Now available free, The Elder Scrolls: Arena is something of a classic and it continues to live on with thanks to the free and open source game engine OpenTESArena. Bethesda Softworks actually made The Elder Scrolls: Arena free to download some years ago as part of the 10th anniversary which has certainly helped.
Still in early development, with gameplay not really there yet, it's very promising and a big new release went up a few days ago further expanding what it's able to do with the original game data. OpenTESArena 0.11.0 adds in quite a lot including: original entity loading (static NPCs, creatures, trees, furniture, palace rulers, etc.), lights, water and lava rendering, fading voxels, translucent entity rendering, Ray Cast selection with pixel-perfect option and more.
Projects like this are vitally important. Some games really are true classics, loved by many, and deserve to be experienced by a new generation of gamers in an updated form. Gaming is part of our culture and history, and a shame when some older gems get left behind by all the shiny new games coming out all the time. It's why projects like this and OpenMW, OpenRA, openXcom and more are so important.
See more about it on GitHub. All the instructions are there to get going with it, although as mentioned it's going to still be a while before it has some proper gameplay but you can at least walk around and explore for now.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Anyway, I just spent 30 minutes walking around in this and it seems much better than Daggerfall as far as dungeons are concerned. A lot of things are working and even though there's no game there yet, it's already very impressive. Fantastic work!
Dungeons were glued together from pre-made sections and completely broken. I remember having to use cheats to open doors and progress as they just didn't work properly.
A proud Bethesda tradition continuing to this day :D
This is so much fun! I missed Arena completely and started my TES adventure with Daggerfall. Which was equally amazing and terrible. Dungeons were glued together from pre-made sections and completely broken. I remember having to use cheats to open doors and progress as they just didn't work properly. Or maybe I was too stupid.
Anyway, I just spent 30 minutes walking around in this and it seems much better than Daggerfall as far as dungeons are concerned. A lot of things are working and even though there's no game there yet, it's already very impressive. Fantastic work!
Sometimes doors in Daggerfall's dungeons are locked and have to be lockpicked or bashed in with a weapon, and I think occasionally they have to be opened via a nearby lever disguised as a candelabra, and some doors blend in with the wall textures and the only hint there is anything there is a misaligned texture, and for some reason the game has teleporters that just look like brick walls, and there's the occasional lever that usually activates something nearby but other times seems utterly purposeless, and upon all that confusion is a liberal amount of bugs that can easily softlock the game.
Something about the labyrinthine dungeons in Daggerfall always sparked my imagination, like I always imagined that getting stuck in an underground sewer system would provide a similarly miserable and terrifying experience, with the exception of the part where my foot touches a tree branch and I fall into an endless void of course.
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