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There are what I believe to be some common misconceptions about Arena. For example, I've seen a comment that the stairs in the main quest dungeons tend to be located in the southwestern sections of the dungeons, or words to that effect, but I haven't found that to be the case any more or less often than other sections of the dungeons.

However, in my opinion the biggest misconception is that, aside from the main quest dungeons, Arena is randomly generated. This leads a lot of players to assume that when you visit cities, the layouts are random; that when you go outside of cities, the wilderness is random; that when you enter buildings or wilderness dungeons, the internal layouts are random.

I've played Arena a lot during the last few years, mostly with a handful of characters on my desktop computer, but also on a laptop computer using a different installation of Arena-- the same version as on my desktop (1.06), and from the same source (Bethesda's website), although the installation on my desktop was downloaded and installed manually using links and configuration guidelines found in the UESP Wiki, while the installation on my laptop was downloaded and installed automatically using the Bethesda launcher. I also have the CD version (1.07) from GOG, but I haven't installed it yet.

Anyway, in my experience the city layouts, wilderness layouts, building interiors, and wilderness dungeons are not random, but rather are constant. For example, I recently explored a wilderness dungeon just west of Camlorn on my desktop, then decided to visit the same dungeon on my laptop, and the dungeon's interior was identical in both installations. Long ago I'd already noticed that cities always have the same layouts, and that the wilderness around cities always has the same layout, no matter how many new games I start. But playing on two completely separate installations has also shown that the interiors of buildings, as well as the interiors of wilderness dungeons, are also constant.

It's evident that the world was randomly generated while the game was being designed, and that the game world is procedurally generated while it's being played, and therein lies the source of the common misconception. The fact that the data seeds used to procedurally generate the world were randomly generated during design does not mean that the data seeds are randomly generated while the game is being played.

There are definitely some elements of the game which are subject to randomness during gameplay, such as when the names of certain equipment shops change ownership. And once or twice I've even had the gender and name of a city ruler, as well as the interior of the palace, change after I failed to complete the (previous) ruler's quest in the allotted time, which I thought was kind of neat if it indicated that the previous ruler had been replaced for political reasons. But the only times I've had the layout of a city change on me was when I saved in a slot over an older save from a different city and one of the new save files failed to overwrite the older version of that save file.

My next step in testing just how constant the gameworld actually is will be to compare the interiors of the dungeons that get placed on the map by the city rulers' quests from one character and installation to the next. The names of the dungeons definitely change from game to game, but does the dungeon at a given location on the map always have the same interior regardless of its name?

Another misconception I saw in a chat during a stream is that enemies do not scale as you level up. I'm not sure about their Hit Points, but the XP you gain from enemies definitely does scale as you level up.

This is easily verified by quickly switching to your Character screen at the beginning of a fight to note your current Level and XP, killing the enemy, then noting your XP to see how much you gained from that enemy.

After you've gained a Level, go through the same procedure the next time you encounter that same type of enemy. You'll see that the XP gained increases based on your Level.

Obviously, this is easier to do while you're still at a low Level, since the higher your Level becomes, the more XP you need to gain to reach the next Level, so you level up frequently at first but eventually hit a plateau you can't seem to overcome.