The Elder Scrolls: Arena

The Elder Scrolls series has a huge reputation today. Each iteration has resulted in more sales, more press coverage, and seemingly exponentially more widespread popularity than the title preceding it. Hell, the last main title in the series, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, has easily become one of the most popular role-playing video games of all time and possibly the most popular western CRPG in general. The success of The Elder Scrolls as a franchise is hard to pin down exactly, though I imagine it largely has to do with a mix of accessible game mechanics, light (but not too light) stat-based progression, and the established popularity of high fantasy tropes and open-world gameplay. Lots of RPGs have these features, but the way they tend to unify in Elder Scrolls games hits just the right balance between accessibility and mechanical depth that allows newcomers to easily feel at home with how to play the game while still offering just enough role-playing options to hook players into the world. And that’s another thing: the setting is massive. It’s not unlikely that this kind of streamlined gameplay style mixed with such massive ambition has significantly contributed to the series’ success. And even in the first title, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, released back in 1994, that kind of ambition is immediately evident, at least for the most part. The storyline in Arena is actually very simple. The emperor of Tamriel, Uriel Septim, is betrayed by his court’s battlemage, Jagar Tharn, and transported to an alternate dimension, leaving Tharn to assume the emperor’s identity. As a novice member of the court, you are clearly far too big a threat to Tharn’s usurpation and are thus locked in the Imperial Dungeons and left to die. Ria Silmane, another member of the Emperor’s court as well as a casualty of Tharn’s regicide, comes to you in a dream and tells you that you must stop him by escaping the prison and assembling all eight pieces of the Staff of Chaos, which contains Tharn’s life-force. Spoilers: You do that. There is practically nothing else of substance to this plot. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, not all games need to rely on a deep storyline to keep players engaged, but it’s something to keep in mind before playing the game.

There are many examples of various flavor text and riddles in each dungeon to establish the feeling of a descriptive, engaging game world and it’s a nice touch, but sadly the game doesn’t come anywhere close to living up to this ideal in practice. While these small details are nice, they simply do not reflect the game as it actually plays. The world is huge, detailed, and has a good deal of history behind it but Arena is, at its core, a repetitive hack-and-slash-like dungeon crawler with the finer world-building details largely built around this concept rather than at the center of it. Every main quest in Arena up until the final dungeon plays out in exactly the same fashion. You receive a vision about where you need to go to find the next piece of the staff needed to defeat the main villain, you ask where this place is, you clear a dungeon for whatever item the information-giver needs to tell you how to get to the main location, you clear the main dungeon and get the staff piece. This goes on for about for about 16 dungeons and then you finally get to enter the antagonist’s lair and defeat him. Everything else is additional gameplay filler. And it really does resemble filler more than anything else. Activities like drinking at a bar may sound amusing but as far as I can tell they have no practical relevancy to any part of the game, side quests are plentiful but only because they are randomly generated fetch and/or kill quests with little intrigue, and even living the life of thievery involves little more than breaking into random houses and looking for piles of gold or using the “steal” interaction at a shop to receive a random item instead of purchasing what you want. The remaining gameplay is relegated to simply wandering around the wilderness, looking for dungeons to crawl or enemies to fight.

While depth is clearly not a major factor of side content in this game, these activities could still be fun if you enjoy the core gameplay in Arena, but even that is a real struggle. The interface is clunky with overlong fade-ins between menus, poor movement control relative to the incredibly fast game speed, and a twitchy combat system that far too frequently relies on small ambushes every few steps as opposed to fewer, more meaningful encounters. The sheer movement speed of enemies also makes ranged characters near useless as fighters since each enemy is relentlessly quick, sprinting right up to your character and attacking almost instantly. Spellcasters will also find it obnoxiousness that spells always prioritize the enemy at the vanguard even if that enemy is already dead. Such a joy. And while game speed is super-fast, frame rate dipping is incredibly frequent, resulting in stiff handling and unresponsive controls during moments of intense lag. This often makes dungeon crawling (the core aspect of gameplay) a tedious slog where you have to mow down hordes of trash mobs and click in and out of menus that are slow to the point of killing the game’s sense of pacing. And this is all on top of the labyrinth-like design of most dungeons filled with mazes to nowhere, countless empty rooms, and scale disproportionately massive to the amount of enjoyment that can reasonably be strung out of each dungeon. Then there’s the bugs. Arena is super buggy, as you may have expected from its sheer size. During my play-through, I was attacked by enemies through walls, killed enemies who were stuck on doors, got stuck onto pillars that required a leap to escape, crashed out of the game several times, and even experienced one glitch where left-clicking on my character portrait resulted in spontaneous death. Death rarely feels fair in Arena. There’s even one point in the game that requires access to a passwall spell to continue because an enemy hovering above a waterway blocks the only entrance. And this happens at every tunnel that contains an enemy above it.

That’s not to say the game is all bad, though. For all the issues that Arena has as a game (and there are a lot of issues), there are still quite a few intriguing details and moments of fleeting entertainment to be had. As hinted at previously, the setting is perhaps the biggest draw of Arena, particularly back in 1994 when the golden age of computer role-playing games was just coming to a close. The world of Tamriel is huge, spanning a massive continent with varying weather patterns, tundra, and local cultures that make the game world feel truly incredible in scope. While the vast majority of this landscape is randomly generated, each city and main dungeon is hand-crafted, which in itself is enough to easily provide a good 30 hours of entertainment or so for those who find themselves invested. Along with the sheer scale of the continent of Tamriel, there is also a considerable amount of flavor text and background events that simply serve to make the world feel just a bit more engaging. There are predetermined holidays that result in some small changes or events, inns to sleep, drink, and hear rumors at, and lots of randomly generated people to talk to about the game world and their place in it. Every time you enter a major building or city, a text bubble giving a description of the sensations around your character is displayed, which really emphasizes that immersive quality the developers were going for. If you read the manual, there’s even background information on every enemy type and guilds that I never even encountered in my play-through with their own histories and reasons for existence. You could argue that such flavor text is pointless in the grand scheme of the game but I do feel it adds a bit to making Tamriel feel like a believable world.

Then there’s the spellmaking. This is easily the highlight of the game for me, as the opportunities for making interesting spell types and combinations is fantastic. You can make area effect spells that sap enemies’ inherent resistance to the flames being spewed at them, spells to reflect projectiles back at unsuspecting mages, combination healing and regeneration spells that keep your character consistently healthy before each encounter, etc. In a game filled with dull encounters and performance issues, this creative mechanic really stands out and breathes some life into otherwise monotonous gameplay segments. Sadly, it also contributes to one further weakness of Arena. It’s progression system. At the outset, there is quite a bit of variety in creating your character with nine races and eighteen different classes to choose from, all with their own viable strengths and weaknesses. And for the first 1/3 of the game, there seems to be few other problems. You’ll struggle to fight even the weakest enemies at the beginning but slowly become powerful as you traverse the dungeons, fighting off monsters and gaining levels. Grinding is not even an issue so long as you take time to explore the main dungeons or do some side quests. Then about the time when you hit level 10 or so, this sense of progression stagnates. Suddenly, you’ll have accumulated vast excess money, powerful spells that render most combat encounters effortless, and pretty much struck a rhythm of combat that almost feels automated in style. And there’s still like fifteen hours of game left. By the time I was searching for the fifth staff piece, I would delete and rebuy what earlier seemed like expensive spells just to save one or two points of magic points per cast, sell and rebuy slightly used equipment rather than wait for repairs, and run around dungeons with reflect and absorb spells activated most of the time rather than deal with the countless enemies the game kept throwing at me in an attempt to appear difficult. The attempt is fruitless at this point though and stands out as the most artificially “challenging” aspect of the game. Sadly, Arena is a game where you’ll peak early and peak hard, with dungeons becoming increasingly clustered with pointlessly high-level enemies who annoy rather than threaten. If you die at this point in Arena, it’s usually a clip kill or sudden barrage of projectiles and that’s no fun.

Because of these issues, it’s hard to recommend Arena to all but the most diehard Elder Scrolls fans or those deeply interested in CRPG history because it’s few redeeming factors simply cannot compensate for the tedious, rarely satisfying dungeon crawling and questing that make up the core experience of this game. If you want a vast open world to play in, there are far better choices, but for those who really want to experience the series’ roots and get a close look at an ambitious early attempt at seamless first-person sandbox role-playing… well your mind is probably made up. I know mine was.

Bethesda Softworks tried their hand at RPGs with The Elder Scrolls: Arena, a first person adventure across a 'giant' landmass split into provinces. On the dungeon-crawler side, these serpentine mazes - complete with limited vision, frequent encounters and weak combat (utilizing mouse movement to perform weapon swings), at least feature two somewhat original concepts: Waterways (i.e. small paths traveling through rooms & under walls, sometimes used as shortcuts and other times as complex sub-mazes) and the Passwall ability (that enables one to destroy walls and therefore bypass locked doors for speedy dungeon clearing). Even more notable are the magic systems, namely a use-based means of leveling reminiscent of Final Fantasy II (governing not stats but the cost, efficacy and duration of spells); and above all the free-form craft of spellmaking, where players could not only combine and alter magic, but even adjust the degree in which those spells' properties improve. Their grind-driven exploits would become one of TES' constants.

The overworld side is vastly inferior. Procedural generation - in this case, underwhelms in terms of environments (composed of flatland and small props), action (surprise encounters only on rest) and discovery (the occasional random dungeon with weak treasure). Main quest playthroughs are better served by fast travel, while those interested in exploring won't find much to salvage (loot, enjoyment, etc.). Ditto for its many towns, whose differences exist only in the layouts, although the combo of a question-filled dialogue system, a limited map, and wandering NPCs gives their navigation a funny quality: As de facto foreigners who cannot easily spot landmarks, players must resort to asking locals for directions.

All in all, between an excessively long main route (given its rather simple plot & structure), pointless job quests (compared to the treasure found in main dungeons), and finicky controls that seem designed for 3-handed people, one suspects that its real achievements (embodied by its massive lorefest of a setting) are not gameplay-related, but rather in the technical, cosmetic and worldbuilding departments.

this is what happens when you give ultima underworld a lobotomy