Free to playThe Elder Scrolls: Arena All of Tamriel to wander
Hunt the shattered Staff of Chaos across a vast, dark empire, one dungeon and one province at a time.
Is The Elder Scrolls: Arena worth it?
The Elder Scrolls: Arena is worth it if…
- you want to see where The Elder Scrolls all began, in its rough original form
- you enjoy dungeon crawlers with huge mazes, little guidance and real difficulty
- you like reading a manual before you play, and figuring systems out by trial and error
- you can forgive 1994 controls and menus in exchange for a whole continent to roam
Screenshots
Eight pieces of a broken staff
The plot fits in a sentence: the imperial battlemage Jagar Tharn has imprisoned the Emperor in another dimension, taken his face and his throne, and only you can undo it. Before you can even enter one, you have to find out where it is, usually by running errands for the people who know. The dungeons themselves are enormous first-person mazes with almost no guidance, lit barely at all, and the doors to the important rooms open only when you answer a riddle. Bring a torch spell.
Can you make your own spells?
Can you make your own spells?
Yes. You can build spells and fine-tune them to suit how you want to play, and a spell you craft yourself can make you very powerful. Not every class can use magic at all, so if spellcrafting sounds like your thing, pick a class that can cast. Spells matter beyond combat too: light for the pitch-black dungeons, and one spell that lets you walk straight through a wall, which is exactly as useful as it sounds.
Do you need to read the manual?
Honestly, yes. The game explains very little on its own, and the player guide and other manuals in the game folder cover what you need: how movement works, what everything does, how the world is put together. Most confusion about what to do or where to go clears up once you have read them. Think of it as an old-school RPG that expects you to do the homework, because in 1994, they all did.
