The Elder Scrolls: Arena: Summary and Rating

 

It's a good thing this is a single-character game, because three of these people would be fatally distracted in combat.

       

The Elder Scrolls: Arena

United States 

Bethesda Softworks (developer and publisher)

Released 1994 for DOS

Date Started: 9 March 2026

Date Ended: 29 April 2026

Total Hours: 43

Difficulty:  Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

     

Summary:

   

The first Elder Scrolls game lays out a surprising amount of the series' geography, history, and lore, including the races and provinces of Tamriel and the basic history of the empire united hundreds of years ago by Tiber Septim. Now, Emperor Uriel Septim VII has been kidnapped and sent to an alternate dimension by his evil BattleMage, Jagar Tharn. To rescue him, the player has to find the 8 pieces of the Staff of Chaos, each hidden in a dungeon in a different province, then confront Tharn in the imperial palace.

    

The game has all the trappings of a modern CRPG, including attributes and leveling, a full set of weapons and armor, a detailed spell list (and the ability to craft your own spells), monsters with various strengths and weaknesses, NPCs, side-quests, and a robust economy. Despite these assets, the experience mostly falls flat, likely because the developers relied too much on bland procedural generation of most dungeons and  NPCs and all cities and towns. The first-person graphics and free movement are decent for the era, but alas they don't age well. Overall, Arena tries to build on its famous predecessors—primarily Ultima Underworld (1992) and Legends of Valour (1992)—but fails to equal them, let alone surpass them.

   

****

    

I'm glad they didn't give up after one game, but Arena is a bit of a misfire. It is more impressive (from a programming standpoint) than fun. Roguelikes show that procedural generation can work when done well, but it has to be coupled with solid mechanics and logistics. Bethesda made a good effort at both but didn't quite clear the bar. The company will continue to struggle with the balance between handcrafted content and generated content straight into the modern age, and many of the complaints I have about Arena are the same ones I have about Starfield (2023).

    

Arena's handcrafted content is limited to its 18 main quest dungeons. The problem is that few of those dungeons are terribly interesting. Even the "handcrafted" locations feel like they started with a procedural base and then just added title cards, welcome messages, furnishings, and riddle doors. Even in this regard, I feel like they got less interesting as they went along. The cities and NPCs, meanwhile, have no character at all beyond some skins specific to their provinces. If I had been a consultant on Arena, I would have advised them to handcraft at least the capital cities of each province, and to sprinkle them with a dozen or so non-generic NPCs.

     

This, for instance, is a "handcrafted" level. As far as I can tell, it may as well have been procedurally-generated.

        

On the other hand, if the mechanics had been better, it might have been a pleasure to explore a few more side-dungeons, gaining a few more levels, finding a few more artifacts. There are modern games for which I wouldn't mind the occasional procedurally-generated level at all. The Infinity Engine games come to mind. If Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale had featured some optional, repeatable dungeons with random selections of enemies, particularly ones that you don't get to fight often in the main campaign, I might never have started this blog.

   

As for those mechanics, Arena almost always has a good base but doesn't go far enough in some areas and poorly balances others. The equipment system (likely influenced by Might and Magic III-V) offers not quite enough variety, particularly for certain classes. The economy is just a bit too generous. Combat goes on just a bit too long against not-quite-enough enemies who are not quite interesting enough to hold my attention. The combat interface is innovative but gets a bit exhausting. Graphics occupy that unfortunate valley between the best of the previous primitive age and the worst of the forthcoming immersive age.

        

I meant to include this shot from Ebonheart in my last entry. That volcano is visible in the distance from everywhere in Morrowind.

       

My repetitive uses of "a bit" and "not quite" are poor English, but they work for a game that landed just shy of the threshold of victory. I've always tried to follow Strunk & White's recommendations to eschew negative verbs and adjectives (e.g., "did not respond," "not unattractive") in favor of positive ones (e.g., "ignored," "pretty"). But Arena almost begs for the former.  It's not a bad game; it's just a not good one. I don't necessarily not recommend it, but I don't really recommend it, either.

   

In the 1980s, I established a rating of about 35 as my "recommended" threshold, but by the mid-1990s, I think it needs to be up to 40. A score of around 40-43 would reflect the way I feel about the game. Let's see what happens.

     

GIMLET 

Category	Assets	Liabilities	Score
1. Game World	A detailed backstory with history and lore.  An intriguing map with interesting place names. Evocative names and historical tidbits dropped into conversation, quest messages, title cards, exploration messages.	A laughable explanation of the game's name.  Most of the name drops are just names; later games will flesh them out but Arena doesn't deserve that credit.  Races in this early game are mostly fantasy archetypes.  Outdoor areas completely wasted. Forced fast-travel.	4
2. Character Creation and Development	Fun, Ultima-like character creation process. Character classes are well-differentiated and create unique gameplay experiences.  Class-based roleplaying options for thieves and spellcasters.	Leveling is boring, involving a simple allocation of 3-6 attribute points with consequent increases in health and mana.     Awful character portraits.  No roleplaying options for fighter classes.	4
3. NPCs	Towns are full of them and you learn a fair amount from them.	They're almost all randomly-generated with no personalities.	3
4. Encounters and Foes	About 20 monsters with some strengths and weaknesses. I found the riddle doors a fun diversion but others will want to subtract more for that.	Monsters are a bit boring. No major variance in tactics necessary to defeat them. No other special encounters.	3
5. Magic and Combat	Spell variety offers most of the tactics in combat. Other tactics found in use of terrain.	Combat is otherwise a bit boring. Different types of attacks don't seem to make any difference. Ranged combat under-developed.  Most of the "use of terrain" tactics feel like exploits.	3
6. Equipment	Lots of equipment slots. Easy to understand relative offensive/defensive value of items.  Items mostly randomized in game world.  Almost anything can be enchanted. Variety of potions serve as a money sink.  Powerful artifact items.	Not quite enough variety in equipment to put in those slots, particularly for certain classes. Limited to one artifact item at a time unless you use an exploit.	5
7. Economy	Several ways to make money: selling looted items, side-quests, thievery. Lots of things to spend money on.	Economy gets a bit generous by the halfway mark.  Silly haggling mechanic. Treasure in dungeons weirdly limited to 99 gold pieces.	5
8. Quests	Clear main quest. Artifact quests. Side-quests with various levels of complexity in each town.	Main quest stages are overly repetitive and predictable. Side quests are boring and don't reward enough to bother. No different main quest outcomes.	4
9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface	Almost everything on the screen has a keyboard backup. Decent sound effects. Limited voice acting is good. 3D continuous movement.  Nice automap and journal.	Graphics are good for the era but ugly by the standards of even 5 years later; do not age well. Dragging mouse to swing weapon in combat gets a bit old, particularly where precision isn't required.  No ambient sound.	4
10. Gameplay	Geographically nonlinear. Replayable to experience different classes.	Narratively linear. Otherwise not replayable. Repetitive nature of main quest process gets old. Game is a bit too long.	3
Other/Total	Lots of procedurally-generated content	Lots of procedurally-generated content.	38

      

That final score is a bit lower than I expected, but not so much that I think something's wrong with the rating. I really wanted to like Arena, which infused some of the enthusiasm of my early entries, but it showed all its cards early. By the time you've found the third piece of the Staff of Chaos, you've really experienced all the game has to offer.

       

Why would you not include a single shot of combat?

            

Scorpia's review in the May 1994 Computer Gaming World echoes many of my own thoughts about the game. "Everything eventually becomes mechanical and repetitious," she says, referring to the interchangeable towns, NPCs, and dungeons, as well as the limited number of enemies. She points out, more than I did in my coverage, how utterly useless the entire outdoor experience is. Bethesda spent a lot of time on pretty outdoor maps with structures, dungeons, monsters, even weather effects, and there's no reason whatsoever to ever experience these things.

   

On the other hand, she liked the combat a lot better than I did: "It's the most natural way of fighting that I've seen in a first-person game." She also spends more time talking about the side quests (I guess some had unachievable time limits) than I spent playing them. Her final comments are almost prescient:

   

The game is impressive as a first effort. Most of the pieces of a good CRPG are there. What is needed now is a tightening of the code, a little polishing up of the basic engine, a little scaling back of the size, and the inclusion of some real role-playing elements . . . with a solid storyline. These are well within Bethesda's abilities, and their addition to future products would make The Elder Scrolls a dynamite series.

    

I'm glad she was still around to review Daggerfall two years later. Despite her misgivings, the Arena won CGW's "Role-Playing Game of the Year" award.

       

According to MobyGames's roundup of reviews, the game's best review (in its age) came from the March 1994 Joystick (a French magazine) at 91%; its worst from the May 1994 PC Zone at 62%: "The cities are dull. The interaction is dull. The playing area is too large. The quests and money-earning too laborious. There is no wit." The mode is around 80%, or a B- in my profession, which makes sense to me. 

       

Just a shot of me fighting a fire daemon. I liked it, and I didn't get to use it earlier.

       

What strikes me about almost all the reviews is the mention of size. None of them seem to have caught on that Arena's supposed vastness is completely illusory. Maybe some of the European magazines that I can't easily translate covered it, but nowhere in the English reviews did I see any acknowledgement about the extent of procedural generation. Maybe they weren't aware of it. Maybe the idea was just too new to them.

        

A ton has been written about both the game and the Elder Scrolls series. I like to try to synthesize everything in these "Summary and Rating" postings, but this is one of those games for which there is far more content out there than I have time to assemble in a single entry. Here are some highlights of what I've found elsewhere:

    

• The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages confirms what commenters contributed to my last entry: The original conception was for the PC to be the ward of General Talin Warhaft, leader of the imperial guards, also confusingly named "Talin." This explains why in the manual, Ria refers to the PC as "Talin" while the cinematic shows Talin Warhaft being captured along with the Emperor (and the original endgame cinematic shows him being returned). There's even a cut slide from the opening narration that explains this.

   

The cut content.

      

• I only experienced a small percentage of the types of random quests available. They include delivery, retrieval, and escort quests (which always take place in towns), and dungeon quests in which you rescue a captive, capture a criminal, or slay a particular creature. I didn't experience any of these and indeed questioned whether they existed. I suppose you could have fun with the game without ever doing the main quest. Although the times I was given were always generous, apparently you can be given a deadline that's impossible to achieve.

• If you fail a palace quest, for some reason the game changes the entire palace and ruler, with males always switching to females, and vice versa. Those are some serious consequences. 

• There are plenty of people online who claim that if you're willing to put in the time, you can walk from one city to another. They claim it takes dozens of hours. I'd like to have some confirmation of this, but I'm not willing to put in the time.

      

Any volunteers?

      

• The full list of artifacts are Auriel's Bow, Chrysamere (two-handed sword), Ebony Blade (katana), Staff of Magnus, Voldendrug (hammer), King Orgnum's Coffer (gives gold once per day), Necromancer's Amulet, Oghma Infinium, Ring of Khajiit, Ring of Phynaster, Skeleton's Key, Warlock's Ring. They all appear again in subsequent games. I think Skyrim has them all except the Warlock's Ring and King Orgnum's Coffer.

• Bethesda began an expansion pack to Arena set in Mournhold in Morrowind. It morphed into The Elder Scrolls II before its setting was for some reason changed to Daggerfall. 

• Unused or cut content for the game includes art for beholders and balrogs, a slave market, and support for up to four party members at once.

        

I'm sorry we didn't get to see this guy.

       

The official cluebook for Arena was called Codex Scientia, written by Judith Weller and Ted Peterson. I didn't learn a lot from it, but here are some tidbits:

   

• "Resist Fire" lets you swim in lava. I suppose I should have guessed that, but I never tested it.

• Different classes have different casting costs for different spell types.

• The experience table in the cluebook goes only to Level 20. From what I read on various web sites, if you make it to Level 27, you get enough attribute points to max out all attributes at 100, which makes further leveling impossible because you can't leave the "level up" screen until you've distributed new points.

• There are apparently 16 annual holidays in Tamriel, each with effects on the local economy. For instance, on the New Life Festival (first day of the year), ale is free in the taverns. On Second Planting (7 Second Seed), temples heal for free. These are cute bits of world-building, but the odds that you'd be in town to enjoy the benefits of a particular holiday are lower than the likelihood you'd even need their benefits, given the generous economy. It's impossible to imagine a player saying, "Well, I need to buy a new sword, but I think I'll wait until the Merchant's Festival" (when all prices are discounted 50%). It's too bad that later Elder Scrolls games didn't implement them, though. It would have been fun to enter Whiterun or the Imperial City and find a different arrangement of NPCs, as Jester's Day would have required, or to find all NPCs mute, as Tales and Tallows requires.

          

Shots from the hintbook. The emblem on the cover reminds me of something I've seen before, but I can't place it.

       

I struggled with whether to include the game in my "Must Play" list despite the low score. The list includes the first games in a large number of series, including Ultima, Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, Pool of Radiance, and Hero's Quest. I have so far not included any sequels in series whose first titles were not on the list. I think The Elder Scrolls is going to be a "first" in that regard. While it undoubtedly had a certain legacy for its own series, it's hard to detect a general legacy for Arena. Please let me know if you know of any games directly inspired by it, but my own search came up short. (There was notably no explosion of procedurally-generated content in the later 1990s.) Finally, in those earlier cases, I honestly think the first game of the series was a superlative example of that series. This is not true with Arena.

      

But I am certainly grateful for the series it spawned, which we'll have a chance to re-engage in a short time with The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall in 1996. And we might have a little more follow-up on Arena specifically. I have been in touch with developer Ted Peterson, who didn't have a chance to answer my questions for this entry. When I receive his contributions, I'll post a follow-up.

   

***

 

Previous entry in this series

 

For Further Reading:

 

The two primary influences on The Elder Scrolls: Arena:

 

• Ultima Underworld (1992)
• Legends of Valour (1992)

 05/06/2026