I know right. My thoughts exactly.

I'm fully aware of all those things. I was just havin' a little fun with the guy. For the record, if someone were to re-do Arena with gameplay and lore elements that became famous in the subsequent installments of the series, it would be awesome. I just never liked Arena since it doesn't feel elder scrolls. I guess that's what I get for playing them in the order of DF, MW, Arena, OB. LOL.

i think the first gamesas game i played was terminator rampage, which while it was impressive in ambition, it was terrible in execution like most of their titles. I played it solidly until I became engrossed with Doom.

Arena was the first TES game I played, and i liked it a lot considering it introduced large cities, a fully explorable countryside and wilderness, and open adventuring. dungeon-wise it wasn't too impressive, the layouts were pretty good, especially the main quest dungeons, but they weren't anything special when ultima underworld set the bar extremely high for the genre in almost all areas(a feat that still hasn't seen a true successor).

For the record, if someone were to re-do Arena with gameplay and lore elements that became famous in the subsequent installments of the series, it would be awesome.

If that were done, Arena would no longer be Arena, it would be some bastard child of the game it was modded from. Whether that would be a good thing would depend on the result.

Arena is so different even from DF that I agree, it doesn't feel like its sequels. But a game shouldn't be judged on its sequels, it should be judged on what it is. And what it is is a rock-solid entry-level RPG that's great fun if you manage to ditch those preconceptions.

Exactly. One must remember that this was the groundwork for The Elder Scrolls Series, and must be treated as such, not as an extension of it. For their first time, and as an RPG of its own, I think Bethesda did quite well. I still play it from time-to-time when not in the mood for DF.

I love Arena, just not as much as the other ES games. It's a great game for it's time and was the first ES game I ever played so it will always have a place in my heart.'

Thou I agree, the olde englishe is quite annoying.

Try playing Ultima VII for a longer period of time...

i have no problem at all with ye olde eanglishe (and english isnt even my primary language) in RPG's such as Ultima VII, so i find it funny that english people have problems with it.

From where dost thou hail, noble _____?

Me neither, but I think that certain people here would spasm and die if they were forced to play Ultima few a few hours.

My main complaint was how inconsistently it was done. Uriel Septim spoke it, the interface spoke it, Ria Silmane and Jagar Tharn, not so much.

The "townies" used it to a lesser extent, it was more just ambiguous medieval English (a la Daggerfall) than ~Ye Olde English~.

i REALLY enjoy the whole wilds of the game. like to the point it's worth just heading out and finding random stuff. shame daggerfall drop'd the wilderness ball so badly and it was nothing but empty plains. id have loved to have a reason to go out there exploring like in arena

i hail from Skyrim.

I was implying that Arena should be kept fairly "as is". The few minor changes I would make would be to tweak the leveling system to ditch the XP. Use the Skills based system of the later games. I would also include more item materials, such as daedric. It would also be nice to see in-game books, etc. Arena was a little shallow in the lore department. Other than that, I'd leave it as is.

I'd just edit it slightly for continuity's sake, ya' know.

(not that I intend to take the time and effort to mod it. I don't even know how to mod it; it's so archaic. )

IMHO, Arena would still be Arena if the XP system were dropped in favor of a superior one. It would also still be Arena if readable books with a small amount of introductory lore were added. It would be more like Arena with whipped topping and a cherry.

IMHO, Arena would still be Arena if the XP system were dropped in favor of a superior one.

I agree and I don't. You're right in a way, mostly in that you could do those things and still have a decent game. But one of Arena's charms is its straightforward, friendly system of character generation and leveling. So I'm only half-convinced you'd have a worthwhile improvement.

BTW you can't mod Arena. It wasn't designed that way. But if you undertook to use a subsequent game's design kit to make Arena from the ground up, before long you'd throw up your hands at the hugeness of the task. Another of Arena's charms is that it is continental in scope with hundreds of cities and towns and a positively enormous wilderness. (I bet there are some dungeons outside cities that literally nobody has ever explored yet, not that that's a really big deal; I'm just sayin' is all.) No, you wouldn't necessarily have to reproduce every last little dull cow town or dusty deserted crypt, but even if you had only the MQ locales, you'd still be left with the supremely daunting hugeness of Tamriel. And without the continental scope, you definitely don't have Arena any more.

uh...Daggerfall was modded to an extent, new quests and some reworked dialogues and even adding a new Guard type NPC back in. (horse riding guards)
so if Daggerfall can be modded i guess Arena can aswell, but it would prob take some re-engineering the game engine.

You see "straightforward and friendly", I see "vanilla and trite". To each his own, I suppose. LOL.

I totally agree about the scope of Arena, however. That's why even if Bethesda were to suddenly go masochistic and decide to reprogram Arena and DF from the ground up with modern tech, nobody would play it, because no one's system could run it.

arena could be recreated with oblivion's scale, actually the whole quest/game could work out well.

daggerfall could be recreated too, minus the wilderness obviously, but someone with ambition could recreate the main locals and have the main quests flow decently.

however both are huge projects to put very lightly.

hmmm.,...perhaps a graphic enchancement then? rebuild it up to Daggerfall standards? or maybe that would be too much, i dunno.

uh...Daggerfall was modded to an extent, new quests and some reworked dialogues and even adding a new Guard type NPC back in. (horse riding guards) so if Daggerfall can be modded i guess Arena can aswell, but it would prob take some re-engineering the game engine.

If you hack the EXE enough you can turn Arena into Chip's Challenge, and that is the only sense in which you could mod Arena.

You see "straightforward and friendly", I see "vanilla and trite". To each his own, I suppose. LOL.

All four could be true; none are mutually exclusive.

arena could be recreated with oblivion's scale, actually the whole quest/game could work out well.

"Wow, I just finished that awful Labyrinthian maze...man, were those spectres tough...what's that, Ria? The next Staff piece is in Elden Grove, the location of which has been lost in the mists of time and memory? But I can see it just over there...by Chorrol Eldenroot..."

it wouldn't be that bad, but one could probably barely see dagoth ur though.

And why bother? The nostalgic feel is half the reason we play them as-is. And I don't think anyone would remake them as, say, Oblivion mods so Oblivion fans can play them. No. Have them go to eBay and find the games if they really care for and respect them.

Or just go to www.elderscrolls.com for Arena. DF's a little trickier to get your mitts on.

so you're saying you'd never try out a source port of daggerfall or arena? that's some discipline there.

back to the topic, the only prime difference of arena and daggerfall is the character development, otherwise they both play as dungeon crawls. daggerfall just gives you more reasons to dive in to dungeons.

I would only support a source port if it required Daggerfall's files (once again to preserve the rarity of these one-of-a-kind games). I actually really would like a source port, it'd be a great way to breathe life into a game that...well, actually it's been 12 years (I'm not counting 2009) and that game STILL doesn't get old. But it'd be great if we could return some of Bethesda's scrapped content.