Saturday, November 24, 2018

Elder Scrolls Arena, First Hour of Gameplay

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The first game of the Elder Scrolls that I ever played was Skyrim, it blew me as I never saw something as open as that game in my life, even with Grand Theft Auto I feel that the mobility was limited and the interaction with the NPC's was also extremely restricted.

With the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim it was the first time I played freely in an scenario that let me interact with everything around, and it was a big world map also; as a player I was impressed and it gave me the idea to play the other games without any order just because I wanted to enjoy the experience.

It wasn't until this week, where I finally decided to play the first game ever, I bought it along with Daggerfall as I never had the chance to play them when I was younger and I am extremely impressed because there wasn't something as Arena back in 1994, and is easy to see based on the technical capabilities of the time why it influenced players through different decades and the development of other games.

I couldn't imagine my 10 years old self facing the first dungeon and getting killed without even saving and having to restart over, my 34 years old self was screaming when I got killed within the first ten minutes and I didn't even save it, learning from the experience I save every single step that I took because I noticed this game is unforgiven with new players and it can surprise old ones also, the controllers aren't intuitive albeit with some hours of gameplay they tend to get easy.

 One thing that happened with old games loading times within the world map it was that everything would pop out and enemies could just spawn in front of you and kill you really quickly without you even noticing, it happened to me twice with rats because they were following me and I didn't got a clue they were so close.

What is fantastic about the game is that is mostly automatic generated making the experience different for every gamer which for 94' that was a big feauture, adding that it has a day and night cycle, and if you are stuck outside at night beware because enemies will approach from everywhere.

The enviroment is tense, you feel you can die in every corner, but also it gives magnificent scenarios that are quite large to explorer and a wide variety of NPC's and enemies that are lurking everywhere.

The soundtrack is cool, and the addition of cinematic sequences makes the game quite charming, as if it's a little jewel from almost 3 decades ago that is still as relevant as it was when it came out on the market.

One interesting aspect is that this game is relic of is time, it's on the same era as Doom, Wolfstein 3D, Quake Grand Theft, the first two Monkey Island, cult game Normality and the classic Ultima IV. Games that influenced storytellers but also the industry towards PC gaming towards the development of 3D games in PC gaming.


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