The Elder Scrolls: Arena

The Elder Scrolls: Arena is an adventure role-playing game developed and published by Bethesda Softworks.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) For its time, it had a huge world split into nine provinces, many races and terrains, NPC interactions, and absence of level limits.
 * 2) Incredible and sophisticated graphics for the time.
 * 3) It's like a cross between Ultima Underworld and Might and Magic: World of Xeen.
 * 4) The storyline is rich and compelling, its setting as well.
 * 5) It has many, many, many side quests.
 * 6) This game has some great combat (one of the most natural ways of fighting in a first person game), magic system, world detail, and character creation.
 * 7) While not much compared to its sequels, obviously, The Elder Scrolls: Arena is super important for kickstarting what would eventually become one of the most popular and profitable video game franchises of all time.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Compared to the other games in the series, Arena hasn't aged very well, mostly thanks to the very clunky controls and UI, unforgiving difficulty, and having a large scope but not enough depth to match.
 * 2) There were a lot of instances where this game had insufficient travel time to finish quests.
 * 3) In a game of this size, everything eventually becomes mechanical and repetitious, including towns, conversation trees, quests, and enemies because everything is so isolated. Arena is too big to offer real variety, and thus becomes no more than a very sophisticated dungeon crawl with minimal plot.

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