Battlespire: An Elder Scrolls Retrospective

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Character Creation

This time out, the player has only six choices for race: breton, nord, redguard, dark elf, high elf, or wood elf. No orcs or beast races in this game.

There are no class questions - just a list of classes from which to pick - but it looks like all of the classic TES classes are there. The existing classes can be modified or the player can choose to build a whole new class from scratch.  Which is where things start to get a bit odd.  And number-crunchy.

Battlespire introduces the concept of Build Points.  The random numbers of Arena and  Daggerfall are gone.  A fixed number of points are given to spend on ability scores, skills, extra health, spells, special abilities, and starting equipment.  A total of 4,700 points, actually, so the numbers dealt with are fairly large, and as such, a bit awkward.

Extra Build Points can be obtained by picking disadvantages inherited from Daggerfall, like the inability to use specific types of weapons, armor, or materials.  And the rules are improved over Daggerfall.  In Daggerfall, you could make your character unable to wear leather or chainmail, but still wear plate.  Is that really much of a disadvantage?
In Battlespire, making your character unable to wear light armor means you can't wear anything better than light armor either.  Or make a character unable to use mithril items and you won't be able to use adamantium, ebony, or daedric either.

Still, some of the special abilities don't make much sense.  There is a "Rapid Healing" ability.  In Daggerfall, this increased the rate at which health is regained when resting.  Likewise, the "Can't Regenerate Spell Points" disadvantage prevents you from regaining spell points when resting.  But the thing is, in Battlespire there is no resting mechanism so it's not clear what (if anything) these do.  Recovering health and spell points can only be done with potions and magic blue crystals.

There is no character level in the game.  The character gains a level when advancing to the next map, so gaining extra levels by cheesing up skills is not possible.  On the six occasions when gaining a level, the player is presented with 600, 800, 1100, 1400,
1600, and finally 1900 Build Points; again, really large numbers that pretty much amount to "improve your stats by 8-15 points".

The real awkwardness of this system is trying to buy those disparate resources with one pool of points.  Bling up your character with some really nice starting equipment and you can't raise your stats as much.  To play an effective mage, you'll need to buy all of your spells at this point, and may end up gimping your character to get all of the desired spells.  You can skimp on improving skills, since those improve when used but if you skimp too much, you may not survive long enough to practice using those skills.

Leaving the player desiring more points to improve the character is a good thing, especially once the player has learned how important it is to have all of those abilities as high as possible.  Here, it really does feel like those Build Points are stretched too thin across all of the resources that need to be bought.  Or perhaps I'm still looking
at this as a player, whereas a game developer will be thinking, "That's a good thing!  That's exactly what the player should feel."

Note that it is possible to acquire spells late in the game, although the number is limited and they don't start showing up until half way through the game - and even then they are random loot - so you can't plan in advance for anything useful.  The spells selected during character creation are the only ones the player can rely on to have throughout the game.

If during character creation you experience a moment of power gaming and decide to unload all of the default equipment, drain your skills to the minimum, and spend all of those Build Points on pumping up your stats, since it is the best long-term decision to make... Well, expect to find the first level of the game to be very, very hard.

On the other hand, if you load up on good equipment, don't be surprised if every piece of it is used up or broken before the end of the first level.

This ends up being a game where character creation takes forethought and repeated restarts to familiarize oneself with the details of the rule system and the layout of the first few levels.

Also, there is one interesting twist to the usual TES skill improvement system: skills cannot exceed the value of their base ability score.  If strength is 50, then all strength-based skills are restricted to a maximum of 50.  Ability scores must be continually increased throughout the game to allow skills to continue improving.

With this rule in place, the ability scores become very important, and more planning is required to decide which scores to improve while leveling up.  I can see why they did not keep this rule in place for Morrowind: it could lead to a deadlock situation where players could level up to the point that their skills could not improve due to their ability scores, which would prevent them from being able to gain more levels.  And since they would not be able to gain levels, they would not be able to improve their ability scores.

Personally, I like that idea but it would conflict with Bethesda's "go everywhere, do everything, and be a master of all skills" design motto.

Equipment

One of the more challenging aspects of the game is the limited amount of useful equipment to be found and the rapid rate at which it deteriorates in battle.  Arena and Daggerfall had items degrade when used but it occurs at a much more rapid rate in Battlespire.  It's on par with Morrowind, perhaps a bit slower, although thankfully nowhere near as bad Oblivion.

There is no way to repair damaged items.  Once they break, they're gone.

Well, that's not entirely true.  There are rare "Chests of Restoration" in the game.  It's not explained anywhere what they do but I did eventually figure out that dropping a damaged object into one of these chests would repair the object.  But this only works once per chest, and there are only one or two chests per level, and only in the latter part of the game.

You may be inclined to fight everything you can find, since it increases the amount of loot you find (which is sparse), and it allows you to train lots of skills.  The down side is that the more time you spend in combat, the quicker all of your equipment gets broken.  This may encourage you to avoid combat, using the dialog options to make friends with some of the daedra.  And while it is fun to get a pack of scamps to take on hostile vermai, you'll find it difficult to contribute to the battle since the critters won't be holding still for you and you're likely to hit those friendly monsters a time or two - then you quickly have everything attacking you...much like trying to fight alongside companions in Oblivion.

Very little information is provided about equipment in the game.  The name and material type is all the game shows.  So when you find that Mithril Claymore of the Merry Lumberjack, you may have the urge to sing Monty Python songs, but that won't get you any closer to knowing what the sword's magical properties are.

Battlespire uses a naming system for magical items.  Sanguine items, for example, provide a +5 bonus.  Surprise items have a bonus to Backstabbing.  Once you are familiar with the naming scheme, you can quickly figure out what that Cloak of Sanguine Surprise does.

There are several fourth-wall-breaking scrolls scattered around the game that explain some of these name properties - the rest you have to suss out for yourself.  Often, in spite of trying, you'll have no idea what those items do.  It's a shame the game did not include an Identify spell like Arena and Daggerfall.

And the Merry Lumberjack?  It has a bonus to Long Sword and can heal you a limited number of times...which I only know because I downloaded a crib sheet with most of the property names.  Having to Alt-tab every time I found an item became quite tiresome  and removed the thrill of finding new magic items.

Another unhelpful quirk is that armor is divided into light, medium, and heavy categories.  As in Daggerfall, your character may not be able to equip certain armor types.  Yet in the game, there is no indication of the item type.  Two different cuirasses can look the
same but you can equip one and not the other.  Two similar types of cuirasses can look completely different due to armor styles.  Plus, the distinctive material colors from Daggerfall are almost gone, muted to the point that mousing over an item was the only way of figuring out what it was.

Also, the protective quality of items is variable.  Daedric armor can be anywhere from +5 to +8, with no indication why.  Is one light armor and the other heavy?  Is it random?  In the end, all you can do is shrug, equip whichever one the game permits and throw the better ones away with a sign of frustration.

Not surprisingly, the protective quality of some cuirasses for female characters leaves something to be desired (unless you're a dancer on a Huttese sail barge).  Bare midriffs and gratuitous cleavage are hardly new conceits.

The Writing

In my opinion, this game has the worst style of writing of any Elder Scrolls game.  I have to assume that the writers wanted the dialog to come across as humorous but mostly it felt awkward, ridiculous, and at times adolescent.

All dialog is voice-acted.  And from the sound if it, only three or four voice actors were used.  Combine the awkward writing of the dialog with the hammy performances of the voice actors and the end result varies from passable to being a real groaner.

There's a time-worn bit of advice for screenwriters: "Read it out loud." Something written on paper may look fine, but often will sound awkward or downright silly when spoken aloud.  The ear is a more exacting judge than the eye, and even good voice actors cannot prevent borderline writing from turning into bad voice acting.

Daggerfall and Morrowind did not have spoken dialog.  But then, they did not really have dialog, they mostly just had exposition and the occasional Yes/No.  Oblivion had something closer to dialog, even if the player response was seldom more than choosing between doing the quest now or doing it later.

Battlespire has dialog, multiple choices (plenty are fake choices, but plenty more are meaningful) and consequences.  The down side is that aside from unique NPCs, each group of monsters only has three or four conversation trees.  Talk to six or eight different scamps, and you'll know every one of the scamp dialog trees.

Except in some cases there are extra dialog options that only show up after the player reaches a certain point, finds a certain item, or pledges allegiance to a particular daedra.  But by that point, the player may well not be talking to monsters anymore (if he hasn't already killed most of them) and thus may not find out those extra choices are there.

By no means is the writing or dialog a game breaker but is does pull the whole game down.

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