This is set up by casting you as an unknown prisoner beneath the Imperial City. Instead, it’s a first-person RPG and dungeon crawler. As far as I can tell, anything resembling an arena was stripped from the game. It becomes even more confusing when you delve into the game’s final form. The real reason for the subtitle is because the game started off as a fantasy arena combat game, and they didn’t want to change the marketing material after it mutated into something different (which is probably also why the cover features a woman who appears equipped for something other than adventuring). That’s a massive stretch that current games sweep under the rug. The Arena in its name is contrived to refer to the idea that the fantasy land of Tamriel has become so violently tumultuous that its denizens have taken to comparing it to a place of constant battle. To truly understand The Elder Scrolls: Arena, it’s important to know where it came from. Unfortunately, in the case of The Elder Scrolls: Arena, that territory is as flat and uninteresting as a game from 1994 can muster. As someone who approaches these games as a form of virtual tourism, that kind of territory gets me salivating. Daggerfall has one of the largest terrestrial game worlds ever created for a 3D game (cited as 161,600 square kilometers).

The few details that I had uncovered just magnified the allure: Elder Scrolls: Arena presents the entire continent of Tamriel to explore, whereas subsequent entries just serve up individual provinces. If nothing else, this just made those primordial games more tantalizing, like distant lands obscured in a mysterious fog.

While I have run into people who extol the virtues of Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, no one has insisted I play it, nor suggested their superiority because I’m the sort of unwashed filth that started with Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. On the other hand, saying you’ve only played past the third Elder Scrolls game is less of a faux pas (though, if you started after Oblivion, you’re still trash). Even so, if you haven’t played them, you’re still cool. To be fair to those jerks, both Fallout 1 and 2 have a lot to offer that haven’t quite been well replicated in the recent 3D entries. That’s because they liked it before it was cool, and it was way better back before Bethesda came in and mucked everything up. If you tell the wrong gamer that you’ve only played the Fallout games past Bethesda Softwork’s 3rd entry, you’ll elicit a scoff.

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