Gameplay of The Elder Scrolls series

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents 1 The Elder Scrolls: Arena 1.1 Development 2 The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall 2.1 Character creation 2.2 Interface 2.3 Combat 3 The Elder Scrolls Legends: Battlespire 4 The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard 5 The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind 5.1 Transportation 5.2 Character creation 5.3 Skill system 5.4 Interface 5.5 Free-form design 5.6 Combat 6 The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 6.1 Transportation 6.2 Character creation 6.3 Interface 7 References

[edit] The Elder Scrolls: Arena

Main article: The Elder Scrolls: Arena

[edit] Development

The Elder Scrolls: Arena began its development as a gladiator-style arena combat game.^[1][2] Had this concept been followed through to an eventual release, it would have consisted predominantly of the player character voyaging about the land of Tamriel with a band of fighters, fighting your way through local competitions on to regional ones, and eventually on through to the grand championship in the Imperial City.^[2] As development progressed, this initial vision was lost, as RPG elements were tacked on in increasing number to the initial arena combat substructure. The player was allowed to meander about the towns he visited, and later still to raid dungeons with team. Eventually the entire conceptual underpinnings of the game were overhauled, and the game became a full-fledged RPG.^[1] No arena combat game ever ended up being coded, and only fragments of text remain from the initial conceptualizing stages of the game.^[2]

[edit] The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

Main article: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

While the initial design of Daggerfall envisioned a reuse of Arena's raycast engine, an engine with similarities to Doom, where the player would travel through a 2D world redrawn to look 3D, Bethesda softworks decided instead to create a fully 3D engine.^[3]

[edit] Character creation

Daggerfall begins with a menu. The player first chooses a race and a sex, next a class, next special abilities, next a face, and a name.^[4][5][6][7] From this point the player chooses their own biography, either through a series of questions, a randomized fast start, or a series of die rolls. Each choice, random value, or assigned dice role, could possibly affect the value of the player character's starting skill levels, attributes, inventory, repuatation, affiliation, special abilities, or weaknesses.^[8] From this point on, the player is dropped unconscious into the game world, to be awoken in the secluded cave of Privateer's Hold.^[9]

[edit] Interface

Daggerfall uses a "more or less" mouse-based interface and offers fully customizable hotkeys.^[6] The game offers the player both a 3D and 2D automap; the 3D offering full rotational freedom of movement, the 2D offering merely a topdown view.^[5][6] In contrast to Morrowind, the game offers the player the chance to annotate the map, though some reviewers found the specific mechanisms by which the system operated made the feature pointless.^[6]

[edit] Combat

Attacks may be made and controlled Daggerfall solely through the use of a mouse. A variety of possible attacks handled through a combination of the device's directional and depressionary movements.^[6] There are four possible combinations in all, with the choices offering tradeoffs between hit chance and hit damage.^[5]

[edit] The Elder Scrolls Legends: Battlespire

Main article: The Elder Scrolls Legends: Battlespire

[edit] The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard

Main article: The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard

[edit] The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Main article: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Like previous entries in the series, Morrowind is primarily a first-person RPG, playing from a character's eye view in a 3D environment. Third-person perspective is also included, but has been called "next to impossible" to use for any length of time.^[10] The player controls one character,^[11] though various NPCs may join the character temporarily,^[12] and in the expansions the main character can hire mercenaries as followers.

[edit] Transportation

The decision was made early on in the development of Morrowind to scrap most of Daggerfall's fast-travel system, where players were capable of instantly traveling great distances, to encourage travel by foot.^[13] However, Morrowind retains aspects of Daggerfall's system by way of Silt Striders, great insectlike beasts who provide instantaneous fast-travel between the major towns of Vvardenfell,^[14] teleportation spells,^[15] and other various minor ferrymen.^[16][17]

[edit] Character creation

Morrowind begins with the player imprisoned, though in the midst of being set free. A well-received^[18][10][19] tutorial following the release moves the player through the process of character creation.^[20] The player is successively asked questions by a slave, an officer, and a bureaucrat as the player is registered as a free citizen; choosing the player character's name, sex, race, birthsign, and class.^[10] These affect the player's starting attributes, skills, and abilities.^[21][22][23] In a throwback to the Ultima series,^[10][24][18] the player has a chance to answer a series of moral questions to determine their class. To accommodate the successive menus and ease the player into the game, the opening sequence uses extensive scripting, and is one of the few parts of the game to do so.^[25]

[edit] Skill system

The player character's proficiency with a skill is increased either by practice or training. Practice involves performing the specific actions associated with a given trait. In order to become better with using armor or a type of weapon, the character must be involved in combat using the armor or the weapon. In order to become better with using magic spells, the character must learn spells and practice casting them.^[26] As skill level increases so does the character's ability to hit opponents with a weapon, block opponent hits with a shield, and throw spells without failing. Some skills, e.g. Athletics or Acrobatics, can be increased by running about or by jumping while walking about. The player levels up their character as a whole by leveling up individual skills from their major and minor skill lists-a set determined by their choice of class-a total of ten times. Each time the player levels up their character, they select three attributes to augment as well. The player is better able to augment abilities related to their skill set, as each levelled up skill adds to the multiplier by which the ability is augmented.^[24][27][28]

This mildly complex reciprocal system was generally praised, with some few exceptions. IGN, though finding the manual's description of the system unclear, found the classes well balanced and well designed for all play styles,^[27] and GameSpot found the system clear and sensible.^[24] PC Gamer, by contrast, found the system unbalanced, with combat privileged over other features.^[11] Computer Gaming World felt the system's privileging of combinations of single-handed combat weapons and shields over double-handed weapons unnecessarily exploitable, but appreciated the freedom offered by the broad skillset and action-dependent leveling.^[19] GameSpy gave strong commendation to the system, stating that "The advancement system makes so much sense that it makes other games, even games set in the D&D world such as Baldur's Gate, look silly by comparison".^[14] One critic felt that Morrowinds system showed signs of inspiration from RuneQuest.^[29]

[edit] Interface

Inventory, local maps, usable spells, and player abilities are accessed and manipulated by way of 4 resizeable windows.^[16][27] The player is able to converse with NPCs using similar resizeable menus containing a main body of text and a sidebar to the right with selectable conversation topics. Words in the main body of text are hyperlinked to related topics, a system that has been commended for its intuitiveness.^[16][30] The text-heavy nature of dialogue was a minor complaint for reviewers of the Xbox version of the game, finding the text more suitable for a PC resolution than an NTSC one.^[31] Game developer Todd Howard has described the game as "very object oriented";^[12] most of the common objects the player encounters, "books, candles, knives, forks", may be rearranged about the gamespace and added to the inventory by the player,^[16][32] and items, once placed, never move or vanish.^[33]

The player has a journal which is automatically updated with information from time to time following conversations with NPCs and important developments in the plot, each new entry following all those previous. Though IGN and GamePro commended the general interface for its relative ease of use,^[27][34] the journal was almost universally reviled. The journal was found to quickly become a "muddled mess",^[35] "hundreds of pages long",^[36] without any useful method of organization by quest title or completion level.^[11] Computer Gaming World simply called the feature an "anal-retentive nightmare of confusion", and called it one of the game's two greatest shortcomings.^[19] The system was overhauled in Morrowind's expansion pack Tribunal, allowing the player to sort quests individually and by completion, much to the pleasure of critics.^[37][38]

[edit] Free-form design

Morrowind, following the tradition established by its predecessors in The Elder Scrolls series,^[39] attempts to establish a completely free-form world, with no constricting boundaries on the player's actions. From the beginning of the game, the player is left in a world where they are left to roam, steal, quest and explore, without necessarily following the main quest.^[11] Morrowind Lead Designer Ken Rolston has called the main quest "of secondary importance" in comparison to the setting and side-quests.^[40] To encourage this behavior, Morrowind, in addition to creating an extensive main quest, provides detailed discursive quests for a variety of factions, including various guilds, religious organizations and aristocratic houses, in addition to mini-quests found by mere exploration. This gameplay style, sometimes called sandbox style gameplay, is seen by some as liberating, but by others as confusing. Morrowind's weapon and spell making utilities have also been found to be open to exploitation, with shrewd players finding ways to unbalance the game, producing weapons and abilities that can make the game's tasks extremely easy to complete. Imbalances between Morrowind's 21^[22] character classes have been noted as well, with mage and thief classes found to be at a disadvantage to fighter classes.^[18]

[edit] Combat

Combat in Morrowind was generally found to be simple,^[41][19] one reviewer describing it as a "purely hack-and-slash affair",^[36] with others expressing similar feelings.^[19] The simplest attack, a chop, is performed with a left click, while the somewhat more complex slash and thrust attacks are performed by a combination of that same generic click with different tappings of the keyboard's directional keys.^[41] Reviewers found little value in choosing amongst the three melee attacks, as none provide any particular advantage. Reviewers and strategists reccommended that the player choose to disable the feature.^[41][42] Questioned for a comparison combat system during the game's development, developer Pete Hines likened Morrowind's system to that of Jedi Knight.^[43]

Each weapon possesses a rating determining its strength in each of these areas. A combination of hidden arithmetic modifiers upon each combatant's skills determines whether or not the attack hits. In the original, the player was given no indication of the amount of health left in their enemies, and no indication of the strength of their attacks. Reviewers took the absence badly, wishing for a more developed visible response system.^[41][24][35] The combat system was poorly received in most quarters, with GameSpot characterizing it as one of the game's major weak points,^[36] and GameSpy devoting the majority of its minor complaints to it.^[35] On a more favourable note, IGN found tactical tricks emerging from within the game's workings, as particular skills, spells and abilities lent themselves to certain strategies. As an example, IGN noted that a levitating character was well suited to kill melee-capable beasties upon the ground from afar, their numbers being too stupid and enraged to flee from the onslaught.^[41]

[edit] The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Main article: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

[edit] Transportation

The fast-travel system returned in Oblivion, to modest praise.^[44][45] In an interview with RPGamer, Producer Gavin Carter stated that the return of the system came in response to the Elder Scrolls fan community's suggestions, as something that "the fan community has requested again and again."^[46]

[edit] Character creation

Oblivion generally follows Morrowind's character creation schema, and was equally praised for its design. Rather than being left completely free to roam from the moment the character is created, Oblivion gives the player some time to choose their own play style, and recommends certain character classes in accordance with that choice. The recommendations system was called "clever" by GameSpot.^[47] The character creation system also allowed greater depth of visual specification than Morrowind, offering the ability to customize skin tone, facial structure, hair styles, eye color, and various other features individually,^[48] rather than choosing a set combination of textures and meshes, as was the case in Morrowind. As such, the system was lauded for providing a depth of specification unattainable by other contemporary games.^[48][49]

[edit] Interface

Replacing Morrowind's resizeable windows, Oblivion developed a system of nested menus of fixed proportion. The interface was marked out as seemingly influenced to an excess by the needs of the Xbox 360, affording little opportunity for the free exercise of the mouse and keyboard.^[50][51][52] In contrast to Morrowind's PC-sized font, Oblivion was said to have "enormous 36-point text font", a feature most unappealing to PC reviewers.^[50] Oblivion contains a hotkey system, though one that was seen by some reviewers as insufficiently large, and limited in scope. IGN complained about the lack of a simple hotkey-switching system, wherein a player could have a "hotkey set for magic, one for combat, one for fighting undead, one for marksman, etc.". Owing to the proliferation of items, spells, weapons, and armor, which were numbered in the hundreds, Oblivion's limit of 8 hotkey assignments was seen as constraining. The lack of the system meant, to IGN, that the player would have to continuously switch hotkey assignments to match the current circumstances, making the game "more of a hassle than it should be."^[53] GameSpy's PC review complained that certain interface menus were not assignable to certain keys. Singling out a particular issue, GameSpy found the journal and inventory not assignable to "J" or "I".^[50] Amongst GameSpot's few complaints was one regarding a slight lack of streamlining in the inventory.^[51]

There was some minor disagreement between reviewers regarding the ease on the PC controls as compared to the controls on the Xbox. GameSpot, in its PC review, felt them to be equally suited to the Xbox and the PC,^[51] while GamePro felt the PC controls somewhat better as regards response, menu selection, and ranged combat.^[49] Elsewhere, GameSpot was of a different mind. In a feature comparing Oblivion on the Xbox 360 and PC, GameSpot concluded that the game felt more natural on the Xbox 360. Menus were easier to flip through using the shoulder buttons rather than mousing over them, and the rumble pack made controlling the Xbox more tactile. The ability of remapping controls on the PC was also noted by GameSpot as a relevant feature, but, in the last analysis, it was deemed to fall on the player's relative tolerance of PC and Xbox controls.^[52]

[edit] References

v • d • e The Elder Scrolls video games

Main titles: Arena • Daggerfall • Morrowind (Tribunal • Bloodmoon) • Oblivion (Knights of the Nine • Shivering Isles) Other: Battlespire • Redguard • Dawnstar • Stormhold • Shadowkey