The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you’re playing the Elder Scrolls games backwards from Skyrim, this game will probably disappoint you. So you really have to look at it through the eyes of when it was new. First of all, this game could have easily been called “The Elder Scrolls: Texas,” because everything about the game is BIG! The map is almost the size of Great Britain, the cities and towns are huge, and you can even get lost inside some buildings. And don’t get me started on the size of the dungeons. But that’s also part of the problem with Daggerfall. See, a lot of quests are timed, in that they have to be completed within a certain number of in-game days. And there is no “fast” travel option - you have to look up your destination on the map and choose how to get there. For example, traveling from one end of the map to the other takes something like 10 in-game days. Because of this, you don’t usually have time to randomly explore the map. On the other hand, a lot of locations look the same. But this is how you fit a game world of this size on a PC with specs that make a Raspberry Pi seem powerful. Overall, this isn’t a bad game at all. It just hasn’t aged well. If you want to give it a try today, I’d suggest running the Unity version.