Move over, Daggerfall Unity—now there’s a project to make the oldest, least accessible Elder Scrolls game actually playable

Posted by

On May 25, 2025

Confession time! I have never played The Elder Scrolls: Arena. I was the ripe old age of seven when it released, and my PC gaming debut was still several years away. I have toyed with the idea of going back to it. But I’ve always fretted it will simply be too crusty for me to properly enjoy. Even Morrowind, a game which I played and loved on launch, is a difficult adjustment in 2025, so the notion of grappling with a game two iterations older is a big hurdle to overcome.

Yet retro gaming salvation may be at hand in the form of OpenTESArena. This is an “open-source engine reimplementation” for Bethesda’s original Elder Scrolls game, one that aims to replace Arena’s existing engine with bespoke tech that runs natively on Windows, Mac and Linux. As explained on the project’s Github page: “The goal is to replicate all aspects of the original game with a clean-room approach while making quality-of-life changes along the way.”

OpenTESArena has been in development for several years. But this week it released a major update. Primarily, the update integrates Jolt Physics, facilitating actions like climbing, jumping and swimming. Moreover, the update also adds hit registering, killable enemies, and item pickups, basically rounding out all the fundamental interactions you’d expect from a 3D, first-person RPG.

The result, as you can see in the video above, is an Arena that looks like the original, but runs crisply at a high resolution and has smooth first-person controls. While I’m unsure if this is the plan for the final version, I’m also in favour of the HUD-less UI design. It instantly makes the game more approachable, removing a big icon-covered barrier to entry.

OpenTESArena 0.16.0 Release – YouTube
OpenTESArena 0.16.0 Release - YouTube

Watch On

It’s worth noting that the underlying game is very barebones at this point, still lacking many key features like working enemy AI and functional RPG stats. There’s also no sense of how much longer it will take to finish. Developer Afritz1 has been diligently plugging away at it for years. This makes me confident that they will see it through, but it seems likely that it will be another few years at least before that happens.

The good news is there are plenty of other Elder Scrolls overhauls to keep you busy in the meantime. Daggerfall Unity successfully finished porting Bethesda’s second Elder Scrolls game to the Unity engine last year, while the series saw its biggest makeover yet with the recent release of Oblivion Remastered. Oblivion may well get a second remaster this year too, with Skyrim total conversion Skyblivion set to launch at some point in 2025. If the modders can stop going on dates with Bethesda, that is.

The dream, of course, remains a proper remake of Morrowind, Bethesda’s strangest and most interesting RPG. The Skywind project is still committed to rebuilding The Elder Scrolls 3 in the Skyrim engine, but it has no set launch date. That said, you can make vanilla Morrowind a whole lot bigger through Tamriel Rebuilt, which recently reached another major milestone in its quest to add the entire Morrowind province to the RPG.