Bethesda Gives Away The Elder Scrolls - Arena

Dan L writes "In celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the classic Elder Scrolls PC RPG series (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, yada, yada..), Bethesda has offered up the original DOS version of The Elder Scrolls: Arena for free download. Also, there is a rather cool contest to win some original game art, or some top of the line video cards and sound gear."

Comments

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like it's time to upgrade my CGA card.

Way to go BethSoft

[Vaevictis666]

And for an old Dos game, they even provide a link to the DosBox emulator so all us that don't still have the good ol' 486 still up and running :)

Re:if only..

[Henry V .009]

Or better yet, open the source, and let us do it.

Re:if only..

[0x0d0a]

You know, at one point I was sure that GPLed old games would languish (and that might still be the case, if the dev population is sufficiently thinned out by masses of releases), but games like Marathon, Quake and Doom have certainly not suffered from being GPLed. Quake in particular has been improved in some amazing ways.

Honestly, I'd sooner that they'd opened the source but kept the data files commercial.

Lucasarts enjoyed a bunch of people buying their old games after the ScummVM people implemented ScummVM and made the Lucasarts games run (with new features and goodies) on a modern platform. Lucasarts didn't have to pay a penny.

Bugs and balance issues

[MMaestro]

Better yet, I would love the game if they were to tweak the balance and fix the bugs in the game. I donno about other people's experiences but the number of balance issues in the entire series (Elder Scrolls, Daggerfall, Morrowind) really bothered me. Daggerfall suffered from the most bugs though (the game had a habit of randomly crashing and corrupting save games). The Elder Scrolls suffered more from balance issues (starting off as a wizard was nearly impossible since all players had to go through a training dungeon. At the end of the dungeon was a level 3 humanoid enemy (thief if I remember correctly) and this is after fighting rats and bats. Since it was a training ground monsters didn't respawn either, so you can imagine it was pretty difficult for someone to get through if they had bad starting stats.

Re:Bugs and balance issues

[ikkonoishi]

While in Morrowind with the alchemy system the way it is you can easily munchkin yourself.

Ash Yam + Bloat = Increase Intelligence Potion

Increase Intelligence Potion + Ash Yam + Bloat = More Effective Increase Intelligence Potion

More Effective Increase Intelligence Potion + Ash Yam + Bloat = OMG I R TEH GENUIS Potion

Once you get int over lets say 2000 any potion you make is twinked.

Restore Health 324 points for 1399 seconds. Value 43523
Fortify Strength 577 points for 2424 seconds. Value 23999

Re:Free not Free Enough

[oskillator]

Emulators such as DosBox ensure that binary-only games will be runnable forever, on any platform someone cared enough to port the emulator to. Emulators currently won't help much for the games listed in that article, but that's really just a matter of time.

The inability to produce tenebrae-style variants is a shame, though.

Re:Free not Free Enough

[Nasarius]

There are potential legal issues with releasing the source. For example, all the code has to be audited, just in case one idiot programmer copied some code he shouldn't have and Bethesda gets sued. And as long as DosBox remains active, there's no worries about losing ability to play the game.

Yay...

[Ayaress]

Now I don't have to feel guilty about pirating it so many years ago.

Then again, I never did feel all that guilty.