Let's Play The Elder Scrolls Daggerfall Blind - Part 1 - My Nemesis, The Main Menu
16Yep, after months of torture in Elder Scrolls Arena, I decide to pick up Daggerfall. Call me crazy for even attempting it, but I am hopeful due to the fact that this game actually has people that like it better than the rest of the Elder Scrolls, something that can't be said for Arena. Having seen the entirety of Arena, I guess we can fully compare the two.
I decide to try it out for a bit, though I end up spending over an hour in the main menus without successfully doing anything besides creating my character. Yeah, I am terrible at RPGs, throw a bunch of choices at me when I have no idea what I am doing and I will probably do something terrible. So, yeah, if you are looking for gameplay you will be sorely disappointed as my headphones start to die before we can even finish with key bindings.
Probably the first noticeable difference, after the fact that we get a Bethesda Softworks cutscene with nothing else instead of a random scroll telling us about Tamriel, is the fact that the main menu has no music. While the main track of Elder Scrolls Arena was pretty soft, there was actually music being played, which makes it pretty silent and awkward here.
Choosing a New Character doesn't start the loud music track where you watch some scrolls sequences, instead you just get thrown immediately into character creation. While Elder Scrolls Arena would have music blaring during all of this, character generation is pretty much entirely silent except for some sound effects. I also feel like I am playing some old war or strategy game for some reason, it has that quiet and intricate nature. Note also that choosing a province was actually pretty much in the middle of selection before instead of the first thing, we had to pick our class and name before all of that before. We also get some more description on each class that tells me more about them than a simple name, including drum sound effects with something related to their province. It isn't exactly needed this time around, but it could have helped when I first played Arena and had no idea what a Argonian even was.
After that we get to pick our class, much like Arena, though with the ability to pick a Custom Class. A big difference between Arena and this is the introduction of skills under the main stats. I can somewhat grasp it due to Morrowind, but the problem is that they don't tell me what any of the skills do, even as a Custom Class. I just pick a Rogue again and hope for the best. We then get asked a lot of questions that I have no idea as to the purpose of (we had to do this twice since I got interrupted during the middle of this). We also get the name and gender things around this time as we did before.
Stats are managed much like Arena, we have a certain amount of points and can apply them to whatever we wish. The big difference is that things are more intuitive, we don't click Done and then Reroll, instead a Reroll button just exists. Furthermore, we can save rolls instead of dealing with frustrations with trying to get a relatively decent roll again. Needless to say, I struggle, but it works better than Arena. We also do something similar for our skills, then select our head (now from a disembodied body, we haven't seen our body yet interestingly enough) and have some sort of difficulty thing that we set to the max in an apparent sign of my eventual doom.
We then get the cutscenes of the game, which consists of a lot more voiced dialog, though the problem is that there are no subtitles so I get heavily confused what is going on. I have no idea what the book said. The live action king basically told us that there is a ghost dude causing trouble and to stop him, not sure if he is around Daggerfall or what that has to do with the town, and that we also have to destroy a letter meant for the Queen from the Emperor of some personal matter (something suggests a very graphic love note).
We then get text that we rode a boat and failed and find ourselves in a cave. We then get a tutorial, though the text so far has been hard to pay attention to because I am also busy with a bunch of key bindings. Yep, unlike Arena we can actually set our keys without messing up Dosbox and having to type everything with Alt. That is one annoyance out of the way. Saved games even get a pretty picture to tell me what I saved. We get the turning arrows again, but this time we can actually disable them, meaning no more clicking and getting frustrated with keys! The HUD is much like Arena, just things placed in different spots such as the compass at the bottom of the screen. Oh, and turning sounds up and down actually work. Amazing.
So, yeah, we didn't get much progress, but we did get to see that we have the potential for things to be a lot less frustrating here than Arena. We can only hope...
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