Second Impressions: The Elder Scrolls: Chapter I: Arena (PC)

The following will be my second impressions of The Elder Scrolls: Chapter I: Arena, seeing as how I already had a first impression, but I felt that that article was written a while ago (January 2013) and since then, I have changed my approach to the game and therefore, my impressions of the game have changed dramatically.

About a month ago, I was rereading the article I wrote about failing at being able to successfully load and play Daggerfall (TES: Chapter II) and was going over the comments that had been left.  I followed the link that one Roger left which took me to a wiki page for setting up Daggerfall, that by default is in French or German (if the page does not have the "_EN" suffix), but thanks to the miracles of modern technology, Chrome does a wonderful job at translating the pages into something readable by my uneducated mind.  For both the Daggerfall and Arena pages, I was able to download versions of the game where all of the previous DOSBox commands came "pre-installed."  This was not a problem for Arena, but the chance at having to play Daggerfall without the risk of having the game tell me the previous problems I had were again present, was much welcome.  So the downloads commenced followed by the playing.

The first mission I received after emerging from the spectral gate in the Imperial prisons (surprise, surprise) was to escort a woman from the town of Vullain Haven to Wasten Brukbrook in the east.  Now, I figured that that meant that Wasten Brukbrook would be the next town over, so I began traveling on foot.  It was not until I had exited the game to look up the control setup that I discovered "Shift+M."  

This brought up a map of Tamriel (the explorable world), which then brought up a map of the province I was in when I clicked on that.  I was told that it would take me 17 days to travel from Vullain Haven to Wasten Brukbrook, on the southeastern part of Valenwood.

First off, I learned that by pressing "Shift+M" I was able to bring up the world map, and by clicking on a particular province, I am able to travel to any of the city states or towns in that province.  Finding this out was the very definition of a "game changer."

This was when I decided that I would greatly alter my approach to how I play Arena.  When out traveling in a world without topography, getting lost is beyond easy.

That mountain is really just a matte painting and does not count as topography.

My approach to the game goes now as follows.  If I am on a time sensitive mission (escort/rescue/kill the beast), I will fast travel from wherever I am.  Often times these missions give enough time to fast travel to the desired location, complete the goal and return if need be.  I have yet to come across a quest that would need me to speedrun through a dungeon.

If I am on my way from one town to another, I will exit the town by normal means (the city gate) and head in the direction of the town looking for dungeons along the way.  I will explore said dungeon, often collecting gear and other items and once I am either carrying at my weight or inventory capacity, I finish going through the dungeon (because having a completed map is OCD important), killing as many enemies as I can in order to gain experience then once I exit the dungeon, I fast travel to the next town to sell my collected booty.  I could just as easily fast travel between cities, but where is the fun in that?  Plus I would not be at level 15 having not collected even one piece of the Staff of Chaos.

Currently in the game, traveling between cities takes an average of three days, at least in Valenwood.  So 72 hours of straight walking towards the destination.  I then figured out that 1 minute in real time translates to roughly 12 minutes of in-game time.  So if I wanted to be "hard-core," I would have to spend six hours in real time in order to reach a city 72 hours away.  I do not think that Bethesda believed that players would not use fast travel.  Keep in mind that the town I had to travel to was 17 days away plus the return trip would total 34 days.  I personally would not want to spend 68 hours of real time completing that one quest.  On the other hand, I would be very interested to find out if travelling from one site to another is actually possible without fast travel, but that might have to wait for another time.

In other aspects of the game, I am able to appreciate what Bethesda was trying to do with Arena back when it was released in 1994.  In the instruction manual, the creators often reference pen-and-paper RPGs (Dungeons & Dragons) and even with the character creation and how the stats are affected such as Strength, Wisdom, Endurance, Personality (Constitution and Charisma respectively in D&D), Intelligence, et cetera are all direct references to D&D.  Even the armor rating is taken from THAC0 where a lower number is preferable to a more intuitive higher number.  Bethesda had also expanded upon the standard classes of Fighter, Mage, Cleric and Thief and developed the following subclasses, each with their own bonuses and drawbacks.  For example Thief, Burglar, Assassin, Rogue, Acrobat and Bard are all subclasses to the Thief header.  I blindly chose a thief because unlocking ALL THE THINGS!! is better than say, being able to wear enchanted armor.

There are a few annoyances though, as is to be expected with playing a game that was created 20 years ago on a semi-modern computing device that was built within the last five years.  Now I do not know how often Arena was buggy or to what extent those bugs occurred, but at least once a day I am graced by a crashed game in one form or another.  While the crashes are not all too frequent, they are very annoying, especially when I am about to be picking up some sweet fwag!

But at least the Male is bigger than the Happy4 turning right to the zero eighth notes.  Amiright!?

Having the game randomly crash has also gotten me to save my game after almost every enemy encounter as I have run into monsters that have killed me in two hits while I have full life.  But my main advice for this game: save often, even after doing inane things like selling swag or before leaving a town.

With this renewed interest in Arena, I feel that I am able to enjoy the game a lot more than my first runthrough, although in the article I did sound quite optimistic despite when I last talked to Dr. Potts, before restarting the game again, I mentioned that my biggest issue was finding my way around the world on a 2D surface.  I will probably put out a post on Friday regarding my choice in character and picking a Bosmer (Wood Elf) female and naming her Silandra, so stay tuned if that happens to be your bag of chips.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

I'm Onto The Next One

My Time With The Elder Scrolls Online Beta Testing (PC)

Now that Bethesda and Zenimax have officially lifted the Non-Disclosure Agreement, I am now able to babble to my hearts content.  Keep in mind though that this will end up being a longer post than usual as I will be blabbing about experiences from three different beta tests going back to November of 2013.

With that in mind, I present to you:

The first of many loading screens, since updated.

First off, I am not exactly sure how many beta tests Bethesda/Zenimax have run, but I was able to take part in the last three (November 2013, January & February 2014).  The current word is that there will be one last beta test before the game is released on April 4th of this year.  My experience that I will relate to you in frustratingly bad detail will be from only those three beta tests.

Secondly, before November 2013, I had never played an MMO of any kind.  I never played World of Warcraft at any point even though I loved Warcraft I and II (still sad that I never played III).  I never played Final Fantasy XI despite my general love of the Final Fantasy franchise, although that love began to wain with Final Fantasy's VII, VIII and X, so it's no surprise that I didn't do anything with XI.  With all of this in mind, it will be pretty obvious that I am not hep with all of the lingo and understanding of acronyms and verbiage.  During the post play survey, I had to look up what LFG meant and I am still not 100% on what "aggro" means in the context of a battle and how it works.  Maybe I do know but I don't know it.  Even though I find it hilarious, this rant that I first saw as a flash back in 2006 doesn't mean a whole lot to me.

Thirdly, with the exception of the last beta test, each session was over a weekend that I had to work. At least two of the days of the test.  In November, I didn't work the first day, but the test did not start until 12pm PST, but as to be expected during a stress test, the server was overloaded at many stages.  The above picture I took after I had logged on.  The progress bar got about as far as the circular band before if froze and I had to restart.  Three hours in I was finally able to make it to the character generation portion, but I was booted out a handful of times before I could create my character:

Bosmer Nightblade, part of the Aldmeri Dominion (November)

In the forums (where the majority of people were very cool with not everyone coming from an MMO background), a lot of people were coming up with names that would be based on the race of character they were playing while I chose a name that people might recognize me by as opposed to a name that would blend in with the world.  So, I chose to be a male Bosmer (Wood Elf) and I was immediately excited that the heights of the races was restored to something more similar to their respective heights in Morrowind; that Orsimer (Orcs) are larger than Humans who are larger than Dunmer (Dark Elves) who are larger than Bosmer, et cetera.  While I am usually not a fan of tattooing my characters, I early on decided that I would give all of my characters the same tattoo pattern, just because.

Because I am lame, I didn't take any pictures during the character creation process, but I will say that it is somewhat similar to the process in Skyrim, but different in other ways.  For instance, you are able to change the general shape/look of the body to be muscular, large or thin and the face to be soft, heroic or angular.  The video put out by Zenimax Online does a good quick job of describing the process.

Moving onto the beta test.  While playing each time, I always had the fact in the back of my mind that what I was playing was not a finished product.  There were going to be errors, which was the whole point of the beta existing.  We were there to find bugs, problems, glitches and whatnot with the game so that it would be as bug-free as possible come launch day.  

My first time though, I initially felt that the controls (keyboard & mouse) felt very loose, almost as if I wasn't totally in control of my character.  Granted I was coming from playing Morrowind which has somewhat sluggish controls and your player does run pretty slowly, even when sprinting, but after a while, I became used to how the character moved/ran/interacted with the environment.

Battles/Fighting in the game is something that I have not noticed any changes to since November.  The fighting has seemed, for lack of a better adjective, weak.  Yes, when you swing your weapon and it comes into contact with an enemy damage is done, except that the contact part does not feel real.  I know that is an odd sentence but I cannot find an easier way to explain what it is that I am trying to say.  Here's another go: when your sword (or your weapon of choice) comes into contact with an enemy, the weapon passes through them as if they were not there, but damage is still done, but the feeling that you have inflicted damage is not there.

My first playthrough, I encountered a number of animation glitches while trying to draw my bow back.  I don't have any pictures or a capture card, but my character would draw the arrow and then begin to rotate very rapidly in a 90 degree arc.  When I released the arrow I would hit my mark, but the character was still wigging out.  In the last beta test, the main animation glitch was that my character would use a long range attack and the animation would stick at the end with the last bit of sound effect that accompanied so the effect sounded like buzzing tin foil.

The most frequent bug that I came across was that while exiting out of a conversation with an NPC, the dialogue options would be gone (as they were supposed to be), but I would be stuck in the same frame, unable to move, re-establish dialogue.  My only option at that point was to submit a bug report (by typing /bug in the chat window) and then killing myself (/stuck) so that I could respawn at a "wayshrine."  A random bug/glitch/error that I encountered and that I actually took a picture of was during the January beta test.  I was playing as a Breton Templar (Cleric) and running around part of the island and came across a missing graphic:

Just in case one "Missing" didn't get the point across.

Mainly because this didn't turn out to be the Dwarven Part that I was searching for, I thought this was pretty funny.

The last bug that I encountered with my Breton Templar, which was a game killing bug, was that I accidentally did a quest in a closed off area out of order and as a result, I was unable to leave the area or proceed with the quest line.

How many Orsimer does it take to kill an invisible prisoner?

What is going on here, is that you are in a memory.  The Orc with the arrow above his head should be standing next to a prisoner.  Upon talking to the Orc he states the prisoners crimes and you decide if they should live or die.  Being an Orc (in the memory I was an Orc), I felt that the prisoners should die, so I found four prisoners and had them all killed.  Only after the fact did I talk to the person who gave me the quest for the area.  The arrows above the specific Orcs appeared but the prisoners remained dead.  I was unable to reload the quest and even after I killed myself (/stuck) I was permanently stuck.  I submitted my /bug report but I was unable to use this character for the remainder of the beta test.

Over the course of the three beta tests, I did see some changes.  First there was a sound effect of coins dropping after purchasing or selling an item that was not present in the November test.  The second was the inclusion of two enemies that greatly expanded the first tutorial area, but I won't say anymore to prevent spoilers, of which I am trying to be somewhat vigilant.

The music!  I just realized I haven't said anything about the music.  From what I can tell, based on the music in the menus and in game music, Jeremy Soule is still the composer for the Elder Scrolls Online, although that is not confirmed.  The credits in the game consists of "Credits Text 1" through "Credits Text 3."  After listening to the music, I do believe that Jeremy Soule is still the composer.  At some point between the January and February beta tests, a lot of the menu music changed and while it does sound less dark than the previous versions, there is a lot more use of a choir, which in my book is very rarely a bad thing.  

And while we are on the topic of sound, Bethesda and Zenimax have gathered quite a cast to handle some of the voice acting.  The "only" voices that I came across, due to my inability to reach Level 10, was that of Michael Gambon and John Cleese.  Again, I will not say in what capacity they offered their vocal talents, but I will say that they were used very well.  I am told that this cast also includes Bill Nighy, Kate Beckinsale, Alfred Molina, Malcolm McDowell and Lynda Carter.  Not that just because the vocal cast is notable will make the writing any good, but the vocal notables do do a great job with the material that they have been given.

That being said, there was not as much reading material as one might have found in any of the previous Elder Scrolls games.  Books were few and far between and when you were able to read a book, it most likely came from a bookshelf full of books rather than a single volume.  This is something that saddened me greatly during all of the beta tests.    Because The Elder Scrolls Online takes place in an era that has, as of yet, been unplayable (ie the Second Era), I never really felt that I was playing roughly 700 years before the events in The Elder Scrolls: The Arena begin or nearly 900 years before the events in Skyrim.  Reading books is what helped me solidify my immersion in the Elder Scrolls games so I was a little sad to find out that, at least, as of the February test, literature would be somewhat scarce.  Or, maybe I am just not looking hard enough, which is always a possibility.

There is a lot that I have not touched on that is present in The Elder Scrolls Online.  There is a crafting system where you can create items related to your specific ethnicity and learn those of other groups as well.  I did not do anything in the way of crafting as I tried to spend the majority of my time doing story and side quests to raise levels.  There are group dungeons that you can only explore with three other people.  I am sure that voice chat is a thing, but I never looked into it as I primarily played by myself and didn't bother with anyone else.  And finally, there is the whole of the mass battles in the PvP area of Cyrodiil.  As briefly stated somewhere up there in all those words, I said that I never made it to level 10 (to note, level 17 was the goal and max for the last three beta tests) which is the minimum level required to enter Cyrodiil and the massive PvP areas.  I did not.  I also do not know about controller support for the PC as I only played with keyboard & mouse.  It would seem like controller support of PC should be a thing as there are plenty of people who simply prefer this way of playing a video game.  I guess these will all just be wait and see.

In closing (because it's late for me and I still need to sleep, as of the writing of this), I will say that I have (so far) enjoyed my time with the Elder Scrolls Online beta tests.  There have been a number of bugs/glitches that have hampered progress and some occurred frequently enough to make me turn the game off because of having to kill myself to become "unstuck."  The beginning areas, which act as tutorials were very linear, almost annoyingly so when compared to other games in the series, but I figure that they are simply that, tutorial areas, for you to become used to your character and to build their levels and abilities up a bit before putting you out in the big bad scary world of people yelling over the internet.

To date, I have had a very fun time playing, despite all the bugs/glitches that I would expect to be present in a beta test and I know that both Conklederp and myself are looking forward to the end of March when the game will launch for pre-orders and April for the rest of the PC market.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
People Running 'round, It's Five O'Clock


P.S.
I wanted to share some of the other pictures I took during the three beta sessions.  Sadly though, I did not take many pictures of bugs that occurred during game play as most were either based around animations that would not translate to pictures or because the glitch would not have looked interesting in picture form.  So here are some others which you may or may not be interested in.

Breton Templar, part of the Daggerfall Covenant (January)

Dunmer Kightblade (Theif) as part of the Ebonheart Pact (February)

Mudcrabs feasting on a washed up corpse of an NPC.

It's never a good thing to see and/or be near a portal that leads to Oblivion.

First Impressions: Gunman Clive

It is fun!


I have however experienced a bug during the second level boss that seems to be a fairly common occurrence.  Hörberg Productions (the creator of Gunman Clive) has issued a forum post saying that they'll be releasing a patch sometime after the holidays in 2013.  The current pre-patch fix is to have the 3D turned off during the boss fight then set back to normal after the boss.  I don't even care I like the game so much.

In the game you can chose to play as either Clive or Ms. Johnson.  As Clive, you're trying to save Ms. Johnson and as Ms. Johnson, you're trying to save Clive who is kidnapped in the exact same way/animation.  The only difference (that I've experienced) is that Ms. Johnson can float as she descends, similar to Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2.  Even the ruffles on Ms. Jonson's dress flutter while she's descending.  It's a nice little touch.

The graphics are very brown, as almost everything is in this game.  It also has a sketch look that adds some kind of charm.  I think it does anyway.  I've linked the trailer below (again), because really, really like this game.  Even more so because it was only $1.99, but that's not the only reason.  The game play is simple: Jump w/ B, Shoot w/ Y, Move w/ either the directional pad or the joystick.

Like Contra, there are a number of powered up guns you can collect.  Apart from your single shot pistol, there's a scatter shot gun; there's a "heat" seeking bullet; and lastly (at least through the 2nd level anyway), there's a large slow moving large bullet that does extra damage against the enemies.

I guess I should talk briefly about the enemies.  There are your standard thugs who shoot at you from the ground, windows and blue colored trap doors and all take only one hit to kill.  At times they ride horses at you and sadly, your only defense is to shoot the horse so it jumps over you then stumbles and presumably dies.  Okay, I lied.  You can simply duck and the horse and rider will jump over you, but where's the fun in that?  There are also wolves that charge you, pelicans that drop bombs, jumping rabbits and a duck.  Maybe the duck is a cultural thing?  Maybe they're like the monkeys in Time Splitters?

The music is very nice too.  There's a western flare to it that doesn't come across as unintentionally hokey.  Think of the music in Blazing Saddles.  It knows the genre and what our expectations for a western/cowboy world are and it delivers and all the music I've come across has been catchy.  Kudos to Arne Hörberg for his compositions.

So if you have a 3DS (it's also available on Android and Apple iOS), I highly (highly) recommend Gunman Clive.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I Can Still Feel My Toes