The first thing a player does in The Elder Scrolls I: Arena is give up on the game's story entirely (after approximately forty seconds of the intro). The second thing you do is create your character.
Not pictured: Witchblade, Bladewitch, Sexy Troubadour, Democratic Candidate, Franklin.
This means you pick a premade class that has its own favored skills, restrictions on equipment, and schools of magic allowed. These classes would confer scaling benefits as players kill monsters and gain experience. Anyone who's played a normal RPG was not going to be very surprised by thisâ€"unless they're from the future and have played the other Elder Scrolls games. For those of you who are but haven't, let me put it this way: it's like finding out Conan the Barbarian had an internship at a small family-owned dressmaker's shop. There's absolutely nothing wrong or shameful about it–it just seems like the sort of thing they'd deny violent at a cocktail party.
Every TES game after Arena rejects traditional classes, skill point allocations, and levels in favor of more organic systems that convince the player they're not just a stat block wandering a world of stat blocks, but a reasonable simulation of a person in a world of reasonable simulations of people. Levels and classes are more abstract systems entirely contingent on player choices, not on premade builds and abstract scaling. So why didn't Bethesda do it like that in Arena?
What race is this? Khajit. Yup, that's what the famous cat-person race looked like. The lore has broken its back justifying this and I will not under any circumstances discuss it.
You might well argue they didn't know any betterâ€"and you'd probably be right. The intro of the game makes it clear that whatever its goals, Arena's texture and setting were not put together with a whole lot of foresight or deliberate vision. The game was very forgivably thrown together out of spare Dungeons and Dragons sprockets and all-purpose public domain fantasy pap. It's not fair to judge them for that; however, it is fair and by no means an accusation to point out that the less organic immersion-focused approach to character design is reflective of a less organic immersion-focused approach to the rest of the game.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls, Part 2: Dungeon Sprawling”
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