The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

Ok, the graphics are realmente dated and pixelated, The plot takes too long to start, but once it starts, The game is addictive. I'm playing for the first time and loving it. For those who played Skyrim, be patient, it's really hard to find the places and the dungeons are stupidly complexes with no indications of objectives.

And I'm not talking about cheese, so put the staff down Sheo. FINALLY managed to complete a single damn run of this game after 146 hours! Always ended up abandoning my runs halfway through, becuase the game gets mindboggingly boring after a while and the early to mid game is the most interesting, as you can watch the numbers go up and your equipment visibly improving. - The quests are mostly flavour text. You will be doing pretty much the exact same copule of things for every faction, including the main quest and the artifact quests. - The world is gigantic, but compltely devoid of anything worthwhile. Other than a minimal visual variety, there is nothing to see (let alone do) in Daggerfall's world. - Quests, including the main questline, are sometimes simply broken. Start the game over - or, better, learn the very basic console commands. - Quest design itself is a sad joke. - All in all this is an extraordinarily bland and boring game, carried entirely by its very satisfying RPG mechanics. If you're obsessed with numbers like me or enjoy roleplaying in a big sandbox and making your own fun, you will still get your time's worth with this hot mess. Sane people should probaby give this one a pass. It's very much a product of its time. If you are going to give this a shot (and why not, it's free), I suggest you go for the Unity version. Unless you REALLY like pixels, the Unity version is better in every way. Shame that GOG took down its version due to the whole modding controversy, but I understand that they just didn't want the heat anymore. The regular unity version is still out there and free, so go nab it. I'm sure I'll be back for another half-assed run in a couple of years when I want to switch off my brain and just slay some monsters while listening to videos in the background, but for now I'm glad that I can finally mark this game as completed.

With the development of Daggerfall Unity & a phenomenal mod scene, it is finally possible for a mostly-normal, not-quite-hardcore person to play the game to completion. It is an absolutely amazing game in its scale and premise. Unfortunately, it is also half-baked in most other regards. As the story progresses, it does not live up to its promise, and the gameplay becomes very repetitive.

I installed Daggerfall on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, my microwave learned to speak Tamrielic. By Thursday, time stopped functioning in any linear fashion, and my dog had a Daedric artifact. This isn’t just a game. It’s an event horizon for mortal understanding. You don’t play Daggerfall — you enter it, and it enters you back, like a polite yet horrifying Lovecraftian entity wearing a DOS prompt. Let’s start with the map. The “map” is roughly the size of actual Europe. When I tried to ride from one town to another, my character aged 23 years, my computer fan achieved lift-off, and the concept of “distance” ceased to have meaning. NASA called me to ask if I’d opened a wormhole. Then there’s the character creator. You can choose your class, your race, and exactly which limb of Akatosh you wish to pledge your soul to. I rolled a Breton knight who somehow majored in lycanthropy and existential despair. Ten minutes later, he was bitten by a rat, became a werebat, and accidentally declared war on gravity. The bugs? Oh, the bugs are divine. They’re not glitches — they’re procedural manifestations of chaos. Once, I fell through the floor and reemerged as the King of Daggerfall. Another time, the walls disappeared, and I glimpsed Todd Howard’s first thought. I tried to quit the game, but Daggerfall crashed Windows itself, rolled a d20, and rebooted as a sentient operating system. The soundtrack? Gregorian chants echoing through the corridors of madness. The sound of wind that whispers, “You will never finish this questline.” I left my PC running overnight, and when I woke up, my toaster had joined the Mages Guild. After 400 hours, I realized something profound: Daggerfall isn’t coded in C. It’s written in the language of creation. Every time you boot it up, the universe subtly reshapes itself. Causality flickers. I got a parking ticket in a timeline that no longer exists. Final Verdict: 10/10 — My life is now an open-world RPG.

I wasn't expecting an RPG of this age to be so good. Of course it's completely different from Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, but my god, it is charming. Everything is so colorful and easy to read on the screen that I mostly played it at sundays just to relax. The technology behind the size of the world map is astonishing, and every RPG lover should at least try it just to feel how it was made. Some mechanic aspects of the game as levelling up, combat systems and inventory management didn't age very well, but if you play with Daggerfall Unity, most of these problems can be solved. If not, it has a long mod library on Nexus. Also beware that it is huge and very repetitive on quest variation. You will spend most of your play time inside labyrinthian dungeons searching for a needle in a haystack, with no quest pointer at all; a migraine indulcing map which reveals itself as you explore; and some enemies that can kill you with half a hit, at least in the beginning, so make sure to save a lot and always. All the Elder Scrolls races and classes are there, also the alchemy and spell creation. Some cities are filled with taverns, stores, banks and houses to interact with, so you will have a lot to do even when you're not doing some quests. After a couple of hours you will stop engaging with most of the NPCs, as most of them are just walking paper dolls, but let's not forget this is a game from 1996. There are no dialog options, neither voice over, but I particularly loved the writing and lore of this game, paying attention to what the main NPCs has to say, reading books and letters. It's a nice piece of RPG history and totally free to download.