Sejarah pengembangan seri. Bagian 1

Oh no - yesterday in the comments to another post, it was asked, "Why was Arena originally a gladiatorial game?" And in searching, it turned out that no one described the history of the series, not even copy-pasted it! This problem needs urgent fixing. No, not with copy-pasting - with translation. However, very free and with lots of comments. Well, other introductions aside - let's go. So, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

TES: Arena

Before working on Elder Scrolls, the guys from Bethesda Softworks (hereinafter: BS, because I will be fed up writing that every time =)) mainly worked on sports games and licensed games (by the way, they even had a license for Terminator). From the founding of the company to the release of Arena in 1992, BS released ten games, six of them sports games - games with titles like Hockey League Simulator, NCAA Basketball: Road To The Final Four ('91/'92 Edition), and Wayne Gretzky Hockey - as well as work on licensed games - adapting the Terminator series to the computer world.

Unfortunately (or rather, thankfully), BS did not succeed with sports games, and the Terminator was not exactly a huge success - that’s when the idea was born to create their own RPG. Designer Ted Peterson recalls the experience: "I remember chatting with the guys from SirTech, who were making Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant at the time, and how they laughed at us, not believing we could pull it off." Ted Peterson worked together with Vijay Lakshman as one of the two designers of what was then simply called Arena, "a medieval gladiator simulator".

Peterson, Lakshman, and Julian LeFay were those who, according to Peterson, "really stood at the origins of the series." Game journalist Joe Blank attributes such a characterization to the company's co-founder Chris Weaver: "If Weaver had a child, it would be Arena – that says it all." During the development of Arena, Todd Howard, later the Executive Producer of Oblivion, joined BS, with his first "mission" being to check the CD-ROM version of Arena. Ted Peterson joined the company back in 1992, with the goal of developing games for Terminator: 2029, Terminator Rampage, Terminator Future Shock, and other "fairly forgettable titles," as Ted himself put it.

Peterson, Lakshman, and LeFay, being longtime fans of pencil and what are now called paper RPGs, influenced how Tamriel was created just as it was. They were also fans of Looking Glass Studios' series Ultima Underworld, which served as a "prototype" and "inspiration" for Arena.

The influence of Legends of Valour, a game that Ted Peterson describes as "a freeform first-person game that took place in the same city," was also noted. When asked about his thoughts on the game, Peterson responded, "It certainly influenced...". Besides BS making Arena "very, much larger" than other games of that era on the market, Peterson felt that the team "didn't revolutionize" when creating Arena.

Originally, Arena was not supposed to be an RPG at all. The player and his team of fighters would travel the world, battling other teams in their arenas, until the player became a "great champion" in the capital, the Imperial City. As development progressed, RPG elements evolved until one day the idea came up that they could turn all of this into a decent role-playing game (and they were damn right!). Eventually, combat became a less important part of the game, and the exploration component increased. Later on, RPG elements were finally added to the game, expanding to include cities outside of arenas and caves outside of towns. Ultimately, the idea of tournaments was significantly reduced altogether, focusing instead on quests, dungeons, and the world.

Interesting fact: In the excerpt where I inserted this block, it is stated that the actual arena in Arena (sorry for the pun) remains only in the title and in the text file with the description. In general, many people are seriously mistaken about this; some publications even posed rhetorical questions about whether to rename the game... So it’s time to lift the masks - the arena in Arena exists, absolutely everyone who plays it has seen it, but didn’t pay attention - the whole thing is that *drum roll* Nirn translates to Arena! (for those not in the know – Nirn is the mortal plane in the game). So, technically, the title can be read as The Elder Scrolls: Nirn, there wouldn’t be any special mistake in it. The developers themselves somewhat clumsily explained this, but no one paid attention to it.

The concept of traveling teams was ultimately also discarded from the game because the team's decision to convert the game to the RPG genre required a change of the world as a whole.

In general, the title was a bit clumsy. The idea of "The Elder Scrolls" was put forward by Lakshman, however, later Ted Peterson said, "I don’t think he knew what the hell it meant more than we did." These words - The Elder Scrolls - eventually came to mean "mystical tomes of Tamriel, knowledge that tells about its past, present, and future." It was at this point in the opening video that the voiceover said a slightly different text: "It was foretold in the Elder Scrolls..."

The release of the game was not very successful (yes, it’s hard to believe, but the potential of the game wasn’t immediately recognized). BS missed Christmas and were forced to release the game at a not very lucky time for such projects - in March 1994, which was "really serious for such a small developer-publisher like BS." Deceptive packaging, which caused revulsion in the distributor towards the game, led to a miserable initial print run of only 3000 copies - which was even less, Peterson recounts, than the sales of his Terminator: 2029. "We were sure that we had driven the company to bankruptcy." However, days and weeks passed, and opinions about the game slowly but surely changed for the better.

Map during character race selection

And in the end, a small miracle happened - soon, despite quite harsh reviews, a ton of bugs, unrealistic system requirements - the game became a hit, a cult. Ratings began to shift from bad to neutral, from neutral to good, from good to masterpiece, until the game was elevated to the standards of RPGs. However, Matt Barton thinks that, in any case, "The game set a new benchmark for this type of CRPG, but merely demonstrated how much room was left for innovation."

TES 2: Daggerfall

Work on TES II: Daggerfall began immediately after the release of Arena in March 1994. Ted Peterson was appointed Lead Designer. Initially, the action was supposed to start in Mournhold and end in Morrowind, but as development progressed, the setting shifted to High Rock and Hammerfell. Daggerfall was not made according to a template, as Arena, which was extremely linear - "Find the eight missing pieces of the "Staff of Chaos" and use it to save the Emperor from imprisonment," as Ted Peterson stated, "that’s the most template out of all RPG scenarios - killing the evil wizard." The transition was to "a complex series of adventures leading to various choices".

Daggerfall was based on the experience of Arena, but the system was replaced with one that rewarded players for role-playing their characters. Daggerfall featured a new and modernized engine, including not just selecting a class from a list, like in Arena, but a system for creating your own class, allowing for the selection of certain skills and adjustments to appearance. Initially, Daggerfall was being developed in pseudo-3D, like Doom, but later the decision was changed in favor of XnGine, one of the first truly 3D engines. The game world of Daggerfall was double the size of Great Britain, filled with 15,000 towns and a population of 750,000 NPCs.

Interesting fact: by the way, Daggerfall is larger than Arena in size, however, Daggerfall only displays a small bay in Tamriel, while Arena shows all of Tamriel. The developers have always disliked such a thing as "scale."

In-game map

Daggerfall, according to Peterson, was devoid of the influence of contemporary video games since they simply "were not very interesting." "I remember playing King's Quest, Doom, and Sam&Max: Hit the Road, but I cannot say they had a sufficiently deep influence on the story or design." Some analog games and literature, which Julian LeFay or Ted Peterson, happened to play or read at that time, such as the book "The Man in the Iron Mask" written by Dumas, influenced "the quests where players had to find the missing Emperor," and Vampire: The Masquerade, which influenced "the idea of vampire clans scattered throughout the world."

Daggerfall was released on August 31, 1996, within the scheduled time. Like Arena, Daggerfall suffered from an incredible number of bugs. Some were fixed with patches, but not all bugs could be fixed - to release a game on such a scale, the beta testing process had to be forcibly interrupted - even today Daggerfall is not thoroughly studied.

Interesting fact: Daggerfall gathered so many different bugs that it is called "the sanctuary of bugs" and "Baggerfall" - the most famous bugs include the eternal questions of "Why when I cross a wall using levitation, does the horse and cart move with me?" and even bugs in the plot, concerning script errors rather than logical issues. Nevertheless, another game like this won't be made anytime soon.

Later, LeFay said, "we gathered all possible nonsense in Daggerfall." Subsequently, the company made games more carefully, focusing on quality rather than quantity.

Then there were Battlespire and Redguard, Morrowind with add-ons, the great and terrible Oblivion...

However, about that in the second part

Source: English Wikipedia

Translation and comments: Pegazs