An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire
Publication information
Developer(s)	Bethesda Softworks
Publisher(s)	Bethesda Softworks
Game engine	XnGine
Release date	November 30, 1997
Genre	First person Action Role-Playing
Modes	Single Player
Rating(s)	ESRB: M
Platform(s)	MS-DOS
Chronology

An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire is a first-person role-playing game developed in 1997 by Bethesda Softworks for MS-DOS. It is the first of two Elder Scrolls adventure games and takes place in the Battlespire academy.

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In Battlespire the player takes the role of an apprentice who on the day of his final test in the training facility of the Battlemages, called the Battlespire, discovers that an army of Daedra led by Mehrunes Dagon has invaded and killed nearly everyone. On top of that, your partner has been held captive by Mehrunes Dagon himself. Over the course of seven levels, you must travel through various realms of Oblivion to reach Mehrunes Dagon, defeat him and escape back to Tamriel.

Bethesda introduced a multiplayer feature that included a cooperative mode to follow the single player storyline online as well as a team-based versus mode to fight using all the same strategies from the single player. This was done through the Mplayer multiplayer network which is now GameSpy. Though no longer supported by Mplayer/GameSpy Arcade, one can still play through the Kali multiplayer network client, which supports and works with all the features in the game.

The game requires a DOS emulator in order to be run on modern operating systems. However, given that it is one of the most resource-demanding DOS games ever released commercially, as of 2009 the emulation overhead causes even relatively modern PCs to run the game sluggishly in an emulator.

There are also some other marked differences between this game and its predecessors:

• Lack of a rest feature.
• Lack of shops or gold (broken or lost equipment must be replaced with randomized drops, either from slain NPCs or treasure piles).
• Enemies do not reset. They are also not randomized.