Elder Scrolls Arena Spells That Fighters Can Cast?

The Elder Scrolls: Arena/Spells allows players to cast and create spells with zero maximum spell points. At higher levels, spells with zero cost can be created, such as unlock, cure, invisibility, levitation, heal health and fatigue, and damage health. The Mages Guild can sell additional spells or construct them using the Spellmaker.

Healer classes can wear chain mail, gain magic points from intelligence, use strong weapons, and cast defensive spells cheaply. Spells can be offensive or defensive. To cast a spell, the Champion must click on the cast spell icon, followed by the Eternal Champion. Sorcerers can have two chances to absorb a spell.

At the start of the game, players are asked to choose their class, with spellcasting being highly recommended. Warriors and their subclasses cannot cast spells, but they can still use enchanted equipment for magical effects. However, they cannot cast spells without the aid of enchanted equipment.

Warriors can equip any type of armor but cannot cast spells. They will always have 0 spell points (magicka). While only Mage classes and Bards can cast spells, anyone with a magically-imbued item or potion can use magic. It is highly recommended that players choose a spellcasting class, as spellcasters are far better than non-spellcasters.

Warriors are true fighters and experts at melee combat, preferring to mix offensive power with defensive ability. They prefer to use a good sword or axe.

In conclusion, while non-mage classes have zero maximum spell points, they can still cast spells if their spell point cost is zero. At higher levels, spellcasters are far superior to non-spellcasters, and players should consider their spellbook and abilities when choosing their class.


📹 It took me 10 years to realize i could do this

It took me 10 years to realize i could do this #skyrim ○My New Mod Load Order: -Reforging To the Masses -SkyUI -SkyHUD …


Is Elder Scrolls Arena infinite?

The game is played from a first-person perspective, with melee combat and magic used through a menu. The world is infinite, requiring fast travel between towns. The game combines procedurally generated content and specifically designed world spaces to create a realistic wilderness with inns, farms, small towns, dungeons, and other places of interest. The towns contain developer-designed buildings and shops, but their order and names are procedurally generated.

There are several hundred dungeons and 17 specially designed dungeons for the main quest. Arena is notable for its realistic day/night cycle, where shops close at sunset and people clear streets before monsters arrive.

In addition to the main quest, small side quests appear, often found by asking around town for rumours. These quests are usually simple, such as delivering a parcel or defeating a randomly chosen dungeon. This feature has become a staple feature of most open-world games.

Can anyone cast a spell from a scroll?

Spell scrolls are a valuable addition to any game, but their current rules may be limiting. They are only accessible to casters with the spell on their class lists. However, there are various homebrew rules used by DMs, allowing spell casters to use other class spell scrolls with an ability check or giving anyone who can read the ability to use the scroll. The decision to use this rule is up to the DM.

What is the best race for Spellsword?

The Breton is recommended for its strong magic resistance, allowing easy access to the 85 magic resistance cap. High Elf or Dark Elf are solid options with high Magicka pool and 50 base fire resistance. The race you choose has a minor impact on gameplay, so choose any race you like. To counter low Stamina, use Vegetable Soup. Other options include Alchemy, Enchanting, Smithing, One-Handed, Destruction, Magic school of choice, Light or Heavy Armor.

Can you cast spells as a fighter?

Upon reaching the third level, the player is able to augment their martial abilities through the casting of spells. At the 3rd level, the character learns two cantrips from the wizard spell list, and at the 10th level, an additional one. The Eldritch Knight Spellcasting Table illustrates the requisite number of spell slots for the casting of 1st-level and higher wizard spells. In order to cast a spell, it is necessary to expend a slot of the spell’s level or higher.

Can you cast spells in combat?

The ability to cast a spell on a unit engaged in combat is permitted, unless the caster is in a state of disorder, such as having sustained a wound in the previous round. A non-disordered caster has the option of either disengaging and casting the spell or fleeing the situation.

Can thralls use magic?

Thralls are powerful allies with low hit rates, ensuring they hit and ignore defensive bonuses. They are useful for speed kills and places where magic spells are not needed. Thralls have an attack speed of 4, or once every 2. 4 seconds. Magic thralls hit enemies 1 tick earlier than ranged thralls, making them preferred in situations without special type resistances. They remain for a set duration (0. 6 * Currence Modulus) and have a ten-second cooldown before a resurrection spell can be cast. The duration of a thrall depends on the player’s Magic level, and boosting it increases its duration.

How do you cast spells in arena?

To cast a spell, click on the Cast Spell icon or press the C key. A list of spells will appear in the lower right-hand corner. Select the desired spell and follow the onscreen instructions. To re-cast a recently cast spell, right-click on the Cast Spell icon or press Shift-C. To aim targeted spells, move your cursor over the desired location. Spells have an “alley” they travel down, and if obstructed, expend themselves on it.

What is the difference between Battlemage and Spellsword in Elder Scrolls Arena?

The research on battlemages and spellswords yielded disparate findings, predominantly between the descriptions of Oblivion and Morrowind, due to their contradictory nature. Battlemages are primarily mages who wear heavy armor and occasionally utilize swords. In contrast, spellswords are a combination of 50% mage and 50% warrior, wearing light armor and displaying agility.

Can anyone in Elder Scrolls use magic?

Magic, also known as the Clever Craft and Arcane Arts, is the art of manipulating magicka to control reality. A mage is a practitioner of magic, while battlemages or spellswords fight with melee weapons and magic. Nightblades prefer magical and thief skills. All races possess some magical aptitudes, but those with elvish blood excel. Magic is governed by Intelligence and Willpower attributes, with those with elvish blood outperforming others.

How long does it take to finish Elder Scrolls Arena?

The Elder Scrolls: The estimated time required to complete Arena is approximately 26 hours, with a projected completion time of 62½ hours for those who intend to fully explore the game’s content and objectives.

Is Royal Battlemage a good class?
(Image Source: Pixabay.com)

Is Royal Battlemage a good class?

The Royal Battlemage tank, while not exhibiting optimal performance in all domains, displays commendable attributes. These include a low mana requirement and the capacity to inflict considerable burst damage, which collectively render it a viable option for tank roles.


📹 TES I: Arena – A Complete Retrospective

The first Elder Scrolls, a game forgotten to time by many. With Daggerfall having a second wind in the last couple of years and …


Elder Scrolls Arena Spells That Fighters Can Cast
(Image Source: Pixabay.com)

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  • I hope you enjoy this look back at such a pivotal game (even if they didn’t know it at the time). Thanks for perusal, and thank you so much for your amazing support over the last year! There is 1 (one) stutter left in the final edit, extra points goes to those who can find it 😉 (totally not left in by accident 🗿)

  • I was doing a permadeath run at some point, and I was poisoned by some rogue. After running around the town, trying to find a cure poison potion, I remembered that I found an enchanted item, then ran to the Mage’s Guild to identify it, in a last ditch effort, and once it was identified, it was a Holy Tome that cured poison.

  • Being able to skip entire dungeons through the use of Destroy Wall and Open Lock was a highlight of the game for me. Another was… losing an entire character to getting the Plague and not being able to leave a dungeon. Always carry a Potion of Cure Disease, kids. Arena was a huge surprise to me. Sure, its old and clunky, but it oozes SOUL. The dialogue, the art, the freaking RIDDLES, its such a fun game. I really want to encourage that anyone with an interest in Arena tries it. There are maps and extra resources in UESP for those who need it, but Arena is way easier to get into than it seems.

  • I’m 35 and from DC – my dad and I actually went to the Bethesda building to pick the game up when it came out. I remember it being fairly popular in the area; I had a couple friends who played it, and we’d talk about it at school or pour over the strategy guide it came with, the Codex Scientia. I’m not really a huge Elder Scrolls fan, but I have very fond memories of Arena and Daggerfall, largely because my friends and I played them together, running out of the room shrieking when we heard scary monster sound effects. One thing we really loved to do was run around buildings and cast Passwall on walls, playing the game like it was Minecraft but 20 years earlier. Arena is only one thing, and that’s a dungeon crawler. Every other element of the game exists to facilitate dungeon crawling; dungeon crawling is the only thing the game does, and in that regard it is probably the best in the series. The dungeons are huge, fun, mostly sensical, challenging. They also play somewhat differently depending on the kind of character you’re using. They’re not sprawling monstrosities like Daggerfall, tiny, interconnected rooms like Morrowind or linear corridors like Skyrim. They’re simple, sometimes monotonous, but they offer real exploration. Later games in the series add a lot – guilds, quests, characters. It’s fun to do guild quests or play dress up or do whatever in these games, but they don’t fundamentally change or enhance the dungeons. So I guess, overall, Arena is my favorite game in the series.

  • Once in a while, you can run into a higher-level enemy during randomly generated quests. I somehow got a rescue quest somewhere between levels 5 and 10 that required me to go to a vampire’s lair. The vampire was the only enemy in the dungeon, but, obviously, that’s more than enough to deal with, especially at a low level. I eventually managed to kill it by using Passwall and bob-and-weaving around the corner I made while using Fire Dart over and over. It was definitely the hardest fight I’ve ever had in an Elder Scrolls game

  • Dragonstrike is one of the greatest things ever made. That was my introduction to D&D. I watched that VHS religiously as a kid. Ended up using it as a module for my homebrew D&D campaign, and no one (all my players are 10 years my senior) recognized what it was, hilariously enough, and they’re all nerds.

  • Regarding the “Placeholder Names” you mentioned as existing the Elder Scrolls to this day, I’ve actually been working on something of a list of where the province names have been borrowed from: Summerset Isles: As you mentioned, borrowed from Summerset, England. Valenwood: I think this one is from “valenwood trees”, giant trees that people built cities within in the Dragonlance campaign setting, present in the earliest modules. Elsweyr: Shares the name (down to the same spelling) with a far-off country mentioned in the Elric of Melnibone stories by Michael Moorcock. Morrowind: One of the most blatant, this comes from the Shannara series by Terry Brooks, where there is a volcanic island populated by elves named “Morrowindl”. Bretony: Like the Summerset Isles, this one’s also a real location. Argonia: Along with the name of the Argonian race, I suspect this might have come from the infamously bad novel “the Eye of Argon”, based on the fact one of the early games that was planned (but never made) was to be titled “Eye of Argonia”. The only wholly original province names appear to be: Skyrim, Hammerfell, High Rock, Black Marsh, and the Imperial Province. And three of those are incredibly generic anyways, and the alternate names for two are borrowed from elsewhere.

  • I’m in awe of the scale and leg-work/research you’ve put into this. I’m a Morrowboomer that has had a lot of trouble getting into Arena and Daggerfall, but it’s nice to digest articles like this and your Daggerfall article to get a sense of the history and development of this series I love so much. Cheers friend.

  • The retrospective on Daggerfall was absolutely amazing and even taught me things I never noticed while playing it, and tbh after hearing you say that you were gonna do a article on arena it compelled me to revisit the game and its story since. I can’t wait to see everything you’ve found and put in this masterpiece, love these vids its great to see the old elder scrolls getting attention!

  • One town in each province? Go to Dragonstar, then go to Sentinel. Or go to Riverwood, then to Winterhold. Dragonstar, and other Eastern Hammerfell towns are green and lush. In the western part of the province it’s a brown desert. Likewise, in Southern portions of Skyrim are green Forest, and Northern parts snow even in summer. I didn’t even notice this until recently. I just happened to spawn in Northwestern High Rock, and noticed it was snowing in early Autumn, went to Daggerfall and was green and warm. So I started testing different locations in places I knew had vastly different climates in lore. I forgot about comparing central Elsweyr to the southern coast. I think I’ll check that now, actually.

  • I’m glad you mentioned the dungeons being unique and interesting. I found that, while most other parts were not very good, the dungeons were better designed than any of the other games. They really feel like a big dungeon you have to explore and find things within (unlike later games where they were just straight shots) which makes sense in the world why other people couldn’t just grab what is within. They are varied as well and have their own flavor which later games basically abandoned too.

  • You know with Tharn… I kind of like the story implications as is that he just wanted to sit on the throne, hookers and blackjack, and basically hedonistically live it up with what he thought he deserved. Didn’t need to be some deeper plot about Dagon’s constant attempts to invade Tamriel or doomsday plotline in general. In fact it’s honestly kind of refreshing in retrospect. As most of the other games do lean on those a bit too much. The idea that the original villain stands out because “He’s some asshole who wanted power and all the trappings of it”… and not being revealed to be part of some millennia old conspiracy and apocalyptic cult and such? Yeah. That’s nice.

  • It’s funny, I remember my friend and his dad showing me Skyrim for the first time. They were in Whiterun, look up to at the Throat of the World and said you could climb the mountain if you wanted to. That the main quest even took you up this mountain in particular. Then they turned to then west, towards the mountains surrounding the Reach. “If you see it, you can explore it.” I had played Fallout 3 and New Vegas before this, but neither of them captured this feeling of…freedom? That’s not quite the right word but I can’t think of a better way to describe it

  • 44:20 It’s funny to look back at in hindsight what with the decades of graphical advancements, but I do remember looking at the updated graphics between, say, the original six Tomb Raider games and thinking that things were getting mind-blowingly realistic and detailed. The way that from Tomb Raider 3 (?) her mouth actually starts moving when she talked, how from Tomb Raider 4 water dripped off her when she got out of a pool. Games of the time felt way more immersive at the time than they might do nowadays.

  • Very nice job here. Consistently high production values for such an extended piece. You’re to the ’90s era of TES what PatricianTV is to MW and beyond, and you’re both a credit to the community. This was as deeply satisfying as your DF piece, but teasing one for Battlespire? You’re spoiling us old fans here. If you take on Redguard as well and haven’t passed 100k by then, I’ll be shocked. Thanks for your great work, keep it up, and wishing you all the best for this year and beyond.

  • I played the game but what I remember most was the HOURS I spent on the original demo. There was no save and it was brutally difficult. I kept playing just trying to survive as long as possible. I loved loved the passwall spell, disintegrating dungeon walls to make shortcuts and escape enemies. If there was an actual end or exit to that dungeon I never made it that far.

  • Good job. I loved your Daggerfall article and this was just as good. I’ve suggested it to several content creators, but I think a article with this level of depth deconstructing The Elder Scrolls Online would be super interesting and doesn’t exist anywhere online to my knowledge. Just something to consider. Thank you for all of your hard work.

  • I wish games still had awesome box art like that. I remember when I was little I would copy Frazetta, San Julian, Enric Torres stuff over and over, it was so inspiring and really made my sparked my imagination. Where as now days most artists are to scared to show half their stuff because someone, somewhere will take offense, it’s really sad.

  • arena was really fun to play. I only did a few radiant dungeons and focused on the main story dungeons. the combat is actually pretty sweet. I loved the mouse movement. Spell crafting is really broken. I created 2 spells that would max out all my stats for a really long time and it barely cost any mana. that’s when I looked it up on the internet, thinking this was a bug lol.

  • 1:01:10 In D&D, the balance to the game is that the Thief can perform functions like Open Locks, Find / Remove Traps, Move Silently, Hide In Shadows, Climb Walls, and Read Languages (all of which have a spell analogue) as often as he likes. Imagine a 3rd level Magic-User, with 5000 XP, vs. the Thief with the same XP at 4th level. Our first party has a Thief. The dungeon entrance is up a cliff face, which the Thief can climb with some effort (failure doesn’t necessarily mean a fall to the death, just as far as your last piton). At the top, he pounds in a final piton and ties off his rope to it, allowing everyone to climb. The party comes upon a hallway with 3 locked doors spaced along its length. The Thief has about a 50% chance to pick each lock, depending on race and dexterity. He probably opens one, possibly all three, but unlikely to get none of them. He searches and might find a trap in the next room, disarming it, although only with a 40% chance of success so he might just set it off from a safe distance after finding it. Later he could sneak with a ~45% chance of success, and if doing so he could possibly get multiple free “surprise segments” of backstabs on the enemy before the party rushes in to battle. Now imagine a party with no Thief. The M-U has two 1st level spells and one 2nd level spell. If he knew Spider Climb, and had memorized it as a 1st level spell, he could have cast it to get to the top of the cliff. Then, Knock is a 2nd level spell, so if he knew it he could have used it in the hallway with locked doors to open just one of them.

  • I gotta wonder how Arena must have looked on an old CRT display. Instead of the pixelated mess we have today, it probably had a blurry but otherwise smoother look back in the day. Great retrospective btw. Your other article on Daggerfall has made me want to try out Daggerfall Unity when I get the chance.

  • I started perusal this article a few minutes after it launched, but I took some breaks and only just now finished this more ambitious sequel article about the preceding game to the preceding article about the more ambitious sequel. So excited for what’s next! The Daggerfall article is something I especially love to rewatch, although the Alone In The Dark one I keep coming back to frequently as well.

  • I got this game in late 94 and spent a good 300-400 hours playing my Dark Elf Spellsword, and I’m pretty sure I only ever collected like 5 of the Staff of Chaos pieces. Had too much fun creating spells and grinding random dungeons for loot. Great article, I haven’t thought about this classic game in years!

  • You can hot key the weapon draw, spells and item use with Ctrl+F1 Dosbox. I have weapon draw on F, spells on C, item use on E and using ASDW keys for movement. Having a real blast here. And how to use the weapon swing in case anyone is frustrated is you have to imagine two invisible bars on right and left side of the screen furthest right and left, draw your weapon, put cursor over far left or right invisible bars and hold mouse button then swing it diagonal or horizontally can do it with thrust and vertical slash as well.

  • I love this article, makes me want to try Arena again- I did finish Daggerfall, but couldn’t get past the icy dungeon in Arena. I think if I spent the time I did perusal this article to do it instead, I would probably already got through this obstacle. I guess the biggest problem for me to immerse in that game is that in Daggerfall you can set up modern controls, with WASD and mouselook, if you will tinker with the files a little, and Arena’s controls are a constant pain. (also, as a member of the Drew Crew I feel pain in my heart when it’s called “shovelware”, even though it’s not incorrect)

  • 20:48 the Beholder is one of the few D&D specific concepts that is under individual copyright. Like any fantasy game can use their version of halflings and orcs, character classes, D20s and Vancian casting etc, but a few SPECIFIC things are under (at the time TSR but now WotC) copyright and Beholders is one of them so I’m betting that would be why they had to remove it.

  • I’ve enjoyed your TES1 and 2 vids. I’ve made an honest attempt at playing Arena. But I really couldn’t get a handle on the game. Still, I appreciate the game. Not for what it does, but for what it did. This is the game that started it all, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I didn’t appreciate it for that. This was a fantastic article that really helped me learn about the origins of TES as a franchise. Also, my love for TES2’s made me an oddball because I prefer it over Morrowind. Thanks for that, Jwlar. Lol. Fantastic work, keep it up. I can’t wait to see what you got moving forward.

  • Just a minor note since you didn’t mention it in the article but it’s worth keeping in mind if you plan on playing Arena: do NOT chose Knight as your class if you intend to acquire all the artifacts, since their ability to automatically repair their weapons/armor effectively prevents you from using the blacksmith exploit.

  • I started the article late so I missed the chance to talk to you during the premiere, but I love this article! I actually like base Arena a little better than base Daggerfall (I think the Daggerfall Unity port is best though), you do a great job describing it. What reallly made a difference for me was what you describe as more coherent and fun dungeons. I agree that made a huge difference in the base game and is why I like it still. I started playing it again after your descriptions of how fun the magic can be – I actually only beat it as a Redguard Knight. I didn’t think lacking magic was that bad with how common magic items were! But I’ve always favored mage classes, and redoing it as a Spellsword is almost a completely different game. Thanks for pointing out the unique class and race abilities, I didn’t actually realize any of that existed despite having played it quite a bit! I suppose that’s what I get for waiting for the digital age to get around to this one, Morrowind was my introduction to the series though Oblivion was the first one I really beat. Despite that, I think the first three feel like more immersive and powerful games to me than Skyrim or Oblivion, despite loving Skyrim and enjoying quite a bit of Oblivion. Battlespire is actually a fun game – but go in with the mindset of testing an unstable beta than experiencing a complete game. Figuring out what actually worked was a lot of the fun to me. I don’t want to spoil much, but one thing I’ve seen screw over other people is Endurance.

  • I just grinded to level 14 in the Imperial Dungeons. Now I’m going around getting Dwarven Gear (that’s the best I could afford a full set for with my imperial dungeon gold, and I like to use full sets of armor, not mix-matched) and I have every piece except for gauntlets. Here is one complaint I have so far: stores are random and it is to the point where it is hard to find stuff. I have traveled to stores in 16 of the cities and still don’t have the dwarven gauntlets. At least 5 stores per city on average, so at least 80 stores. Although I have seen mithril and ebony gauntlets. That’s my only gripe so far. You really have to get lucky and just hope for the best for some things in Arena.

  • Hey JWLAR I found the daggerfall article and that’s why I subscribed to you and now I like your articles a lot. I’m guessing you thought this article would do quite a bit better but this topic isn’t one I think a lot of people are super interested in. Daggerfall had a very compelling story that is pivotal to understanding the modern games. Arena isn’t as important to the series but I’m still perusal this because you make good content but I’m basically saying please don’t get discouraged by this and maybe try the same thing but for morrowind and that might do better for you

  • My dad (massive guy) bought this for me as a teenager. When it came completely broken he was PISSED. The game was expensive. After 2 months of scrappy play and multiple emails he drove us to the head quarters in Rockville. We lived in Fairfax in the beltway. After raging and demanding his $back or a patch they sent a nervous programmer yo give us their unreleased patch on disk. It made the game barely playable but worth it.

  • Thank you for this. Arena is one of my favourites but it still comes behind Underworld. I played nearly every RPG back in the day. Knightmare is a very honourable mention also. So many great games with epic size quests and areas. Loved every other Elder scrolls from daggerfall (although dungeon maps a nightmare) and onwards also the MMO. Don’t know how many times I have redone Skyrim. Check out the Nolvus 5 mod pack and auto mass mod updater to Skyrim. Yes I have started again. Love this article. TY again.

  • It only showed up for like three seconds, but that Island of the Caliph indie game you showed really grabbed my attention! I love me some first-person dungeon crawlers, but I’ll admit I struggle going back to em all these years later. I feel like the indie scene has all these little hidden gems coming up that I’m unaware of because they dont get the same attention as platformers and JRPGs and the like. That’d be a fun, less-intensive article idea for you sometime maybe: Indie successors to old-school TES, haha

  • Recently, I finished my journey of playing through every TES game, and I mean all of them. Including spinoffs, and the mobile ones, Shadowkey, Dawnstar, Stormhold etc. I must say with arena, despite games like Skyrim dominating the series obviously, there’s something very very cosy about it. The soundtrack is simple yet blissful, walking through Winterhold in the snow with that lovely theme playing. Crawling through every uniquely designed dungeon and being absolutely tacken back by the attention to detail at the time, and the overwhelming amount of rooms and hidden chambers to explore, seeing random paintings on the wall, finding secret chests, and having to actually tactically plan and retreat when fighting monsters. Then that sense of relief when you finally find the dungeon item after scrambling around 4 whole floors, and sprinting your way back to the entrance to get to an inn as soon as possible just to realised you were diseased. The immersion of having to repair your gear, buying drinks and renting rooms at inns, being able to explore each individual building in each individual town and being welcomed with flavor text each time, asking NPCs for directions etc. Like most I started out with Skyrim, but If you like the lore, it’s so interesting going back and seeing early concepts of things you recognise in the later games. I always said I’d never try arena, but now I’m addicted and go back to it at least once a year, each time finding new things I hadn’t known about before.

  • Another amazing article Jwler! Your retrospectives are of exceedingly high quality, and your covering games like Daggerfall and Arena that are kinda’ forgotten gems is really great, and important in that they are incredibly influential games. I personally just recently started playing Daggerfall Unity with a bunch of mod from your mod list, and I’m really enjoying it man. Keep up the great work.

  • Great article. Thx. I bought this game and played it a lot. I loved it. The atmosphere in the cities as the snow fell was amazing. The best part of the game was that you could write notes on your map. I wish more games would use that function. But in the end the game felt too big and I felt lost after some time. The game was massive but awesome.

  • 54:42 from what I read the wood elves were given their stats on accident which is why they’re so good as warriors instead of the stealth archers we know them for. Also the nord resistance to frost saved my butt quite a few times when I played arena against those ice wolves and their cold explosion blast they would throw out

  • Fantastic retrospective. I remember playing through as a spellsword and having some trouble at the start, but by the end when I got a firm grasp on the spellbuilder I laughed at how fast I took down Jagar Tharn, and since I had the shadow key I walked right in and finished. Anticlimactic, but deep down I loved the game.

  • An excellent essay on one of the most important games ever made. I remember well buying it when it came out, having to uninstall games from my whopping 40MB hard drive in order to have room to install this one, then having to create a new boot floppy to reconfigure the RAM because the game required a RAM format different from my computer’s default. But, it was most definitely worth it. Arena was a huge leap forward in RPGs, and that’s speaking as a veteran of the Ultima’s, Wizardry!’s, and SSI gold box games. Interesting side note, when EverQuest first came out, I had friends and co-workers trying to get me to play it. I resisted them for a few months until I happened to be at a friend’s place while he was playing it. He turned in a quest and I heard the familiar Arena level up fanfare and suddenly I was interested. Bought EQ the next day. So, Arena is ultimately responsible for my longtime MMO addiction.

  • After never having played any TES game seriously from beginning to end, I finally started kind of a pseudo-marathon of the series last year (I say pseudo-marathon because I’m not actually playing them back to back, but putting some other games in-between to prevent burnout), and I’m currently in the middle of my Oblivion playthrough, having just beat the base game and starting the KOTN questline. Arena is actually my second favorite game in the series so far, only behind Morrowind. I liked it way more than Daggerfall and (so far) Oblivion. It might not be the same type of game one would expect from the series, what with it being almost 100% dungeon crawler and all, but I felt it did the dungeon crawling part pretty well. It’s the main reason I liked it way more than Daggerfall, as while Daggerfall DID expand the formula and it’s ambition was undeniably impressive, most of the actual action still happened in dungeons, and the Daggerfall dungeons kinda sucked IMO, which ended up making me not enjoy it that much in the end, not gonna lie.

  • I remember when I first tried this game, it was when I was on a bit of a dose box spree. I was discovering all kinds of old games from before my time, it was great. Arena ran like complete garbage but I still played it a good 10 hours atleast lol. I made it out of the initial dungeon, and immediately got frustrated with the town layout and directions. So I ran off I to the wilderness and found some other dungeon and made a bit more progress, got some strong loot, and came back to town, still confused on how to do basic things lol. Fun times

  • I kind of wish that classes and imbalance still existed. Something like a thief is way more specialized and, especially today, its feats and stats could be put to great use. Oddly, today, Mages in Elder Scrolls feel super lame. They need a rework in TES6. Maybe bring back their levitation and teleportation, and maybe let them use mage hand to loot from a distance.

  • another correction, there are only 4 quests per day, never have been able to get more than 4 even in larger cities. quests are mutually exclusive between palace and tavern. A bug with them has female players stuck with a portrait of themselves permanently stuck on the upper left corner if they have to escort a npc that looks like them. another bug is found when quest takes place in the same location as another, dialogue is skipped but item delivery/retrieval or person escorts still give the correct amount of gold and experience.

  • You know you don’t actually have to level up in oblivion and it the game stays the same difficulty the whole way through if you don’t it’s like my only real complaint of the game is how lazy level scaling was like it needs to be there for balancing in some manor but I think Gothic probably did it the best which is that the whole world is open and available but to get there you need to get strong enough to fight your way through it gave the game a sense of progression and with the way it plays and the lack of an invasive UI it really does immerse you into this world of survival

  • Fantastic article! I loved the details from contemporary reviews and dev interviews, that really made the quality of the essay stand out. I’ve only played an hour or so of Arena, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun it was. I’m closely following the progress of OpenTESArena. Very excited for a playable release of that!

  • I just binge watched both this article and Daggerfall and man this is so well made and quite the undertaking. I look forward to seeing any more of these deep dives and this really renewed my love for the elder scrolls and wanting to jump back into it despite its age, Arena does have its own charm for sure and it really can become whatever you want it to be. I thought the ideas behind the game even if slightly upscaled and presented today as an open world rogue like would become quite a cult classic in it’s own right. All it needs is fun and a since of completion for every dungeon you come across. I find myself going around the wilderness and writing my own notes about locations dotted around that in-house generated terrain. Anyway, keep doing what you are doing man, you definitely have the gift of keeping the viewer’s interest with how you display the information and how you pace and structure the whole thing.

  • I have so many vivid memories playing this game, the scale of it was beyond belief.. being turned into a vampire and seeing my characters inventory appearance change freaked me out! Just groundbreaking! I could be wrong, but I believe some people involved in Arena are developing a similar game currently.. can’t quite remember what it was though..

  • 42:42 i got the game via the anthem edition, it has every tes game released. yet when i opened arena…i actually needed to old manual…as it asked me a question, this was about 7 years ago when i tried playing the game, but i defenelty had the pirate protection version but not the manual. so i couldnt play the game. and daggerfall just wouldnt start up. and then there was morrowind…constantly crashing during character creation. then i tried oblivion! hey this one was working and stable! played that game to death!

  • Here’s my interpretation of whether or not the Eternal Champion is or is not Talin. It’s clear that Talin Warhaft was not the Eternal Champion because it says in the game that he was imprisoned in the alternate dimension along with the Emperor. Even with the new cutscene at the end without him added to the CD-ROM version, this still holds true. I think what makes the most sense is that Talin Warhaft is the Eternal Champion’s father (based on the cut story slide), and the general public are confusing the two. It’s a situation where they are mixing up the father and son, which may be exacerbated if they share the same name of Talin.

  • I bought Arena on 3.5″ disks back when it came out (which I still own along with the hint manual purchased mail-order from Bethesda.) I don’t recall encountering a single bug in my entire play through. Keep in mind this was pre internet & acquiring patches meant having a $300 (or less if you don’t want cutting edge) US Robotics et al modem & dialing into a BBS in the hopes that they have it or acquiring it on CompuServe or another competing service, usually at 9600 baud even with a 28.8 modem. It was slow & cumbersome. For this reason, patches tended to be fewer & further between than these days when everyone & their mother has broadband. I’ll take the development quality of the 90s over now any day.

  • At about the 1 hour mark, the Thief is discussed, and it is simply said that the Mage is flat out better. In this game, that is true, however in Scenarios like Styx: Master of Shadows, a mage would get eviscerated, same for the a mage in a long haul scenario in the wilderness, or a prolonged series of battles, the fighter is going to shine there. To summarize it’s all about the scenario and a game like arena and a lot of CRPG’s, the mage doesn’t face the issues a tabletop mage inevitability will.

  • Great article. Great listen while working. Arena is a game that was tough to get through but I have a lot of love for it. Its dungeon diving is addictive and the ability to travel to any place in Tamriel makes a great role play experience. I await OpenArena as I did Daggerfall Unity. Like Daggerfall, Arena is a blank canvas for modders to roam and expand.

  • The wilderness was… something… I did not know of the worldmap hotkey, so I just looked at the world map online, saw first story dungeon was around the north coast and just thought “if I keep going NorthWest I will hit the coast and get my bearing from there”. After about an hour I saw the revealed wilderness map in front of me and realized this whole thing was pointless padding… and then I could not find the city from which I started.

  • Random side note from D&D’s history at the time? A Thief’s backstab almost always did more damage than a fighter, not the other way around. Yes the Thief’s backstab was hard to set up as it had to use limited types of weapons, be completely unexpected by the target, be roughly human anatomy that you could reach (you couldn’t explicitly backstab a giant in the ankle for instance as the book called out). But there was a trick to D&D back then that most people forget because WotC tossed it out into the bin never to think of it again. In TSR era D&D? It was very hard to get damage bonuses. For instance as a Fighter you’ll probably be using a longsword (good mix of damage versus weapon speed and all). Which does 1d8 damage. While a thief for similar reasons is probably using a short sword, which was 1d6 damage. So the fighter on average is doing +1 damage. They also will get Weapon Specialization giving them intrinsically +1 damage to a chosen weapon type. However? You needed a 17 in strength to get a Damage Bonus at all on melee attacks. Considering the stat generation of the time was “Roll 3d6 in order” it’s highly unlikely anyone would have it compared to more modern styles of Point Buy or “4d6, drop lowest, assign at will” and such. Outside of that the only damage buff was from magic that could apply to both classes (and the fighter didn’t naturally have available, though the thief through being able to Read Magical Scrolls DID get). So most Fighters were doing 1d8+2 damage naturally, an average of 6.

  • I love your dive into this. I’m going to be absolutely nasty at nerd-bar trivia thanks to this article! I’m so sorry if this is a dick move but I noticed at 4:03:37 you’ve got two takes for “this is a dungeon” in there. Just needed to verbalize it somewhere. Edit: just read your comment under the article. Lol.

  • Can we just stop and appriciate how Jwlar here didn’t start off his restrospective, without a long, pretinous monolog of phlisophical ramblings that have NOTHING to do with the content of the article as so many of these game retrospective creators always tend to do? It’s like “bro I’m not here to hear you start the article, ranting incoherently about yourself and your ‘experience’ for 45 minutes as you autiscally over analize and crititue the littlest things with zero evidencial backing” I swear to god…Using a thesarus in your script doesn’t make you sound smarter and no cares. Mah man here however starts his thesis, with a quote sigficant to focus of the article, Tells you what he wants to achieve in this article, and BAM! Straight to it. Shout outs to Jwlar! This was a well-produced retrospective.

  • 4:10 That’s actually good. It’s like getting an A.I. to design the map: Pseudorandom generation. Really make things feel alive. 8:20 Holy shit, King Bubba of Skyrim. 😂 54:10 It’s amazing to see the races of TES already being pretty well-established. 1:05:00 So be a High Elf Mage, put points into Int, Agi. Got it. 2:43:00 Again: Hearing that Auriel’s Bow, Volendrung and the Ebony Blade are older than my brother is a hell of a head trip.

  • Finally done with this! I will say that I think the structure could use some improvement in that the first 40 minutes feel a bit too much like an info dump. Not that the information isn’t useful or interesting mind you, I just think you ideally should dilute the marketing analysis and development history while talking about the game so it’s a bit more digestable. That’s nitpicky though this was a great article!

  • Been asking for an Elder Scrolls Arena remake. Daggerfall is a bit too big and complex to make it happen but Arena looks like it’s in order of a remake. Would have everything that it has but with a graphical face lift. Despite the name Arena is truly the full dungeon crawling experience with many special check systems. You can actually level and make money in towns and buy upgrades as well in case you don’t think you can tackle the dungeon yet. Personality may seem crap but it’s pretty good for getting some gear from merchants cheaper. Playing a Bard this way because hell this is the only Elder Scrolls game or any RPG for that matter where you get to play a bard doing what a bard does. I was surprised when playing burglar you can actually break into houses, didn’t find anything of value of course. Getting caught of course is bad of course. I like the distinction with burglar and rogue. Burglars are good at lockpicking and breaking into houses and rogues are good at pilfering from people’s pockets. Even the thief classes have distinctions. Acrobat might be best at dodging I believe.

  • Jagar Tharn’s motivations aren’t explored in Arena itself, but they are in The Real Barenziah, which was originally written for Daggerfall. The Real Barenziah reveals that Jagar Tharn was a member of the Ra’athim family, which is the ruling family of Ebonheart. During Tiber Septim’s war, the Ra’athim family was nearly wiped out, and Ebonheart’s wealth was stolen by the Empire. Additionally, the Empire was demanding that Morrowind conform to its cultural practices and religion. When Jagar Tharn went to steal the Staff of Chaos from beneath Mournhold, he had to appeal to its guardian — Ephen, an ancestor of his — and he said to him, “At Morrowind’s last need, with all of Elvendom in dread peril of their selves and souls, release to me that guerdon which thou guardst!” I think from this we can assume that he wanted revenge for his family, to free his people from the Empire, and to claim the power and wealth that he believed were his birthright as a Ra’athim of Ebonheart. I think his mismanagement of the Empire was intentional in that he wanted it to fall apart and to live it up until then.

  • You might not remember but I was in the chat during your playthrough and told you it took me 60 hours to complete the game, I now know that’s because I picked my class through the Q&A and got a dude who couldn’t use magic, had no game manual and didn’t know of the THAC0 system so I put on armour with the highest numbers 😂

  • Seeing as how Arena could of had a Sega Saturn port, it would of been funny to see how the game would of ran on a console. That said, the art piece drawn for that caught my eye since that was drawn by Yoshitaka Tamaki, an artist known for his involvement with the art of Sega games such as Shining Force and Alundra.

  • This was the second game of this type I ever saw. Dungeons of Daggorath being the first. Roommate had a pc and let me try it one night. Played it nonstop till dawn that night till I looked at the wall panelling in the place and it started to glitch, I was having an halucination. Haha. It blew my mind. Many long nights if gaming in my life ensued. I was amazed. “You mean I can do whatever I want?” I asked him.

  • It’s been almost ten years ago now, but a long, looong time ago, I remember picking up Arena while I was resting and recovering from some surgery. It took a few restarts and a thorough browse of the UESP, but I ended up settling on a Dunmer Knight just to make things easy on myself. And honestly? It was pretty darn fun. Did the artifact exploit to get both Chrysamere and the Lord’s Mail, did a little exploring for gold, etc etc… I made it all the way to the Crystal Tower before I finally went home. Sadly, I didn’t know how to transfer my save data, so I think that run is lost forever now. If I had to toss out my two cents, I agree with your point about the random dungeons in Daggerfall vs Arena, but I think I actually prefer DG’s sprawling messes. It definitely comes down to taste, though – if anything, playing Daggerfall first might have made Arena’s dungeons a little easier to navigate, hah!

  • It is cool how ESO brought some of those locations back. Fang Lair, Elden Root/Depth, Hall of Colossus (and the true reason it was built), Crystal Tower (and its purpose and one of the best quests – The White Gold Tower is only supposed to look like it, not being an exact copy, buy yeah), crypt of hearts

  • I played for the first time a few months ago. I was a Dunmer Nightblade. Had some difficulty with a few things, but was for the most part blitzing it until the mid-game where enemies start spawning that will just spam eight spells at you in a row with no chance to drink a potion or cast a healing spell in between. Shield and resistance spells helped SOME, but I was struggling until I discovered the power of the Gods. The power to end all powers. Spell Reflection. When every enemy attacks you by just casting boatloads of spells at you, you can just slap on a spell reflection and waltz through dungeons as your enemies kill themselves. I finished the last two or three dungeons like this. Liches? No problem. Five Liches in one room? I laugh at your feeble attempts to kill me. You just walk into a room and in ten seconds every enemy is dead from trying to spam you to death. Spell Reflection is OP and mandatory.

  • It’s hard to review an old game like this without a lot of presentism. Back then, games were small and simple. The idea of a large world with random quests was highly appealing because having an “endless game” was very unusual (Elite being the classic example). Good quests were not a common thing, with games like Baldur’s Gate being 4 years in the future. The random quests in Arena and Daggerfall were not really worse than fixed quests in other games and their endless nature seemed like an amazing boon. The coolest thing about Arena at launch was wandering into the wilderness, seeing some building, going into it, and possibly running into late game enemies early. I still remember wandering into some prison outside a city back in 1995 and encountering a medusa. I’ve played many games since then, but that feeling of exploring an extensive open world was amazing, such that I remember the medusa encounter even now. The cracks in Arena really showed when Daggerfall launched, since Daggerfall was mostly everything in Arena done better (it would have seemed near perfect if Daggerfall had reasonable sized dungeons). In fact, the Elder Scrolls had little competition in the open world genre. In Daggerfall, doing side quests was massively encouraged because the main quest was very subdued and deliberately slow paced. In Arena, the side content was something you might do at low levels, but you could get enough loot and XP from the main quest so there was no real incentive. I have the original 8 floppy disk copy of the game, complete with copy protection at the end of the sewer.

  • So male Dunmer/Dark Elves have a 350 base stat total while everyone else has 330. And their race has a bonus to and encourages a mix of melee and magic? Seems good for a beginner, If the right class is chosen. I don’t know the classes of this game and their restrictions so I don’t know if there is even a decent spellblade class. I only dabbled in the game. First time I did the personality class and ended up with some more rogueish class that couldn’t wear plate armor. Considering that there is only one tier of leather and chain, offering -1 and -2 respectively, meanwhile plate starts at Runite or Iron offering -3, and had four tiers above that just like the weapon materials with each giving and additional -1, it seems like characters that can’t wear got the short end of the stick being stuck with the same type of gear they found on their way out of the prison. So I made a knight, and realized that I couldn’t cast spells at all, so my INT was basically useless. I didn’t spells would be so good in this game. I was coming off Morrowind when they released Arena for free, and at the time I and myself considered magic to be the hard mode of Morrowind, and it was always recommended on the forums that making a pure magic build was a challenge meant for more experienced players, but from what I’ve heard if you make the right build and spells and know the system magic is actually OP in Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind. Thankfully enchanted items can help shore up your weaknesses. Get out of the sewers, save, try to break down the door to a random home until you can succeed before the guards reach and summarily execute you like they’re American cops and you didn’t pass the paper bag test.

  • Fantastic work. I played Arena in 2010 and it was both one of the most memorable as well as frustrating gaming experiences I’ve ever head. I never finished it, because AFAIR one of the keys necessary to progress through the main quest disappeared after I dropped it by accident. I think it was in The Halls of Colossus. Also, I picked a Khajit and a thief, so I appreciate your hindsight that I picked the worst build possible. I’m glad you mentioned the atmosphere and how the archaic sound and graphics stimulates the player’s imagination. I felt the exact same way and it totally changed how I view article games as a medium.

  • I didnt have Arena or Daggerfall as a kid. Instead, i had Might and Magic 6: the Mandate of Heaven. And Crusaders of Might and Magic. Both of which hold a special place in my nostalgic heart. And i think it would be amazing to see an old Might and Magic 6 – 8 era game that looked like M&M byt had the size and depth of Daggerfall. Imagine a Might and Magic and Daggerfall love child…

  • 3:47:00 That’s not quite right, White-Gold is modeled after Adamantine, not the Crystal Tower. I actually think its ESO depiction fits the Arena description even better than the Arena picture, it really looks like an “accusatory finger pointing at the sky above”. And tbh, ESO does pay homage to this old portrayal of the Crystal Tower, as the newer Altmer architecture seen in Summerset (like in Alinor) has a similar vibe; lofty square towers, imposing arches, circular turrets, opulent buttresses, etc.

  • Not enough love (or article analysis) for this game. My hot take: I think it’s more fun than morrowind. It’s a shame so much commentary of The Elder Scrolls simply turns this game into a footnote. I’m honestly surprised at the amount of fun I had playing it for the first time when it came to steam, and I think its qualities are vastly understated.

  • If a DM has difficulty improvising, that doesn’t make them a bad DM; in other words, DMs aren’t inherently bad just because of railroading. The issues around railroading are most often caused by bad group communication. Players that sign up for a pre-written module that can’t accept the bad-improviser DM is not able to handle every curveball leads to undeclared expectations, which often leads to people criticizing that DM unfairly. A DM that doesn’t temper their player’s expectations can lead to these problems, and vice versa, that DM might blame their players unfairly. I’d say the entire playgroup is immature if they all can’t talk about what they want from their experiences and make it known and transparent ahead of time. TL;DR Railroading isn’t inherently bad, but it’s not bad to hate railroading 🙂

  • the Flat movement perspective made me feel sick within 10 mins perusal this article, I’m glad i chose to listen to most of it while doing stuff, i get really motion sick and used to struggle playing doom for long periods without feeling ILL, the only fix for this is third person perspective, like in Skyrim, this left me unable to play a lot of 90s games like hexen and heretic although i struggled though them, worst for it was Wolfenstein the narrow ceiling and floor aspect is hell for me

  • Wow! This article is a real masterpiece! So many new info! I’d like to add that in bethesda launcher there was a floppy version of the game, but when they’ve closed the launcher and added the game to Steam the said that they fixed some bugs and improved a game a bit. It was a lie! They just used a cd version instead of floppy one!

  • (3:01:06) The babiness of these “Cities” in Fallout3/NV/OveryhypedRim is my biggest point of contention. They don’t feel like a city. They don’t feel like a town. They don’t feel like a village. They feel like a load instance that is isolated from the rest of the world, because they are. It blew my mind playing Daggerfall lately, seeing a city in the distance, riding up to it, and immediately entering WITHOUT A LOAD SCREEN! That simple execution, makes the world feel whole, not segmented. And don’t even get me started on the God Awful Dragon “Fights” which boil down to, get the Dragon stuck on terrain, or find a way to break it’s aim with terrain, then hit it alot. I was so underwhelmed after that first Dragon fight. It completely kills the experience and the entire game. I actually do my best to AVOID the first fight, so I can actually have fun playing the game. But eventually I need to, and shortly afterwards I always grow very bored with being able to see the wires and tricks the game has. And exit the game. And I don’t return for half a decade. It sorta works, but not well, with Fallout3/NV. The world got nuked in a war, of course things are going to be different. It falls apart in Oblivion and Skyrim. I just figured I had a hatred of Swords and Dragon and Magic bullshit, and to be very clear, I do! I eye roll so hard it can give me a stroke at all the fantasy crap. Give me Sci-Fi any day of the week that ends in “y” over AbraKadabra! LOOK A DRAGON! I’d love to see a return to form from Bethesda, a Terminator game designed similar to Fallout/TES.

  • I like how Todd “burns” floppy disks in the basement. He definitely has the touch nobody else can comprehend. Edit: somewhat later in the article, it is revealed that baby Todd was hired to help test the CD release of Arena, he wins here, i do not delete statements. But i will challenge Todd to a dance off over the south Italian ocean atop pillars !

  • My headcanon regarding the Crystal tower was that despite of it being large and prominent, it is hidden by a spell that’s basically a Fidelius charm from HP. You won’t be able to see it even if you look right at it, and you won’t comprehend information on its location even if you read about it or overhear it. The only way for you to find the location is if someone who’s in on the secret chooses to reveal it to you. And the spell is so powerful that very few mages, if any, living today can cast it, and Tarn is not one of them (which explains why he didn’t just use the same spell on pieces of the staff).

  • 3:07:30 I really think that this ‘anonymous’ main character is a mistake, especially since TES has since went with a multiverse/all possible timelines are real thing in the lore. Having a specific named character that can be referenced in later games doesn’t invalidate a players own story of their play-through any more than other players having their own stories of their characters, it’s just another one of those possible characters. And I’d argue that the arrangement where the canonical character just fades into obscurity immediately after the main quest is actually worse from the invalidating players personal stories point of view.

  • the lack of bosses aside from the final boss certainly speak of a development that should’ve been held back a little. Makes you wonder what the other potential bosses could’ve been, lie fighting the ghsots of the twin brothers in the maze or such. For now we cna nly speculate on Jagar’s goals and motives, and while we can make headcanons or theories, as it stands Jagar seems to merely be an asshole who wanted to be king for the sake of it. For example I could say that he could’ve been envious of the emperor or arrogantly felt he could do better than Septim and refused to acknowledge or recognise what a shit ruler he was, or he jsut anted to mae people suffer for some reason. As it stands, he’s jsut a fairly bogstandard fantasy villain. The title of course really speaks of how little time they had to change any marketing, as the game obviously has no Arenas as you said. Even the idea of Tamriel being called the Arena in slang is tacked on to justify it. and the boxart featuring a party of characters despite it being a purely single experience with no other characters or players fighting alongside you. This game probably would’ve had a completly different name had they had a sslower pace, as right now its the ONLY elder scrolls game (apart from the online game) to not be named after a specific location. I posit an alternate title for this game would be Tamriel, since its about travelling the entire world of Tamriel. Or perhaps Empire, as you’re fighting to save the Empire.

  • Funny enough, just as a minor quibble when it comes to the spell section? I kind of agree that Magic has gotten worse in the games… until Skyrim. This seems strange to some. Just how I feel. Like Elder Scrolls spells in general until Skyrim comprised of three elements. Range (Self, Touch, Ranged), Area of Effect (single point of impact or an expanding radius), and Magnitude. It’s actually a pretty simple system. There’s not much complexity to it and outside of a few niche spells like Teleportation? There’s not overly much creativity available to spellcasters. But it FELT like there was due to the spell crafting system. Something that was basically lifted from D&D, gamified more, and given to the player. Now the didn’t have to just pick fireball, they could have some Explosive Lighting Ball spell. It is something that was revolutionary for its time. But I feel that it’s also a big distraction from how limited the system actually was. If you wanted to bring magical doom to someone (a task most mages go for in those games). You’re kind of limited to very few effects. And just like people complain that Skyrim characters “always go stealth archer”. Similarly mage characters always tended to go Fingerpoke of Doom. Hell it was even better as most of the games (for destruction magic) made the elements barely matter or that Fire was just cheaper/more efficient. While Skyrim at least tried to give more reasons why you might like Frost or Lightning over Fire. Funny enough I felt that Skyrim was almost refreshing for the series.

  • 3:10:45 Ria Silmaine’s animation is fantastic but her waving divine spirit-robes give me flashbacks to those air dancer/wigging-out mega-balloon arm-flailing demons in front of car sales lots, the guys they blast hot air thru to make them wildly wiggle around. The dissonance gets to me, between her serene unearthly presence when I look at her radiant face while my subliminal associations with car-lot-demons turn her billowing robes in the periphery of the screen into manically flailing limb-tentacle-stump-things.

  • Seriously game journalists are the last people I would look to for info on a game. Its crazy how terrible they have become. I think the problem is you have a bunch of journalists that hate gamers & games, and think gaming is childish and beneath them, but at the same time it’s the only job they can get, and instead of doing the best job they can they just try and make everyone else miserable like themselves.

  • As someone who couldn’t play this game as how huge it is – Thank you for this Retrospective! It’s incredible how quick those 4 1/2 hours flew by. I can’t imagine the time this whole project took you, but thanks for taking your time and bringing us these intricate articles! You deserve my subscription and I am excited to see more!

  • So I think it makes the most sense to assume that the realm of Oblivion that the emperor was trapped in would be that of Vaermina rather than that of Mehrunes Dagon. Constant waking and sleeping nightmares that you can’t recall sounds right up the alley of the daedric prince whose artifact eats dreams.

  • I just finished your retrospective and I can’t express with words how much I admire your hard work, drive force, patience and sheer mental strength to finish a article of this scale 👏👏I can’t wait for your Diablo Retrospective and full Analysis, if that day comes 😁You are one of the reasons that Youtube is my main medium for entertainment 😍

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