Arena:Deluxe Edition

Deluxe Edition box art

Developer	Bethesda Softworks
Release Date	November 1994

The Elder Scrolls: Arena Deluxe Edition was the CD-ROM upgrade of the original video game released in November 1994, bringing the game up to Patch 1.07. Later in 1995, a generalized CD-ROM version released at a lower price point.

At the time of Arena's original release, the production of floppy disks was an expensive enterprise, and could eat directly into the health of your profit margins, which made it difficult to produce bigger games. When the CD-ROM came about, it became a big jumping off point for the industry where your projects were no longer limited by memory space. Producer Todd Howard was put in charge of of the Deluxe Edition project, porting Arena from Floppy to CD-ROM and putting the game to market. This was done by a different team than who made the original game. Taking advantage of the new disk space, new amenities were added to the game: altered cutscenes, character sprites, voice acted dialogue for the main characters, as well as new bug fixes. The team physically burned the disks themselves in the basement using disk replicators.^[1]^[2] Mark Jones was responsible for the cutscene additions.^[3]

Deluxe Edition Exclusives[edit]

Codex Scientia hint book
Map of Tamriel mouse pad

Changes[edit]

Ria Silmane, Jagar Tharn, and Uriel Septim VII now have voiced dialogue in cutscene sequences by unknown actors.
The endgame cutscenes at the Imperial Palace have been entirely redone. However, the in-game appearances of some of the following items were not changed as well, leaving the art depictions inconsistent.
- The Jewel of Fire was changed into a large glowing green gem, rather than a red orb.
- The vase beneath the Jewel of Fire was completely remodeled, it is now entirely gold and sat on a large stone pedestal, rather than being a small sort of blue vase.
- When Uriel Septim is returned, the vase beneath the Jewel of Fire becomes heavily damaged, and the Jewel itself explosively disappears. In the original, both the vase and the Jewel remain perfectly intact upon Uriel's return.
- The penultimate reappearance of Talin Warhaft was removed.
- The sprites of Uriel Septim and Jagar Tharn were heavily altered.