THE ELDER SCROLLS: CHAPTER ONE - ARENA

The start of one of the most popular RPG series ever, which I never played until this year. And in order to get properly introduced to the series, I chose the first one thanks to Bethesda giving it out for free, so let's start.
(I used TES Arena Re-mapped mod to significantly improve controls and bring them in line with modern games, but the default controls are serviceable and you can complete the game with them, if you wish to do so)

Here's what I liked:

- Graphics: For the year 1994 the game really holds up in terms of it's presentation. Day/Night cycle present and active, seasons change according to the in-game calendar as well, with rain, storm, fog and snow prevalent during the proper season. Dungeons, cities and wilderness are done in 3D, while the enemies, items, NPCs and decoration items are done with sprites.
- Role-playing systems: Game uses a class system as well as dice rolls to determine your stats distribution and what weapons and equipment you can use. Each class can feel distinctly different. Warriors can use every weapon but are absolutely unable to cast spells without the aid of magical items. Mages can destroy everyone with spells, but are unable to protect themselves with proper armaments and defense.
- Music: Surprisingly for the game so old, the soundtrack holds up excellently and is definitely one of the highlights of the game. The overworld music is your standard fairy tale vibe with trumpets and strings, while a dungeon music consists of the ominous drones and drums. One track in particular sounds like it could be composed by Mark Morgan for Fallout 1.
- Atmosphere: The game really immerses you into it's fantasy setting helped by an occasional town description and NPC dialogues. Meanwhile, the dungeon exploration is almost a horror game, with you being unable to see more than a few inches in front of you if there is no light source and monsters jumping out of darkness to put their claws and hands on you.
- Gameplay: Overall gameplay loop consists of fighting with monsters inside procedurally-generated dungeons, using melee weapons, bows and magic, while searching for better weapons, armor and magical items, as well as consumables like potions. You attack by clicking right mouse and dragging it across the screen in the way you want it to swing. There are various obstacles on your way to victory, like pitch-black mines, lava and water pools in which you can swim and they consume your stamina. You need to repair your equipment, rest to restore HP, visit mage's guild to identify magical items and buy/sell items to keep you stocked. Despite it's age, it's still a very fun and engaging loop.

Now here's some things I did not like:

- Procedural-generation: The whole aspect of this means that you rarely get hand-crafted content. Hand-crafted content of this game consists of Main Quest dungeons, some in-game towns and that's pretty much it. Side quests, open-world, side quest crypts and everything in-between is generated randomly, so you will encounter same blocks of dungeons and maps, and because there are not that many variations of this generation, it can eventually get repetitive.
- Lack of content: Despite the game being a pretty big RPG, it has around 10 types of monsters and around 8 types of weapons and armor. In order to compensate for this, weapons and armor can be made out of various metal materials like silver, adamantium and ebony and they can be found/bought enchanted to improve your stats, but overall around the middle point of the game you'll be using weapons that you will pretty much stick to until the end, unless you roll a good luck dice and find better gear.

Overall:
Despite it's flaws, shortcomings and sometimes janky gameplay The Elder Scrolls Arena is a very good DOS game and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who likes classic DOS games and has a bit of patience to learn the game and it's mechanics. There are mods and settings in DOSBox that you can tweak to improve your experience and once you do that, you have a damn good 90s RPG on your hands.

With the right mods (some tweaking to DOSbox and a modern-keyboard control mod, both very easily google-able) this game is absolutely spectacular.

terrifying and nearly impossible to play