I'm referring to the first two, prior to their 3D incarnations as of Morrowind. My laptop can't run modern RPG games, but I want an RPG fix and so have been playing old 2D RPG games. Currently playing through Fallout 1.

Daggerfall is an awesome game, will not hold your hand, and will kill you quite often until you get the hang of things. It's a fun game. Arena is more of a Dungeon Crawl. Battlespire and Redguard are more for fans of the series than fans of RPGs (as they are not really RPGs)

How are they not RPG games? In what way? And, so long as they aren't flatout unfairly difficult (as some older games were), I'm happy with the lack of "hand-holding". Fallout 1, so far, has been the same.

Redguard is an action adventure with a fixed protagonist (Cyrus) and predetermined skill set. If The Witcher can be considered a RPG then so can Redguard I suppose.

Battlespire is a dungeon crawl.

To also add: Battlespire offered Multiplayer, and that was it's hook. Obviously, unless you find someone hosting a Battlespire Server, your not going to have online play.

I was never able to get into Arena, but Daggerfall is what made me fall for TES. The UI is clumsy and not as nice as what we're used to now, but it had a good story, the best faction system to date, a humongous world, and old school RPG mechanics that have been more streamlined with every BGS release (which I think is a mistake). OTOH, I hated some of the unending dungeons. There are mark & recall spells worth investing in ASAP.

Definitely worth a try. You have to give it some time to get over the interface, but after that I think you'll enjoy it.

I'll just point out Daggerfall's keyboard controls can be remapped so that they are quite similar to Oblivion and/or Skyrim. Melee combat will remain different, since it depends on mouse movement rather than button clicking. I quite like Daggerfall's melee combat system. In fact my first correspondence with Bethesda back in the day was to comment that I felt they were "selling out to consoles" by switching to button-click combat in then upcoming Morrowind.

Daggerfall then?