[Japo]

I started a game in Daggerfall, and I have to agree that much of what's cool about it is unrealized potential. And dungeons are a pain even with recall (which takes a ton of spell points), because you have to find the quest item/person before. I'm trying to ascend in a temple to get access the potion maker, to see how alchemy is in this game. Whenever they give me a dungeon quest I do the [] cheat, just like at the end of my previous game.

They totally ruined the dungeons, because they were so innovative. Daggerfall had the first real 3D dungeons ever, AFAIK (the Duke Nukem of RPGs), but they made the mistake of making them as maze-like as in traditional RPGs with flat storied dungeons. Even if Daggerfall had a higher resolution and you could rotate the map more freely, it would still be a mess.

You know what 3D game has the best dungeons ever? Tomb Raider. It doesn't have maps, and I wondered why. Now I can imagine they may have studied the concept and concluded that 3D maps were impractical. The levels in Tomb Raider take every advantage of the three dimensions, and they're challenging, but they're just simple enough that you can find your way after a while on your own.

In Arena, only two more pieces of the Staff to go. But the dungeon I'm now in (Mines of Khuras) is seriously hard, full of magic spewing monsters. And I'm not sure what kind of system Arena goes by, but armor class doesn't seem to matter, because I totally cheated to have four artifacts at the same time, but even the weakest monsters can hit me. But only the iron golems are dangerous in melee for me, and I can use my ring of forcewall. The biggest danger is magic, two lowly hellhounds can kill me in the open if I'm not carefull; I have spell shield in the ring of Phynaster, but I'm saving it as much as I can.

I may revisit Morrowind after this. I don't think I've played it enough to exhaust its entertainment value. I'll shop around for mods, now that I know what I like and what I don't.