Of course the battle mage is intent on stealing the emperor’s power (ALL battle mages, advisors and viziers have the same plan, its tradition) He does this by imprisoning the emperor in another dimension using an artifact called ‘The Staff of Chaos’. Uriel Septim, emperor of Tamriel, allies himself with the battle mage Jagar Tharn in order to unify the whole of Nirn under the imperial flag. Arena takes place on a planet called Nirn (sound cheesy, doesn’t it?) in the empire of Tamriel.

If you’re interested in some more recent RPGs and how they perform, be sure to check out our breakdown of 22 role-playing games running on the Steam Deck.Elder Scrolls, The: Arena Arena is the first game in the Elder scrolls series (TES). All of these games should be able to hit hundreds of frames per second on any modern machine. The nice thing about playing games so old that they’re allowed to buy alcohol is that you can run them on a toaster (so long as the toaster runs Windows).

That’s thousands of times more land to explore than the world of Skyrim, and Daggerfall is even bigger. The world map of Arena is estimated to be approximately 160,000 square kilometers, about the size of the state of Georgia in the real world, and you can explore every inch. With much simpler graphics and game engines, these games are absolutely enormous. While Arena and Daggerfall were incredibly innovative for their time, their mechanics and interfaces are so far removed from modern games that you might find them hard to even begin.

If you’ve never played 1990s PC RPGs, prepare for a bit of culture shock.

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