witch one do you think is better i think arena is the best one

Care to elaborate why? Most people find Daggerfall to be a great improvement over Arena in practically every aspect. But I would be interested in hearing why some people feel otherwise.

The only reason I think people would like Arena better is because of nostalgia. I really don't see anykind of pros about Arena compared to Daggerfall except for the taverns. :shrug:

The generators they used for Arena towns are very good for their time. I don't know why they didn't used the same generators in Daggerfall. There are small alleys in Arena in contrast with big roads, prosttutes waiting in corners and beggars sitting in the streets.

cities were presented better in arena, as cities were more lively as zinger stated. there were more than just wandering NPCs, you had beggers, prosttutes, monks, street vendor types, etc...not that you could really interact with them all that much, but they represented themselves accurately (daggerfall's 'prosttutes' would talk about politics and give directions, odd bunch eh?). the cities had harbors & canols if they were next to the coastline or on a river respectively, and there were alleys. at night, you could run into thieves and other monsters in town if you weren't careful.

the wilderness was well presented, as there were actually roads outside of the cities that would lead you to places, be it a wayside tavern, a farmstead, a 'dungeon', or even another city. some would have rivers too.

the main story dungeons in arena were some of the best designed dungeons in the series, the random dungeons were a bit simple, but had merit. we had the spell passwall though, which does lead to some interesting results.

arena's biggest con is the lack of custom character generation & and heavy reliance on d&d rules and leveling. however the character classes play near exact same as in daggerfall.

overall, arena is not bad considering it came out in '94 and took up 45MB space.

i prefered arena simplicy, but after that daggerfall is better in almost every way. i mean daggerfall is so complex! guilds, quest the enormas dungeons, im yet to complete one dungeon quest as i can never find what im looking for.

That, and Arena is free. Heheh.

That said, I can't believe this is even a question. Daggerfall, without a doubt.

Arena in my mind is very much superior for casual gaming. If I want to play a hack & slash for a couple minutes, say ten or fifteen I can get much more enjoyment out of Arena then I can Daggerfall. Because in Daggerfall it is so much more deep, so much more indepth... It is just so much more. Arena is just the bare minimum and its fun.

Personally, I preferred Daggerfall: bigger game, more things to do, skill system, more varied quests, etc.

My main disappointment in Daggerfall was the wilderness. In Arena, you could walk out of town and find a crypt to explore or a tower to fight your way through. Follow a road to a cluster of houses with people walking the street; explore the reeds around a lake and find a boat you could use to get to a dungeon on an island in the middle of the lake.

In Daggerfall, the wilderness was boring and not worth exploring. Just fast travel to the dungeons, towns, etc. and ignore the almost empty landscape.

...just passing through...

Sur Warlock gets at it nicely: Arena is more playable than Daggerfall. Daggerfall is involved, and you have to plan and scheme to get your character to where you want to be. Arena is far more straightforward.

Plus Arena is one of the most rock-solid games code-wise I've ever played. There is only one bug of consequence, and you could play the entire game and not encounter it.

I prefer Arena. Daggerfall is unstable, its wilderness is bland, its dungeons are way too large and chaotic, and I have no direction because it seems any direction I go I end up with a quest to kill an enemy 50 levels higher than I am or it's in a dungeon that I cant navigate or it's stuck in the wall.
Arena's (8 templates as they may be) were straight forward, easy to follow, and pretty fun, due to the dungeons being better generated. Arena was a straightforward game, not really much of an RPG as it is a dungeon romp, but it was a damned fun one.

I know this isn't technically a bug, but when I used to run Arena under native DOS the game was really picky about EMS memory management. I spent hours getting the damned thing to work.

It really is extremely solid under DOSBox, though.

I know this isn't technically a bug, but when I used to run Arena under native DOS the game was really picky about EMS memory management. I spent hours getting the damned thing to work.

Many old games came with caveats like that, that you'd have to fiddle with this or that (or this and that...and the other) to get it right. Arena wasn't particularly bad in this respect; just get 600Kb below the line and you were good. Sound card issues could be particularly painful, with many switches the program would accept to get a game working. Games were generally easier to run back when the only sound came from the PC speaker; sound cards screwed that up for many casual users.

Nowadays the issue isn't "How do I make it work," it's "Do I even have the hardware to run this beast of a game?" Hence the popularity of consoles.

I know. Getting the games working was half the fun

custom boot disks, a staple of the era '91-94. then i believe dos4gw changed it all.

arena wasn't that bad, but it needed a lot of ram & harddrive space/

Getting TES to run on a Win98SE machine in Windows was fun. Took me a weekend to get Arena to Redguard working. Then the bloody thing went kaput the next week, I was not happy.

Arena only beats Daggerfall in the looks of towns (Yes, looks, all that stuff didn't really have many functions except for talking or to get some flavour) Daggerfall had less things in towns, but the things it has are more functional.

I like arena for a quick blast because its dungeons are easier to navigate, plus the people in towns act more realistic in Arena. But if I had to compare them, Daggerfall wins because of its skills and better sounding music.

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