Battlespire and some thoughts on recent RPGs

                     From Stefan Herber

In many ways I have to thank Bethesda because the original Arena
Elder Scrolls was the game that hooked me on RPGs years after all
my colleagues had stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons. After
Arena we had Daggerfall - in many ways magnificent but bugged to
hell and with the most incomprehensible automap system ever. Now
comes Battlespire - released months after being reviewed in the
press (badly of course, but when have they anything positive to
say about true RPGs?)

Firstly a word of warning. This is not a sequel to Daggerfall,
merely an adventure set in the same realm. The positive things are
far better graphics, an automap system that is comprehensible and
a gripping storyline which unfortunately by the end has so many
holes and unexplained sidelines that the thing barely holds
together. It is also quite large although this is largely to do
with the numerous and often very tough adversaries than the vast
areas to explore. The negatives? Character development is along
the same lines as the previous Arena games, but nowhere are you
warned that except at the onset of the game no further spells will
be available. Consequently one can generate a reasonable all
rounder mage only to find that no offensive spells of any use turn
up anywhere.

Also throughout the game one finds weapons with fancy titles but
their effect is never explained. Early on I found a gem of fawn's
gleaming which stayed with me to the end unused as I never found
out what it was supposed to do. I found the combat very tough -
more difficult than in "specialist" shoot-em-ups such as Quake.
This honestly becomes very annoying in RPGs where I have always
felt that combat should be there for character development, not
for its own sake.

The good news is that the sequel has been released to favourable
reviews in the USA. This again is not the next in the Arena series
(Morrowind, promised for mid 2000) but a game called Redguard.
One lives in hope ...

All told a bad couple of years for RPGs, not only because there
have been so few but because of their standard. Battlespire has to
go down with Lands of Lore 2 as one of the most disappointing and
one of the worst games I've bothered to finish. Yes, we've had
Diablo which bore as much resemblance to an RPG as Civilization
does to Doom; we've had Fallout which I liked but was too short
and easy - and waiting to be installed are FF7 and M&M6. Sad to
say the only true RPG of the last 18 months which I liked was
Betrayal in Antara, and nobody would say that was as good as
Krondor.  We are promised many more RPGs shortly, so I continue to
live in hope.







                              - o -