Does anyone foresee Battlespire being made available for download in the near future? And if not, where would one go to procure a copy of the original game? I looked on eBay, and there are only six available, and I'm afraid that they'll all be bought before the end of August comes and I have money to buy one!

Battlespire has not been released and can only be legally obtained on Amazon or ebay. Personally, I think you'd be better off with Arena or Daggerfall, both of which are free to download. Battlespire has some major performance problems and looks kind of unfinished. It's still cool, just not as neat as Daggerfall.

If the game is released for free, it won't happen anytime soon but years from now. It took 5 years between the free release of Arena and Daggerfall, so maybe in another 5 years from now? Pure speculation from my part, though.


Copies keep coming and going on ebay. If those 6 are gone by the end of August, there will no doubt be other new ones too.

I do have a copy somewhere.

But....
I did work on it, so it's sentimental. I used to have a spare copy. I'll take a look if you really want it. It wasnt in the same vein as Arena and Daggefall. More "action" orientated.

Mark Jones
OLD Bethesda artist
http://www.mjonesgraphics.com

Good to see you still around here. I've got a copy of Battlespire, but I've had trouble getting it to work with a decent framerate on Dosbox.

I don't think Battlespire would really be a worthy 20 year anniversary release. Maybe Redguard, or both of them. You know, Bethesda churns out games at a slower rate than the five-year increments of anniversaries. Eventually they're going to run out of stuff to give away. :rofl:


It's always an honor to be visited by some of the older Bethesda developers. Thanks for taking the time to reply, and best of luck in your future endeavors! :foodndrink:

If Battlespire if ever released for free, and again, like Arena and Daggerfall Bethesda not wanting to release the manual with it, then i think Bethesda will get a lot of hassle as will we, but in bigger numbers, with questions about so many things. Battlespire is a hard game indeed to play and is a bugger to get working in XP/Vista and even DOSBox, so a wonderwall of questions will have to be answered and 100,000's more people will think that Bethesda doesn't help them much, despite the free download, because of all the problems and frustrations they have come up against with these downloads. I mean there have probably been 100,000's with Daggerfall and I would expect even more for Battlespire.

I personally would love the answer to the question of why Bethesda doesn't like to release the manual with the free download. Doing this would solve so many problems and answer so many questions for gamers that download the game, try to get it going, and give up before ever posting a message on forums like this, just remembering about a Bethesda game they would like to have played but couldn't and wondering if thy could not have been helped just just a little more, like incorporating DOSBox with these retro downloads, like GOG do. An hour's work for a Bethesda intern doesn't seem too much to have done to avoid these 100,000's of frustrated gamers not used to DOSBox or retro PC gaming but lovers of either Morrowind or Oblivion.

I read the http://www.imperial-library.info/tsobs/, and it made me feel as if I'd played the game, minus having to purchase it at an exorbitant price and wrangling it to work on my computer.

EDIT: OMGBBQ! Mark Jones! I've looked at your art, it's fantastic! By the way, some of the links in the Morrowind section don't seem to work. For instance, I click on Morrowind Creatures, and next to the Dremora, the text says to click on him for more info... but when I do, I get redirected back to the main page for Morrowind.

Sorry about the link! The website is a bit out of date. I'm trying to get a new "refresh" ready but I'm busy trying to find work all the time! LOL
The joys of freelancing...
NOT

Say Mark, did you leave Bethesda after Morrowind/Shadowkey? Or was there some terrible holocaust of all the old developers?

I left before Morrowind and worked on both Morrowind and Shadowkey as a freelancer. I'd like to go back to be honest! I'll have to get my resume up together! LOL

I'd love to see your name credited on a future TES game... I'm a fan of your work, as you can see by my avatar.

Not only an excellent artist, but a stand-up guy. I'd also like to see your art in future Bethesda games, but a lot of that is probably out of your control.

Well, his resume isn't! Man, does it ever svck getting those things right. Every person you meet thinks you should do it a different way.

While we're at it, let's get Julian LeFay, Eric Heberling, and Ted Petersen back! :goodjob:

Together, the four of you could easily overthrow the evil Todd Howard.

Hi Mark, good to see you on the forum

Personally I'd rather see Redguard released, but then again I only say that because I already have Battlespire...

Well if having the forum spam provide Bethesda with demands requests that you be reinstated I'm sure we'd oblige... you could completely deny involvement of course and have this thread deleted to remove any evidence. :ninja:

still looking for a copy of battlespire? i have a spare. bought it from ebay not realizing that is didnt come with a box, just game and manual/paperwork which was unacceptable to me. i would be willing to give it to someone who would enjoy playing it.

Just speculating, of course, but it is likely that they don't have it in a format easily distributed. Guarantee it would be weeks of man hours to "scan" it into PDF. And would it really be that surprising if the original text is no longer easily found. There can be a brazillian good reasons..

It would take an hour, at most, to scan the manual. There are scans of it floating around, too, but obviously I can't post something like that here.

My guess is that it would use extra bandwidth for no real gain (as in, it wouldn't help anyone install or play it considering the information available through the UESP or Google) and they probably just didn't care. I find it funny that Humorguy gets so worked up over the lack of inclusion of a manual for a free game.

@Taemos, one of the reasons I get a little upset is how much time is taken up on forums like this answering questions that probably wouldn't be asked if the person had the manual. The same questions are asked over and over as people aren't willing to search the forum,. and quite simply, I believe more than 50% of this forum's post could be deleted with no appreciable difference to us that have the game.

It's one man hour for Bethesda to do the PDF manual and about 2 man years of people like you and me answering questions from people that would be answered if they had a manual. I know what side I am on, even if you aren't.

That's what Google is for. If people aren't willing to use Google, I'm pretty sure they aren't willing to look through a PDF file.

Man.. What kind of scanners are you guys using? I have a fairly nice Scanjet 7100c here with ADF. I've used OmniPage, Adobe, and one other OCR utility I can't remember, and none of it is that straight forward for effectively scanning existing documentation. Now, I'll be the first to admit I've been left to fend for myself in trying to negotiate problems, but I've just never had much luck scanning text. Of course, if you want it to remain a dumb graphic format, that's fairly easy, but if you have to take a published booklet, open each page, scan & ocr it, and then correct errors in text & formatting, I don't see that being an hour. How many pages was the manual? (I think I still have it somewhere, but finding it may take some time)

My point was that it wouldn't take "weeks of man hours" to scan a manual. Yes, if it were up to me, I'd leave it in a graphic format, because that's half the fun of reading the manual.

It doesn't matter, though, because I have a scan of the manual and I couldn't care less whether or not everyone else gets it. I have it purely for archival purposes; everything anyone needs to know about Daggerfall is easily found via Google.

You do realize that you don't have to answer anybody's questions don't you, its not like its your job and you're being short-sticked by not having the manual. Who really gives a crap how much time is taken up answering the questions so long as the questions get answered, is it really taking away from the quality or the progress of the forum in some manner?