemes that Daggerfall had a plethora of human enemies so they didn’t have to make more animals and monsters. Arena had more varied and well-drawn enemies.

Someone is porting the Arena monsters. Sounds great, got any pics.

[Werewolf]

I agree with many of the points voiced here, and I've made similar observations myself some time ago. On the other hand, I've always loved Daggerfall for having infinitely more content and playing variety than Arena.

I don't believe that limiting potions to guilds is a bad choice -- it's certainly a thing that is not obvious for new players, but it is a big part of the playing strategy in how you build your character. In short, joining a temple and progressing there to get potions is one of the priorities that you need to manage, making the game a more non-linear experience. Arena on the other hand is generally way more linear for the lack of factions/guilds and limited side-quests.

I do agree that Arena is more coherent both in the world that it presents and the visual art style. One can only blame Daggerfall's extremely turbulent development history for all its shortcomings, including the mishmash of art styles (e.g. three different types of NPC spites), loads of randomly generated content and game mechanics that may have sounded good on paper but did not work out well in practice. Concerning the art style, there have been various community attempts at re-drawing Daggerfall NPC sprites at higher resolutions in diverse art style, I wonder what Arena's art would look like with a similar approach. However, to complete this, additional frames would be needed for mobile enemies (they only have one direction facing the player in Arena) and their variations with different weapons etc. as mentioned above.

Sprites face all directions in Arena. They are rarely seen in the other directions unless using sanctuary or invisible. there was plans for sneaking at some point for the thief classes using the mouse movement, but it wasn't in the game.

I think there's someone in the process of porting some of the Arena monsters to Daggerfall, but more in Daggerfall's palette/style.

Arena I think had better monsters overall. Daggerfall’s spiders and scorpions were disgusting, werewolves had awful sprites and looked nothing like werewolves, there were way too many human enemies, vampires looked like human enemies unlike in Arena. It almost seems that Daggerfall had a plethora of human enemies so they didn’t have to make more animals and monsters. Arena had more varied and well-drawn enemies.

Someone is porting the Arena monsters. Sounds great, got any pics?

[MrFlibble]

Sprites face all directions in Arena. They are rarely seen in the other directions unless using sanctuary or invisible. there was plans for sneaking at some point for the thief classes using the mouse movement, but it wasn't in the game.

Oh, I wasn't aware of this. I suppose I just assumed that there are no other directions for enemies because they seem to be always facing the player.

But then again, one of Arena's inspirations is Legends of Valour, where I believe all characters and monsters have a full set of animations from all angles.

Arena I think had better monsters overall. Daggerfall’s spiders and scorpions were disgusting, werewolves had awful sprites, there were way too many human enemies, vampires looked like human enemies unlike in Arena. It almost seemes that Daggerfall had a plethora of human enemies so they didn’t have to make more animals and monsters. Arena had more varied and well-drawn enemies.

You probably know that originally Daggerfall was supposed to have fully hand-drawn NPCs and monsters, just like Arena? The pre-rendered sprites were the idea of Mark Jones, who created some on his own to show to Ted Peterson and Julian Lefay, who at first insisted that the sprites should be drawn. But because of time constraints, they had to streamline the process of creating sprites, which is why all human enemies and some of the monsters are very noticeably based upon the same dummy models like the human male and female bodies, skeleton and orc/daedra body.

The epitome of pre-rendered sprites came in Battlespire where Mark Jones created much more polished, high resolution sprites for all characters, including animated NPC flats.

With the few creatures remaining hand-drawn like the harpy, you can also see some of the early hand-drawn monster sprites in the form of creature statues (mostly showing undead beings), plus a few pre-release screenshots show a monster or two and some NPCs.

[imsobadatnicknames]

I do agree that Arena is more coherent both in the world that it presents and the visual art style.

Not sure I agree that Arena was more coherent than Daggerfall in terms of visual style. In Daggerfall the diference between hand-drawn and pre-rendered sprites is a little distracting, but in Arena there are some sprites that look extremely out of place too, even moreso than any sprites in Daggerfall.

E.g. these two creatures don't look like they belong anywhere near the same game

[MrFlibble]

Yup, Arena actually has a few pre-rendered creatures as well, and apparently the developers were not completely satisfied with them, hence the initial attempt to make everything hand-drawn in DF (at least, according to Mark Jones).

But you'll have to agree that there is a greater consistency between the player character sprite on the character screen, both types of town NPCs (static and mobile) and human enemies in Arena than in Daggerfall, because in the latter all these are of completely different styles, including two separate styles (and resolutions) of hand-drawn characters (the earliest ones resembling their Arena counterparts, but IIRC they were drawn by a different artist).

[Werewolf]

I do agree that Arena is more coherent both in the world that it presents and the visual art style.

Not sure I agree that Arena was more coherent than Daggerfall in terms of visual style. In Daggerfall the diference between hand-drawn and pre-rendered sprites is a little distracting, but in Arena there are some sprites that look extremely out of place too, even moreso than any sprites in Daggerfall.

E.g. these two creatures don't look like they belong anywhere near the same game

The wolves look so much better then the golems due to being hand-drawn. But still Arena has better sprites overall because there are less janky pre-rendered ones

[Dalebvr]

I really wish we hadn't lost the old Bethsoft boards. They were almost a development diary for DF, including the compromises they had to make due to time, or the fact that the tech simply wasn't up to the idea at the time. After almost 40 years I can't begin to quote, but a lot of the things mentioned here were discussed a lot then. I can't wait to see what Ted and Julian can crank out on the Unreal 5 engine.