Elder Scrolls 1: Arena - Retrospective Review @ RPG Codex

RPG Codex member Deuce Traveler posted an interesting retrospective review of the first game in the Elder Scrolls series from 1994: Arena.

I had originally never intended to play The Elder Scrolls: Arena, as I'd heard enough about this imperfect creation from other RPG fans to keep me away from it. It was said that the game is unbalanced. That it feels incomplete. That its main quest and characters are shallow when compared with that of contemporary RPGs such as the Ultima games or Betrayal at Krondor. But in the end, I decided to give the game a go as part of a larger project I am working on, in order to ascertain these facts for myself. What I found was a game that is indeed quite unbalanced, with many gameplay elements that feel rushed and incomplete, and a main story arc filled with cliche fantasy tropes. And yet, the game was a total joy to play, like a B-movie that manages to be greater than the sum of its faults.

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Probably the best early fantasy game from Bethesda. You could levitate and fly through dungeons really fast on a pentium. The music was beautiful.

Is it really 21 years since I played this?

Corwin did a retrospective review in 2007 as well.

Arena was a good first try, but I still prefer Daggerfall and Battlespire. (And I really like the pirate adventure Redguard, too.)

I like Arena as much as Daggerfall (which means more than any other TES game). The balance issues are less grave than in Daggerfall btw even though the classes/ races are unbalanced.

The atmosphere in Arena is just beautiful.

I played the game when Bethesda released it for free and while I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the game (I have a fond memory of wandering aimlessly in the snow with this music then stepping in an inn humming this one) the game was completely unbalanced and a very buggy mess.

I remember a lot of graphic problems like insigna missing on a mage's guild building for example (good luck finding them) or a door upside down. I remember falling into the void or being stuck in place because the collision system didn't work at all or the random generation of dungeons left some holes in the map. Fun times!

The impressive nature of this game is best appreciated considering that it was released at 1994. When I played it I can´t believe what I was seeing in my 386 PC. An enormous world, with countless towns, dungeons and NPCs… A world with changing weather, day/night cycles, with apparently real distances between cities, and each of the thousands cities with hundreds of houses that you can enter… or you can fly over, or climb up, or magically walk through walls..!
Sure, it was a unbalanced and unpolished game, but I always see this game as a world to live in, not a story-driven RPG. A kind of Fantasy World Simulator.
The conservative and money based Bethesda of 2015 owns all its current satus to these adventurous designers of mid 90s.

Played Arena and thought is was amazing at the time, but it never gripped me enough to finish it. Daggerfall however, sucked me in and didn't let me go for 1000s of hours.

I don't remember much about this game, I played it to the end way back then. One thing I do remember is that I could create my own spells! OMG OMG OMG It's the one thing I loved the most about all TES games after that, except Skyrim, may the person who decided to remove that feature from the game rot slowly while getting 100 paper cuts per minute while getting kicked in the nuts by a horde of screaming babies and a kid in front of him repeating everything he says while at the same time having costant explosive diarrhea.