idea for Arena as a mod

[Grilly]

I was recently playing Arena since it's free now and I can get it work on Linux fairly well. I made it all the way to the end and I had two very strong impressions.

1: I hate having to hold down right mouse to swing a blade. You never get used to that.
2: I would much rather be playing the game on OpenMW if the game is to be played at all.

Then it occurred to me that Arena isn't actually very big. Each town exists in its own world space and there aren't a lot of npcs that need to be created if one wanted to recreate the Arena main quest in OpenCS. Daggerfall would be a nightmare to recreate but Arena (and even Battle Spire) I think is actually doable as a hobby project. To start with I'd just make a template town for each place that is required by the main quest and reuse that town for each province. The player wouldn't be able to go outside the town and explore. The quest giver would teleport the player to the dungeon and there'll be a way to teleport back at the end. I'll put a guild guide in each mage's guild location that can teleport the player to the other towns. I might be wrong but I think doing it that way will require 18 dungeons and 9 towns. For the dungeons I'll just copy the layout of what exists in Arena and at first all the towns will look the same with the same shops in the same locations, just with different npcs so do the quest. Come to think of it, I think you only need 20 npcs to do the main quest in Arena. I wouldn't try to recreate any of the monsters that weren't already there in Morrowind. I'll just use what's available.

I won't bother with side quests or other frills but I'll release whatever work I do as creative commons so others can come and improve whatever they like or add more of the Arena towns.

Of course the big thing to keep in mind is if anyone's lawyer would start sending out angry letters. However, assuming that doesn't happen and none of the files from Arena are used in OpenMW, I think there shouldn't be a problem.

[Chris]

https://github.com/afritz1/OpenTESArena/

It's not remotely worth supporting Arena in OpenMW. Skills are handled differently (it's more akin to D&D than what TES has been doing since Daggerfall), questing is handled differently, the world is handled differently (infinite randomly generated wilderness outside of towns where you find dungeons), and the file formats are completely different. It really should be a separate project.

[AnyOldName3]

I think he was meaning remaking the game, similarly to how Morrowblivion or Skywind remake other Elder Scrolls games for a new engine.

[Biboran]

I had some ideas about how remake of arena should look like

But mod like this will requre a huge team of professional modders and even on openMW it will be in development for 10 or 15 years, like Tamriel Rebuilt so it not possible for me

[Grilly]

https://github.com/afritz1/OpenTESArena/

It's not remotely worth supporting Arena in OpenMW. Skills are handled differently (it's more akin to D&D than what TES has been doing since Daggerfall), questing is handled differently, the world is handled differently (infinite randomly generated wilderness outside of towns where you find dungeons), and the file formats are completely different. It really should be a separate project.

I wasn't talking about supporting Arena. I was talking about recreating the bare bones of the main quest by warping to each town and not being able to leave the town. I'll leave open world to the land mass that already exists in Morrowind. I'll create one town and then copy and paste it to stand in for each town the player has to visit for the main quest. I guess since that part is actually easy, I could copy and paste it for every town listed in Arena but I don't see the point since I'm just trying to give the player a chance to see the story of the main quest. Maybe, in the future, if people are interested in seeing Arena's story they won't have to run Dosbox. They can just run Openmw. It would only be about four or five hours of game play on a modern engine. The only reason Arena takes dozens and dozens of hours to finish is because of the engine it runs on.

Honestly, the hardest part would be recreating the dungeons. Some of those huge rooms are going to have to be reduced in size. And I'm not going to put sleeping areas in the dungeons. I'll either smooth out the walls or just leave a gap there for a future modder to use for something.

[Grilly]

I had some ideas about how remake of arena should look like

But mod like this will requre a huge team of professional modders and even on openMW it will be in development for 10 or 15 years, like Tamriel Rebuilt so it not possible for me

I like the image and I'd love to play in that space but for my mod I'm just making the insides of towns that are walled off similar to Mournhold. I won't let the player leave the town and the quest givers for the main quest will teleport the player to the dungeon and then back again. I'll keep the mod as small as possible so that it can actually be finished and playable. Of course future modders are free to go nuts. I honestly sort of felt like all of Cyrodiil in Oblivion should have all been located just on the imperial isle and Lake Rumare should have been huge. The rest of Cyrodiil should have been jungle too dense to traverse. But again, that's another mod for another time.