without irony, the first Elder Scrolls game that is actually decent enough to recommend as something more than a mere exercise in history. why is that? character creation is simplified but otherwise has not changed much. combat has not changed at all. due to Battlespire's status as a spin-off, there are much less RPG elements. there certainly is not any open world to explore. Battlespire's superiority is for one primary reason: it actually has half-competent level design, likely in part due to its more limited scope.
Arena's levels, while as far as i can tell are "hand-crafted", are simply bad; they are labyrinthine to a fault, senselessly "designed", and hurt to navigate without a strategy guide. i would say this is in part an artifact of the game's open world ambitions but i am not entirely sure that is true. Daggerfall's levels are at least as intolerable, and in many ways arguably worse: every level, main quest or procgen slop, uses the same goddamn brick/cobble/tile textures fucking everywhere. you generally cannot identify what -- again main quest -- level you are on based on a screenshot. not only that, levels are constructed out of prefabs stitched together. both games' spaces are, holistically, monotonous homogenate; utterly devoid of soul.
enter Battlespire. the first thing one notices about it is that it is not an open-world RPG. it is a dungeon crawler, and when a game is a dungeon crawler, suddenly the dungeon matters a lot more. the game makes use of a diverse set of textures, models, level geometries -- this may sound like nothing, but this is a rather drastic improvement! the levels themselves are distinct from each other. one is a training facility for imperial battlemages. another is a sprawling island with various landmarks spread out across it. the various realms of Oblivion may actually end up sticking in your memory, both while you are playing the game and long after. levels do not de facto require a strategy guide to merely navigate. there are some hiccups with the game being excessively obscure, but it is nothing a brief trip to a walkthrough cannot solve. emphasis on "brief".
Battlespire's setting is a lot more interesting. you are outside of the mundanity of Tamriel, cast into the seas of Oblivion and set to traverse several of its realms flowing with magica. what or who are the residents of Oblivion? that would be the Daedra: divine immortals who instance a panoply of morphologies and personalities. you do not fight a single bat or rat in Battlespire. the resident trash mob is a diminutive satyr which speaks like a pagan from the Thief games. did i mention you can enter dialogue with practically every opponent you meet? this is all to say that the game is simply a lot more interesting and weirder than not only the previous two Elder Scrolls games but also a great deal of fantasy games more generally. you are somewhere between heaven and hell, but certainly not earth.
Battlespire is probably one of the buggiest and most poorly optimized games i have ever played. straferunning exists, which, granted, is far from unique to this game. if cycletime is too high you can both barely move and move in the wrong direction(s). that sort of jank is expected from any dos game really. what isn't expected is that even with cycletime set to what was the cycletime of one of the best CPUs at the time, the game still has noticeable movement glitches, and still performs terribly. random crashes are common. FPS drops by ~half in the presence of transparent textures. enemies either phase into the ground or turn invisible when you attack them sometimes. i can't tell which. one level corrupts your save if you load it from a restart too many times because it generates too many container objects for some reason. the final level lacks music. so it's a testament to how decent this game is, or at least tolerable relative to the hells of Arena and Daggerfall, that it is still basically enjoyable.
Arena's levels, while as far as i can tell are "hand-crafted", are simply bad; they are labyrinthine to a fault, senselessly "designed", and hurt to navigate without a strategy guide. i would say this is in part an artifact of the game's open world ambitions but i am not entirely sure that is true. Daggerfall's levels are at least as intolerable, and in many ways arguably worse: every level, main quest or procgen slop, uses the same goddamn brick/cobble/tile textures fucking everywhere. you generally cannot identify what -- again main quest -- level you are on based on a screenshot. not only that, levels are constructed out of prefabs stitched together. both games' spaces are, holistically, monotonous homogenate; utterly devoid of soul.
enter Battlespire. the first thing one notices about it is that it is not an open-world RPG. it is a dungeon crawler, and when a game is a dungeon crawler, suddenly the dungeon matters a lot more. the game makes use of a diverse set of textures, models, level geometries -- this may sound like nothing, but this is a rather drastic improvement! the levels themselves are distinct from each other. one is a training facility for imperial battlemages. another is a sprawling island with various landmarks spread out across it. the various realms of Oblivion may actually end up sticking in your memory, both while you are playing the game and long after. levels do not de facto require a strategy guide to merely navigate. there are some hiccups with the game being excessively obscure, but it is nothing a brief trip to a walkthrough cannot solve. emphasis on "brief".
Battlespire's setting is a lot more interesting. you are outside of the mundanity of Tamriel, cast into the seas of Oblivion and set to traverse several of its realms flowing with magica. what or who are the residents of Oblivion? that would be the Daedra: divine immortals who instance a panoply of morphologies and personalities. you do not fight a single bat or rat in Battlespire. the resident trash mob is a diminutive satyr which speaks like a pagan from the Thief games. did i mention you can enter dialogue with practically every opponent you meet? this is all to say that the game is simply a lot more interesting and weirder than not only the previous two Elder Scrolls games but also a great deal of fantasy games more generally. you are somewhere between heaven and hell, but certainly not earth.
Battlespire is probably one of the buggiest and most poorly optimized games i have ever played. straferunning exists, which, granted, is far from unique to this game. if cycletime is too high you can both barely move and move in the wrong direction(s). that sort of jank is expected from any dos game really. what isn't expected is that even with cycletime set to what was the cycletime of one of the best CPUs at the time, the game still has noticeable movement glitches, and still performs terribly. random crashes are common. FPS drops by ~half in the presence of transparent textures. enemies either phase into the ground or turn invisible when you attack them sometimes. i can't tell which. one level corrupts your save if you load it from a restart too many times because it generates too many container objects for some reason. the final level lacks music. so it's a testament to how decent this game is, or at least tolerable relative to the hells of Arena and Daggerfall, that it is still basically enjoyable.