Exploring some of the main quest dungeons in this game honestly doesn't feel that bad in itself, I can appreciate the creativity in the layout of some of them. However the janky combat and various bugs do not really make this game worth visiting, though.

The combat really starts to fall apart like a third or halfway through the game, as enemies start melting your health much faster, especially the magic enemies that will constantly shoot high damaging spells at you, potentially killing you in 2-3 seconds. At this point you will be spending a lot of time pressing U, constantly activating effects to reflect/resist/absorb spells to negate magic enemies from a distance, and chugging Heal True potions when fighting in melee range (basic healing potions are a useless waste of money). Also enemies that paralyze you are bullshit too (spiders do it very frequently since the start of the game), so you always need some Free action potions on hand. But if it happens to you while you're swimming, it's instant death lol.
This game is weirdly focused on potentially exploring the hundreds of equipment shops across all of the towns in the world to buy upgrades, instead of actually finding them as loot. Aside from passive & active magic items like belts & bracelets, the only equipment that can roll as enchanted when you find them as loot from enemies or loot piles are daggers longswords and platehelms. And even then, they are always going to be the basic quality instead of higher tiers such as elven/ebony/etc. So if you get 2 or 3 staff pieces, instead of trying to explore all of the shops yourself, you should honestly just look at the UESP wiki for whatever items you would want to buy, because the shop stocks are static.


As far as some other tips for slogging through this game:
Press F4 to save a lot of time with all of the menuing/talking in this game.
If playing on DOSBox, the game will run slower if you drag the 'Detail' slider to the right... so just drag it all the way to the left lmao.
Cure/resist poison is literally useless until the very last dungeon of the game, don't bother keeping it in your inventory.
Leaving a daedric artifact-related dungeon and then coming back to it can apparently despawn the chest that contains the map/artifact, potentially softlocking you out of getting any artifacts in that playthrough if you do not have a backup save before you entered the dungeon. (You cannot get a quest for more daedric artifacts if you have one in your inventory, or the quest for it in your log.)
There's also various other bugs with NPC dialogue sending you to the wrong locations, or orange text on the screen being garbled, for me at least this was always fixed by exiting and reloading the game, though I don't know if this always works.
Passwall is a busted ass ability that can be a necessity if you can't picklock high level locks. Also if you ever have to swim to get into a room, you can often be bodyblocked from entering it if there are flying enemies in there. They will fly above you and prevent you from climbing up, so you either have to reposition them and use invisibility to try again, or use passwall to get inside if the enemy is a ghost that can see invisibility.


Also man Keys are way too small, if they're not on a platform or have no message indicating their existence in the room, they are incredibly easy to miss. There was also one absolute bullshit riddle in The Halls of Colossus, and overall the riddles weren't that good tbh.

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.

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.

Simplistic but charming. The Elder Scrolls I: Arena is a rather primitive game that greatly outstays it's welcome by continuing long after it runs out of steam, the latter half of the game especially being a grind devoid of new ideas, but there's a lot of charm in it's early DOS RPG oddities and despite the flaws it's still interesting to go back and see where such a huge and influential series started. The CD version is definitely the way to go, the humorous voice acting in the few cutscenes present in the game may be sparse but it's a shame to miss out on.

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.

The first game in the Elder Scrolls series, not as hard to go back to as some older games like this but is held back by content they likely couldn't get into the game in time and some poor earlier design sensibilities.

There is a large number of classes and the series usual race options give some good variety for character creation. Music is good. Fairly good UI/controls for the time, there are a some more commonly bad for the time and strange control options (shift J for a forward jump) but I have definitely seen worse, being able to add notes to an auto map and ask for directions in a town for people to mark your map is nice, you get a journal that gives you relevant quest data. There are many towns in each region of the continent with a good number staying in a similar or the same location for future games, different parts of the world will have their own music, environments, and architecture. Good flavor text when entering a town, inn, mage guild, or when walking around in some dungeons. Different seasons in the game lead to different text descriptions or effects in the environment. You can toggle the slow pixelation effect on menus/text off if you want to get through menus and conversations faster. Some cool spells like one that allows you to break down many types of walls.

The randomly generated inn quests are often fairly dull, though to be fair to the game, are better than what Skyrim generated all these years before. Health and stat rolls can be very out of your favor where a class like the Barbarian will roll between 1-30 per level and you can get 3-6 stat points to assign at each level up. Never was a fan of random stat gains in all these games that are almost entirely about combat or combat and exploration. Though much of the combat can be made very easy with the use of potions that give elemental resistances, and near the end of the game you pretty much have to make use of these. Named enemies and their followers in quests are rarely a real thing. Many of the main quests will have someone telling you to go somewhere to get the thing that was stolen by some leader or powerful character that you will never see but will often be thanked for dealing with when you get back, I assume they wanted unique bosses at one point but were unable to add them before release.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1382592131366211585

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.)