I started my journey with Oblivion, then Skyrim, and then Morrowind, so I knew I’d have to play the older ones someday. This game is incredibly ambitious, and that’s probably the best thing I can say about Daggerfall. You don’t really have to walk everywhere (though you can in the Unity version in a very pleasant way); instead, you use the map to travel from town to town. The dungeons can be tricky and you need the right spells and paths, and in that regard the Unity version really improves how you interact with the map and it tells you where you "really" are. In the cities, you navigate by using the city map, and all of these elements combine to create a true RPG sense of a living world. Because of it being a product of the ’90s, the visuals are nowhere near the Todd Howard trilogy” where the focus is on spectacle. In my opinion, Daggerfall was never made for the eyes. To me, it felt like playing the RPG version of Doom, and I loved every second of it, even the main quest. Before the Unity update, we had to mess with codes in Dropbox to get it running, and now that whole process belongs to my memories. Thank you, Julian LeFay.
I first played Thief shortly after spending around two hundred hours in Deus Ex because I wanted to dive deeper into immersive sims. Having already played another Dark Engine game, System Shock 2, I approached it thinking I would know how to play Thief. But man, this game makes shadows smell and velvet footsteps feel like art in this 'medieval' setting, with metal music in the cutscenes. The general atmosphere is great and the sense of darkness is very well achieved. The only downside to that first experience is that the enemies' physics are awkward, and also I did not know until several levels later that I was playing "Gold" and not "The Dark Project", so I did not know why some levels felt kind of unfitting. I mean, I bought Thief 2 afterwards.
Fallout 3 looks like it wants to be an immersive sim but Bethesda is there saying "not on my watch", which means, Fallout 3 is not an RPG. Probably, FO3's best pro is the atmosphere, how it is visually achieved, it looks like a western with fantasy vibe. I love it. The game might be old, even the graphics but the deep visuals are still strong. I also never complied with the green tint. My problem with this game is of other nature: - Moira Brown wants you to go to the Tepid Sewers to kill a bunch of mole rats with a wood stick of hers. The tepid sewers is not a dangerous path, but it is a not an easy one for a beginner because it is close to D.C. That dungeon only serves for that purpose, this quest. You do that quest and come back and so on. But then you keep playing and playing and then... Woooww! Your Pip Boy says you stepped into a new random place near Megaton. It is called Jury Street Metro. You go in the sewers and you see an interesting amount of mole rats and a thing to make food with wonderglue. There are so many of them you could have done the quest in an easier way, but the game somehow does not want you to explore or wants to tell you that. This situation almost made me look away in "some" way, but it does not mean that I hate the game. This said, the imm-sim part of the game could have been better, above all when I have played other games worth its genre. I miss more interaction with world objects. Everytime I think about it, I see those empty barrels that you find everywhere in the wastes and I miss situations where you can them more ofter. I only use them in two situations: by entering the mayor/sheriff house from the roof (you need a barrel), and there are some lorries with ammunition where you need a barrel so you can jump there. I have explored all the map and played all the DLCs. I have played Fallout 1 and 2 after having played this. And I also think, during my playthroughs, that this is a wasteland worth hundreds of hours.
After you finish Deus Ex, you do not mind "bad graphics" in a game. I wanted to try other games like Thief, Hexen 2, Wasteland 2 or Jagged Alliance, but I could not, I thought it was because they were very old games. That was not the reason. I had to play Deus Ex first, it had to prepare me for that. Thanks to this experience I can give an opportunity to those other games, several of them already played, and of course, Human Revolution had to be there, Mankind Divided, not yet. DX has taught me that good games do not have to look artsy.
Now I play it and only need twenty minutes on hard difficulty. But as a child during my first time, back in the 1990's, constantly dying made me develop this sense of deep story. I end up having those kind of dreams where I was there in that planet and was friends with the alien guy.
I will be fond of this game forever. The DLC can burn in hell though, as it is what makes me not want to repeat this amazing experience.
... because the infamous 50% screen radius only serves its purpose with the pipe and the rapier, and if you press 2 and you see the whole screen before you, at least from the moment you reach Maintenance, if you did not drop the stungun you set it to max and stun the three or four rays you will see yourself saying hello to them while you come and go through the game, after that, choosing how to kill every single enemy seems to be... an interesting experience, and not only because of the 100% screen. Nothing more to say, but this: the game is supposedly not an imm-sim, but it has not also its elements (with an awful leaning physics that forces you to play slow), and behind a lot of the graphics and pixels, it is an experiment on an imm-sim, and if you are sometimes in the mood, the fact that the press buttons are very easy to miss should make you kind of smile, and you will learn that this game has a lot of magic that the remake does not. My keybinds: WASD. Q and E for leaning, X for negate leaning, Ctrl for crouch, V for lie down (jump and you will stand up) and Shift for run. R for reload. F for mouse freelook / screen movement, useful also for cyberspace (drill / pulser). Tab for fast pick up. Thank god for this option. G grenades list and H for attack with the one you choose. Y for patch list and U for apply patch. B for boots. My cyberspace keys are SZXC, A and D. You can cheat if you do not know how to do the wire puzzles, save, apply a logic probe, see the result, then reload.
This is the typical games you kind of want to play because you once saw the Alien franchise and it meant something to you. I played all three episodes. End.
You cannot be a hero if you were not a prisoner before.
Pros - New visuals and sounds. Now I know "where I am" and I know what sounds weapons do. But still it wants your imagination. - The music makes the experience immersive. Superb. - I like the chess kind of movement. - Two different text boxes between damage texts and skill raising while in combat, the 1988 layout everything together in the only box. Good idea, not good implemented though (CONS). - Great save list, still with its own autosave. Take that, 1988 autosave option!! - Great new paragraphs layout, presentation of the idea, texts, voice narration and scenary pictures. 10 out of 10. Wonderful. - Nice sleep option with weather changes, just do not do it in Las Vegas' sewers unless you have the ax :) - You can use the old keys and new ones. In my opinion, the presentation is good, and it makes your old brother pay attention to you, that younger lacking in videogame taste sibling. Cons - Layout of "combat texts" makes you have to pay attention to the text. The font needs to be bigger, it makes the texts go over your head and you have to pay close attention about who is hitting who. In 1988 it was very clear who had a 4 skill in AT weapons. Very meh. - Enemies who make damage at 10' feet do not come to you if they are far and you called their "attention", but they move away. In 1988 they get closer. - The new visuals and sounds tell that you get ranged damage from some enemies when you actually do not get any damage from them because you have to come closer to your enemies because they do not come to you. Distracting. - Although I said new visuals are now immersive, these enhacements make the game look like that cheap "Alien Whatever" from Steam that nobody wants to play. - Sometimes it does not load a saved game and you have to Ctrl+Alt+Supr. - Macros not possible now.
