Could someone please do me a slight favor and rate the qualities of these games on a scale of one to ten, (one being the worst)?

Arena

Combat:

Roleplaying:

World design:

Lifespan:

Setting:

Daggerfall

Combat:

Roleplaying:

World design:

Lifespan:

Setting:

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Finally, is it actually possible to buy them new anymore?

Thanks in advance.

They're both free on the Elderscrolls website.

Go get em and rate them for yourself!

Arena http://www.elderscrolls.com/arena/

Daggerfall http://www.elderscrolls.com/daggerfall/

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If you want my two cents, I'm going to lean towards Daggerfall. I was drawn towards the quests a lot more.

Combat: The combat is similar to Morrowinds in the sense that it's chance based. But it's unique in the sense that you have to click and drag in a particular direction to swing a melee weapon. It's not hard, nor is it frustrating and unlike Morrowind, if you specalize in a particular weapon style, you won't miss that often.

Roleplaying: The game gives you a lot of freedom to roleplay and with your skills really forcing your ability to do things in the game, it really keeps you in character. Ontop of this, theres three ways you can talk to an NPC. You can be polite with them, you can be somewhat normal with them or you can be short and impatient with them. This adds another level of character.

World Design: The world is much larger than later games. Cities are huge and dungeons are mazes consisting of massive rooms and tiny corridors. But in spite of this the game lacks variety and micro detail. At first, you will feel as if everything is new and unique. A good portion of this game is procedural generated from a limited amount of tile sets.

Lifespan: Like I mentioned, this game is massive. You can spend hours questing in a particular city. There are plenty of guilds to choose from as well.

Setting: http://images.g4tv.com/ImageDb3/166168_S/The-Elder-Scrolls-II-Daggerfalls-Map-Is-62-Square-Miles----Hows-That-Compare-To-Oblivion.jpg http://www.jceason.dircon.co.uk/dagger/graphics/province/daggerfallmap.gif See those dots? Some of them represent dungeons, others represent towns. A single dot on that map is at least 4 times the size of any city in Skyrim, I'd think. Each region has it's own environment. Theres snowy settings, murky muddy settings, theres even arabian cities in the sand.

As previously stated, the games are Free to download. You don't have to buy them.

Arena...

Combat+Controls - Unfortunately, there's no way I've found to re-bind the archaic keyboard commands, making getting used to the game difficult, and at best it's still slower and harder than the new ones.

Roleplaying - You're stuck in a predetermined, extremely limited class, instead of the free choice in later games.

World Design - Every city and main dungeon is its own world-space in an infinite-scrolling area. The only . There are no guilds. Most quests are just running around town, but you might get an artifact quest. There are a few dungeons outside of the towns. Areas other than the main quest dungeons are level-scaled.

Lifespan - It seems to be a novelty nowadays, but Daggerfall is an improvement in every way.

Setting - All of Tamriel, via the magic of Copy+Paste and Palette Swaps!

Daggerfall:

One advantage Daggerfall's combat has over Morrowind's is that you don't need to hit the target with the attack AND deal with miss chance - if you're in range and can see the enemy, you have a chance to smack him, making archery pretty fun. It's possible to "parry" attacks by swinging at the same time as the enemy. There are no other active defenses, and Block isn't a skill - Shields just increase locational armor class. There are lots of weapon skills to choose from, but Long Blade is best of the melee weapons. Short blades are decent because you can start with an Ebony Dagger. Axes are neglected. Hand To Hand is surprisingly useful, though - It bypasses all immunities from the start, so you don't need to make sure you're using the right material. You can sort of "Dual-Wield", but not really - you can equip a weapon in each hand, and swap between them with a button press. It has very few niche uses, though - such as possibly having a high-damaging inferior-material weapon in one hand, and low-damage superior material in the other (Such as a Steel Katana and . However, Hand-to-Hand and Archery complement each other well, because you always have Hand-to-hand available as the "off-hand" when shooting a bow. On that note - actually switching weapons (instead of switching hands) takes a long time, making it impractical to switch between, say, a bow and any other weapon. Also, the keys are completely remappable, so you can make it function similar to later games in the series.

Roleplaying - Depends how much you can suspend your disbelief around the random generation of things, but it's pretty strong. The main quest is the best in the series for player agency and decision-making, but the dungeon crawls can be tedious - especially main-quest dungeons. Unfortunately, the game is very shallow, though stunningly wide. Unfortunately, this game has the worst case of psychic guards in the entire series - it's impossible to commit a crime without getting their attention. Fortunately, avoiding fines and bounties amounts to avoiding getting hurt while being pursued. Unfortunately, that means you get a fine if you get hurt from falling damage by misjudging a jump trying to run from the guards.

For some reason, though, the high courts of the Illiac Bay are perfectly fine with a naked catgirl barging in and expecting to get an audience with the - reactions based on clothing was one of the millions of ideas left on the cutting room floor, along with prostitution, dynamic warfare, A mage's guild knightly order (Cut because it gave non-magic users too much access to wizard stuff), and all sorts of other goodies. This game was Peter Molyneux-level ambitious or more.

I think Mikedzines summed everything else up perfectly.