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.

"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)

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.

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.

Look, I have a high tolerance for old games and their bullshit. I can deal with clipping through platforms because of the primitive 3D engine. I can excuse a simple leveling system and limited RPG elements, it was their first go at it. What I can't let pass is the most repetitive main quest possibly in any RPG ever. It's the same goddamn thing every time: go to town, ask where your objective is, talk to the person who knows, fetch what they want from one dungeon, bring it back and get the real dungeon's location, then go there and get the piece of the MacGuffin, rinse and repeat seven fucking times. This is something the "it's old" excuse doesn't cover, because games like Ultima and its Underworld spinoffs had much more varied quest design and came out long before Arena. Rarely do I ever recommend people outright skip the first game in a series, but seriously, there is no reason whatsoever to play this over Daggerfall unless you really like crawling through obnoxiously designed dungeons.

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!

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.

Controlls are a bit hard to get used to, but not too awful. Figuring out what you are supposed to do is the hardest part of the game, since you are instantly thrown into the story and understanding what you need to do next is quite difficult. Tasks are repetitive and you need to do essentially the same thing for 8 times to complete the game. Without the map from the internet you could spend a lot of time figuring out the way in the dungeons.

I used a Battlemage build with Shield and Area Attack and Absorption. Struggled somewhat in the beginning, but then killing enemies was very easy. The final boss stood no chance against me.

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.

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.

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