Introduction

Introduction
Arena is the game that began the iconic Elder Scrolls franchise, created by Bethesda Softworks and released in 1994 for MS-DOS. While it's still a first person open world RPG, it's quite different than its more popular successors such as Morrowind and Skyrim. The game relies heavily on procedurally generated content, though there are still some hand crafted elements to be found in towns and certain dungeons. It also features one of the largest explorable world spaces in video game history, though it is not connected like the majority of the lands in other Elder Scrolls games. The gameplay mostly consists of hacking and slashing monsters to bits in various dungeons, but there is a story to tie everything together as well as spells, thieving, and NPC interactions. The game begins with the current emperor being betrayed and locked away in an alternate dimension by one of his imperial battlemages, Jagar Tharn.

The dashing hero of our story:

About the Playthrough
I got into the Elder Scrolls games starting with Oblivion. I also played a little of Morrowind either a bit before or around the time of Oblivion's release. I can't quite recall. Like most other people I enjoyed Skyrim quite a bit, though usually with mods. However, I've never finished the main story in any Elder Scrolls game. Since I like retro games quite a bit, I've been wanting to go back and play through the older titles and actually finish the newer ones. I've done a fair bit of research about Arena and have played a little, but I haven't touched much of the main quest. I'll probably end up sticking mostly to the main story, though I do want to do some additional exploration here and there, just to see what I can find. Since there's no Arena playthrough in the master list, I figured I'd do a thread about it for people who are curious about the series' roots. If you've played the game before and have any tips on stuff to try or look for, I'm open to suggestions. Note that I'll probably be recording at least a couple episodes ahead usually, so I may not be able to act on advice immediately.

As a fun extra, the music in this playthrough will be generated by a real Yamaha MU50 MIDI device. The game itself will be emulated via DOSBOX.

Episodes

Series Playlist

Images
The game isn't completely hideous, but it hasn't aged spectacularly in the graphics department, in my opinion.

The Let's Play Archive

The Elder Scrolls Arena

by rojovision

Introduction

Episodes