How good is it, I heard Arena was very hard.
I want to know because I'm downloading it.
Is the game play fun, are the controls easy, does it get progressively hard as you go on?

I'd still rate it among my favorite games ever though in some regards it hasn't aged too gracefully : graphics, dungeons that were of a size totally unheard of in later games but can get at times just freaking too HUGE and random, a world that's pretty generic medieval fantasy fare compared to the exotic brilliance and detail of Morrowind.

Daggerfall isn't excessively hard. Do be warned however that, exactly like in Arena, character classes whether stock or self-created, are not equal and do act as an unnofficial difficulty setting. The easiest and no-brainer one is probably some variant of Spellsword (heavy armor, some weapon of choice to deal most of the damage, restorative/protective/utilitarian spells).

For the controls : They're decent, some more recent games like World of Warcraft have improved upon that but they're OK. Beside the basics like not standing dumbly in ennemy fire or smack in the middle of places where you'll be surrounded, the default game doesn't rely excessively on player reflexes anyway. There's a slider at the beginning of each game if you want to make the game more nervy or relaxed, though a number people just tweak their dosbox speed nowadays I'd guess.

For the gameplay... huh... I suppose you could say it's a tad clunky by modern standard. The real attraction of the game is in the sheer size of the world, epic main quest that you can however just ignore very soon to roam freely, the number of things you can do or discover about the game.

For progressive difficulty, random opponents' level is roughly adjusted to your own, and *most* quest-giving is tiered according to character rank within the organization giving them (and his skill and experience to some degree), but the game definitely doesn't babypark you totally, so you should know when to turn down that lich-hunting quest at level 7, or flee / work around some problem ennemies or areas.

Daggerfall dungeon crawling follows similar ideas used to design rogue likes. Sometimes there's an enemy with a level high above the player so you have to flee sometimes and find an alternative path. There's always a treasure room that gives a very good weapon or magic item that you can only obtain in stores after raising 5 or more levels. At level 7 i found a daedric tanto once but had to explore a big dungeon fully. There's also hidden parts that can only be accessed solving puzzle levers or finding the right pit to climb and the main quest dungeons are usually very interesting with huge dungeon sections.

This is a hell good game the controls you can set yourself in the pause menu gameplay is good but it takes ages to level up, (im only level 3 and i have had Daggerfall for two months or so) anyway download this, it might take a long time to sort out because dosbox is a very confusing tool.

Benoede I totally do not agree with you. But I suppose I'm more into modern games like Oblivion. I don't like Arena either. My brother tells me it's because I like graphics more than gameplay... But he's wrong. I do like gameplay. It's just that Arena and Daggerfall aren't the games for me... :nope:

If it takes that long to level up you might find it easier to make a character that levels more easily. You could also train some more of your primary or major skills. I've had Daggerfall installed for roughly the same amount of time and I'm about level 15 or so.

Yeah i was like only raiding tombs and such and found out about quest dungeons and i was like OMG this is massive got to level 4 yesterday W00T