My first Elder Scrolls game was Oblivion. Now, if you've seen my About page, you know that I love Oblivion. I didn't play Daggerfall until much later, after playing Skyrim and Morrowind. And honestly? I prefer Daggerfall to either of those two. When it comes to creating a character, dungeon crawling, and even on an aesthetic level, I feel that Daggerfall does a better job. The only Elder Scrolls game that I would say surpasses the character creator of Daggerfall is Battlespire (which is one of very few compliments I have for Battlespire). The entire game is built for dungeon crawling, which is always my favorite part of a RPG. When you're not in town stocking up on supplies and getting quests, you're in a sprawling labyrinthian dungeon fighting monsters and getting loot. That sort of gameplay loop is really all my goblin brain wants from a game. On paper, Daggerfall is my dream game. So why do I hate the game so much?
I hate Daggerfall because it's a shitty game that manages to scratch my itch more than any other game. Bethesda wanted to evoke a sense of scale with Daggerfall, and put out one of the largest maps in any video game on the market. The dungeons are also similarly massive, and even with an automap it can be easy to get lost in them. How did they accomplish this? Through random generation. This means that they can plant down as many towns and dungeons as they want while only needing a relatively small pool of assets, and it saves a significant chunk of time over manually placing all of those buildings and hallways. So what's the drawback? Everything looks exactly the same. If you've seen one town, you have very little reason to see the others. Dungeons are the same 5 or 6 large segments arranged in god knows how many different ways. The only exceptions are the main capital cities and the dungeons used for the main story quest. Otherwise, you can see almost everything Daggerfall has to offer within an hour or so.
Now, you might be thinking, as someone who played Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, that at least the quests will make things interesting. Some of those games have pretty good writing, so surely Daggerfall counts as well. Well, Skyrim fans will feel right at home with Daggerfall, as every side quest is a Radiant Quest! You will be asked by randomly generated townsfolk to go to random spots on the map to do some random thing that usually involves combat (but not always). Enjoy!
Now, I started this blurb by mentioning bugs, and Daggerfall is rife with them. It would be pointless to list them all here (you can probably find a good list on uesp), so I will point out some that I consider to be "deal breakers" - bugs that hamper enjoyment of the game by a significant degree. Firstly, fighting on a sloped surface is incredibly dangerous. Not because of anything enemies can do, but because of the consequences for getting hit. You see, when the player is successfully struck by an enemy, they move backwards a small amount. If they get hit into a slope, there is a chance that they will clip through it, and fall into an infinite void. Watch out! This glitch adds a bit of spice to the combat.
Anyone who's familiar with the Elder Scrolls series can agree on one thing: Lockpicking is a pretty useless skill. In Oblivion, you can get the Skeleton Key and mash autoattempt until every lock bends to your will. In Skyrim, you can unlock expert difficulty locks at level 1 at a fairly consistent rate. So what about Daggerfall? As it turns out, Lockpicking is completely invalidated by the game's level scaling. As a player's lockpicking skill increases, the locks of the game become more difficult, making choosing it at chargen pointless. On top of this, doors in dungeons can be bashed open with a weapon, and the unlock spell works on every lock in the game with no problems. If you wanted to play a thief type character and went with lockpicking as a primary or major skill, you're shit out of luck.
One of the types of random quests involves going deep into a dungeon to retrieve an item. Well, the fun of random generation means that there can be sections of a dungeon that are inaccessable to the player, and the quest item can spawn in those sections, making the quest incompleteable. Enjoy scrambling through identical looking hallways trying to find the one item that you need. Also, quests have a time limit, so make sure you hurry up!
I need to wrap this up because it's gone on way longer than I expected it to. Long story short, Daggerfall has the makings of being the exact sort of game I want, but certain design choices (namely the random generation) and the bugs prevent it from being that game, and those hangups are what agitate me so much. If you read this (do people read this?) and want to see the game for yourself, I highly recommend downloading the Daggerfall Unity project, which modernizes the game a fair bit and removes some of the more atrocious bugs. It's not finished as of me writing this but it's still worth checking out.
