The Elder Scrolls: Arena

Overview

The Elder Scrolls: Arena is a first-person action role-playing game developed and published by Bethesda Softworks for MS-DOS on March 25, 1994. It is the first game in The Elder Scrolls series. The player, a court official thrown into the Imperial dungeons, must stop the Imperial Battlemage Jagar Tharn, who has imprisoned Emperor Uriel Septim VII in another dimension and taken his place on the throne.

What made Arena remarkable was scale. The game covered the whole continent of Tamriel across nine provinces, with towns, wilderness and dungeons, much of it built by procedural generation. It had a day-night cycle in which shops closed at sunset and monsters roamed the streets until morning, and a system that let players create their own spells by mixing effects. Both ideas became fixtures of the series and of the open-world RPG.

Origins

Bethesda, founded by Christopher Weaver in 1986, was best known for sports and Terminator games when designers Vijay Lakshman and Ted Peterson began work on what was simply called Arena: a "medieval-style gladiator game" in which the player would lead a team of fighters from city to city, battling other teams in their arenas until becoming grand champion in the Imperial City. The engine grew from the codebase of The Terminator: Rampage (1993).

Peterson, Lakshman and programmer Julian LeFay were longtime tabletop role-players, and Tamriel grew out of those games. Their main inspiration on the computer was Ultima Underworld; Peterson also acknowledged Legends of Valour, a free-roaming first-person game set in a single city, and admitted that Arena was "certainly derivative." As development went on, side quests grew more important than tournaments, towns and dungeons were added beyond the arenas, and the tournaments were eventually dropped altogether. The planned party of four was reduced to a single adventurer.

By then the box art was printed, so the game shipped as Arena anyway, with a lore explanation: the Empire was so violent that it had been nicknamed "the Arena." Lakshman supplied "The Elder Scrolls," which Peterson admitted none of them fully understood at the time; the phrase came to mean Tamriel's mystical tomes of past, present and future. A young Todd Howard, later the series' director, joined Bethesda during development, and his first assignment was testing the CD-ROM version.

How it plays

The player creates a single character, choosing race and class, and sees the world in first person. Melee combat is performed by holding the right mouse button and dragging across the screen as if swinging the weapon, a system Computer Gaming World's Scorpia called "the most natural way of fighting that I've seen in a first-person game." Magic is cast from a spell menu.

The world is effectively endless. Towns use designed buildings arranged and named procedurally, and the wilderness between them is generated too, with inns, farms and dungeons scattered through it; travel between cities uses fast travel. The main quest sends the player through seventeen handcrafted dungeons to recover the pieces of the Staff of Chaos, while rumors in taverns lead to simple side quests. The opening is notoriously harsh: Ken Rolston, who later led the design of Morrowind, said he started the game at least twenty times and escaped the first dungeon only once.

Reception & impact

Planned for Christmas 1993, Arena slipped to March 1994, and distributors put off by the delay and the misleading packaging took only about 3,000 copies at first. Word of mouth rescued it. Critics praised its ambition — PC Gamer US called it a "stunning technological achievement" — while Scorpia found it repetitive, unstable and in need of patches. It won Computer Gaming World's Role-Playing Game of the Year for 1994. PC Data counted 120,000 units sold from 1994 to 1996. Historian Matt Barton concluded that it "set a new standard for this type of CRPG."

Legacy

Arena was followed by The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall in 1996, which pushed procedural scale further still, and then by Morrowind (2002), Oblivion (2006), Skyrim (2011) and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014). The series became one of the best-selling Western RPG franchises, and the first game's gladiator premise survives only in its title and in the Emperor's thanks: the hero of Arena is named the Eternal Champion. In 2004 Bethesda released the floppy-disk version as freeware for the series' tenth anniversary, and fans have since begun an open-source reimplementation, OpenTESArena.