Hello,

I used to view Daggerfall as the “Mother-Load” of The Elder Scrolls series. I respected it, but was never motivated to try it myself because it was too daunting a task.
Of course, I’ve now graduated college and am in the middle of seeking employment. I feel incredibly miserable as my education, despite being “useful” apparently doesn’t have any openings at the moment. Couple this with some personal issues and a near-crippling sense of loneliness and you have my current state of affairs. So I decided to put the free-time I never wanted to poor use and give Daggerfall a try. Here’s my review.

Some Background:
I first got into TES with Morrowind…after Oblivion came out. My friend loaned the game to me because he was obsessed with Oblivion. It took a while for me to warm up to the game, but eventually I got very hooked. I got a 360 a year later and with it my own copy of Oblivion, which was good, but didn’t have the same magic as Morrowind for me. A few years later Skyrim came out and I played the hell out of that, more so than Oblivion in fact. Fast-forward another four years and now here I am, about to tackle Daggerfall.

Some things to understand:
I never did finish the main quest. I got about 60 hours into the game though, so I think I can establish some credibility.
My review in a nutshell: Daggerfall is both fantastic, and absolutely awful. A relic of a bygone era that deserves to be seen and has some neat ideas, but fails to keep my attention like its successors do.

Graphics and Sound:
it’s almost unfair for me to even have this category here, but it does need to be critiqued. Daggerfall boasts one of the largest single-player worlds in gaming history. And it shows in the fact that the graphics can be extremely bare-bones to compensate for how much is in the game. I’ve heard some people claim this was cutting edge back in 1996, but I’m hard-pressed to believe it when looking at other games of its era. The card-board 2D sprites are my biggest stickler, I just can’t get into them. There are times when I get immersed in the spooky atmosphere of a dungeon when suddenly a cut-out thief shuffles towards me and my suspension of disbelief is broken. It doesn’t help that there are only about 25 or so sprites for the hundreds of NPCs you’ll come across. Say what you will about Oblivion’s five voice actors, but this…this is true repetition. The overworld is as flat as its denizens. You would think a world as large as the United Kingdom would have a bevy of places to see, but no. The game is extremely flat, with bits of shallow hills to break up the monotony. “forests” are the same cardboard-sprites and are also fairly sparse. “Deserts” are just tan flat-land as opposed to green or brown. The sky-box is oddly jarring to me. It has this weird move-the-opposite-direction as the player thing going on that just looks bizarre. You’ll never get to see those flat mountains either, no matter how tall, or deep some descriptor tells you a region is, it’s always going to look flat.
Thankfully, the game is significantly better indoors, particularly the dungeons. The dungeons are actually quite cool. They manage to achieve some degree of atmosphere, which is important to me. Despite the repetitive textures on the walls, I found myself far more entertained when I was traveling through places like Privateer’s Den and Nulfaga’s castle. The game’s sound is fairly useless from a gameplay standpoint, but does sound decent all the same. It reminds of System Shock 2 in how it would unnerve me to hear a zombie from behind, only for there to be nothing. The game’s music can be fairly catchy at times, but, in old-timey style, repeats itself constantly and I eventually just turned off the music.
One little kudo I will give though is that I actually did enjoy messing with my character’s portrait. They did a good job with the paper-doll effect of your character in the inventory screen. I would occasionally just buy outfits and try them on my character, or equip armors/weapons for kicks just to see how badass my character looked.

Gameplay:
The Meat-and-Potatoes of Daggerfall. The word I’d use to describe Daggerfall’s gameplay is Cheesy. There’re people who will stand by Daggerfall as one of the greatest and most rewarding games of all time. Now, as a Morrowind camper, I used to think this meant that the world was engrossing, and that I was missing out on something akin to TES: III. I now realize that these players are not vaunting the game’s lore, or world, or style, they’re singing praises for its design. This game is incredibly fun…to snap in half. Daggerfall is a Min-Maxer’s wet-dream. The game just bends over and takes it like a jaded porm-star 10 years into her career. The game is extremely easy to jury-rig and render insultingly easy. What’s sad about this is that the mechanics that allow this to happen, are actually quite clever. I really like the advantages system. I wish Bethesda still kept that concept in later TES games.
Things go like this: I load up a character, custom class of course. I want to make a mage, but not the stock mage, I want the kind of mage that can end worlds. I roll a Breton, give myself general spell absorption, regenerating health, and immunity to paralysis. I then make myself critically weak to everything. However, spell absorption negates those critical weaknesses because most non-physical attacks are magic based. I’m not even level-one and I’ve already rendered all spellcasters and power users in Daggerfall completely impotent. Which leads to one of the greatest ironies of Daggerfall: this is the ultimate meat-head RPG.
Oh yes, all you Morrowind whiners (I know because I was one) [censored] and moan about how Oblivion and Skyrim favor warriors but those games have nothing on Daggerfall. The same can, admittedly, be done as a mage, and in fact, that is what I did. But the fact still remained that the most effective way to kill anything…literally anything, no matter what it was, was it to hit it over the head with a staff or sword. That being said, the cheesiness doesn’t end at character creation. Mana potions in Daggerfall are almost impossible to produce unless you go to a specific group, but spell absorption can negate that if you use the right spells. I got though most of my 60 hours using a very simple tactic: I see an enemy, I look down, cast fireball…and keep casting fireball until the enemy is dead. My spell absorbs the damage the fireball would’ve done to me, replenishing my magic and simultaneously killing my enemy. I took on entire armies with this tactic. A lot of monsters have saving throws, yes, but those throws aren’t always perfect and eventually, even the most dangerous of ancient vampires and liches went down with my fireball spell purchased at the start of the game. This isn’t even the worst that can be done in Daggerfall. There’re plenty of Let’s Plays on Youtube that show players violently sauaging the game’s mechanics far, far worse than I ever felt the need to.
But I digress, the foundation is well-founded, Bethesda’s heart was in the right place, and I really did enjoy character generation. I did eventually role a new character who wasn’t quite as obscene and I enjoyed it all the same. It’s just fun having that much freedom over character stats. It’s something woefully missing from games like Skyrim.
Now onto fast-travel, and the game world. I heard people say that Daggerfall needed its fast-travel, and that Oblivion and Skyrim don’t deserve that excuse. I used to turn my nose at those people insisting that they’re just playing favorites. No, I take that back now, Daggerfall needs its fast-travel. I attempted to walk on horse from Daggerfall to a local village. One, real-time hour later, I had encountered nothing but flat brown terrain with occasional hills and one bear. It was mind-numbing and had absolutely no reward for exploration. Daggerfall’s world is entirely too large. I never thought I’d say that, but I did. There is no reason to make a game world 2,000 miles large if you can’t put anything meaningful for the player to find on their own. You will fast-travel everywhere, you will only go to places that you have already heard about from NPCs, because finding places on your own is entirely unreasonable. Furthermore, the rewards are not as great as in later Elder Scrolls games. Again, I’m reminded of the massive back-lash against Oblivion and its randomly generated dungeons and loot. Oblivion has absolutely nothing on Daggerfall. There is no fixed loot of any kind as far as I can tell. You’re never going to find a unique ring in a dungeon that you slaved through, you’re never going to find a badass sword that was once wielded by a great warrior. The closest thing to unique loot in this game is occasional stuff given as rewards for quests, but these are extremely small and half the time the quest won’t give that legendary item, but something else generic. You make your own gear, that’s how it works. This games relies quite a bit on crafting I’ve found out. Just about everything you do can be upgraded, but it has to be upgraded by you, and only after you’ve climbed the ranks of various guilds.
Ah yes, the guilds, which leads directly into the most infamous part of Daggerfall: the bugs. I joined the Mage’s Guild. I played 60 hours of Daggerfall. During those 60 hours I only ever got to journeyman rank. This was not for lack of trying, oh no, I must’ve done at least 80 quests for the mage’s guild, but something got buggered up. I got all my skills well-past 75 and never ranked up, I wondered if it was a reputation issue, but there’s no way to check that in game. I google-searched and found that this has happened to a lot of players. Sometimes, the guilds just don’t work. In fact, a great many things in Daggerfall, just don’t work. Enemies clipping through the geometry, stores never being open, certain NPCs never talking to you despite you being in good standing, items not being where they should be, quests never triggering and crashes, oh the crashes. This game is very buggy and overshadows everything else in Daggerfall. It’s really a shame, because a huge amount of content was ultimately locked away from me because of shoddy programming.

The Main Quest:
The last part of my review, I never finished the main-quest. By the 60 hour mark, my enthusiasm gave out. It wasn’t a bitter quitting, I just got tired of it all. Daggerfall’s main quest has got to be one of the most counter-intuitive stories I’ve ever seen. The story itself is not bad, in fact, I quite like the political intrigue. It’s reminds me a bit of Game of Thrones or some other medieval political drama. You’re thrust into High-Rock with the task of finding out why the ghost of a dead king is now haunting his former kingdom, which expands into a massive conspiracy among the various powers of High-Rock to take control of an ancient artifact called The Numidium. As you play you get swept up in all the faction’s petty rivalries, and will eventually be forced to choose who gets the artifact. Unfortunately, how this all unfolds is abysmal. You’re shipwrecked onto the shores of Daggerfall with literally no
direction. You’re going to be stuck with no direction for about three in-game weeks until you get a random letter from the leader of blades telling you to meet her. She then informs you of what the opening cut-scene also told you and you’re, again, left to your own devices. It was not until another in-game month later that I got another random letter from a princess in Wayrest, who sent me on a quest to find the King of Worms. I did that quest…and was left to my own devices again. Another three in-game weeks I get a letter from a prince in Sentinel. The process continues like this, as far as I can tell for the main-quest. You literally wait for the game to give you something to do. Logically, this makes no sense. Why would your character, a Champion of Emperor Uriel VII, sit on his ass like this and wait for someone to summon him? From a gameplay standpoint is frustrating because the conversations imply that you should investigate these various places, but actually doing so yields nothing, you just have to wait. In the end, I just couldn’t get into it.

Conclusion:
Daggerfall kept my interest for 60 hours, that’s saying something. A game with so many problems was not without its charm. Ultimately though, I doubt I’ll be coming back to it. The games feels flat, both literally, and figuratively. The game’s enormity is really its biggest weakness, as it did not allow any of the developers to truly shine and put touches of love and attention into the game. This looks and feels like a shoe-string game held together by shoe-string on a shoe-string budget. I would like to see this game be remade though if it was ever possible. The Bretons are my favorite race in TES, High-Rock was always interesting to me, and the game’s lore and setting is still good. The world does not, and should not be so large, and the story needs to be presented to the character in a better manner.

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