The Elder Scrolls: Arena

The game is played from a first-person perspective. Melee combat is performed by right-clicking the mouse and dragging the cursor across the screen to attack as if swinging a weapon. Magic is used by cycling through a menu found by clicking the appropriate button on the main game screen, then clicking the spell to be used, and its target.

The game's world is infinite. While the game's manual claims that the player can walk from one village to another, in actuality it is infinite and requires fast travel to get between towns. This is achieved by combining procedurally generated content and specifically designed world spaces to create a realistic and massive wilderness, where one may find inns, farms, small towns, dungeons, and other places of interest. The towns contain developer-designed buildings and shops, but the order in which these appear and their names are procedurally generated. There are several hundred dungeons and 17 specially designed dungeons for the main quest.

The game's setting begins in Tamriel on the 389th year of the Third Era when Emperor Uriel Septim VII summons his advisor and Imperial Battlemage Jagar Tharn over concerns of betrayal from within the court. His concerns are justified when Tharn is revealed to be the traitor, magically trapping the Emperor and his general, Talin Warhaft, in another dimension.

When Tharn proceeds to magically disguise himself as Emperor to usurp the throne, his conspiracy is witnessed by mage apprentice Ria Silmane, whom he murders before she can warn the Elder Council. Tharn then summons demon minions to replace the Emperor's Guard. In his disguise, he sends the player character, a court official and subordinate of General Warhaft, to die in the Imperial dungeons.

Designer Ted Peterson recalls the experience: "I remember talking to the guys at SirTech who were doing Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant at the time, and them literally laughing at us for thinking we could do it." Peterson worked alongside Vijay Lakshman as one of the two designers of what was then simply Arena, a "medieval-style gladiator game". The game's engine was derived from the same codebase as that of The Terminator: Rampage from 1993.

Ted Peterson, Lakshman and Julian LeFay were those who, in Peterson's opinion, "really spear-headed the initial development of the series." Game journalist Joe Blancato credits company co-founder Chris Weaver with the development: "If Weaver had a baby, Arena was it, and it showed." During the development of Arena, Todd Howard, later executive producer of Oblivion, lead designer on Skyrim and Fallout 3 and 4 and director of Starfield, joined Bethesda Softworks, testing the CD-ROM version of Arena as his first assignment. Peterson had joined the company in 1992, working assignments on Terminator 2029, Terminator: Rampage, and Terminator: Future Shock, as well as other "fairly forgettable titles".

When previewing the game in December 1993, Computer Gaming World noted Arena's "huge world split into nine provinces", many races and terrains, NPC interactions, and absence of level limits. The magazine stated that the game had sophisticated graphics "without forgetting the lessons of the past in terms of game design" or being "more like [console] action games", citing similarities with Ultima IV, Wasteland, Dragon Wars, and Darklands. The magazine in April 1994 said that Arena "looks like a cross between Ultima Underworld and Might and Magic: World of Xeen", with both depth and sophisticated 3D graphics. It surmised "This may be the 'biggest' world, in terms of game play, that will reach store shelves this year", with a "rich and compelling" storyline and setting.

The magazine's Scorpia in May 1994 noted the game's "many, many, many side quests". She liked the combat ("the most natural way of fighting that I've seen in a first-person game"), magic system, world detail, and character creation, but disliked Arena's instability "even with three patches so far" and insufficient travel time to finish quests. Scorpia complained that "in a game of this size, everything eventually becomes mechanical and repetitious", including towns, conversation trees, quests, and enemies, reporting that "Everything is isolated, and there is no sense of a coherent whole here". She said that "Arena ...