Closing Thoughts and Review

With the defeat of the usurper Jagar Tharn, and Emperor Uriel Septim VII returned to his throne, Talin’s adventure is over. But our journey through the Elder Scrolls has only just begun. Before moving on to Daggerfall, I wanted to write a few thoughts about the game, as well as a few lines about the future of the blog series.

A Brief Review

Arena is a relatively simple and linear game, one that gets more than a little tedious before the end. Despite the unparalleled freedom it advertised at the time of its release, there is very little of interest to do with the freedom you’re given beside the main quest. The side quests that exist are quite basic and few in number, so you’ll be seeing the same ones before too long. The most exciting side content just entails more dungeon crawling without the hand placed design of the main quest locations, so it’s rather dull.

The main quest dungeons are quite interesting and feature some cool details and environmental storytelling, but the addition of eight additional dungeons which boil down to finding the given scroll/tablet/gem/hammer/whatever to unlock the location of the next staff piece pads out the length unnecessarily and turns the game into a slog by the halfway point.

Despite all that, I’d still call Arena a good game. The dungeon crawling is immersive and satisfying in its simplicity, one that has great atmosphere aided by its old-school presentation. As I said in the introductory post, fans of the series will recognize a plethora of names, locations, and legendary items from later games in the series even if they are not quite as realized here, and it is compelling to see how many of these elements have existed in the series in some form from the very beginning. The mechanics are much simpler than later entries, but there is still satisfaction to be found in seeing your character grow in power and acquire better gear, which feels very tangible and meaningful as you progress. This can be quickly trivialized with magic (and particularly the spellmaker), but game balance is hardly an issue unique to Arena in this series.

Arena exists as a labor of love. Without it, we wouldn’t have the Elder Scrolls as we know it today, and we very nearly didn’t. The history of this game is troubled and complex, more so than I can reasonably cover here. For more in-depth analysis of Arena and its history, I would highly recommend this fantastic retrospective from Jwlar. His thoughts echo many of my own here.

Looking Back, Moving Forward

It feels surreal to have blogged about an entire game, something that I’ve thought of doing for years. It was not without issues. There were long gaps between postings as making writing a consistent habit is an ongoing process. I also think somewhere along the way I lost the pulse on the narrative I was trying to craft and defaulted into gameplay commentary, which is hardly unique and lacking what sets this project apart from others I’ve seen. Moving forward, there will be more emphasis on the narrative, canon, and role-playing elements of my posts. Thankfully, this will be easier in future games where there is more to do and spin narrative from than simple dungeon crawling.

There will also be some technical improvements to look forward to. I’ve recently moved to a new web hosting provider and am researching SEO and site refinements. An index will be added for better access to prior posts, rather than the endless scroll we currently have. Even with all that in mind, I’m considering a move to the Ghost platform which will entail a full site revamp and new domain, but I’ll keep everyone in the loop if that comes to pass.

With all that out of the way, I’m very much looking forward to continuing this series with The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, a game I love. Stay tuned for the first post very soon.