Mini-Article: The Elder Scrolls Library

Over the holidays I’ve been tinkering around with the Elder Scrolls back catalogue. I’ve touched on them before in these pages but haven’t previously had much to add to my Oblivion review. Oblivion, after all, was largely Morrowind with some more modern quality of life features and tweaks to be equally suited to console play and with a much blander aesthetic; Skyrim was basically Oblivion with a nicer aesthetic and a few other minor improvements.

Still, it does occur to me that these days, thanks to the efforts of the community and due to Bethesda making the earlier games available for free, each of the Elder Scrolls games can have its own little niche and purpose. So I thought I’d so a little thinkpiece here about what I think each of them is good for…

Play The Elder Scrolls: Arena if…

…you want an exercise in frustration, or have vintage hardware to try it out on and you’d rather play an old game with no quality of life features and no modding scene worth speaking of, or you really, really love procedurally-generated content.

Arena is the game which began it all and has far and away the largest playing area of any of the Elder Scrolls games, due to its absolutely massive map which covers the entire Empire. It is also an absolute pig to play, partially because running old games on modern hardware is often a crapshoot, partially because a lot of the iterative improvements between Elder Scrolls games involve making the whole experience more pleasant to play. Whilst the very old-school approach of Arena is charming to some, the consensus seems to be that it’s better served by the next game. On which note…

Play The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall if…

…you want the old school experience whilst having some modern conveniences. This is because the Daggerfall Unity project has produced a total conversion of the game to use the Unity engine, both giving it a visual spruce-up and making it much, much easier to run on non-antique hardware.

The old-school approach in Elder Scrolls puts an emphasis on a custom experience and much less emphasis on quests, which largely exist only to support exploration. You have lots of options for customising your character compared to recent releases, there’s a massive world to explore (albeit with a certain amount of randomly-generated terrain), and there’s a particularly neat spell customisation system, which was increasingly scaled back in subsequent games until it disappeared entirely by the time Skyrim happened.

At the same time, there’s only so much you can spruce Daggerfall up, and its DOS-era conventions can still be somewhat awkward. That’s where the next game comes in…

Play The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind if…

…you want the most vividly original aesthetic and lots and lots of lore, and still some old-school functionality like spell and class customisation.

Taking place on the strange island of Vvardenfell, Morrowind takes a deep dive into one of the more unusual and original cultures in the setting, and that means it’s packed with flavour. The OpenMW project has produced an entirely new engine to smoothly run the game on modern PCs and which also packs in some basic mod management, which is a big help. It’s arguably the first “modern” Elder Scrolls game, since to a large extent Oblivion and Skyrim are iterations on its formula, and that comes across even more if you use OpenMW, which makes in game controller support as standard.

Really, the major speed bump with Morrowind is that it doesn’t have regenerating magika – the points you use to cast spells – which in practice means that I find I just don’t cast spells very much unless I add a mod which provides that. Fortunately, you can get one – in fact, there’s several, the modding scene for Morrowind is very healthy and most of what’s out there will work just fine with OpenMW.

Play The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion if…

…you want something a notch closer to modern graphical standards, but to find a lot of what you see with them a bit generic.

As I said in my Oblivion review, it’s decent enough, but a lot of it feels fairly generic. To be fair, this may be on purpose – the realms of Oblivion you visit during the main quest are very odd indeed, so the more “generic high fantasy” the main game area is the bigger the contrast. However, that does mean that a lot of the weirdness which had been par for the course in Morrowind is reserved for little incidents on the main quest, rather than being stuff you’ll encounter particularly frequently through regular exploration.

Play The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim if…

…you want the most modern single-player experience, at the cost of regular Bethesda intervention. Skyrim is still actively and regularly updated by Bethesda, and whilst that does have its good aspects, it will every so often break a good swathe of the mods the community has developed; the transition from baseline Skyrim to Special Edition did it, and the recent hop to Anniversary Edition did likewise.

Still, Skyrim is significantly more flavourful than Oblivion, even if that flavour is in and of itself a fairly standard Scandinavian mythology aesthetic rather than the more distinct and original Morrowind look and feel. And as the most recent single player game it has the most energetic modding scene currently.

Play The Elder Scrolls Online if…

…you want other human beings to barge in on your Elder Scrolls experience, and to be stuck within the parameters of the MMO. Seriously, the big draw of this series is the single player experience and the scope for modding, both of which are things that are essentially incompatible with MMORPGs. Why bother?

GOGathon: Frogwares’ Sophisticated Sleuthing

Time for another dip into Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes series. After humble beginnings, Frogwares had managed to develop the series into something more ambitious, with The Testament of Sherlock Holmes providing the most cinematic experience yet in the series. For their next games, they would shift gears again, simultaneously upping the production values whilst shifting more towards episodic plot structures. Would this be another fruitful reinvention for the series, or a bridge too far? Let’s see…

Crimes and Punishments

It’s the mid-1890s – spanning a period before and after the events of The Testament of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes and Watson are doing what they do best – taking on cases, offering their solutions, and proposing resolutions to the matters at hand. As Holmes works his way through a series of standalone cases, his brother Mycroft is bothering him to undertake a bit of work for the government – plumbing the mystery of the Merry Men, a group of radicals who appear to be up to something or other.

Still, as the traces of the Merry Men’s work crop up here and there, matters seem to be coming to a head – and when the elder brother of Wiggins, leader of the Baker Street Irregulars, is caught up in a murder investigation, the trail ultimately leads Sherlock to a direct confrontation with the Merry Men. Will he buy into their rhetoric about robbing from the rich to inspire the poor, or will he consign them to a hands of a system out to defend the status quo at the expense of everyone else?

Planescape: Torment – Fascinating Lore and Combat Chores

The city of Sigil is built on a ring-shaped structure floating at the very centre of the Outlands, the cosmological plane of True Neutrality. It is a nexus of interplanar travel, paying host to travellers from all the cosmological dimensions, from the elemental Inner Planes to the philosophical Outer Planes to the Prime Material Plane where most Dungeons & Dragons world reside (as well as the interstitial planes which exist between those categories). It enjoys this cosmopolitan natures due to three things: the mysterious Lady of Pain who makes sure that no one deity or force takes control of Sigil, the philosophically oriented Factions who seek to use the city to promote their way of thinking across the multiverse, and the plethora of portals it pays host to. It is said that somewhere in Sigil there is a portal that can take you anywhere in the cosmos, if you have the right key.

Perhaps, then, there is a portal that can take you where you’ll find the answers to some pressing questions that have been weighing on your mind. Questions like: why did I just wake up on a slab in the Mortuary, the city morgue operated by the morbid Dustman faction? Why can’t I remember anything? Why is this talking skull, Morte, bothering me? And why do I have this weird habit of getting up again after I die?

The conventional wisdom on Planescape: Torment is that it’s one of the best CRPGs of all time, and it certainly stands head and shoulders above the rest of the Infinity Engine games (the first two Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale games) in terms of having a creative plot, engaging writing and character dialogue, and clever use of Dungeons & Dragons source material, really embracing the weird possibilities of the Planescape campaign setting. By the standards of 1990s CRPGs, it’s incredible.

At the same time, giving it a replay after experiencing Disco Elysium makes a lot of the seams show. Disco Elysium is often compared to Torment, and for good reason: both games have you begin as an amnesiac as a means of easing you into this extremely ornately-described universe, based on a tabletop RPG setting. Both games offer up fairly in-depth, detailed conversations with NPCs, full of characterful writing, in the service of a plot which is as much about piecing together who your character is (and deciding who they want to try to be going forwards) and exploring your personal philosophy as it is about what is going on. Both games centre what your character says and believes as a key part of the experience. The influence of Torment on Disco Elysium is palpable, in that sense.

What Torment has which Disco Elysium doesn’t have is a full-blown combat system derived from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition – and this is to Torment‘s detriment. It’s a problem common to all of the Infinity Engine games that AD&D combat is really designed for a turn-based structure, and the single player nature of the games means that there’s no real barrier to making it turn-based, but the engine doesn’t present you with turn-based combat – it presents you with a weird attempt to persuade you that it’s giving you real-time combat whilst having turn-based assumptions baked in.

GOGathon: The Frog’s Afoot, Watson!

The story so far: the first three games in Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes series each had a different presentation. Mystery of the Mummy was very much a Myst-alike, whilst The Case of the Silver Earring presented a classic-style point-and-click adventure. Then the Cthulhu Mythos-themed The Awakened jumped forward into the world of first-person realtime-rendered 3D, though in its Remastered version it also provided an alternative point-and-click third person viewpoint and control system.

With The Awakened being well-received, Frogwares realised they were onto something, and they fairly rapidly set to work on sequels. For this tranche of reviews, I’m going to dip into the other two games they made using the same general presentation as The Awakened, plus the game which saw their next big leap into more modern styles of presentation.

Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis (AKA Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsene Lupin)

It is 1895, a year after Holmes and Watson had their terrifying encounter with the devotees of Cthulhu. Holmes is feeling that old craving for opiates a juicy new case, and as chance would have it, a juicy new case is actively seeking his attention – for he receives a note from none other than Arsene Lupin, the famed French master thief. Lupin’s note is a taunting declaration that over the next five mights, Lupin is going to carry out a series of daring heists across London, with the intent of destroying national pride and making the British the laughing stock of the world. (My dude, just wait 120 years, we’ll do it ourselves just fine.)

The note also flatters Holmes by declaring him the only person who might have the wit to stop Lupin – but is Lupin overestimating Holmes? Night after night, Holmes, Watson, and Inspector Lestrade find themselves one step behind Lupin and powerless to do anything other than follow the trail of clues to the site of the next heist. Will the final score be France 5, England Nil, or will Holmes be able to save the day?

GOGathon: Call of the Longest Journey to Pripyat, the Land of Lore

Time for another rundown of stuff I’ve been tinkering with from the depths of GOG. This time around, it’s three games which I really wanted to like, and early on in my playthrough I did like, but which ended up losing me partway through.

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos

Back when I reviewed the Eye of the Beholder trilogy I largely came to the same conclusion as the broader consensus: the best two games in that dungeon-crawling CRPG sequence were the first two, developed by Westwood Studios for publication by SSI, with the second game adding a welcome level of additional story over the fairly bare-bones original, and with both of those games offering a fun take on the Dungeon Master formula (Dungeon Master itself being a welcome improvement on the format of Wizardry, a series which despite being undeniably pioneering when it first came out is nonetheless rather clunky and unwelcoming to play today), whilst the third game, developed in-house by SSI themselves, was kind of a botch.

Part of the reason for Westwood not taking on the third game in the series was that they were bought out by Virgin, who may not have wanted them making content for other publishers when they could be making material for Virgin to distribute. Among their first projects under Virgin was the Lands of Lore series, which are a sort of spiritual successor to the Eye of the Beholder trilogy liberated of the need to use the trappings of the Forgotten Realms and an approximation of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons system.

The first game in the series, The Throne of Chaos, was unleashed in 1993. The evil witch Scotia has uncovered the Nether Mask, a magical ring which confers incredible powers of mimicry on its wearer. King Richard (voiced in the CD-ROM version by none other than Patrick Stewart), who rules the realm from Gladstone Keep, has dispatched you to recover the Ruby of Truth, a relic famed for its capacity to cut through all forms of deceit. Little do you or he know that Scotia’s forces are already one step ahead of you.

GOGathon: Elementary, My Dear Frogwares

As I think I’ve well-substantiated in past articles, it’s arguably a fallacy to say that old school adventure games went extinct in the late 1990s/early 2000s. It’s truer to say that studios which had previously taken the lead in the field such as LucasArts and Sierra pivoted away from the genre to produce games which delivered bigger returns on investment instead, ceding the market to smaller developers instead.

Those smaller developers, precisely because of the lower budgets and smaller teams they were working with, weren’t able to produce the sort of triple-A games which were yielding those big returns the massive studios were chasing – but they could make entirely adequate adventure games to serve a market more than happy to pay for them, and which yielded returns which may not have been worth the time of the top-tier studios to chase but were more than adequate to keep the lights on for a smaller concern.

Of course, smaller developers, precisely by virtue of having less budget, can’t quite bring the same level of marketing to bear as a major studio – which explains the impression that adventure games had suddenly vanished, because with the big developers pulling out of the genre it meant you had to look a little harder to find new releases, and there was a lot of new hotness out there with more advertising behind it to distract you before you got there.

Between this and the somewhat more modest presentation necessitated by lower budgets, perhaps a big reason I missed out on a lot of adventure games in the 2000s was because so many of them looked like fairly cheap offerings with zero marketing behind them – making it very difficult for them to stand out from the swathes of honest to goodness shovelware that flooded the market at the time.

All this goes a long way towards explaining why I’ve slept on Frogwares’ series of Sherlock Holmes-themed games up until now. Frogwares – based out of Ukraine and Ireland, established by French ex-pats – got their big break on the market via their Sherlock Holmes games, and it’s remained the backbone of their portfolio to this day. Of the 15 games Frogwares have developed under their own name, 9 have been Sherlock Holmes releases; Holmes also accounts for 4 of the 9 games they put out under their Waterlily sub-studio, which concentrates on casual puzzlers and hidden object games (though I’m not going to bother with the mostly handheld-only casual games).

Nonetheless, the combination of a mid-budget studio, cheap and cheerful packaging, and the use of a thoroughly public domain character (though the last few Holmes stories only slipped into the public domain in the US surprisingly recently) all conspired to make the whole setup look like shovelware fodder. Apparently, though, that isn’t the case – some of the games in the series are quite well-regarded, and with GOG offering a bundle of most of them a while back, I decided to take the plunge then.

Even then, it took me a while to get around to taking a look – was it worth the wait, or was the less than £40 I ended up spending for the series still too much? For this article, I’m going to click through the first three games and see how Frogwares laid the foundations of the series.

The Mystery of the Mummy

Holmes’ cousin is about to marry Elisabeth Montcalfe – daughter of Lord Montcalfe, the celebrated Egyptologist Lord Montcalfe, who died recently in an apparent self-immolation. Since they are about to be family, Elisabeth brings Holmes into her confidence: she believes that there was something suspicious about Lord Montcalfe’s death, and she would like Holmes to investigate with maximum discretion.

This will be no problem, for Watson is away on holiday with his wife, making this the perfect time for Sherlock to investigate the matter solo. Elisabeth arranges for Holmes to be given access to Lord Montcalfe’s mansion, but unfortunately there’s a hitch – many areas of the mansion are locked, and towards the end of his life Lord Montcalfe became increasingly paranoid, and filled his house with dangerous traps. Sherlock will have to use all his deductive skill to stay ahead of the traps, gain access to the inner reaches of the house, and discover the truth…

GOGathon: Dilapidated Dungeons, Rusty Steampunk, and Videogame Outsider Art

Time for another dip into my backlog of old PC games. For this article I’m going to dip into a slightly random cross-section of games, where I don’t have much in the way of detailed comment to offer but do want to put some notes out there. First up I’m going to give a hyper-brief explanation of why the old Dungeon Keeper games don’t do much for me, then there’s slightly deeper dives into Arcanum and Drowned God.

Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2

Dungeon Keeper is a game series which has a fun “reverse dungeon crawl” concept: you play the manager of an underground complex of monster-haunted rooms, and you have to set up traps, monster encounters, and other dangers to wipe out adventurers invading your subterranean realm. In essence, it’s like a Dungeons & Dragons spin on Theme Park.

The original Dungeon Keeper is one of those DOS games which were ambitious enough at the time that we tended to overlook their limitations, but now seems tremendously awkward to play now, with the graphics and controls being sufficiently rudimentary as to be a pain to get to grips with. Conversely, Dungeon Keeper 2 plays reasonably well on modern systems, but not interestingly – after getting about halfway through the single player campaign I got tired and stopped playing due to simple apathy. The game largely relies on its quirky (and occasionally rather dated) sense of humour to keep you interested, and once the joke begins to wear thin there’s not much left.

GOGathon: Ah, Sweet Myst-ery of Life!

Myst is one of those videogames which constantly gets rehashed. You had the original Myst. You had Myst: Masterpiece Edition, which was the exact same game with somewhat nicer graphics. You had realMyst, which gave it a proper 3D engine. Recently you had a VR version. It seems like more or less any platform people play games on gets some form of Myst implemented on it.

In some respects this isn’t surprising. It was a commercial hit when it first came out, after all – it was one of the first games sold on CD-ROM to be a big hit, and helped drive the adoption of that technology, and soon after its 1993 release became the bestselling PC game, holding that status for nearly a decade until The Sims overtook it in 2002. It inspired an absolute slew of imitators, and at the time was regarded as either a revolutionary leap forward in the adventure game genre or its death knell.

Since they are insisting on rereleasing it yet again (the VR update being now released to other platforms now that its Oculus exclusivity window has elapsed), we may as well take another look at it, especially since GOG makes it nice and cheap to try it out. (Indeed, the entire Myst collection has sat untouched in my GOG library for a good while.) It blew people’s socks off when it came out, but how’s it aged?

Myst: Masterpiece Edition

After encountering a strange book which draws you into its pages, you find yourself on the island of Myst. Strewn with strange machinery, the place seems abandoned. After some exploration, it is possible to piece together a picture of who is responsible for the place: Myst was the home of a strange family of people who had an astonishing power to leap between “Ages”, which it is apparent are various different worlds accessible from Myst itself. Intervening in the different Ages, family of Myst seem to have exercised a sort of god-like power. (There’s some parallels here with Roger Zelazny’s Amber novels.)

Some disaster has befallen the place, however – the library is burned, the means to jump to other Ages hidden away. Two of the surviving library books seem to have odd messages inside – like videos embedded in the paper, but severely fragmented, though the more you are able to complete those two books, the more the two messages come through. It comes down to you to unlock the ways to the Ages, unravel the mysteries of Myst, and resolve the family’s last bit of unfinished business.

GOGathon: (Amer)Zone of Alienation

Over 60 years ago, intrepid naturalist Alexandre Valembois mounted an expedition to the South American nation of Amerzone, using a novel water craft of his own design called the “hydrofloat”. Accompanying him were law student Antonio Alvarez, who hailed from the region and had come to Paris to study, and Father David Mackowski, a Jesuit priest keen to evangelise the uncontacted peoples of the interior. At first, the trio were united by an idealistic view, believing exploration and discovery to be noble endeavours in and of themselves. However, each of them found that their ideals in the end became a cover for other motives.

Alvarez abandoned the expedition in order to mount a coup in the country; as its dictator, he would steer it on an isolationist path; in the name of modernisation his regime would take a repressive approach to indigenous culture, framing it as a farrago of superstitions that the nation needed to move beyond. Mackowski became head of the Jesuit mission at Puebla, the last significant market town on the edge of the deep rainforest, but became ambivalent about the good he’d done, especially since the Church hierarchy seemed intent on maintaining a cozy relationship with Alvarez rather than condemning his atrocities.

As for Valembois, he betrayed not only his ideals but his love; after falling in love with Yékoumani, a member of a hitherto-uncontacted tribe, he had given serious consideration to never returning home, but when he learned that the tribe had this intriguing relationship with a certain species of white bird that nested near the local volcano – a bird which, in fact, would go extinct but for the tribe’s interventions which allowed it to thrive. Stealing the most recently-laid egg, Valembois returned to France thinking he had uncovered both a biological marvel in the form of the birds themselves and an anthropological one in terms of the tribes’ role in maintaining the bird population.

Alas, the academic authorities thought Valembois had just found a huge ostrich egg, and were unconvinced by his story. A laughing stock, Valembois spent the last 60 years rueing his awful decision and laying the groundwork for a return voyage – groundwork which picks up pace when the egg is returned to him and he discovers, to its astonishment, that it still seems to be biologically viable. Realising he has become too old to make the journey, he summons a journalist friend of his to the lighthouse on the coast of Brittany where he lives, in order to implore them to take the egg and put right at least one of his wrongs…

GOGathon: Point-and-Kirk Adventures!

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary casts you as Kirk, in command of the rest of the familiar Enterprise crew, setting its adventures somewhere in the vicinity of the original five-year mission. Originally released in 1992, the definitive version of the game is usually held to be the CD-ROM release, which made some minor changes (the Starfleet admiral who gives you your missions is now a woman), tuned up the sound effects and music (including more sound loops from the original series) and, perhaps most importantly, had voice acting from the original cast.

In fact, this game and its sequel (of which more later) represent the last Star Trek thing which Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, Takei, Koenig, Nichols, and Doohan would all appear in together, and perhaps the greatest joy of the thing is how well it captures the tone of the original series – right down to Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov not really getting that many lines, Uhura enjoying a bit more spotlight thanks to her comms role, and most of the cast interplay taking place between Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and whichever redshirt you happen to have tagging along with you on a particular away team mission. (Hilariously, the redshirts all look the same, and whenever danger crops up in a mission the redshirt usually buys it first.)

In some ways, the game was very ahead of its time, since it presents an explicitly episodic point-and-click adventure experience. Each episode in the game is kept fairly short and simple, with the idea being that you can play through a single episode in a reasonable amount of time and enjoy the game in bite-size chunks. This certainly enables the game to present players with a wide range of scenarios without needing to weave them all into a single narrative, and enhances the sense that you’re playing through a lost season of the original show.