I had a surprising amount of fun with Arena. Do the controls suck,? Yes. Does every town look more or less the same? Yes. Do I care? No!... Ok maybe a little, but after some adjustment and accepting the fact that this a game from a different era, you can get some entertainment from the sprawling dungeons and NPCs.
The game has side quests and a fully open randomly generated world to explore, but these are almost entirely pointless, as they yield no real reward, I suppose you can simply use them for the sake of roleplaying but they are pretty much a waste of time and can be entirely ignored.
The soundtrack (At least on the version I was playing which was the steam release) is also pretty good! A few tracks repeat often and can get on your nerves but for the most part they are pretty stellar.
The class variety is also pretty impressive, I did my main playthrough as a Knight, then did some experimenting with a mage after and there is a wide variety of unique and interesting spells and such in this game to utilise. This is somewhat important to the game as it is the only true replay value, as the main quest is extremely linear and as mentioned the sidequests are all but a distraction.
Before playing this game I heard a lot about the SCATHING UNFORGIVING difficulty of this game, which, in my experience really is not true. I was expecting super cryptic messages and directionless quests, but no, this game is very clear with what you need to do and where you need to go, but not in an overbearing handholding way, it just makes very obvious "hints" and indications as to who you need to ask to find out what information.
One of the huge things that put people off in this game are the controls, and thankfully there is an easy fix to this with mods and editing files and the like, but I did not do this! (Totally by choice and not because I didn't realise such options existed). I actually got used to the controls rather quickly, you will have to shift your keyboard over to the left to actually hit the arrow keys and move the mouse accordingly, but, for me, it was bearable, with the exception to jumping which I did as little as possible. But even with that said, the controls are not good and are far beyond acceptable for most people.
Overall is this game comparable to the other Elder Scrolls games to come, probably not, but is it worth playing? I would say yes!
The game has side quests and a fully open randomly generated world to explore, but these are almost entirely pointless, as they yield no real reward, I suppose you can simply use them for the sake of roleplaying but they are pretty much a waste of time and can be entirely ignored.
The soundtrack (At least on the version I was playing which was the steam release) is also pretty good! A few tracks repeat often and can get on your nerves but for the most part they are pretty stellar.
The class variety is also pretty impressive, I did my main playthrough as a Knight, then did some experimenting with a mage after and there is a wide variety of unique and interesting spells and such in this game to utilise. This is somewhat important to the game as it is the only true replay value, as the main quest is extremely linear and as mentioned the sidequests are all but a distraction.
Before playing this game I heard a lot about the SCATHING UNFORGIVING difficulty of this game, which, in my experience really is not true. I was expecting super cryptic messages and directionless quests, but no, this game is very clear with what you need to do and where you need to go, but not in an overbearing handholding way, it just makes very obvious "hints" and indications as to who you need to ask to find out what information.
One of the huge things that put people off in this game are the controls, and thankfully there is an easy fix to this with mods and editing files and the like, but I did not do this! (Totally by choice and not because I didn't realise such options existed). I actually got used to the controls rather quickly, you will have to shift your keyboard over to the left to actually hit the arrow keys and move the mouse accordingly, but, for me, it was bearable, with the exception to jumping which I did as little as possible. But even with that said, the controls are not good and are far beyond acceptable for most people.
Overall is this game comparable to the other Elder Scrolls games to come, probably not, but is it worth playing? I would say yes!