The Elder Scrolls: Arena
Description official descriptions
The Elder Scrolls: Arena is a first-person action role-playing game in which the protagonist must rescue the Emperor Uriel Septim VII from his dimensional prison by recovering the eight pieces of the Staff of Chaos. The emperor's position has been usurped by impersonator Jagar Tharn, whose slain apprentice rallies the protagonist in his dreams to find the eight pieces of the staff and return the status quo.
It is the first chapter in the Elder Scrolls series and the first game that is set in the fictional world of Tamriel. The game features 3D environments, with sprites representing non-playable characters and enemies. In the beginning of the game the player chooses the race for the protagonist, based on his or her home province. Each race has its benefits: for example, Redguards from the province Hammerfell have physical attack bonuses. There is no skill system; leveling up occurs after a sufficient amount of experience points has been accumulated. The player is free to raise any of the protagonist's main attributes by allocating the points gained with the level.
Unlike later games in the series the player can travel through almost all of Tamriel, instead of being restricted to certain provinces. There are over 400 cities, towns and villages to explore, as well as many magical items and spells to create. The player can walk endlessly in any direction as more and more land will be procedurally generated. Walking manually however never allows the player to reach other cities; the fast travel feature must be used for this. The player is free to go where he or she wants. The story itself is resolved in a linear fashion, although the locations of items is randomly determined at the start of the game.
Melee combat is performed through mouse gestures and spells are cast using a menu interface. The player controls only a single character, which happens in real-time. In the wild and in dungeons the player can expect opposition from enemies which need to be defeated and who drop loot. In the cities NPCs can be found, some will barter or provide other services to the player.
The CD-ROM release features speech in cutscenes and additional rendered sequences that the floppy version does not include.
Groups +
- Animals: Cats
- Covermount: PC Action
- Elder Scrolls series
- Fantasy creatures: Elves
- Fantasy creatures: Goblins
- Fantasy creatures: Minotaurs
- Fantasy creatures: Orcs
- Fantasy creatures: Trolls
- Gameplay feature: Auto-mapping
- Gameplay feature: Character development - Skill distribution
- Gameplay feature: Journal
- Gameplay feature: Paper doll inventory
- Games with manual lookup copy protection
- Protagonist: Female (option)
- Sound engine: AIL/Miles Sound System
Screenshots
Promos
Credits (DOS version)
17 People · View all
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[ full credits ] |
Reviews
Critics
Average score: 77% (based on 24 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 60 ratings with 7 reviews)
Hands down best CRPG even released, bar none!
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!
DOS · by Paul Kostrzewa (13) · 2004
The exotic world of damp and cold weather
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:
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
- 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.
DOS · by Alex Man (31) · 2002
Beautiful world. Now for a story to go with it.
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".
DOS · by anton treuenfels (34) · 2001
Discussion
Subject | By | Date |
---|---|---|
Skill system in Arena? | MrFlibble (18265) | Jul 21, 2013 |
Release date on main summary | Izmir Egal (73) | Jul 29, 2012 |
Term of development. | Virgil (8563) | Nov 1, 2007 |
Trivia
Development
Arena was at first, not going to be a RPG, but instead a gladiator style game. Someone came up with the RPG idea, and it caught.
Freeware release
To coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls series in 2004, Bethesda Softworks released the first game, Arena, as freeware. It can be downloaded from the Elder Scrolls website
Inspiration
The Elder Scrolls: Arena was primarily inspired by a collection of pen and paper RPGs, the Ultima Underworld series, and the first-person RPG Legends of Valour.
Translations
A German version of the game was announced and the box distributed in Germany even included a sticker and post card offering to exchange the game for the German version once available. However no localized versions were ever released. One reason may have been that the game's program code is using fixed text lengths, making it very difficult to find equal length translations for other languages.
Awards
- Computer Gaming World
- May 1995 (Issue #130) – Role-Playing Game of the Year
Analytics
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Related Sites +
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Official Elder Scrolls Website
Bethesda Softworks official site for the Elder Scrolls series. -
Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages!
A wiki page that is dedicated to the Elder Scrolls series. It a great source for hints and backround information concerning the Elder Scrolls saga. Just about everything can be found here.
Identifiers +
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by faceless.
Windows Apps added by Plok. Windows added by Rik Hideto.
Additional contributors: Blackhandjr, Isak, Iggi, SGruber, Patrick Bregger.
Game added January 27, 2000. Last modified March 15, 2024.