T w e n t y S i d e d
As part of their invasion of the Battlespire, the daedric armies have apparently deployed tactical questgivers to several locations. Some of their quests have been brief, but eventful. I’ll be happy to get back to a sane and healthy model of interpersonal relations wherein I go around killing and fetching on behalf of standoffish strangers.
After all, I like to keep things professional.
But before I can move on from the scouting-and-clouting portion of the level, there’s a logistical hurdle. I’m unpleasantly surprised to discover in the process of cleaning scamps out of this zone’s grouty crevices that the game [i]does[/i] have a maximum carrying weight. This is a problem not because I’m burdened with mission-critical gear–I’ve pretty much got the clothes on my back and a few potions I’m comfortable drinking and everything else is trash–but because it requires literally dozens of clicks to reach all the inlets and reefs of this game’s pointlessly balkanized inventory. Clearing out the garbage requires:
- Weighing the importance of all my items…
- …including the magic items with mysterious names and no stats, like Evangelistic Jock Strap of Cunning Perfume…
- …then my sigils, which are broken up into Almost Worthless and Literally Mission-Critical…
- …but look identical, and can only be distinguished by taking my cursor off the scroll icon and clicking on each individual item, which gets old after the fiftieth or sixtieth mouse click…
- …and the scrolls, which are all named things like Scroll and need to be individually selected and read to figure out what they’re about…
- …and which sometimes contain important intel on the second or third page…
- …and which are surprisingly heavy…
- …plus potions which have thus far been totally useless, like Ethereal or Jumping, but might turn out to be practically necessary in the next area.
- Hunting down everything I can get rid of…
- …which means navigating the inevitable clusterfun that is this game’s nesting bag system…
- …and scrolling, one box at a time, one click at a time, down an inventory with many many boxes…
- …and many blocks of completely identical items, meaning it’s easy to actually get lost.
- Sorting that which I wish to keep…
- …by mixing it in with all the identically-iconned items I’ve dropped on the ground, because I need to put it aside so I can get it out of its nested bag…
- …and inevitably putting it BACK in a nested bag, because otherwise the scrolling-through-eternity issue comes up and my wrist starts aching.
I try to be a considerate Battleguest, but Spire Services can go ahead and clean this one up.
Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, it’s time to get social. In addition to a bunch of rooms full of punks, there’s three daedra in this area who want to have a chat with me. First up is a Spider Daedra who I am happy to observe does not want to seduce me.
Who am I pretty sure does not want to seduce me.
There’s also this lady. She’s got a quest for me that I gather is nonessential. That’s good, because much like every other objective in this game it’s an overbearing pain in the cojones and surgical strike in Operation Slam Use Key on Every Moderately Unique Asset.
So Wosherface here wants me to get her a mace that she’ll trade for one of the collectible MacGuffin crumbs that open the next area. There’s a surplus of said crumbs, but they’re hidden all over, guarded by low-level enemies, and really annoying to find. So sure–anything that means less killing scamps and painstakingly searching rooms for secret compartments.
Anyway, the mace is in a secret compartment. How do you find it? You go into one of the cubbies, turn around, look up, and hit “use” on a mace that’s hung up above the door. It opens a vault full of scamps.
The good news is, when you give her the mace she’s teleported to a dimension of eternal suffering.
Then there’s this chum I found standing around in total darkness. He’s surrounded on all sides by a placid dremora entourage, none of whom react to my approach or friendly greetings. All the while he insistently beckons me to speak with him.
I mightn’t have bothered. Turns out he’s one of about a hundred daedric dudes I’ve met so far who want to talk to me exclusively so they can tell me I suck and they’re going to kill me. No diplomacy–no listening to reason–no sensible dialogue choices. With a contemptuous laugh, he orders his men to attack. And they do, in spectacular fashion. Jackhammer fireballs drop one after another at point-blank range. The fight’s over in two seconds–and then it’s just me and Jabroni blinking away spellflashes in a cloud of settling dremora ashes, neither of us having budged, his hands still planted awkwardly in his glistening armpits.
Less out of spite and more to break up the awkward silence, I attack him. As soon as I do I lose a chunk of health and go flying backwards. Not sure what else to do, I verify firstly that this does indeed happen every time and secondly that it is literally his only means of inflicting hit point damage. It seems like ordering his two dremora bros to fry me was the only move he had memorized. He doesn’t seem to be taking damage, either.
Not really knowing what else to do, I talk to him again. Worked great the first time. It triggers–well, not the SAME conversation. Just a subtly different and obviously equivalent one which has a peaceful dialogue option.
Developers, was I supposed to get this far?
NEXT WEEK: A STEADILY NAKEDER CAHMEL
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Developers, was I supposed to get this far?
Probably not.
I remember that at some point a ways in you encounter a guy who always faces you – not because he turns towards you, but because (it looks like) they didn’t bother to create the sprites for all directions.
That’s everyone. That’s basically everyone. Not super uncommon for this era and basically considered an acceptable shortcut.
I don’t think so – this game, like other 3d games using sprites as models, has most of the mobs rendered from 4-8 different views. Which sprite you see depends on where you are relative to where they’re facing.
The one dude I’m thinking of stood out because he was only ever seen from the front – even when you snuck into the room from the far side you could see him looking at you and he would rotate to always be facing you in a way that unaware mobs didn’t. You would see the point where it changed sprites as you moved around them, but not this guy.
Not that it might not have been a bug on my end (this was back when BS was actually released) or patched in a later version.
I wasn’t clear. I meant every NPC–mobs, since they move around, have multiple viewing angles. Most non-combat NPCs between Arena and Daggerfall only had one appearance unless they had to move about.
Unless I’m misremembering? Could be.
No, you’re right. Daggerfall was the same. Anything that didn’t have to move (shopkeepers, quest givers, etc) just had one sprite and so would always be looking at you.
Considering it’s Bethesda, the one guy that was set to do part-time QA on the game never got this far.
Washherface’s dress, is it meant to be melting?
Wait, Wonshala’s quest worse-than-kills her? Is that a trick, or is she just really stupid?
She’s really stupid, but it’s sort of a trick in that the same document that gives you mission-critical intel (you need a codeword as well) tells you what will happen.
Not that you needed to pay any attention to that for it to work. What it comes down to is that she has really bad intel.
Wow.Who wouldve thought that skyrim and fallout inventories are actually an improvement.
Maybe it was this terrible ‘bags-in-bags-in-bags’ inventory that lead to the decision to instead put everything on screen at once in Morrowind. Talk about over correcting.
Some argue they’ve improved with every single game.
My order is more like Morrowind, then Arena, Daggerfall, Skyrim, Oblivion, and Battlespire, but at some point it comes down to taste.
I’d agree with Morrowind being the best, but that’s because you could see more than three items at one time and just hovering told you everything you needed to know.
SkyUI would go first, but since that’s a mod, it probably doesn’t count. :P
Maybe they’ll just steal SkyUI for the Skyrim Remaster.
That would be a very smart move. Every once in awhile I remember that SkyUI isn’t the actual original inventory system and get the shakes all over again, remembering the horror.
On the off chance reality glitches and I get a chance to do anything on TES6, that’s literally the first thing I would do because it isn’t terrible.
I don’t remember the original UI from Oblivion, barely remember the atrocity that was Skyrim’s, but SkyUI is the baseline for “good UI” for me. :P
Id still put morrowind in front of it.SkyUI may be better than vanilla skyrim,but its still just a list.A well made list,but still a list that uses only half of the screen.
It does give you a good look at the items, though, something Morrowind didn’t really do.
There’s also having spells and items on different pages, creating a smoother experience than having 4 windows with literally everything showing at once. :/
Console Morrowind had each window as their own page that you scrolled through. Now, some of them were poorly laid out, but it was rarely difficult to find what you were looking for.
It was all on one screen in the PC version. It was easier to use since mouse, but the layout left a lot to be desired.
I’m pretty sure that in Morrowind you could filter the inventory by category. At least on PC. If you’re one of those weirdos who gets Elder Scrolls games on XBox, I can’t really help you.
I bet that at some point one of the developers thought that the bag-in-bags thing was a cool idea because it basically allows the player to keep a folder structure which can make things much quicker to access than in a long linear list.
It is a really cool idea when it’s well-implemented – i.e. not how it’s done here!
Is Battlespire really that ugly, or is it something to do with how you shrunk the screenshots for the website? That first picture, with the mixture of blurred fuzzy bear fur and jaggy-edged blue glowing sigils, looks absolutely dreadful. Compare that to System Shock 2, which was just 2 years after Battlespire, and whose interface looked great.
Shrunk? The screenshots are in glorious state-of-the-art 800×600 resolution, i.e. a 1:1 reproduction of displays of the day.
You’re right – I guess I thought it was scaled down from 1024à—768 or something. But look at the text – identical letters right next to each other don’t match. They have obviously been pixel-scaled from another size. Why deliberately do something that looks so terrible?
Everything about this game is ugly and awkward. It was either a rush job by people who were at best semi-competent, or a weird psychological experiment to see how much abuse gamers will put up with.
OR, option 3 – it came from the age before digital distribution, which GOG has done a very good job of making look better than it probably was. At least, my physical shelf of video games is a pretty hit-and-miss affair.
(Although that being said, there still doesn’t seem to be anywhere you can get the original Sims or Zoo Tycoon online, and that’s quite annoying.)
Yup.You have to keep in mind that lots of modern ui elements did not just pop up as soon as the games appeared,but were rather slowly developed and improved on over the decades.
Ultima Underworld and System Shock [1] are both older than Battlespire, and the interfaces look great (see screenshots from Wikipedia). Both developers recognised the limitations of low-res displays, and carefully used stylised pixel-art to great effect. Battlespire is clearly attempting a “realistic” picture of the player-character and their equipment, but fails dismally. The reason I picked SS2 as my first example is that it also used a realistic style for inventory items, but successfully achieved a really nice clean look. I don’t think that’s much to do with technology, just art direction (but see Rutskarn’s reply below). I suspect even earlier games managed to do this well, but these are the examples I know.
Dont know about uu,but system shock 1 had you turning with the numpad.Thats NOT good UI.
*curls into a ball and starts whimpering uncontrollably at the mention of System Shock’s control scheme*
Seriously though, SS2’s interface and control scheme were a vast improvement over the original, and still incredibly annoying, even for the era.
Playing pre-Starcraft RTSes is an exercise in masochism.
This could be my own nostalgia messing with me, but I remember the original Command and Conquer having a playable UI. Also, Warcraft 2, though it had a 9 unit selection limit, as I recall, so you were basically limited to hotkeying squads around the map. Though the expansion pack (for both WC2 and Starcraft were exercises in masochism because of the difficulty jumps).
Using the same button to both select units and order them around was rough.Also,c&c had that huge thing on the side,which you had to constantly scroll(without the wheel) AND you only could build one building at a time,whether it was a chunk of wall(you had to build walls a chunk at a time)or a production factory.
Heck,even starcraft 1,which I will praise as the best game of all time till the day I die,had its problems.Most notably,limited number of units you could select,no autocast for abilities and weird hotkeys.
Lets face it people,UI has improved for practically every genre over the years,and is the biggest hurdle when trying to play old games.
Even better, the actual pixels used to render these images are smaller now, so it actually looks smoother than life.
On the other hand, back then we also had CRT displays, which meant that a certain amount of alpha blending occurred just because of slight scatter in the paths of electrons. So if you were looking at it back then it wouldn’t have looked quite as jarring as it does on a modern LCD.
That’s also why emulators, even back to NES ones, have various supersampling modes to reduce the harsh pixel edges the way an ancient CRT would have.
Let me straighten out a few facts:
The game runs in glorious 640×400 resolution.
My screenshots are all blown UP to 800X600 so they’re visible.
Lately, and I’m trying to fix this, I’ve had to batch-convert my screenshots from .pngs to .jpgs because I’ve had trouble opening them in Photoshop. That’s lowered the already miserable quality and I need to find a better solution.
This should probably be the point where someone tells you to use either GIMP or Paint.net, if you’re not wanting to do anything particularly complicated (although GIMP can do most of what photoshop does, but I’ve not really delved too far into it beyond relatively simple stuff). Plus, GIMP and Paint.net are both totally free.
I strongly recommend *not* using Gimp. I had forgotten to install PhotoShop on my new laptop before a recent trip to Japan and had to get by using the Gimp. Ugh. (Besides, why should somebody use a PhotoShop wannabe when he has the real thing?)
As to the problem, P.S. should be able to open png files easily – I’ve done it plenty of times. I’d guess the screencaps have some really minor change from the normal standard.
Does seem to be a reasonably common problem – well, perhaps not common, but Rutskarn’s issue certainly isn’t a one-off. Potential solutions seem to be making sure Photoshop is up-to-date, disabling any third-party plug-ins, and changing your printer to a local rather than a network device.
Er, I’ve no idea what that last one is doing in there.
Why would you want to use GIMP or Paint.net if what you want to do is format-convert a bunch of files? That’s not what they’re for at all. Just use a decent batch-converter (I prefer cli myself, but you can get gui ones if that’s more your preference).
Ah, that explains a lot, thank you!
You might have been better off just doubling the image size to 1280à—960 (you meant 480 rather than 400, right?), which would easily fit on a modern full HD monitor, and look much nicer. Although I admit that would mess up Shamus’ page-column-style-thing, and maybe annoy laptop and mobile users. Perhaps make each image a link to the original (but only if you love making work for yourself that you don’t get paid for)?
Regardless, I’m really enjoying this series, thank you!
That is pretty low by 1997 standards, but not too surprising I guess. Bear in mind though that by then we already had 3D accelerators including the original 3dfx Voodoo. Couldn’t find out whether the game actually has resolution options, but I did find this gem in Gamespot’s original review:
”
…and the scrolls, which are all named things like Scroll and need to be individually selected and read to figure out what they're about…
…and which sometimes contain important intel on the second or third page…
…and which are surprisingly heavy…
”
It’s like they went out of their way to make this as obtuse and gamer-unfriendly as possible. I like how you ordered the text there, when describing the inventory.
Thanks for playing this game, Ruts, so we don’t have to
They are all elder scrolls, it’s understandable that they’re a bit confused.
I think that first screenshot finally explains why Battlespire Guy always has such a hilariously pained expression. Those three things on the right that he’s looking at are X-rays of his kidney stones.