The Elder Scrolls: Arena | Pixelated Fantasy | Review and Playthrough
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- Опубликовано: 11 фев 2025
- Developed by Bethesda Softworks and released in 1994, Arena is the first entry in the award winning Elder Scrolls Saga. Join me in going back to see the origin of one of PC gaming's biggest fantasy worlds, and finding out if its worth playing on the cusp of the series 30 year anniversary.
#gaming #theelderscrolls #retrogaming
Kind of surprised that Bethesda hasn’t gone about remaking Arena in their long-standing game engine and make it both less and somehow more broken.
It is kind of shocking, I'm sure they would make massive sales from it. Daggerfall would make huge money as well modernized.
I feel that somehow both less and more broken statement haha.
@@aquawalrus Daggerfall unity is getting that way and it is immensely popular.
@@sirellyn I've heard someone is working on an arena unity.
@@wolfwing1 That's cool, but at this point I think an arena world mod for Daggerfall Unity might be better.
If you play as a mage, you get much stronger at the end. Especially with the Shield spell I made with the spellmaker. I had a 255 HP buff, on top of my other hit points. I would cast that, be +255 of however many HP I had, and go to sleep. When waking up, the buff remains, and now there's full mana as well. I would go into those dungeons and just DESTROY. Absorbing magic is another great spell effect. Blast away at magic-using enemies, and have their spells not hurt you... but instead give you more mana to blast away some more. So choice.
Thanks for the review!
I'm actually just finishing up my run of Daggerfall, and I leaned pretty heavily into magic this time and it's wild the difference in difficulty it makes. Even from mid game level I was just sprinting through dungeons.
I think the lesson is don't play a melee focused character in these early titles! I'm definitely going to be going back to Arena to try it out with magic as my focus, bet it's a world of difference.
@@aquawalrus Oooh, finishing up! I'm looking forward to your upcoming video! :D
10:42 hell hounds and many other fire enemies are casting fire ball, meaning the projectile explodes hitting everything within 5 FT and fire daemons are the only enemy that I know of that have fire immunity, meaning everything else can die to fire damage, and the AI for all these enemies tell them to cast fire ball even if you're within 5 FT or have a wall between, meaning those hell hounds literally killed themselves because of poor AI.
The poor dogs were killed by their own hubris.
@@aquawalrus another thing, I noticed you played a martial and went through the whole game, that is a considered a huge achievement in the Arena community, the game is actually so much easier to play as a magic user that you can have more health than the final boss before finishing Labyrinthian, also not to mention that magic users use less money from making custom spells including the ability to have to give yourself a 100% to absorb any spell at level 10, meaning you can walk through an entire dungeon of liches without taking damage and being able to send out an infinite supply of fire balls that only refill your mana when you get to close to your own explosions making you basically god.
@@froztrollbru yeah, a few people have told me magic would have been the better choice. Ironically I was trying to make my run more simple by playing a barbarian.
I do definitely want to give it another run through as a mage now that I've gotten some tips, nothing beats a good power fantasy in an elder scrolls game.
Just want to say this is quickly becoming one of my favorite channels. Keep doing what you're doing
@@rusty9514 thanks! That means a lot. I've been having a great time making the videos.
You can really feel the OD&D campaign origins in Arena, huh
Oh absolutely, the vibe is definitely there.
I'm watching your videos in a random order and you are normally so happy with the games that you play despite their age that I was somewhat surprised you found one you didn't like. It's understandable after watching the review but I thought you would find all of them to be bangers.
@@matthewbutner8696 to be honest with this one, I think the real reason I didn't have a great time is because I did a mostly magic free playthrough.... The first few elder scrolls games really have a heavy reliance on using magic, without it you are pretty underpowered.
Still stand by the review, but I probably would have had a better time playing a mage.
Hot take: I like Arena more than Daggerfall
I'm amazed you so handily finished this game, and in only 15 hours? I play this sporadically for about 8 minutes per year out of sheer morbid curiosity. I will never forget seeing the delightfully tacky cover of this for the first time as a kid at Office Depot of all places. You are in a very small percentage of people who have ever completed it, and an even smaller number that (at least from what i inferred) completed it and haven't played Daggerfall. Thank you for beating it so i don't have to pretend that i ever will
Yeah, I'll admit I drilled down pretty hard on the main quest a few hours in. There definitely was a tipping point where I was playing just to finish so I could say I had done it.
Still though, glad I can say I completed it, will probably be some time before I try playing it again.
Daggerfall is definitely on the short list to play soon though!
Great video. I have subscribed and liked. I look forward to more videos from your channel.
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Anothet example of great fenale fashion! A+
Just subscribed nice videos from the past.
Happy to have you here.
If you're not big into riddles, I might steer clear of Betrayal at Krondor, but even more, the main Might & Magic series, which is especially full of riddles, ciphers and code locks.
Seriously, while the riddle chests in BaK go from childishly obvious to obliquely devious, playing M&M will require a lot of paper or a second computer just for solving the damn ciphers.
Haha, yeah there are a few game that go pretty hard on the riddle aspect. I like a good puzzle, but stuff like in arena where it's literally just a riddle unrelated to the game it feels a bit lazy.
Your description the game in the beginning is exactly what you can describe starfield as
I don't mind most buildings being pointless, it's like that in real life....do you walk into every building in the city you live in? It is immersive in that aspect. The cities have a big enough size that they feel believable. Going in every building would be the same as not going in, copy paste interiors and activities you'd always go to the nearest one to you anyway. Then they should just stick to the smaller towns at that point.
I can take or leave the sizes really.
I'm not a riddler either, hate them. As for combat, I just went with magic....got me though, ended up hardly using my sword.
The Mark and Recall Spells should avoid the backtracking if I remember.
Yeah, I can understand the preference but me personally just found it intrusive and confusing most the time trying to find the building I wanted.
If they were laid out a bit more logically, like having doors facing main roads, or having market squares, I could get behind the big towns. As it is it just felt like someone shotgun blasted dozens of buildings at random to add unnecessary padding, which is sort of how the whole game felt to me.
I would personally rather a tightly crafted experience, rather than a massive amount of procedurally generated stuff I have no interest in exploring.
Just my two cents on it.
I believe the riddles were in the game manual.
You may be right! I did give the game manual a quick skim but will admit I didn't read it in detail.
I'll have to go back and take a look, possibly it could have been some sort of copy protection like a lot of other games from this era had.
So it has an open world but you can't travel to the next city because it doesn't load properly? This is literally how Starfield works, you can increase your speed and fly to another planet but it won't load. Glad to see we have the same technical issues 30 years later.
Bethesda has definitely done some things right, but it is wild that they have the same issues 30 years on.
Probably the worst triple A dev in terms of actually fixing bugs.
I think there were a couple of RUclipsrs who made a video of walking from one end of the map to another. I think it took about 60 hours.
I feel like I watched a Daggerfall version of that at one point. I remember the horse.
I reconstructed the staff of chaos once....turns out you really cant use it to unclog a toilet
I played Arena when it first released (yes I am that old). I did NOT have all the crashes, but did get bored with all the repetition. I had more fun in Daggerfall, with it's banks and the ability to buy a house, but then the repetition bug got Me again. Then came Morrowind, will never forget how blown away I was climbing up to the ship's deck and looking around the first time. Yes I have been playing The Elder Scrolls games along time. I WAS waiting for TES6, but it has been so long of a wait, and Bethesda has fallen so far down the corporate rabbit hole, I no longer care if TES6 is ever released.
I'm in a super similar mindset, I absolutely loved Morrowind, and it's still one of my top games of all time. Especially wonderful using a modern system and modding in a further draw distance so you can see everything more clearly.
I'll definetly give TES6 a go when it releases, but I don't know that I trust Bethesda to make great games like they used to.
passwall is such a troll spell :> I used it once to by pass the dungeon only to get stuck in a wall and couldn't escape and my last save that was available was ages back.
Once I started using it I think I was running about 4 save slots at various points, I was so paranoid about getting trapped somewhere.
@@aquawalrus my case I didn't know they could return or such so got into the room with the staff piece, saved, died to the monster that monster that gets summoned, reloaded :> And was stuck. Took me till a year ago to finally beat the game, I was so annoyed.
Yep, I didn't realize the walls would come back when you go to a lower level. Imagine my surprise coming back up from the lower floor of a dungeon to find myself now boxed in.
I really wanted to enjoy Arena but I think it'll be a good while before I do another playthrough of it haha.
@@aquawalrus yeah, but at the time it was so amazing hehe. so much fun to just play around in, now I realize it's limitations :> but at the time I was blown away by it.
Absolutely, I do think I will revisit it eventually, mostly to play with the magic system a bit more.
I did a barbarian in my run so I mostly ignored that part of it, but it's so customizable I think you could do some pretty interesting stuff with it. I remember having a blast breaking the game with Morrowind's magic creation system and this one can be similarly abused from what I understand.
The reason why they added all the useless empty landscape was so that they could put it on the box. A map the size of a real continent! No one ever dreamed of such a thing in the Nintendo days.
It was definitely interesting from a tech perspective. Daggerfall definitely capitalized on it better though.
I always considered Arena and Daggerfall (OG not unity) as more of tech demos than actual games you would want to play.
How people played them: "wow it's a whole world, and it looks so real, you can walk across a country and do anything...... and that's enough of that back to Baldurs Gate"
That's what I did, that's what my friends did, that's what my uncle who was a huge gamer did.
Yeah, that's a pretty good way to put it. Like the sheer scale of it was cutting edge, but the story was back burner at best.
It was there but you could really tell it wasn't the focus for either game.
We both think the same about this game. But don't worry, in time, bad memories disappear and there will only be good ones.
Edit: I go apeshit whenever I hear "With you died.." or "You were a fool to..." sentences. I have ptsd i guess?
The one I'll never forget is from Morrowind when you kill a character related to a main quest and get the giant dialogue box of text saying you've severed the thread of prophecy and doomed the world.
Thats pretty frigging nuts they made a game that frigging big way back when
I have to assume they just made it so zones were inactive until you got there than other zones were made inactive....must've been quite a fucking chore
@ I think they relied a lot on procedural generation to create environments and towns. But even so, for 1994 it is pretty impressive they made a map this huge. Especially knowing like 90% of the player base would only ever explore such a small corner of it.
8:30 glove?
Yep!
Arena needs the Daggerfall unity treatment.
Could be on the way, we seem to be in the age of remakes and remasters and that's ok by me.
@@aquawalrus Yeha try Daggerfall unity it’s a full remake in unity great stuff.
Stonekeep referenced 🗡️💀 (not really but it made me double take)
Last year I beat Arena. For the 5th time lolll. I'm so good now I didn't even die à single time the whole playthrough! There are some very safe tactics to use involving Shield spells, Invisibility, Reflect etc. This game is incredibly easy when you understand it :)
You aren't wrong. My head first steamroll approach probably wasn't the best choice, but I was playing a presumably fairly stupid barbarian so it fit the rp.
@aquawalrus Oh my first playthrough attempts weren't super good either. Arena is more akin to a board game than a video game in a way. Can't wait for a proper port like Daggerfall Unity
For sure that would be great.
I'm very excited to give Daggerfall a go, it's the only elder scrolls main line game I have never played, just need to find the time to play it. I've heard it's very time consuming, though in a good way.
@aquawalrus Daggerfall is very hostile for beginning players, but once it clicks, it's a unique and very very good game. I finished it 3 times and every time was unique. The main quest is kind of hard because of time limits and just finding your way around. I have a couple of recommendations for you if you want to make it a lot more enjoyable
1- Make sure you can use the Recall spell before exploring dungeons if possible. It acts as both Mark and Recall in other games. When you get a quest, just place an anchor where the quest giver is. If you explorer a random dungeon just for fun, set an anchor at the entrance. Trust me on that one lol. The dungeons are GIGANTIC. And quests are timed, so you save time teleporting back.
2- When you explore mazes, it is often a good idea to stick to the left wall and backtrack when you hit a dead end and start following the left walls of other corridors again. Learn to use the map and understanding dungeon blocks.
3- Make multiple saves just in case you screw up the main quest
4- If you are to commit crimes, do it in provinces that are not the 3 main ones for the main quest (Daggerfall, Sentinel and Wayrest). If you don't, you might get your rep so low that you'll have to spend hours building it up again to advance the main quest.
5- Don't hesitate to look up a chart of the main quest subquests and their relations to each other, because there are multiple paths and it can get confusing.
6- Have fun ! It's addicting
I beat it for the first time last year :> 30 years and nvever beat :>
You might be the only living being that bothered to finish this game. Back in the day, all my friends & classmates played it and for some reason, sang praises on its graphics and gameplay (LOL) and kept on defending it with "truly open world" and "whole world free to explore", but besides stating all that which was obvious, nobody actually ever got to really spend time to explore that world, get used to the game mechanicz, get involved in any qide-quests, work on leveling-up etc.. And for that matter, nobody I know ever finished it.
BTW I was quite lucky there - I gave it one try, didn't like it, so I shut it off and never got back to it 😀
To be totally honest, I probably wouldn't have finished were I not making a video on it. The game had some cool ideas but was super undercooked. Daggerfall luckily fixed most the problems.
@@aquawalrus Hehe, a reason as good as any other 🙂 BTW I'm not familiar with Daggerfall, but my former neighbour played through it (for days and weeks) and said something like "it was a pain in the ass to figure everything out, but fun", so I'd guess that entry really is superior.
@@buffalodebill1976 Daggerfall is definetly better... Sort of similar to Arena but the ideas are a lot less half baked. It's biggest downfall is they literally have one texture pack for seemingly every single dungeon, so it gets really samey after a few hours.
You need to play Unity Daggerfall with all the mods.
You are absolutely correct!
Skimpy armor is canon it would seem
I like to imagine the skimpy armor is effective not because it actually provides protection, but it instead distracts your enemies and they miss more often.
Game doesn't crash for me. The problems you had are likely Windows related, due to the game being so old.
Also, if you use magic the game is a lot easier. There's spell absorption, spell reflection and magic resistance - all the staples of most Elder Scrolls games. You can even make your own spells, like we could pre-Skyrim. Obviously you shouldn't be forced to use magic, but I think all Elder Scrolls games are easier if you do.
Yeah, it's funny how much magic flipped after Morrowind. Used to be such a staple then magic just became borderline useless in their newer titles.
If I end up doing another playthrough it will definitely be as a magic character.
Finished this, Daggerfall and Morrowind. Never bothered with Oblivion and played Skyrim with 100 mods so it was decent, but have never finished it!
They're all entertaining in their own ways. I have to admit Morrowind is my favorite, with Oblivion as a second.
This need a remake. Serious. But, its a great game.
It needs the Unity treatment Daggerfall got, or a full on modern day remake would be super interesting to see.
There's a reason even the most die-hard TES fans recommend going back no farther than Daggerfall.
And after Daggerfall Unity I don't think I could ever go back to the DOS version.
Yeah, I want to play Daggerfall as well but I'm debating whether I want to do the original or unity.
I'm leaning toward the original DOS version, but I worry about stability issues.
@@aquawalrus If you really want the original pixelated experience, play Daggerfall Unity in retro rendering mode. Don't install any mods (unless you want to), and you now have a Daggerfall that looks and plays like the original Daggerfall, but with much smoother movement, less to no bugs, and whatever conveniences you choose to enable or install. I personally recommend checking "click to attack," so you don't have to swing your mouse all over when attacking... but that's just me.
@@TheRPGChick it's funny you mention the click to attack, I did try to play with the original vanilla swinging for the first couple hours but holding click to attack is such a massive quality of life upgrade.
I played mod free, and I think I kept as many options in vanilla mode as I could so hopefully it was the most "authentic" experience possible.
@@aquawalrus Oh so you did play the Unity version? Seems so. Good to hear!
> plays game made 30 years ago
> complains about mechanics being old
To be fair, I was also made over 30 years ago and I frequently complain about myself.
Might just be an unrecoverable personality flaw.
Cmon bro at least slow your audio down a little to drag out the video to an hour /sss
If I include all the footage of me getting lost in the various dungeons I could probably bring the video up to the 10 hour mark.
I just finished my run of this game in December as part of my idea to play every single TES game, even using a guide the entire way and spells to make me invincible it took me about 12 hours, though I only actually started using passwall in the last 3 or so hours.
@@rmstitanic1 12 hours! That's wild fast, I felt like I was pushing it with my 18-20ish hours.
I want to do Daggerfall as well, it's the only other one I have left that I haven't tried. From what I understand it's a much better game, but has a lot more content.
@aquawalrus Daggerfall Unity only just released a few days ago so it's the perfect time for it, I know it's gonna be a huge timesink so I've gotta mentally prepare for it
Yeah, definitely one I'll need to make time for. Maybe next time I get a big holiday from work so I have time to enjoy it properly.
Yeah.... If you don't save as soon as you load an elder scrolls game you shouldn't be playing elder scrolls game, kid.
This is why future titles have quick save support 🧐
Stop saying "on offer"
That's something a Hugh Jaynuss would say.