The Elder Scrolls: Arena

The Good
Look, I can't really remember EVERY SINGLE DETAIL about a a game I played some 5-6 years ago. But I played this game to the end - which is something I can't say about Wizardry 7, any Might and Magic game or the follow-up to this same offering, Daggerfall. I'm just not a very fanatic role-playing game fan so the fact that I finished this game says something. And what in particular that something might be I'll try to list here:

1. The role-playing elements don't get in the way of enjoying the game. I didn't know what "stats" were before I played this game, and I didn't know it after I finished it either.

2. Combat was fun and almost Wolf3d like in terms of speed in which you hack through enemies. It wasn't too hard and it wasn't too easy.

3. Getting cool items was very cool indeed. Everything in this game could be bought and sold, and half the enjoyment of the game was in this process. It's more like SimMedievalWanderingMerchant with 8 or so dungeons thrown on just so you could get your exotic items somewhere. After that, it's a matter of walking through a dozen or so different towns with mostly exquisitely NON-exotic weather (snow, damp, rain - it feels like home), finding various merchants and haggling with them as you try to get the biggest price for your violently-acquired wares and try to find that elusive Deal of the Century (plate for chain prices, Orb of Killeverybody for a mere 4 Stones of Swamp-creature-B-gone, your own super-duper-sword which you just sold the guy yesterday for 200 now being sold for 1200).

4. Buy this game. Get out of the initial dungeon. Look at the sky. TWO moons, was it? Or three? I don't remember exactly, but it was beautiful. And the game has lots of stuff like that - atmospheric stuff, swamps, rained-down cities at night with bandits lurking behind the corner, beautiful snowing dawns as you watch the rising triple-suns or whatever. Don't ask me for details but it was beautiful. And in a way that has nothing to do with that scantily-clad chick on the cover.

5. Unlike a certain follow-up, it was quite straight-forward and basic. 8 big dungeons, each with one item you need. Get them, kill baddies, done. And no bleeding impossible to navigate 3-d dungeons with horrific impossible to understand 3-d maps either.
   
   The Bad
   I don't really remember. There was no real plot. There was little if any NPC interaction. It was all quite basic and basically all about wandering either through depressing dungeons or rather desolate countryside with bandits roaming about or some cities where no-one wants to talk to you except the merchants who only want to rob you of your hard-earned cash. Wait, I meant to put "bandits" there.

Ah well. At least it didn't ra- er, at least I wasn't hit by any lightning.

The Bottom Line
There's really no reason not to play this game. It has no real in-your-face drawbacks, and has lots of quiet charms hidden inside. And it has a memorable unique feel about it - I like to think of it as the depressing, damp side of Ultima 7, only without the plot and the npc interaction. And unlike the (thunder and lightning, little creatures run in terror) follow-up, it's over before you begin to feel the inclination to take the CD to the forest and burn it and bury the ashes in some crossroads.

The Good
After Ultima series defined the Western RPG quality standard rather early in its history, it influenced subsequent development of the genre in a somewhat odd way. The series' continuously growing preference for tight scripting (which culminated in Serpent Isle) paved the way to the RPG revival of the late 1990's, heralded by Black Isle and BioWare. On the other hand, the early, Ultima V-style template prescribed non-linear advancement, full free-roaming, and focus on exploration and gradual immersion into the game world rather than following an exciting story with interesting characters.

Elder Scrolls games by Bethesda are heirs to the second approach to RPG-making, but also to the groundbreaking Ultima Underworld games with their first-person real 3D navigation and action-based combat. So these games have the vast world and open areas of "regular" old Ultimas plus the immersive quality and atmospherics delivered by the engine used in the spin-offs. Arena is the first in the series, and while many people grew more familiar with its better-known sequels, it cannot be denied that Arena already contained in a nutshell many of the defining elements of the series' gameplay.

First things first: Arena is huge. It has an absolutely gigantic 3D world that surpasses by far anything that was created for role-playing games before it. The amount of towns, dungeons, and other places of interest is positively overwhelming. You get dizzy after emerging from the initial dungeon and realizing you can travel anywhere, at any time, on the enormous continent of Tamriel. The absolute freedom to do whatever you want is what makes Arena so addictive and awe-inspiring. Never before was there a RPG world of such size, offering such unlimited exploration possibilities. It is no wonder this feature became the cornerstone of the future series.

Now, it's true that much of this world is randomized, and some people tend to dismiss Arena because of that. But the game cleverly conceals its randomness by offering varied terrain, weather effects, and climatic changes influenced by times of the year. You can travel from Elsweyr to Morrowind and witness the first snow there. You can leave the city gate and travel in the darkness and snowfall, find a cozy abandoned house, rest in it, and be greeted by the clear morning. Graphically on par with contemporary first-person shooters, Arena manages to create a beautiful world that is in constant motion, calling you back even after you get tired from the repetitive textures.

Even though NPCs are random as well, there are many dialogue templates that are surprisingly well-written and often quite amusing. You can always hear different responses in every tavern; you can bargain with shop owners and repeatedly talk to jesters and listen to their stupid jokes. People have different names and occupations and also refer to the protagonist's race during conversations. Nice text descriptions greet you whenever you enter specific buildings. Naturally, after having been doing this for a while you'll see how everything repeats itself. But still, there is a big difference between an enormous randomized world and a small one; the possibility to physically move in every direction at any time in a seamless 3D environment is simply exhilarating, no matter how many recurrent elements you encounter on your way.

The role-playing system in Arena is simple: you create your character, fight enemies, gain experience and level up. Were Arena just a dungeon crawler, this simplicity would have made it boring; but the necessity to explore and travel in order to encounter tougher enemies and obtain better gear is what makes the whole process so addictive. You never know where you may find some great armor or a particularly challenging beastie to defeat. There are hundreds of cities and dungeons; each city has several shops, and each dungeon has foes lurking in the darkness. You choose your own adventure in all this vastness; you decide where you want to shop, how exactly you outfit your character, what you specialize in, and so on. The game never dictates you the pace; you choose it on your own. You can perform quests, search for treasure, bargain and trade, go on a killing spree, hunt for monsters, steal valuable items, or just walk through the countryside. It's this free-form role-playing that makes Arena uniquely entertaining.

The main quest may be very simplistic, but if you follow it you'll encounter the game's only planned, hand-made dungeons, assignments, and items. There are also some interesting riddles you'll have to solve along the way. Outside of the main quest, there are plenty of missions offered by country rulers to undertake, as well as the artifact quests, which hold some of the game's most powerful weapons, armor, and accessories.

The Bad
The obvious flaws of Arena owe their existence to the severe technical limitations of its time. 3D gaming was still in a rudimentary state, and the only way to create immense 3D environments was by using the same elements over and over again. To the game's credit, I must stress that there are many such elements - certainly enough to create a considerably large game world in which every single NPC, object, terrain style and building would be unique. That is why I can't help thinking that perhaps it would have been more reasonable to reduce the size of the world somewhat and minimize the randomness.

I don't particularly like the idea of endless countryside. You can walk for hours and never reach another town; terrain, lone buildings, wandering NPCs and enemies will be procedurally generated as you advance, never coming to an end. Again, I'd prefer exploring a world that would be less jaw-droppingly gigantic, but coherent in its structure. In the end, much of the exploration in Arena is reduced to bringing forth the world map and clicking on a location of interest.

You can travel to any Tamriel province in the game, but towns will still look the same. There are certain racial diversity among the inhabitants and differences in landscape and climate, but I didn't notice any variation in the architecture. Imperial City, for example, is the same collection of blocky, bland buildings as the most decrepit village at the outskirts of High Rock. If you have visited one tavern, you have visited them all; all weapon and armor shops in Tamriel are managed by identical twins; the same types of NPCs, graphically and personality-wise, appear everywhere. The game generously presents you with an incredibly large world to explore, but doesn't fully encourage you to do that. You can safely base yourself in any of the provinces, never leave it, and you will have seen pretty much everything the game has to offer. You'll only have to travel all over this world because the main quest requires you to do so.

Speaking of which, the main quest's premise is certainly not worse than in any other fantasy RPG, but the extremely formulaic structure makes it somewhat tiresome and repetitive. You'll always follow the same scheme: listen to rumors, detect the next province of interest, locate the next questgiver there, complete a mission for him or her, and learn the location of a dungeon containing the staff piece. Also, the riddles you'll need to answer to get the crucial items, while entertaining, cannot be bypassed; if you can't figure out the answer to any of them, you'll be stuck, unable to find any other way to continue the main quest.

Fans of Elder Scrolls games got used to the rich lore of their world, presented in detail in long conversations and well-written books. Unfortunately, there seem to be no books in Arena, and the conversations are brief and rarely concern any cultural topics. As a result, the world of Arena lacks depth and intellectual appeal, becoming a rather generic, simplified fantasy environment with recycled themes.

The Bottom Line
Notwithstanding its limitations and shortcomings, Arena amazes with its sheer ambition. Its accomplishment as the first fully free-roaming 3D RPG cannot be overlooked. Ahead of its time, Arena contributed and paved the way to the genre's subsequent development, and still remains a surprisingly enjoyable game today.

The Good
The World. A huge gaming world full of quests, factions, lords, ladies, and death awaited the player everytime you started a new game. A new game is certainly that..a brand new game, with new dungeons, new quests, new people. The replayability of this game was staggering

The Bad
The Bugs! Horrible bugs that just seemed to multiply as time went on. Casting magic missle often scheduled a date with the DOS prompt. You really had to save often to have any hope of enjoying this game

The Bottom Line
This game was the first of an entire series of Elder Scrolls adventures. Each new game brought forth a new perspective to the land. I highly recommend playing it even if its for the sake of seeing where it all began. If the presentation doesn't impress you, the scope will!

The Good
The world - the first-person perspective, 3-D world with day and night, seasons, weather (it rains! it snows!) just blew me away. In the towns, I could see building reflections in the puddles on the street. Sometimes I'd just stay in one place and simply watch the world go by (best at night - what a busy sky!). After I lost interest in the plot, I continued only to see what different kinds of places the designers had come up with.

The Bad
The plot - been there, done that. And while it is true that nothing forces you to do any particular thing, it's also true that the plot will not advance unless you accomplish certain specific goals in a certain specific order. And those goals are all the same goal, repeated eight times. If the game is played again from the start, the quest items will appear in different locations, but that doesn't make the game "non-linear", IMHO (or interesting enough to play again).

The endgame - that was easy. Did I simply have the best spell for that job? My character wasn't even the best spell user class!

The user interface - I'm not new at this kind of game, and I still died several times before I figured out how to even begin to defend my character against attack. And having to switch between several screens to review little pieces of information was a pain.

The riddles - the problem is not the riddles per se (some of which are quite fun), but that fact that if you can't solve one, you can't advance in the game. There's no way around needing what's behind the riddle-locked door. Another feature of linear game play.

The travel - why can't I walk from one town to another if I want to? There's inns, farms and dungeons along the way! That would be letting me do what I want, a feature of non-linear gameplay!

The bugs - once in a while the game would freeze up. Saving often helps here. The character status symbols aren't always current, which can mislead you into thinking your character is okay when s/he isn't.

The Bottom Line
It's as if, having come up with a rich, detailed fantasy world far beyond anything that had been seen before, the designers were at a loss as to what to do with it. The game itself is not nearly the quality that the environment is. The designers almost admit as much in the manual, writing that you don't have to pursue the quest if you don't want to, but can instead run around the environment killing the peasants or whatever. Maybe so, but that doesn't lead anywhere - what's the point?

Perhaps that's what they really mean by "non-linear".

The Good
This game has everything a great CRPG should have: cool weapons, varied enemies, diverse locations, large areas to explore, secrets to discover, and a sense of actually accomplishing something. The sounds are haunting, the music is appropriate, and the combat system is easy and involving.

The Bad
Bugs, bugs, buggy-bugs. This game crashes more often that a car with no steering wheel, often while trying to save the game before doing something you know will probably cause a crash. The graphics are also dated but to be expected from a game this old.

The Bottom Line
Despite the things I DIDN'T like I will always come back to Arena. This game gives the player full immersion into a world rich and vast. You don't PLAY the character, you BECOME the character. I've never played a game for so long or with such intensity... I started playing it in 1994 when it was the first CD based game I'd ever purchased and now, ten years later, I'm within reach of the final staff piece. No matter what game has come out, I always go back to Arena... even Morrowind (The Elder Scrolls III) takes a back seat to the graphically inferior, but better in all other regards, original. Do yourself a favor and buy this game!

The Good
The Elder Scrolls Arena, is the first game in the Elder Scrolls series, and it is very good. With 8 races, and 18 classes, you have a bit to chose from. It's non-linear, very, if you want to kill a elf, walkng in town fine, if you want to break into a noble house and rob it fine, if you want to be a noble knight and kill those scumbag, fine. The fighing system is good, simple, you click and drag mouse. Theres over 400 places to visit, and the wilderness, is real fun to travel, on your way you'll find, people, temples, houses, wayside inns, and crypts and that sort of stuff. It's big. Also the holidays, which make thing cheaper, free. Then the mighty spell maker, you can make powerfull spells.

The Bad
Bugs. The most annoying one is, when you save your game, the game frezzes, and you lose you save game, making save alot, with servel, games, and that can get confusing. But it's pertty rare.

The Bottom Line
If your a rpg fan, and see this game, buy it.

The Good
The first-person RPG was quite a revolutionary idea that has been used in future titles like Deus Ex, System Shock and Arena's sequels, Daggerfall and Morrowind.

The Bad
NPCs have the personality of a particularly boring cheese sandwich, the control and journal system gets on my nerves and plays slow on DOSBox (you can increase the speed but it messes up the sound) and made unfortunately inferior by Morrowind.

The Bottom Line
This would be a good game but I played it after playing Morrowind and the whole experience was made worse.