For any Elder Scrolls fans on here:
It's taken me about two years of leaving it and coming back again, but tonight I've finally finished
Arena. Man, does that game enjoy kicking you in the balls...
Unlike later games in the series it isn't heavy on lore. In fact, there isn't much lore to begin with. You have the nine provinces, each with its own race, except Cyrodiil because Bethesda hadn't come up with Imperials as a separate race yet. Orcs also just appear as enemies, not a playable race on their own. Apart from that you get some very basic background on the empire and... not much else really apart from some small details that would be contradicted by later games. It's funny walking through the Imperial City with no arena, Arcane University or White Gold Tower in sight

Speaking of White Gold Tower, the Imperial Palace has certainly changed a bit:
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The story's pretty simple: Emperor Uriel Septim VII (who sadly isn't voiced by Patrick Stewart this time round) is trapped in another dimension by his court mage, and you have to free him by gathering the eight pieces of the Staff of Chaos, which are scattered all over the continent of Tamriel, which is only about the size of freaking Africa (no really, the game world is that huge, thank Akatosh for fast travel).
One of the reasons I found myself repeatedly turning my back on the game was (apart from the often insane difficulty) the amount of bugs that almost made it impossible to complete without going back to a previous save. Two problems in particular were being ambushed several times by high level enemies that literally appeared out of nowhere (four iron golems on one dark elf warrior is not a pleasant experience) and one incident in Red Mountain where I had to pick up a key off the body of a vampire, which of course disappeared, rendering it impossible to bypass the door that needed to be unlocked.
Because of the game's sheer size, much of it is randomly generated, from terrain, to shop names, to dungeons, to people, with some... unfortunate results:

I also found this nice reference in the Valenwood city of Eldenroot:

Anyway, that leaves Daggerfall as the only main game in the series I have yet to finish. I've come close before, almost getting the Totem of Tiber Septim before, yes, a game-breaking bug prevented me from picking it up. Reverting to an earlier save didn't help, so I started a new game. Maybe one day I'll finish this new save.