The arena in Might and Magic III ended up being something I wish I had done sooner. I’m not exactly sure when would have been the best time. Perhaps a little at the time. The issue was I had no idea about it or I had missed some mention of it until I entered into one of the pyramids.

To get there I just had to walk up to any of the portals in town. Then I just needed to type out “arena” and be sent there. This place was massive. I kind of wish it was a bit smaller. As you can’t move forward in it until you have killed everything.

Each round in the arena would start once you talked with someone at one of the four tables in the corners of the map. The round would then end once everything was killed and you talked with any of the four tables again. You would get 1k experience times the round you were on. Then you would get ported back to town ending that round.

At the lower levels, it would often take me quite a lot longer to find everything that needed to be killed. Then the actual killing. Since I was after all just one shooting anything that moved with arrows.

Even by the time I made it to around round 15. Everything was still rather easy to kill. I also only got 15k experience per character. I have no idea if I got further experience from getting any kills there. I do know there was no loot from getting kills in there.

This seemed to be just something for experience only. There was never any hint that I could get anything further than that. At my stage of the game even if I made it to say round 30 of the arena that is still nothing for experience. When I could just go out and do a quest or an orb turn in for 100k to 1 million experiences instead if I had any sitting in my inventory.

It was at least a fun experience. Each round it seemed like I'd be facing a different creature. Along with a mix of a couple of other stuff I had fought in prior rounds. I was kind of shocked the difficulty of it did not ramp up faster.

At this point, I had finished four of the four town’s dungeons. That just left me with Blistering Heights Cavern. With how rewarding the other ones had been. I was rather eager to head on over there. Since I was only going to this town to check on new spells and to level up my characters. Otherwise, I've been mostly staying away from this region of the game.

Funny enough the map for this place looks like a giant bug. I have a feeling some game developers were rather bored and thought they would see what they could get away with for making a map. I for one found it rather entraining. That is also something about Might and Magic. There are usually a few funny things, some insider jokes, and odd stuff going on as well in them. This was something a bit milder side of things. Then again for all I know there is supposed to be some rather deep meaning behind the way this map was shaped. This again I would not put past them either.

I ended up mostly fighting scorpias which are these ugly creatures in the arm parts of the map. I had to yet again inform this creature that I had no interest in any dates with it. It did not take the news kindly.

To get into the arm sections of the map I needed to jump over some fire. While I did have some fire resistance from the statues in the town above. Once I needed to rest, I'd be losing that fire resistance anyway. So, it was something I did not count on having all the time.

There were a couple of tricky little sections where I could not just jump forward without hitting a wall. So sometimes I'd just bite the bullet and take a couple of turns walking through fire to get to the next section.

This is also why I did not fully explore every tile of this place. I did start to notice after a while. I did not need to always jump back to the center of the map to get to a new leg section. Once you got over the first couple of fire traps in many instances you could walk around.

There were also a couple of gem table alters around this place. To my shock, they did not just give resistance to a single character like I'm used to getting when interacting with such an object. The entire group got it and it was a nice persistent boost to each of the resistance types. Once I had found all of the alerts in this dungeon.

All of these boosts my character is slowly starting to get are paying off in a big way. It has made running about every dungeon I could find well worth it. Maybe I don’t always get a stat or resistance boost for someone in my party or all of them. It is however happening enough in many of them. Not like I needed yet other excuses to go running head-first into a dungeon.

Final Thoughts

After I had made my way to all the alters it was time to make my way to the head of the map. I was greeted with a bunch of phantoms. Their touch can cause a character to age. Thankfully I unlocked that fountain to deal with that.

There ended up being a million gold in a chest with a few items. At this point, many things I was looting were no longer upgrades. I could also tell by the names it was not even worth trying to work out if I wanted to keep everything. I’m at a point now where I mostly just want obsidian items. While sure I do have quite a few weaker pieces of gear across my many characters. Unless something stands out as a massive upgrade, I'd rather just quickly sell it to free up the inventory space and move on to the next place to clear out.

I would end up returning to the arena a couple more times. Each time however it just did not feel like it was worth my time. Perhaps if there was more of a reward than just experience. Perhaps if I sat here and ended up getting to some insane arena round then it would become worth it. Sadly, the arena is just too massive to run them quickly enough to keep both my attention and make it worth my time and experience gained wise.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Might And Magic III.