The Elder Scrolls: Arena (OpenTESArena)

Game: The Elder Scrolls: Arena (DOS, 1994)

OpenTESArena: an open-source engine written from scratch for The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the 1994 DOS game, aiming to replicate every aspect of it with a clean-room approach while adding quality-of-life changes; what’s known about the original’s inner workings is documented in its wiki. Character creation (except the class generation questions), combat with enemies that attack and drop loot and experience, leveling up, picking up, equipping, and dropping items, shops (buying and selling, renting a tavern room, curing diseases), citizens who wander, give directions, and share rumors, and fast travel anywhere on the world map already work. Plate armor materials, potions and on-use items, quests, spells, and saving and loading are still missing. It has a modern control mode, with WASD and mouselook, and a classic one; it uses Vulkan by default and lets you raise the frame rate cap to your monitor’s refresh rate. Version 0.18.0 (August 13) added enemy combat AI, leveling up, conversations, thieving mode, and detection of the Steam and GOG releases. There are builds for x86-64 Windows, x86-64 Linux and Raspberry Pi 5, and Apple silicon macOS.

You needNo need to buy the game: Bethesda gives The Elder Scrolls: Arena away for free, on Steam, on GOG, or as Arena106Setup.zip on its website, and its files are enough (on Linux and macOS, the ones from the self-extracting Arena106.exe). It finds the Steam release on its own on every system and the GOG release on Windows. For music, optionally, the eawpats instrument patch set the project publishes with its releases. Plus 64-bit Windows (with the Visual C++ Redistributable and OpenAL), x86-64 Linux or Raspberry Pi 5, or Apple silicon macOS.

How it gets to PC

Fan reimplementation

Console

MS-DOS

Original studio

Bethesda Softworks

Year

1994

Author

afritz1

Stars

1.4k

Last activity

2026-10-30 · 1 day ago

Latest version

opentesarena-0.18.0 · 2026-08-13

License

MIT

Language

C++