The Elder Scrolls I: Arena

Bethesda Softworks has released their newest game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but I haven’t bought it yet. Instead, I’m playing the first game in the series, The Elder Scrolls I: Arena. Let me explain why.

The problem with being an avid gamer, and with consuming video game-related media, is that you are constantly exposed to hype. I personally suffered from this when, based on glowing reviews, I bought Peter Molyneux’s Black & White the day it was released. Every game magazine in the world shouted its praises from the rooftops. It was, according to nearly every source that had done a preview or a pre-release review, the best game ever made.

In case you haven’t heard, Black & White was unremittingly, brutally bad. It was terrible along nearly every axis. It was an unplayable mess, a disaster of Donner party proportions. For years I have been bitter about the reviewers who failed to warn me and wondered what could have possessed them to say that such a blatantly terrible game was good.

One popular answer is “payola,” but I don’t think any conspiracy theories are necessary to explain why bad games sometimes get positive reviews. There are a few factors at work here. First and most importantly, both gamers and game reviewers thrive on the new. It gives us something to write about, and we all like trying something we haven’t seen before. This means that unless a game actually goes out of its way to ruin our lives – such as erasing our hard drives – there’s a tendency to give the game a lot of slack when first encountering it. Sometimes reviewers write their reviews while still in this “honeymoon period.” Second, no one really complains about positive reviews, while writing a negative review guarantees you an unending stream of e-mail from 14 year old boys informing you that you are an idiot, a homosexual, and probably just didn’t like the game because you weren’t good at it. Last, many game reviews are written based on free copies. Again: it’s not because of payola. It’s that playing a bad game doesn’t sting as much if you haven’t spent your own hard-earned cash on it, and this can come through in the writing.

So, while I’m reasonably sure that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a wonderful game, I’m going to make myself wait before rushing out and buying it. In the meantime, to drum up excitement, Bethesda has released the first game in the Elder Scrolls series, Arena, for free, available at http://www.elderscrolls.com/downloads/downloads_games.htm. Having immensely enjoyed the third game, Morrowind, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to look at this 1994 game through a 2006 lens.

You almost certainly will not be able to run Bethesda’s free download of Arena on your Windows machine “as-is”, but on a fast Windows or Macintosh machine it will run well in DOSBox, available from http://dosbox.sourceforge.net.

What is impressive about Arena is how well it sets the tone of the Elder Scrolls series. Yes, the graphics are more primitive and the user interface is a bit kludgy, but all of the elements that make the later games enticing are present even at this early stage. The settings, and the races that inhabit them, are all present (if not fleshed out). All characters can use a variety of skills – fighters can cast spells, magicians can learn to swing a sword. You begin the game as a forgotten prisoner in the Imperial dungeons (sound familiar, Oblivion players?). You are set free, and tasked with finding the eight pieces of the Staff of Chaos, which you will use to defeat Imperial Battlemage Jagar Tharn. Tharn has imprisoned (and is impersonating) Emperor Uriel Septim VII. You’d think as a prisoner in the Imperial dungeons, you wouldn’t particularly be motivated to rescue the Emperor, but apparently your avatar is either long on generosity or short on brains.

The shocking thing to me is how primitive it al looks. 1994 isn’t so ancient to me, but we forget (or at least I forget) that the original Doom was released in 1993. By those standards, Arena is fairly advanced. The movement in-game feels like that in Ultima Underworld or System Shock. However, the world itself is not quite as sophisticated as in those games. Objects only exist in your inventory (all treasures are represented on the floor as a generic “treasure pile” sprite). NPCs and enemy creatures have a very Duke Nukem feel to them, flat and without facing.

Combat is surprisingly satisfying. You swing your weapon by holding down the right mouse button and moving the mouse. The direction of movement determines whether you swing, jab, or overhand the weapon. In Morrowind I found this mechanic to be tiresome but in Arena it somehow works.

One aspect of The Elder Scrolls that has become a hallmark of the series is its sophisticated usage-based skill system. Put simply, your character improves in skills that he or she uses, without regard to level. That system is missing here; it wasn’t introduced until the second game, Daggerfall. Rather, as in most traditional RPGs, you are awarded experience points for killing monsters, and every so often you gain a “level” and can increase the vital statistics of your choice.

Apart from the opening dungeon, nearly everything you will encounter in Arena is randomly generated. This is what allows them to model (in their own way) such an apparently huge world. But, like cotton candy at the carnival, there is a lot of air inside the spun sugar. The world, while large, is mostly hollow. None of the quests have any sense of place or permanence, or indeed even of import. The half-naked barbarian women that stride around the major cities are more irritating than interesting.

The world of Arena, like that of the later games, has a short attention span. If you choose to wander away from the main plot and explore at random, the game does not feel appreciably different than if you quest single-mindedly. The plot is just an excuse to explore more dungeons.

Arena, in other words, is a curio. It is the forebear of some classic games, but it is not a classic in and of itself. And now that I have experienced it for myself, and have explored the origins of the series, it’s clear what I should do next.

I’m going to buy an Xbox 360 and a copy of Oblivion, and play that instead. Well played, Bethesda, well played. Your devious plan worked.

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