Lemming42
Arcane
Inspired by some discussion about the flexibility (or lack thereof) of the Elder Scrolls games in another thread recently, I thought I'd try to go through all the main games in the series with no kills.
THE RULES:
- No causing damage to another creature or NPC, whether through physical attacks or through spells.
- No recruiting companions and having them do the killing for me.
- As far as possible, no use of Frenzy spells or anything else that would make me obviously directly responsible for violence.
- If someone dies because of their own aggression toward me - for example, casting an AoE spell at me that causes the caster to be killed in the blast - that is acceptable.
- IMPORTANT FOR ARENA: NO USE OF SPELL REFLECTION! I'll explain shortly but this makes the entire game into a total joke and the only way to make it interesting is to forbid myself from using this spell. In later games, I might reconsider its use.
Here's all the parts so far:
The Elder Scrolls: Arena
PART 1: ARENA (the first few screenshots are shit because I captured them with DOSBox itself, they get better partway through).
In this part, we roll a believable and down-to-earth character, meet a ghost and ignore her advice, solve a challenging puzzle, get sexually assaulted by rats, drown, and learn of the mysterious Shift Gate.
And so on and so forth. I'll sum it up: Tamriel fucking sucks and is so filled with violence and death that the people who live there have nicknamed it "The Arena", hence the title. On to the plot.
Here's the gist: Patrick Stewart has been consigned to a nightmare dimension by a drag queen named Jagar Tharn.
Tharn uses illusion magic to impersonate the Emperor and usurp the throne. His understudy, a woman named Ria Silmane, figures out what's happened but Tharn murders and vaporises her before she can raise the alarm. He then starts summoning monsters and turning them into "twisted versions of the Imperial Guard". Nobody finds this, or Ria's disappearance, suspicious enough to investigate, apparently. Unfortunately for Tharn, Ria's magical skill enabled her spirit to remain in Mundus, and now she's planning to contact a hero (me!) to reveal Tharn's plot.
Anyway, here's the best character creation music of all time:
If you've never played Arena, there's a bunch of differences from later games which I'll explain here. First is that you can't make a custom class (which is what will trivialise all the later games up til Skyrim removes classes altogether). You have to pick from a list of classes, some of which are very obviously better choices than others.
We're going Mage as our class and Altmer as our race, for obvious reasons (Altmer get 3x INT spell points). The character's sex doesn't matter - I think Nord men (and, apparently, Argonian women) get a paltry starting bonus to strength that a female character can easily overcome during char creation, so it's mostly cosmetic. You'll generally want to pick female because all the male face choices are horrible, but I'm picking male this time because I always play women and it's time to shake it up with some testosterone.
With the help of an Altmer name generator, here is our hero:
(Yes, that is genuinely the least ugly head option for a male Altmer)
INT is the most important stat by an absolute mile, as it determines spell points, which are going to be the crux of pretty much the whole run. Agility is marginally important for picking locks and such, but really, INT is all that truly matters on this one.
RPGs are, of course, always more fun when you create a bit of background for your character, to figure out who they are and what their place in the world is. I've created a short backstory for Lovillon which I think everyone will agree is pleasingly low-key and mundane, a pleasant change of pace in a post-Critical Role world of special snowflake characters:
For this playthrough, I shall harness the powers of AI to achieve a new level of interactivity with the game. It's time to speak to Ria directly.
Shut it, Ria. Invisibility is my best friend and absolutely is a solution for everything.
Only one snag. I can't cast it! So, if you've played any TES games after this one, you'll know of the stupid skill-by-use system. Want to become a master at stealth? Hide in a corner, go AFK for an hour, come back to see that you now have 90 Sneak. Want to become a master of Illusion magic? Make a spell that costs 1 mana and cast it over and over. And so on.
Arena doesn't work like that - it has an XP system. There are only three ways in the whole game to get XP - killing enemies, collecting pieces of the Staff of Chaos, and doing procgen'd fetch quests for NPCs in towns. That last option is going to be our only way of getting to a high enough level to actually cast Invisibility so we can start collecting Staff pieces. But first, I need to get out of the Imperial Dungeon - unarmed, with no spells other than Light Heal, and without violence.
We're locked in a cell! But wait - a key on a plinth in the corner. Hmm... what if... no... but maybe...
What if we put the key... in the door...?
Incredible! The first of many brain-twisting puzzles in the Elder Scrolls series. If we can handle a puzzle of this magnitude, we're sure to excel at the brutally difficult "can you put the three symbols in the order we're directly telling you to put them in" Claw Door puzzles in Skyrim.
There's a few considerations here. First is loot. We need to find magical items - Marks, Bracers, Crystals, or Rings - to sell in town so we have enough money to start abusing the Spellmaker and making our stupid custom invisibility shit. Another consideration is this:
This is a minimap of the Imperial Dungeons. I'm the pink square; enemies are yellow. You can see that the game exists in a quasi-grid-based system, where actors take up one square on the grid. This is important because it means that our hitbox, and enemy hitboxes, are one square wide. This means enemies can and will block narrow corridors. This happens a lot. There's a workaround, but again, we need to get out of here if we're gonna be able to access it. Note that the exit door, in the southwest corner, is at the end of one such narrow corridor, and even a single enemy in that corridor will block it fully. You'll be pleased to learn that an enemy is set to spawn right there.
However, nil desperandum - there's another thing to know about Arena. It can only spawn one enemy type at a time. The map is also divided into invisible spawn zones. If you move too far away from the already-spawned group of enemies (like if they're trapped in another room or something), a new group spawns when you cross over into a new spawn zone. However, if enemies are in viewing distance of you, new enemies won't spawn. This is extremely helpful because you can, say, get a harmless rat to follow you into a spawn zone that would otherwise be spawning Liches and other deadly shit. For the Imperial Dungeon, our best bet is to get a rat to follow us as far as possible, preventing the more dangerous Goblins from spawning and also preventing a new enemy from spawning in the exit tunnel.
GOBLINS ATTACK. This is 1000x more tension than you'll find in any modern videogame. They butcher me, forcing me to load my save. ;(
Second attempt fails a similar way. You can see that this corridor is one square wide in both directions and I'm flanked by rats on both sides (you can just see the tail of the one to my right). I can't move, they eat me to death. Back to the start. To impress upon you how difficult and annoying this is - Goblins will kill you in about three hits; rats in four or five. They also hit about once per second.
AND NOW: BETTER SCREENSHOTS
I take to the waterways. This is cool because it lets me avoid the main corridors where enemies lurk. This is less cool because it drains your stamina and you die if it runs out. It also means I have to slowly climb up out of the water when I find a ledge, and if enemies see me, they'll beat the shit out of me before I'm even able to move again. This happens, and I'm back to the start again.
This little motherfucker is our best friend, despite the fact she's trying to gnaw my cock off. By guiding her along with us, we can prevent the gobbos from spawning.
During the scramble to escape, I chance upon magic items. Despite Ria's dumb warning to "not succumb to greed", I am absolutely guided by greed and it's paid off big-time. We can't tell how much they're worth because they haven't been identified yet, so we don't know what spell they're enchanted with, but with luck, we'll get enough gold to get the custom Invisibility spell we need. (By the way - if you really want to cheese it, you can just move away from a loot pile, save the game, load the game, and it'll regenerate its contents)
See that? That goblin's gonna whack me as I swim past him. And he's gonna get like three hits in while I can't move or do anything because I'm in the water. Watch my health bar, I'll show you exactly how much health "Light Heal" restores at this point, and how much mana it costs.
There you go. Half my mana gone for a fraction of health. Brilliant.
The Shift Gate! And look how much health I have remaining, with a rat literally biting my ass as I hurl myself through the gate! Will I make it?
Yes! Lovillon leaps through the gate, and roars the roar of FREEDOM! (With so little health left that you almost can't see it on the bar)
The roar of freedom from the stupid man with rat claw marks all over his crotch startles an Altmer lady, who quickly shuffles off down an alley to the right.
Enough for now, first dungeon done. Next time the nightmare of procgen radiant quests begins.
THE RULES:
- No causing damage to another creature or NPC, whether through physical attacks or through spells.
- No recruiting companions and having them do the killing for me.
- As far as possible, no use of Frenzy spells or anything else that would make me obviously directly responsible for violence.
- If someone dies because of their own aggression toward me - for example, casting an AoE spell at me that causes the caster to be killed in the blast - that is acceptable.
- IMPORTANT FOR ARENA: NO USE OF SPELL REFLECTION! I'll explain shortly but this makes the entire game into a total joke and the only way to make it interesting is to forbid myself from using this spell. In later games, I might reconsider its use.
Here's all the parts so far:
The Elder Scrolls: Arena
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
PART 1: ARENA (the first few screenshots are shit because I captured them with DOSBox itself, they get better partway through).
In this part, we roll a believable and down-to-earth character, meet a ghost and ignore her advice, solve a challenging puzzle, get sexually assaulted by rats, drown, and learn of the mysterious Shift Gate.
And so on and so forth. I'll sum it up: Tamriel fucking sucks and is so filled with violence and death that the people who live there have nicknamed it "The Arena", hence the title. On to the plot.
Here's the gist: Patrick Stewart has been consigned to a nightmare dimension by a drag queen named Jagar Tharn.
Tharn uses illusion magic to impersonate the Emperor and usurp the throne. His understudy, a woman named Ria Silmane, figures out what's happened but Tharn murders and vaporises her before she can raise the alarm. He then starts summoning monsters and turning them into "twisted versions of the Imperial Guard". Nobody finds this, or Ria's disappearance, suspicious enough to investigate, apparently. Unfortunately for Tharn, Ria's magical skill enabled her spirit to remain in Mundus, and now she's planning to contact a hero (me!) to reveal Tharn's plot.
Anyway, here's the best character creation music of all time:
If you've never played Arena, there's a bunch of differences from later games which I'll explain here. First is that you can't make a custom class (which is what will trivialise all the later games up til Skyrim removes classes altogether). You have to pick from a list of classes, some of which are very obviously better choices than others.
We're going Mage as our class and Altmer as our race, for obvious reasons (Altmer get 3x INT spell points). The character's sex doesn't matter - I think Nord men (and, apparently, Argonian women) get a paltry starting bonus to strength that a female character can easily overcome during char creation, so it's mostly cosmetic. You'll generally want to pick female because all the male face choices are horrible, but I'm picking male this time because I always play women and it's time to shake it up with some testosterone.
With the help of an Altmer name generator, here is our hero:
(Yes, that is genuinely the least ugly head option for a male Altmer)
INT is the most important stat by an absolute mile, as it determines spell points, which are going to be the crux of pretty much the whole run. Agility is marginally important for picking locks and such, but really, INT is all that truly matters on this one.
RPGs are, of course, always more fun when you create a bit of background for your character, to figure out who they are and what their place in the world is. I've created a short backstory for Lovillon which I think everyone will agree is pleasingly low-key and mundane, a pleasant change of pace in a post-Critical Role world of special snowflake characters:
Lore-friendly and fits right into the setting. Let's play! We're napping in our cell in the Imperial Dungeon when suddenly, a ghost looms horrifying above our heads.
This is Ria's plan, to appear as a fucking ghost right above your head, staring down at you with her Clint Eastwood glare, and tell you not to shit yourself. Madame, this is the most scared I have ever been. (By the way - Ria pronounces Tamriel as "Tam-real", rather than the "Tam-ree-yel" used in later games - I prefer the way Tamreal sounds, honestly. More trivia for you - the lady with a load of toilet paper strapped to her portraying Ria is Jenniffer Pratt, a programmer for the game - one of only three programmers working on the project! Game dev teams were small as fuck back in 1994).
For this playthrough, I shall harness the powers of AI to achieve a new level of interactivity with the game. It's time to speak to Ria directly.
Shut it, Ria. Invisibility is my best friend and absolutely is a solution for everything.
Only one snag. I can't cast it! So, if you've played any TES games after this one, you'll know of the stupid skill-by-use system. Want to become a master at stealth? Hide in a corner, go AFK for an hour, come back to see that you now have 90 Sneak. Want to become a master of Illusion magic? Make a spell that costs 1 mana and cast it over and over. And so on.
Arena doesn't work like that - it has an XP system. There are only three ways in the whole game to get XP - killing enemies, collecting pieces of the Staff of Chaos, and doing procgen'd fetch quests for NPCs in towns. That last option is going to be our only way of getting to a high enough level to actually cast Invisibility so we can start collecting Staff pieces. But first, I need to get out of the Imperial Dungeon - unarmed, with no spells other than Light Heal, and without violence.
We're locked in a cell! But wait - a key on a plinth in the corner. Hmm... what if... no... but maybe...
What if we put the key... in the door...?
Incredible! The first of many brain-twisting puzzles in the Elder Scrolls series. If we can handle a puzzle of this magnitude, we're sure to excel at the brutally difficult "can you put the three symbols in the order we're directly telling you to put them in" Claw Door puzzles in Skyrim.
There's a few considerations here. First is loot. We need to find magical items - Marks, Bracers, Crystals, or Rings - to sell in town so we have enough money to start abusing the Spellmaker and making our stupid custom invisibility shit. Another consideration is this:
This is a minimap of the Imperial Dungeons. I'm the pink square; enemies are yellow. You can see that the game exists in a quasi-grid-based system, where actors take up one square on the grid. This is important because it means that our hitbox, and enemy hitboxes, are one square wide. This means enemies can and will block narrow corridors. This happens a lot. There's a workaround, but again, we need to get out of here if we're gonna be able to access it. Note that the exit door, in the southwest corner, is at the end of one such narrow corridor, and even a single enemy in that corridor will block it fully. You'll be pleased to learn that an enemy is set to spawn right there.
However, nil desperandum - there's another thing to know about Arena. It can only spawn one enemy type at a time. The map is also divided into invisible spawn zones. If you move too far away from the already-spawned group of enemies (like if they're trapped in another room or something), a new group spawns when you cross over into a new spawn zone. However, if enemies are in viewing distance of you, new enemies won't spawn. This is extremely helpful because you can, say, get a harmless rat to follow you into a spawn zone that would otherwise be spawning Liches and other deadly shit. For the Imperial Dungeon, our best bet is to get a rat to follow us as far as possible, preventing the more dangerous Goblins from spawning and also preventing a new enemy from spawning in the exit tunnel.
GOBLINS ATTACK. This is 1000x more tension than you'll find in any modern videogame. They butcher me, forcing me to load my save. ;(
Second attempt fails a similar way. You can see that this corridor is one square wide in both directions and I'm flanked by rats on both sides (you can just see the tail of the one to my right). I can't move, they eat me to death. Back to the start. To impress upon you how difficult and annoying this is - Goblins will kill you in about three hits; rats in four or five. They also hit about once per second.
AND NOW: BETTER SCREENSHOTS
I take to the waterways. This is cool because it lets me avoid the main corridors where enemies lurk. This is less cool because it drains your stamina and you die if it runs out. It also means I have to slowly climb up out of the water when I find a ledge, and if enemies see me, they'll beat the shit out of me before I'm even able to move again. This happens, and I'm back to the start again.
This little motherfucker is our best friend, despite the fact she's trying to gnaw my cock off. By guiding her along with us, we can prevent the gobbos from spawning.
During the scramble to escape, I chance upon magic items. Despite Ria's dumb warning to "not succumb to greed", I am absolutely guided by greed and it's paid off big-time. We can't tell how much they're worth because they haven't been identified yet, so we don't know what spell they're enchanted with, but with luck, we'll get enough gold to get the custom Invisibility spell we need. (By the way - if you really want to cheese it, you can just move away from a loot pile, save the game, load the game, and it'll regenerate its contents)
See that? That goblin's gonna whack me as I swim past him. And he's gonna get like three hits in while I can't move or do anything because I'm in the water. Watch my health bar, I'll show you exactly how much health "Light Heal" restores at this point, and how much mana it costs.
There you go. Half my mana gone for a fraction of health. Brilliant.
The Shift Gate! And look how much health I have remaining, with a rat literally biting my ass as I hurl myself through the gate! Will I make it?
Yes! Lovillon leaps through the gate, and roars the roar of FREEDOM! (With so little health left that you almost can't see it on the bar)
The roar of freedom from the stupid man with rat claw marks all over his crotch startles an Altmer lady, who quickly shuffles off down an alley to the right.
Enough for now, first dungeon done. Next time the nightmare of procgen radiant quests begins.
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