My first boat (they DO exist!)

[SeaGtGruff]

The other day I was looking through the Codex Scientia for some information and I happened to see a reference to boats that can be found by the shore of large bodies of water. I didn't recall ever seeing one before, or maybe I did but thought it was just "window dressing" like so much else in the game.

Tonight I found my first boat and rode around in it. Yay! I'm going to keep an eye out for them from now on.

Addendum: As if to mock me, I found my second boat not long after the first one. It was a different body of water, so it was a different boat.

And now that I've learned how to use boats, I think I must have seen them before but hadn't realized you can use them.

The first one was kind of difficult to click on, much like trying to click on a key to pick it up but never quite being able to get the cursor positioned successfully on the boat.

The second one was a lot easier to click on.

[MrFlibble]

I also found the boats only after reading about them in Codex Scientia, even though I had done quite some wilderness exploration on previous playthroughs. I think the trick is that unless you know what you're looking for they blend in rather easy with the terrain and props.

I love the boat riding music. The ride is unbelievably atmospheric especially considering the primitive tech all this is done with. For example there are bridges you can swim under which are basically just flat blocks positioned in a stair-like fashion, but your imagination draws the rest of the scene into a complete bridge.

[SeaGtGruff]

What you say about imagination strikes a chord with a thought I had recently. It seems to me that Arena encourages me to use my imagination more than the other TES games do.

That's probably not a very fair assessment, but what I mean is that there is so much of what I call "just window dressing" in Arena-- things added to help make the game look better or more interesting, but which you can't interact with, even though your experience with other TES games (and other RPGs in general) leads you to expect to be able to interact with them.

This even holds true with the NPCs to some extent, in the sense that their conversational abilities are so limited.

Consequently, I find that I use my imagination to "fill in the gaps" when playing Arena, to a greater extent than when playing the other TES games, because with the other TES games I don't need to rely as much on my imagination to flesh out their details (or lack of same) in my mind.

[MrFlibble]

It seems to me that Arena encourages me to use my imagination more than the other TES games do.

This is exactly the idea that occurred to me a while ago too. In this respect I especially admire all those detailed text descriptions like those that show up when entering taverns and stores, or quest dungeons. It's like the text supplements the visual part of the game.

This should not come as surprising probably, as Arena comes from the time when computer technology allowed to convey more and more of the game world using the direct visual medium, whereas less and less text was used.