I'll admit, I've never played an Elder Scrolls game before (missed out on Skyrim and Oblivion when they were originally released), so I've challenged myself to play through the series from the beginning...no matter how hard the ones before Morrowind may be. I've already made it out of the first dungeon, but I still kind of fear I'll be screwed later in the game if I don't do certain things. For anyone who has played Arena, do you have any tips? I'm already abusing the save system, but just entering this first town is already daunting. Is there anything that I should be aware of to make my life easier in this game? Is Daggerfall even harder? I'm enjoying it so far, but I'm just worried that I'll hit moments with massive difficulty spikes.

Arena is pretty easy as far as early 90s CRPGs go. It's relatively clear what you should be doing and it's pretty hard to catastrophically fuck up.

Daggerfall is a bit harder due to it's general vagueness and much larger scale but it's not difficult.

What I did in order to have the most fun with this game was to make sure that you take a lot of notes, notes on the map. Notes on what you are supposed to be doing. Just notes on everything it will keep you on path (:

Daggerfall is actually easy to fuck up because of bugs and random crap. You can go on a mission in the game to enter a dungeon and kill mob X, and mob X could be placed in a room where no actual entrance exists. Or in a room where to get to it you have to fall down a hole with no exit. This kind of crap happens all he time in that game in fact.

Always be saving. Before you enter a room, save. After you enter the room but before you do anything, save. Any time you kill anything, save. Any time you talk to anybody, save before and after.

You don't have to tell me, I played the damn game. I just wanted to point out that "challenge" wise Daggerfall might not be that bad but it is the buggiest of all Elder Scrolls games unless you count Battlespire.