The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

Listen... the graphics are a 2 of 10. Everything else is a 10 of 10. If you love the elder scrolls and want to travel back in time... play this game! You will arrive at a more simplistic and on the other hand excrutiatingly painful game that hopefully expands your gaming horizons.

its a great game if you put in the time to learn it

Its great that GOG has this game and its free, it worked perfectly without any crashes or issues. The graphics look dated even for the mid nineties, but then again it was one of the first 3D games like doom or wolfenstein 3D. The controls feel pretty bad and the starter dungeon is too difficult. Like others I found Daggerfall Unity elsewhere and it vastly improves the graphics and controls. However, the general gameplay is still kind of boring, there are endless tasks of picking up and dropping off things in samey-dungeons and towns. I'm glad to have tried this game out, moving on to Morrowind now.

After playing all modern entries in The Elder Scrolls series, I decided to go back and see where it all began. What I found was a game that clearly laid the foundation for the series identity, with mechanics and ideas that are still present today. There's plenty to do here. The quests themselves are basic and often templated to simple fetch quests but it's understandable within the context of the limitations of its engine. Dungeons are another beast entirely. They are fully 3D and often feel like sprawling labyrinths. There's a sense of scale and confusion that's hard to replicate today. But the best part of the game is immersion. You're not the center of the universe here. You're just one person in a huge, living world, and it behaves more like a simulation than a typical RPG. The main quest isn't urgent. In fact, it often pauses for ingame weeks until the next letter arrives. In the meantime, you're free to do whatever you like. Buy a house or a ship. Travel the wilds, worship Daedra and earn rare gear. Or break into someone's home, get arrested, go to court and spend a whole ingame year in prison because you can. It's all part of the world, and it never pressures you to follow a specific path. Of course, it's still an old game. Accessibility is a hurdle for modern players. Thankfully, there's a version running on the Unity engine. This brings quality of life improvements plus full mod support. Imagine how important this game is to fans, carefully porting it into another engine and preserving the experience. And with mods you can also have your waifu experiences in Daggerfall. Great isn't it? It is glitchy and janky but still worth trying. With the Unity engine and because you can play it for free today, there is no excuse not to give it a try if you're curious about the roots of the series.

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.