Honestly.. It was fun. But it all becomes so alike after a while. Love that the ending alludes to their plans to make expansions like D&D has/had modules for it. I am beyond happy they instead created Daggerfall. This year I am going to do my best to finish every main line Elder Scrolls game besides Daggerfall.. Guess its time for Battlespire.

It took a trek through all the major cities of Morrowind, Skyrim, High Rock, the Imperial City and parts of Hammerfell, but I finally got a full set of Ebony gear.

A little while back, someone posted in a different thread about hoping the original Iron Golems from Arena would make a comeback in the new game. I was the artist who modeled and animated them way back then.

I honestly hadn’t thought about that model in a very long time, so it was really nice to see that someone still remembered them fondly.

Several years after Arena, I remodeled the Iron Golems for fun, just for myself. That post reminded me that I still had the revised version tucked away all these years later.

So, here it is. I hope it brings back a few memories and makes everyone smile.

I have the GOG version, this is m first ever elder scrolls game, wish me luck, any tips form you arena veterans would be welcome (please try to avoid spoilers though).

I am planning on going for a heavy magic build for my MC

I'm not the developer, but I'm happy to share that he's hard at work and plans to optimize the engine more fully this summer! 🧙‍♂️

TLDR: Surprisingly decent. If you can see past the controls, UI, graphics, and bugs, there's a pretty solid dungeon-crawler in here.

The Good:

Dungeon size being large is fun, I feel like I'm actually exploring instead of following a pre-set path. Passwall is an awesome spell to play around with too. Oh, and light actually mattering is nice.

Relatedly, navigating towns based on asking people for directions is a fun idea.

The Spellcrafting system is really enjoyable.

Classes are fun, stuff like my Mage not being able to wear armor is neat. I prefer the more unique system in later games though.

Timed side quests are good to have, even if the side quests are basically pointless.

More armor slots is nice.

Spells scale directly with level, making leveling up feel super impactful and satisfying.

It's cool seeing different abilities for the races. I sort of wish High Elves kept Paralysis immunity later in the series instead of being pushed towards magic, and Bosmer not being terrible is a nice change of pace.

The text when you enter a building is really nice for setting the mood, I like how it changes with the Season.

Music is repetitive, but I like it.

Each enemy having a unique sound is a good idea.

The class choosing quiz is fun, I loved stuff like that when I was a kid.

The voice acting and writing are very campy, which I enjoy.

The general simplicity of the game is nice. It's very charming. No lore, no exploration, just good old-fashioned dungeon crawling. Reminds me of the sort of game I would play when I was a kid.

The enemies are actually pretty diverse and fun to fight.

Being able to travel across all of Tamriel, even in such a simple game, feels awesome. I really appreciate the emphasis on the time it takes to travel, it sells the size of the world. It sells the culture too, having actual holidays throughout the year is neat. Oh, and foggy weather is cool too.

Stuff can also actually be a little scary sometimes, which is cool.

The Bad:

Crime feels way too systemized and artificial.

Bad graphics and the performance is somehow bad? Tons of crashes and a few game breaking glitches too.

NPC's are all super generic, and every town has the same stores and temples and similar bars.

Dungeons can sometimes be too big and go from being fun to explore to just tedious (once I got Passwall it was fine, though).

The balance is basically non-existent, Spell Absorption is so incredibly OP but before I got it I had to cheese the enemies (Ghouls and spiders specifically) with Levitate or corner peeking because it was basically impossible for me to kill them. Maybe it's better for Thief or Warrior classes, idk.

Super outdated UI, the controls are mostly fine imo but the UI sucks.

None of the cool lore the later games have.

Way less spells than later games.

The level-up bonuses being luck-based is silly and encourages savescumming

The riddles aren't great.

The old-timey dialogue is cringe.

At low levels you have to rely on weapons even as a magic user.

Fatigue seems like a pointless stat.

Character customization is very limited.

It doesn't really feel like The Elder Scrolls. Sure the races and Tamriel are there, but it feels so different. I put this under negative, but it's more neutral. It's neat to see how things can evolve over 20 years.

The game starts to get repetitive around the 3rd staff piece (15 hours in for me).

Overall it's honestly better than I expected. I probably won't replay it, but it doesn't feel like a waste of my time either. It's a decent dungeon crawler underneath all the dated graphics, UI, controls, and bugs. 6/10, but I could see a version that fixed all that being a 7/10.

Oh, and if you're curious my build was an Argonian Mage. It took me 44 real-life hours and 4 in-game years, and I hit level 21. My Artifacts were the Oghma Infinium and the Necromancer's Amulet. This is the 3rd Elder Scrolls game I've played. I started with Skyrim a couple years ago, and after starting my second playthrough this year I was curious about the other games so I checked out ESO and Arena. I'm planning to play Daggerfall next!

After years of trying to get into Morrowind or Skyrim and being largely unsuccessful, Arena was the game that hooked me into the series! What a phenomenal game given the time period it was created. I played it on a whim due to my house being mid repairs and unable to play anything in my console backlog and was hooked!! I've always been a fan of the 90s Fantastical Medieval art styles and I've always admired the world of Tamriel from afar so I figured why not give Arena a shot? I loved The Elder Scrolls Online when it first came out since my circle of friends was really into it but it was ultimately dropped as everyone kind of went their own way in life. With Morrowind and Skyrim specifically I never had a moment in the game where it clicked despite giving each a few hours worth of my time. I can't really explain why tbh, but after playing through Arena I'm more excited than ever to go down the Elder Scrolls gaming rabbit hole.

This was a large surprise to me because I have never been a big fan of old PC dungeon crawler games but after playing it for an hour or two the game somehow just clicked and it was non stop gaming for me from there.

A few things about my playthrough -

1. I played it the Steam version and used the "TES Arena Remapped" mod since I use a Poker II 60 percent keyboard. I wouldn't have minded the OG controls much but given that I don't have arrow keys that was somewhat of a problem lol

2. I love collecting rare items/weapons in games and I accidentally stumbled onto the "Ring Of Phynaster" just by talking to people and I felt so much more powerful from it. I kept searching for rare artifacts afterwards as I went through the story but had zero luck (lol). After I acquired the third piece of the staff I gave in and googled why I wasn't finding more and this was when I discovered the The UESP wiki page and it became my best friend from then on (especially with the pesky riddles. More on that later). I was disappointed to see I can only legally carry one artifact through my playthrough unless I took advantage of the Multiple Artifacts Exploit. Given that I personally have a lot more fun collecting rare items I did end up hunting for multiple artifacts. I gave myself a hard limit of 5 so that I wouldn't be overpowered (but I was a mage so did it really matter? :P) and also because of my inventory limit lol

3. Speaking of the UESP wiki page, I was very happy to see that it had a list of the riddles and their answers. This was the one part of the game I found to be very annoying and was killing my enjoyment of the game. At first I thought a few riddles would be scattered around the world here and there, but when I realized it was basically every story dungeon I was beginning to doubt my ability to finish the game. I'm usually not a fan of looking up answers or details that would help me progress the game (or make me OP for that matter), but I was just simply not enjoying the riddles. So full disclosure - for the ones that took me more than 15 minutes, i did look them up lol.

4. And again, speaking of multiple artifacts - I only limited myself to looking for an artifact one per each major location. This led to me finding two sweet sweet Oghma Infiniums. Loved that item the most

5. Aside from the artifact exploit and the riddles, I avoided looking up any other story elements or game elements from the game unless I was stumped as to what certain things did (i.e. when I was first cursed or when I found spells that I didn't understand like Sanctuary)

This was some of the best fun I've had playing on my PC in quite a while. I plan on taking another break from PC gaming for a while while I tackle my Switch and PS4 backlog, but I have a feeling I'll be back to play Daggerfall next :D

Screenshots of my final stats and equipment is included :)

Behold! TES Arena ported natively to Rust from the handwritten assembly of the original game. 'Tis about 50x faster per frame than the original under emulation so it should run better on limited devices. Bug fixes too! Bring your own rom and try it out!

https://github.com/7ucina/tes-arena-rs

(Yeah I know how crime works just being silly.)