Elder Scrolls: Arena Playthrough Blog

part 1 ❦ Intro

On doing this

There are anniversaries that catch you off-guard, horrifying manifestations of the march of time into your social media scrolling—but for whatever reason, Skyrim’s 10th is one I waited for years in advance. I knew ahead of time that Skyrim was going to be a fucked-up thing to be ten-years-old. (And extra fucked-up that it’s ten and still the newest mainline Elder Scrolls game.)

Skyrim has an unfortunately large hold on my life. There are three major dates in the last decade that I use as mental markers, reference points I can place all other memories as a “before” or “after”. Those events are: COVID, the 2016 election, and Skyrim coming out. Getting my cat? Summer before Skyrim. Moving houses on short notice? One month after Skyrim. (Okay, look, 11/11/11 is an easy date to remember, okay?)

This all led to a sense of duty to do something for the anniversary. Replaying Skyrim was out of the question. (Out of the question.) The traditional 10th anniversary gift is tin/aluminum, not much to go with there. Probably could’ve just drawn an Argonian or something. But then I remembered—I only have one mainline Elder Scrolls game left. One I’ve claimed I was looking forward to starting for years, but minus a few hours of tinkering around, never sat down and committed to.

Another reason for blogging is self-serving. The only reason I remember half the technical details of my Daggerfall playthrough is because of my strangely high-effort video about playing it with a Steam controller. There’s still a lot I forgot: why’d I pick that build? What was my leveling strategy? What advice would I give to newcomers? I have no idea. Playing a severely unpolished ’90s dungeon-crawler has its pleasures (I had a great time with Daggerfall) but it’s also high-effort in a way where I don’t want the whole experience to evaporate from my mind in two years. Hence, a blog, an ideal dumping ground for all my thoughts, impressions, screenshots, and Skyrim bloviating. Enjoy... the arena.

What Arena is (I think)

Arena is older than I am, the only other ’90s dungeon-crawler I’ve played is Daggerfall, and I’m playing both as a direct casualty of getting into Skyrim as my first Elder Scrolls game. Which is to say, beyond a few YouTube comments and snippets of 2002 forum chatter I’ve stumbled across, my impressions of the Arena-era PC gaming landscape are coming from a beautifully blank mind. Maybe Arena has nothing on Ultima Underworld, maybe Arena wouldn’t be played anymore if not for its famous sequels, maybe it was a masterpiece innovating things no one ever dreamed of before, I can’t talk on that.

From what I have gathered, Arena is the quickly-surpassed infant sibling to Daggerfall. Daggerfall arrived only two years later, expanding on the core gameplay with new features and 1996-computer-demolishing tech specs and graphics (and with it, Bethesda-trademark bugginess).

But technical power wasn’t Daggerfall’s sole advantage. Though Daggerfall didn’t bring the quantum leap of storytelling and worldbuilding originality to the series that Morrowind would, Daggerfall noticeably stepped up efforts to spruce up its plot, and included in-game history books that have made appearances in all future games (and even hardcover collections). Arena’s plot, in contrast, centers on collecting eight pieces of a magical staff. Daggerfall expanded Arena’s mechanics and traditional experience-based leveling with new magic abilities and skill-based progression. It added more meat to the faction system, creating a more immersive hook to the game’s world beyond Arena’s simple linear main quest (though, again, the menial radiant quests the Daggerfall factions offered are still quaint compared to the full sideplots established by Morrowind).

Although Arena used procedural generation, it wasn’t to the level Daggerfall made famous. (This isn’t an outright downside for Arena, but it does give Arena less of a unique “thing”.) The famously massive (empty) procedural generated overworld of Daggerfall is more of a ruse in Arena—you can walk out of towns indefinitely, seeing randomly generated paths, dungeons, and billboard sprites of trees, but you will never actually reach another town. (This is not the case in Daggerfall, though it’s 100% a case of something that’s more meaningful to know is possible than something you’d ever want to do.) Arena’s generated dungeons are meager house-sized right-angled affairs, not the literal-miles-long webs of stitched-together modular dungeons requiring hours of exploration for a single fetch quest like in Daggerfall.

The long and winding road

So, does Arena get any wins?

The first big compliment is backhanded. The same aspects that made Daggerfall a more notable game (and so endearingly ambitious beyond its grasp) are not in Arena, and Arena is a significantly more stable game because of it. I love Daggerfall but will freely admit that it felt like a half-working tech demo to the end. Arena’s relative technical simplicity allows it have some of the most sandbox-y elements in all of Elder Scrolls, even including spells to create or destroy walls and floor tiles.

Second, it’s the first Elder Scrolls! It was always going to have the joy of experiencing the series’ humble beginnings. There’s only five of these after all.

But neither of those were what originally got my attention.

It’s all there!

Arena’s ultimate draw to my hopped-up-on-Skyrim-lore brain: all of the Tamriel continent fully open for exploring.

Daggerfall, for all its improvements, is set within the upper northwest of Tamriel that no games* have explored since. Meanwhile, this is the map Arena presents to new players:

I know what that is!

And when you click on one of those, what do we see?

Riften! Whiterun! Falkreath Falcreath! †

I knew these weren’t going to be hand-crafted cities with distinct personalities. I knew there’d be no functional difference whether I’m in Skyrim or Black Marsh when I saunter into the same generated dungeon throwing trolls at me. But they’re there! You can go to them!

In an unplanned meta way, Arena’s extreme age lends a mythic, ancient quality to it. If Skyrim and Oblivion exist in our modern, recognizable Iron Age gaming landscape, getting to see Tamriel in Arena is like traveling to the Heroic Age. Of course Riften wouldn’t look like the modern recognizable Riften—this is the symbolic elemental seed of Riften. The sign that Riften is an important thing that emanates throughout the ages.

Riften of yore

I know I’m looking at things backwards. It’s not that hard to stick to a map and some names you drew seventeen years ago. But the damage is done—Skyrim (and every Elder Scrolls game I played since) tricked me into caring about this game-world and I can’t resist this self-validating sense of history and scale Arena offers.

Mythic, ancient quality

Funnily, this illusion isn’t remotely impacted by learning the captive whisked-to-Oblivion emperor of Arena is the same emperor across the first four Elder Scrolls games. Fun trivia, but it can’t fight what I know in my heart: Arena is old.

This man would later be voiced by Patrick Stewart

Up next in part 2… actually starting my new file!

Originally posted 2021.11.11

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