this is Ultima Underworld, but after a lobotomy. it plays as if a shareholder handed a programmer a 10th generation monochrome photocopy of a screenshot of ultima underworld, and the entire design was based on that 10th generation monochrome photocopy of an ultima underworld screenshot alone. it set the stage for all the elder scrolls games (and the radiation poisoned elder scrolls, as adapted from interplay) that would follow, vapid, sprawling expanses with maybe a story or something there. but unlike the (as of writing, and as of playing) most recent two instances of melatonin replacement therapy, you can't attempt to salvage this one with 3rd party enhancments, or 3rd party additions. those that may exist, honestly will not save you here.

so you have this exercise in vapidity, a sprawling procedurally constructed world (not generated, all who play tes: arena experience this same world, unfortunately) lightly (not to be misconstrued as sparesly) filled with like maybe 5 (a generous estimate) town variations. a world so big, with so little to explore, it's no wonder that fast travel is mandatory (recurring). too expansive for its own sake. the percieved expanse to the player, and purported expanse by the publisher ironically results in an experience that itself is lightly packed with content not worth any player's time, despite how it may initially seem, despite how it wishes to present itself. they, time and time again, claim to have been inspired by ultima underworld. at the absolute surface level, i suppose that statement makes sense. if i were handed deep-fried photocopies of something with the pinoint focus of underworld, without getting the chance to ever play it, and had to make an approximation of the experience i imagine that screenshot provides, The Elder Scrolls: Arena would be it.


the problems with the elder scrolls run deep, and they are ALL present here, from the jump, in arena. play daggerfall instead, and you can experience every single one of those problems, and possibly have fun doing so!

after a lobotomy, one might be able to adapt. but recovery? no one recovers from a lobotomy.

I enjoyed my time with the game and greatly enjoyed the story dungeons and atmosphere, especially with such a fun soundtrack to back it up. The dungeons have a lot of gimmicks that keep things interesting. The issue is that you must read the manual and play a spellcaster or a hybrid. There's a shield spell trick that you must use if you want to have fun with the game. With that, the balancing issues are mostly done with. (I'll explain it at the end for anyone who might be interested)

The actual fighting is just serviceable. The main reason the score isn't higher. You should play this game only if you like first person dungeon crawling. It doesn't have anything in common with Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. I didn't play Daggerfall yet to comment on that.

As for the shield trick, you need to do this. You go to the wizard's store in any town and create a spell that uses up almost all your mana to create a shield. You use it before you go into dungeons and rest in town. Inside dungeons, once the shield breaks, whenever you're in a safe area where you can rest, you use said shield spell again and rest fully. When you can't rest safely, you use weaker shield spells when it breaks or heal spells.

Arena foi o primeiro game da serie The Elder Scrolls, introduziu tecnologias novas, um mundo bem grande, de forma geral, parece ser um jogo interessante, porém, a mecânica de copy protection, é TERRIVEL, toda dungeon que você sai, é necessário uma palavra chave do manual do jogo, sem falar que o jogo não funciona de jeito nenhum no meu Pentium. logo após sair da primeira Dungeon, você tem que faz uma quest, sobre buscar por algo, ou algúem não lembro mais e quando chega no bar pra perguntar sobre, o jogo simplesmente trava, ja procurei em todos os lugares, e não consegui resolver, então vai ficar assim mesmo, se pensar em jogar o Arena, não jogue, jogue o Daggerfall

Review EN/PTBR

First of all
YES THE GAME HAS AGED BADLY
But it is undeniable that compared to the games released at the time, this one made history, unique Dungeons never seen before in any other game and systems that made everyone impressed, nowadays it really can be strange to look at a game and wonder because we move the character and camera with the arrow keys on the keyboard instead of WASD, we may be surprised because the jump button is J and because to jump forward is SHIFT + J, at that time everything was still very new, but that doesn't mean the game has no flaws, the game can become very repetitive and tiring towards the end, the increasingly time-consuming grind to level up and the lack of possible bosses (with the exception of the final boss) in this game leave a strange taste in the air, but it's nothing that for the time you would say was unplayable

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Antes de tudo
SIM O JOGO ENVELHECEU MAL
Mas é inegável que comparado aos jogos lançados na época esse aqui fez história, Dungeons únicas nunca vistas antes em nenhum outro jogo e sistemas que faziam qualquer um cair de beiço no chão, hoje em dia realmente pode ser estranho olhar pra um jogo e se perguntar porque a gente move o personagem e câmera com as setas do teclado ao invés de WASD, podemos estranhar porque o botão de pulo é J e porque pra pular pra frente é SHIFT + J, naquela época tudo era muito novo ainda, mas isso não quer dizer que o jogo não tem falhas, perto do final o jogo pode se tornar muito repetitivo e cansativo. os leveis cada vez mais demorados de subir e a falta de possíveis chefões (com exceção do final boss) nesse jogo deixam um gosto estranho no ar, porém não é nada que pra época você diria que é injogável.

Confesso que no inicio me empolguei legal com o jogo, mas a falta de desafio e dungeons desnecessariamente grandes sem muito conteúdo foram deixando a experiência maçante com o tempo, tive que apelar pra guias com os caminhos das dungeons pra conseguir terminar o jogo sem morrer de tédio. Mas ainda sim vale a pena a experiência de ver onde tudo começou nessa franquia. Eu levei 25 horas pra zerar o jogo, mas ele tem conteúdo pra muito mais do que isso, o que é bastante impressionante pra época em que foi lançado.
Ah, e ter que sair no soco com o boss final é muito maneiro.

"Not A Good Start At All"

"The Elder Scrolls" was never really on my radar until the release of "Skyrim" over a decade ago, and I've only ever played "Oblivion" in addition. I've enjoyed my time with both games, but I was always interested in going back to the franchises' humble beginnings to see if there is any semblance of a spark with those games. Naturally, I found myself playing this title - "Arena" - the canonical, technical, and "spiritual" start to the series.

My god was this awful to play.

The controls are exceptionally poor and make navigating the opening area a complete chore. Combat felt stiff, clunky, and directionless. The presentation of the game was fine, but the audio mixing was all over the place. Creating a character was a complicated and arduous process, and I never quite felt like I understood what stats were important and which were absolutely useless. I also knew the game wouldn't look great, but it really does just look like a jumbled mess of textures and sprites hopping around.

Don't bother with this one. It's a redundant entry nowadays that technically indicates the start of the franchise, but it's just not worth going through its slog of mechanics for a chance of enjoyment.

Final Verdict: 1/10 (Terrible)

it's good to know even the first Elder Scrolls had side quests which are just pointless filler. bewildering at first but quickly becomes merely tedious. i've heard this game was intended as only a dungeon crawler at first but was morphed into an RPG late into development, and if true, that shows. any and all "role-playing" mechanics are slapdash, though often overly ambitious. there are dozens of individual towns in this game, all complete with plenty of NPCs. there are even holidays. you can visit all of Tamriel, which is apparently unique for the series with the exception of the MMO. it's just a shame it's all copy/paste. no town has a unique identity nor do any NPCs. there is no point where you have the chance to actually role-play as your character; again, the game is at heart just a dungeon crawler.

as for the dungeon crawling, it has more individual identity. levels actually have distinct themes -- there is an ice dungeon, a volcano dungeon, etc. but the levels themselves are quite bad -- all of them without exception are sprawling and senseless labyrinths which practically require you to use the (very good!) strategy guide. as for combat, the heart of the game, it sucks. you have a problem when the heart of your game sucks. enemies early on feel far too powerful and still feel rather over-tuned late into the game. monsters often randomly spawn on top of or behind you. combat practically forces you to rest in between fights but you cannot rest while enemies are nearby (sort of like another game!) and enemies spawn near you frequently when you try to, interrupting it. you die very, very fast; too fast. at the very least swinging your weapon in different direction is cool at first, but that's about it. there's nothing really compelling in this game.

Very primitive but the DNA of the Elder Scrolls series can still clearly be seen. Hard as hell to get started and find your footing but once you're over the initial hump it becomes strangely hypnotic in how repetitive it is. As always, magic can be exploited to make you hugely OP but that's part of the fun. Archaic controls and some rough visuals (especially with draw distance) combine to make a game that feels quite old and clunky and without any source ports (and modding it is a pain in the balls) its a tough sell to most people but if you've got the patience to get into it, there's still something worth playing here.

Going backwards-ish through the Elder Scrolls library the way I did, you really start to get a feel for how dumbed down current RPG's are for truly creating and role-playing a character that you have complete control of. For every iteration, we gain playability and accessibility, which can be a good thing, but we also lose the ability to really be able to immerse ourselves in a character that is built from the ground up to be the way we want them to be.

I'm not someone who doesn't appreciate how wide of an appeal RPG's have in the current market and god knows I don't want every game I play to be this archaic. But this game made me feel like I was in the middle of an epic DnD session, and for someone who has played through a lot of different games, that's not something I can say for every RPG I've played.

If you go into this game expecting to get a really primitive Skyrim, you're going to be disappointed. If you're trying to get into this game because you really love Morrowind, you're probably going to come away disappointed. Yeah, you can see traces of what's to come in the Elder Scrolls series, but at times Arena almost feels one or two steps away from being played on a pen and paper. Just follow along to a guide so you don't get too lost, embrace your imagination and try to have fun with it.

Bethesda Softworks tried their hand at RPGs with The Elder Scrolls: Arena, a first person adventure across a 'giant' landmass split into provinces. On the dungeon-crawler side, these serpentine mazes - complete with limited vision, frequent encounters and weak combat (utilizing mouse movement to perform weapon swings), at least feature two somewhat original concepts: Waterways (i.e. small paths traveling through rooms & under walls, sometimes used as shortcuts and other times as complex sub-mazes) and the Passwall ability (that enables one to destroy walls and therefore bypass locked doors for speedy dungeon clearing). Even more notable are the magic systems, namely a use-based means of leveling reminiscent of Final Fantasy II (governing not stats but the cost, efficacy and duration of spells); and above all the free-form craft of spellmaking, where players could not only combine and alter magic, but even adjust the degree in which those spells' properties improve. Their grind-driven exploits would become one of TES' constants.

The overworld side is vastly inferior. Procedural generation - in this case, underwhelms in terms of environments (composed of flatland and small props), action (surprise encounters only on rest) and discovery (the occasional random dungeon with weak treasure). Main quest playthroughs are better served by fast travel, while those interested in exploring won't find much to salvage (loot, enjoyment, etc.). Ditto for its many towns, whose differences exist only in the layouts, although the combo of a question-filled dialogue system, a limited map, and wandering NPCs gives their navigation a funny quality: As de facto foreigners who cannot easily spot landmarks, players must resort to asking locals for directions.

All in all, between an excessively long main route (given its rather simple plot & structure), pointless job quests (compared to the treasure found in main dungeons), and finicky controls that seem designed for 3-handed people, one suspects that its real achievements (embodied by its massive lorefest of a setting) are not gameplay-related, but rather in the technical, cosmetic and worldbuilding departments.

I'll cop to being almost entirely unfamiliar with the old-school "CRPG" genre, having never played the games like Ultima Underworld that apparently inspired Arena (I honestly was never into DOS games as a kid; I didn't have the attention span for them). It's my understanding that this is a fairly unnoteworthy example of that genre, doomed to be forgotten if it wasn't for the enormous popularity of its sequels. So I don't exactly have proper context for this, and no idea how I'd feel about the actual "classics" of the time. I can only guess they made better usage of the tech available to them.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena has aged like fine dirt, almost entirely unengaging from beginning to end. A colossal miscalculation on the part of its developers, it's as if the designers got swept up in how technology allowed them to depict a supermassive game world and fully implement things like seasons and day/night cycles, and then forgot to make anything fun. The scale of the game is just enormous, with hundreds upon hundreds of cities and dungeons, dozens of different classes and corresponding items, an enormously complex spellmaking system, bartering systems, item repair systems, character stats, alchemy, magic items, etc. All of it goes to waste. For all that effort, and all that complexity, 95% of the game boils down to navigating maze-like dungeons and swinging the mouse wildly in what could very charitably be called "combat" (the futility of this can really only be experienced and not described).

And yeah, the dungeons and combat might kind of suck in the later Elder Scrolls games too, but that's not where the heart of those games resides. I play RPGs because I want to have a dozen different quests going it once, all with their own set of characters, all with their own little stories, all with different tasks for me. There's none of that here. Everyone you will meet in this humongous world is interchangeable, devoid of personality, and doomed to be forgotten the microsecond you are finished with them. ​The main quest is exactly the same thing eight times in a row, with plot kept to an absolute minimum. The side quests are worse; all of them are some variation of "go from tavern A to tavern B and get a negligible amount of gold". The special item quests are actually a nice reprieve (if only for the fact that you get an overpowered unique item at their conclusions), ruined by the fact that you can only hold one special item at a time, keeping you from getting any more item quests. This is especially disappointing because there isn't enough progression in the regular items; you will have your perfect loadout with two-thirds of the game left to go, and then loot/gold become pretty much pointless.

The technological limitations are absolutely not the problem here. There was nothing about the hardware or even the manpower of 1992 Bethesda that would have stopped them from adding a decent story, or fun combat, or functional controls, or letting you see more than two feet in front of you. I can imagine enjoying the novelty of things like having NPCs react to the in-game holidays back in 1993, but I can't imagine anyone ever finishing the game without forcing themselves to keep playing, no matter what year it was. And yes, I finished the whole 30+ hour game (!!!!) without guides (except for the riddles because fuck that).

I've been pretty hard on Arena. I'll concede that the game has its charms, the whole early 90s vibe makes me smile, and I'll even admit to occasionally enjoying finding my way through the dungeons and getting really excited when I found an item to advance the main quest (though in all honesty, this might have been because I was one step closer to getting to stop playing). It's also fascinating to see how so much of the lore of the later games is present here (in things like town names and races), and yet how so much of it feels like an uber-generic D&D campaign rather than the distinct flavor that Tamriel would later become (perfect example: the pseudo-medieval speak used here that was completely dropped in the sequels). As someone raised on the sixth and seventh generation consoles, it was fascinating to experience an early DOS RPG like this, but I will absolutely never play this game ever again.

Up next is Daggerfall, which I know is supposed to be an exponential improvement so I'm cautiously optimistic.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena is iconic not because of its own quality as a game, but because of the series that has its roots here. This is not to say that the game was of no good in its time. Quite the opposite actually. That said, one would be hardpressed to find many arguments to recommend this game to fans of the more modern games of the series, let alone gamers as a whole.

As someone who is a very big fan of Bethesda's work from Fallout 3 to today, and as someone who has always wanted to look at their library before that point as well (Oblivion & Morrowind mainly), I'm pretty happy to have finally taken that step by playing a good chunk of time of the first Elder Scrolls game ever made. I did not beat the game, for many reasons, but I've played enough and read up on the game enough to be able to give you a run down on what this game offers and why you probably wouldn't enjoy this much once the novelty wears off.

The game released initially on March 25, 1994 after a three-month delay on its original 1993 Christmas Day launch date. For various reasons, the game initially only sold roughly 3.000 units, but in what should show you the quality of the game at its time, word of mouth was what ended up pushing The Elder Scrolls: Arena into a success commercially and by the end of 1994 and 1995, critically through the reception of many awards.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10

What I like about playing the first game of any franchise spanning multiple titles vs. starting from the newest one is that you don't feel overwhelmed by the amount of lore in it. Instead, you get to enjoy the ride from the very start, and every bit of info you receive is all there was up to that point. You quickly realize that it's not as daunting as it seemed, though this is not to discount the fact that there certainly is a lot of lore in place even in The Elder Scrolls: Arena.

For starters, a lot of locations, names and dates will instantly be familiar to players of other Elder Scrolls games. The game's setting is Tamriel (a continent located on the planet Nirn). It plays in the Third Era and its 389th year. While this is the beginning date, each time you fast travel elsewhere, a lot of time passes depending on the distance, and you're unlikely to spend less than a couple years in the game before finishing it. Theoretically though, you could fast travel so much that you end up going thousands of years into the future and to the date of more modern Elder Scrolls games, which is a funny thought (at least I think there is no limit).

Jagar Tharn is the main antagonist in this game, betraying Emperor Uriel Septim VII, whose betrayal is witnessed by a mage apprentice called Ria Silmane. She is killed by Jagar Tharn, but takes up an incorporeal form, meaning she can't take a physical form, but reveal herself to the player in their dream. The player starts the game imprisoned (of course) and gets a message from Ria Silmane regarding the events that led to her death, and she tasks you with stopping Jagar Tharn. To do so, you need to get the Staff of Chaos' eight fragments, piece it together and destroy it to kill Jagar Tharn, whose life force is held within it.

It's a very typical story for a game of this time I realize more and more with each game I play, especially RPGs. There is only so much different gameplay that these games can offer, and apparently the only way to tell stories is to tell the player that there are x number of objects/people/locations that they have to collect/visit/destroy in order to win the game. It's not necessarily something I dislike in and of itself, but when the gameplay truly is one dimensional, focusing on just the main story can be quite repetitive and tedious.

Thankfully, this is Bethesda we're talking about, and the main story is only one part of your adventure. Elder Scrolls: Arena doesn't just take place in one province, but in the entire continent of Tamriel. Depending on the race you choose, exiting the first dungeon sends you to your home province. Not only that, but you are also randomly sent to one of dozens of unique villages/towns in each province. From there, you can travel to and explore every single one of them if you so desire, as well as explore the outskirts of these towns if you so wish. While they look same-y after a short while of course, there are differences, including in weather, building structures and placements, textures and types of citizens.

From my understanding, each player gets the same locations in every playthrough, and even every village's inns for example have the same unique names every time. NPCs might even be the same at all times, but then there are many things that are randomly generated. The outskirts for example seem to be procedurally generated and will look differently in each playthrough for specific villages, but I doubt there are many different variants there. Either way, in terms of story and exploration, they don't really have had any role in my playthrough. Dungeons are procedurally generated as well, and not only that, but side quests are too. This means that asking for work can result in you being tasked to bring an NPC item A from NPC B in Location C until the Deadline D, and you will be compensated with X amount of gold for doing so. If we go back to 1994, this is a pretty neat way of constantly giving the player things to do and reasons to enter dungeons and explore other areas. Clearly, it won't result in a lot of exciting, unique moments, but for 1994, this was unique and also probably pretty enjoyable. From a lore standpoint however, these don't offer any value other than maybe sending you to certain towns in, say, Skyrim, many of which are still named the same in the Elder Scrolls V, which I thought was pretty cool.

Bigger side quests exist as well though, especially from a lore standpoint. There are "Artifacts", legendary items of lore, which you can collect. You ask for General rumors, and if you're lucky, get one regarding one of these Artifacts, which you can then find in a dungeon. These are mainly items you can wear, but there is also the "Oghma Infinium", which gives you 50 attribute points to distribute. These Artifacts have descriptions however and some might even be relevant in future Elder Scrolls titles.

That said, the main way you will learn more about the Elder Scrolls universe is through the main story, which is quite disappointing in that regard. Similarly to many Bethesda games, the main story seems a bit like an afterthought, though the side content is not filled with excellent exploration to make up for it here. Ultimately, you will need to be satisfied with the small story you get with the three main characters being Ria Silmane, Jagar Tharn and Uriel Septim VII. Is that worth playing the game for? I don't think so. But if you're expecting very little here, the number of areas and NPCs that exist here and have actual names, jobs and tasks makes for a cool, somewhat immersive setting. The main way of progressing the story adds a lot to this as well, since you have to ask NPCs for information on dungeons to be able to pinpoint their locations. But thanks to the Elder Scrolls series growing since, I think anyone looking for an RPG where you need to use the help of NPCs instead of quest markers should simply play Morrowind.

GAMEPLAY | 9/20

There is no sugarcoating it, the game hasn't aged well. Controls are unintuitive, combat is incredibly unforgiving, you can easily find yourself losing hours of progress by being stuck at the end of a long dungeon, items and their benefits are not explained until you use or wear them, dungeons are repetitive and you either have to grind a ton or cheese the game's systems to get incredibly rich and make combat very easy for yourself.

First, here is what you do as part of the main story. Go to a village. Ask for information on a dungeon. The dungeon name is given to you by Ria Silmane whenever you sleep after finding the previous piece of the Staff of Chaos. You get information on the province where it will be. Go there. Ask around some more, get to person who needs you to find an Elder Scroll, which will reveal the location of the dungeon you're looking for. So go to dungeon to get the item that unlocks the main dungeon. Now go to main dungeon. Find your way to the lowest floor and find the piece. You get dialogue with Jagar Tharn when you do, who is pissed, but won't do shit about it other than sending minions because guess what, there are no bosses in this game apart from the finale I believe. Now repeat this process many times.

Second, here is what you do outside of the main story. Go somewhere, walk around the villages, talk to people to get to know their name and occupation, ask for general and work-related rumors, pick up a randomly generated or artifact related side quest, do the side quest.

That's pretty much it. If you're playing this in 1994 or the years afterwards, many of you would have clearly had a solid time based on the game's reception. Play it today and you'll be left with a repetitive game that has been improved upon not only by hundreds of other RPGs since, but by 4 iterations in the same series as well. So apart from the novelty of it all for the first couple of hours, there is no reason to indulge.

If the general things you can do here don't scare you off, here is the gameplay. Combat is done by pulling the mouse across the screen in a bunch of directions. Up and down, diagonally up/down, left/right, every way you can imagine basically. Some of these attacks do more damage, but are likelier to miss. Some deal less damage, but are likelier to hit. Some are neutral. There are plenty of weapons to choose from with different animations, but the idea remains the same. There is also spellcasting though, which adds a nice extra layer to it.

As you explore dungeons, you fight a rather low number of different enemies, at least until the point that I played, with Lizard Men, Orcs, Skeletons and Spiders being regular foes. You collect loot from their bodies or loot piles, which gives you gold, armor and other items like "Mark"s, which are items with special abilities, such as the ability to heal you or to cast certain magic attacks. Items have different tiers and the better you want your gear to be, the more gold you need of course, but from my experience, getting the gold necessary to properly deck yourself out takes a loooot of time of doing the same thing over and over again. Instead, what you can do is simple.

Mage guilds sell certain Ebony items that are very expensive. Absurdly expensive. You can simply pickpocket these and sell them back. If you fail, you can simply kill the mage, exit the guild, re-enter and the mage reappears, meaning there is no real system behind it other than the fact that pickpocketing exists in the game. Do that a few times and you're rich and can test out all sorts of items to your hearts content. It sounds like that's cheating and boring, but I'd say it's the only thing that will keep you from yawning your jaw off and actually opens up the game a bit more.

One final point regarding combat here: I feel like about half of my encounters started with me not even seeing the enemy. You get visually and audibly alerted to an enemy attacking you, so it's not the end of the world, but the amount of times enemies got a hit in without me seeing them was crazy. The path before you in dungeons is dark as you approach it, and any dead angle can have an enemy getting alerted to your presence, and especially early on, by the time you realize you're attacked, you'll have nearly your entire health drained by some of the enemies.

Looking at gameplay clips of Daggerfall makes me realize how dated Arena looks compared to its sequel, which is shocking considering that there is only a two-year difference in release dates. If you really want to dabble with old-school Elder Scrolls, Daggerfall looks like a much, much, much better choice, while Arena can safely be skipped in my opinion.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10

There is voice acting here and it's actually not terrible. Jagar Tharn does a better job here than Ria Silmane in my opinion, but neither sounds as bad as you might expect 1994 voice acting to sound. The sound design has some discomforting qualities to it, in a good way, and I'm sure I'll find myself awakening in my own pool of sweat to the door sounds in this game at some point in the future. Add to this disturbing sound the sudden and in-your-face level-up tune and you got yourself a horror RPG a la Elvira. The soundtrack itself is quite long at 40 total minutes compared to other games at the time, but for an RPG that is quite long, this still means listening to the same tracks over and over again. The soundtrack can be best described as the most 1990s Fantasy RPG OST of all time. Puts you in the right mood, but does not stand out.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10

The fact that this game is so massive in terms of number of villages and dungeons is both a positive and negative for it visually. On the one hand, the game can show off the surprisingly varied designs used to create these villages. On the other, there obviously are not nearly enough differences to make up for so many villages. On top of that, dungeons in particular look same-y quite quickly, and considering that that is what you're looking it for most of your playthrough, your eyes will deserve a raise after you're done with the game for the sacrifices they make. That said, special effects used in this game and the design of the cutscenes were some of the standouts here visually, though overall the game is meh in that regard.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10

Towns/Villages in this game are MASSIVE. Tons and tons of buildings, lots of NPCs, all of them with unique names and jobs, plenty of rumors to hear, inns to visit, provinces to travel to and the vibe you get from the soundtrack make this game a hell of a lot more immersive than one would expect. It felt like a Morrowind-lite in that regard, where the ideas are there already, but not the means to execute properly.

CONTENT | 5/10

Lots of provinces, races, classes, and weapons. Lots of towns/villages, NPCs, dungeons and more. Content quantity is truly large. Content quality on the other hand is lacking in many regards.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10

I truly appreciate the way you find your main mission locations: By interacting with the NPCs and asking them, which gives you the feeling of immersiveness that makes Morrowind so beloved and unique to this day. Obviously, the systems are extremely limited here even in comparison to Morrowind, but just giving you instant quest markers would make this game even more boring than it already is in modern times. That said, the repetitive nature of both how you get to your locations and the dungeon layout within is hard to ignore.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 7/10

The game is very ambitious, but unlike many other unique, ambitious games of its time, this one doesn't quite hit the mark like its sequel "Daggerfall" might have. Ultimately, the game presents you with a really large world, but with very few ways to interact with it that you are meant to repeat ad nauseam. You can already see what kind of games Bethesda want to make, and how they want their games to be ultimate fantasy RPG simulators, but the systems in place here are not refined at all, probably mainly due to the technology available in 1994, but also probably because of what ultimately led to a delay out of the Christmas Day window. 2 years later, at least at a glance, Daggerfall looks like on a whole nother level within just two years, and I don't think PC gaming got along THAT far during that time for their to ostensibly be such a massive difference in quality, though I might be underestimating the growth of gaming at the time.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

Yeah, the game is replayable, but replayability must also mean fun to replay, and I think the only part that provides that is the fact that you can have an entire playthrough feel different by placing an emphasis on spell-casting instead of melee combat.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 61/100

I respect this game a lot for its ambitions and for bringing us the Elder Scrolls franchise. That said, if you are intrigued by its "talk to NPCs to figure out your way" system, just play Morrowind. If you're OK with more hand-holding, just play Oblivion and/or Skyrim at this point. Elder Scrolls Arena does not have much to offer anymore after its first few hours.

(This is the 96th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

This is honestly a fascinating game, kind of. The world is massive, and while the majority of it is procedurally generated, there are still hundreds of towns to discover and plenty of large dungeons to crawl through. There is an ingame time system that keeps track of days and everything. You can barter with merchants both when buying and selling, and ask people for rumors and jobs. There are dozens of different weapons and spells for you to find and experiment with, and the class selection is vast. The lore, while not super fleshed out, is interesting and lays out a good formation for later games. The entire continent where the series takes place was created for this game, and you can visit every single city in every single province if you want, and many of them have their own themes and looks.

The caveat to all these cool things is of course that the game never really utilizes any of them in meaningful ways. The procedurally generated environments get boring to explore after 3 seconds, after you realize what little variety there is. The timer never comes into play at all, it's purely for show, and apart from the few quests that require you do do something within 3 days or whatever, you can go the entire game without having to look at the calendar once. The bartering is tied mainly to one stat, which isn't used for anything else. And while it is pretty neat to have all these different weapons at your disposal, they are practically useless due to how OP magic is. Not picking a mage class at the beginning of the game is basically a death sentence if you don't want to spend a fortune on potions.

To me at least, the two biggest problems with the game are technical jank and tedious combat. For the first one, I am at least partially willing to excuse it because of its age. Having expansive 3D environments in 1994 must've taken a lot of work, but that doesn't change the fact that the draw distance is so fucking bad. You can't see anything unless it's right in front of you, and this is honestly the biggest immersion killer in the entire game. The clunky movement isn't super frustratating, although I don't think it was necessary to have the swimming speed be 1 m/year. Still, this is a minor gripe.

The combat is an entirely different story however. First of all, just wildly swiping your mouse across the desk is not very intuitive. Second of all, who the FUCK was responsible for the rng in these fights. The damage and hit probability for both you and the enemies in this game vary so massively, that fighting a single enemy can go completely different ways. You might be lucky with your hits, take few in return, and dispatch them in seconds. OR, your foe might land three high roll strikes in a row, draining your entire health bar almost instantaneously. It is impossible to tell how a fight will go beforehand, and this uncertainty makes the dungeon crawling feel even more aggrevating and pointless.

Overall, Arena is a game that hasn't endured the passage of time very well. It is janky, tedious and frustrating to play, and the vastness of its different systems isn't enough to save it, especially considering how underutilized everything is. I've heard the sequel is way better, so let's hope the Elder Scroll experience improves.

Well, I really thought I was gonna do it this time. I thought I would beat Arena. I got about halfway through, and my game broke. Now it doesn't open, and if it does, it crashes within 10 minutes. I guess Bethesda really does never change.
Anyways, it's alright I guess. Anyways, it's really a victim of it's time more than anything. You can see a lot of the groundwork for later Elder Scrolls games here, which could be a compliment, but you can also just like play those games instead. It's limited by the resolution, capped at 320x200, which is just what computers could handle, it's not under their control, but it still detracts, because if I had to play this game in 1994, I would probably not play games, and do something else!
The controls are bad, but they can be changed in DOSbox, which let's be real, is the only way anyone is playing nowadays, and the controls were pretty standard for the time. They weren't nearly as forward thinking as Daggerfall was, and the lack of mouse look is a big limiter when you're often fighting close range enemies that can go below your field of view. The controls don't hold back the combat as much as they could though, and they actually do a pretty good job at replicating the feeling of rolling a die in a tabletop RPG, but without a group to play with you it doesn't feel quite as good. The later dungeons are hard as shit as a melee character, but I never felt completely dissuaded, but as stated I only was able to play half of the game, and I imagine they would be real grating to keep going through them as the lack of variety really stands out, the most variation basically being "now the floor is green!"
In conclusion, play Daggerfall, or hell play Skyrim or Oblivion, they actually feel surprisingly close to the gameplay loop of Arena. Nowadays, Arena is basically only to be looked back on to see the origin of the series, a game that required innovation, but limited itself to already established gameplay standards. Good enough, but utterly antiquated by it's later entries.