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."
