Perhaps it’s just an internet urban legend, but rumour has it that ‘Arena’ was originally designed to be just that: a gladiator style battle arena game. But the designers just kept on adding to it and the result was one of the first truly free-form RPGs. Like its more famous successors, Daggerfall, Morrowind and the mighty Oblivion, Arena presents the player with a vast and exciting world to explore and a convincing illusion of perfect freedom. Yes, there’s a plot (assemble the Plot of Chaos, defeat the evil Jagar Tharn yadda yadda yadda) but for most players the pleasure of Arena is simply getting on with doing your own thing.
Perhaps it’s just an internet urban legend, but rumour has it that ‘Arena’ was originally designed to be just that: a gladiator style battle arena game. But the designers just kept on adding to it and the result was one of the first truly free-form RPGs. Like its more famous successors, Daggerfall, Morrowind and the mighty Oblivion, Arena presents the player with a vast and exciting world to explore and a convincing illusion of perfect freedom. Yes, there’s a plot (assemble the Plot of Chaos, defeat the evil Jagar Tharn yadda yadda yadda) but for most players the pleasure of Arena is simply getting on with doing your own thing.
The class system is slightly less customizable than Daggerfall (only thiefly character types can pick locks,
for example) but still allows you a reasonable opportunity to create your character, either by answering Cosmo style questions about your responses and ethics, or building something from scratch from 8 possible races and 18 classes.
Although not as good as Daggerfall, the graphics are still very competent for 1994, featuring a vast and detailed 3D world complete with weather-effects. Movement and fighting (which is real-time) is reminiscent of the Ultima Underworld series, being primarily mouse-focused but there are the usual array of action icons along the bottom of the screen for using, camping, casting spells, talking and so on. There’s even an auto-mapping feature to stop you getting lost in the vast and intricate indoor dungeons.
Like many of the later Elder Scrolls games, the problem with a big world and non-linear game play is that it all feels and looks a bit samey. You can travel to the many provinces of Tamriel but ultimately the multitudes of NPCs are pretty interchangeable and the quests, although abundant, are usually fairly generic.
It’s still great fun though, and a must for RPG fans, Elder Scrolls fans and people for a few weeks of their life going spare because you can practically live in Arena. It’s unique out of all the Elder Scrolls games for allowing the player to visit all the provinces of Tamriel and, although the plot is quite hackneyed, the sense of world is compelling. If you see yourself as a tough-of-nails dungeon crawler, a sneaky thief who travels from shop to shop and town to town robbing them blind, a holy warrior on a spiritual mission, a drunken layabout who sits in the pub all day listening to gossip or a combination of all them, Arena will let you do it. Oblivion may be glossy but Arena has real heart.
