I've been playing now for a few hours, but I have decided to give up. It's confusing, hard, horrible NPC interaction, difficult quests that I can't complete, etc etc etc... I can't even complete the opening quest to the thives guild because I can't open the bloddy door. The guards are always chasing me for no apparant reason. Criminal conspiracy my ass.

Can somebody please tell me how they were able to enjoy this mess.

Heh, you're partially right. It does have a lot of annoying features, but the game really comes into its own once you start dungeon crawling

I'd argue that dungeon crawling in Daggerfall is pretty horrendous. The dungeons seem to literally have no variety between them and are unnecessarily long and labyrinthine. Some people may be fine with that and may prefer the large labyrinths of Daggerfall to that of newer Bethesda games and others may hate it.


To the OP, if you don't enjoy the game, you shouldn't force it. I know I may get scolded for this, but I'll just say I fully understand why Bethesda moved away from Daggerfall-style games and Daggerfall literally is an unfinished, unpolished, buggy mess (not just my opinion, but a fact of the game's short and seemingly rushed development) stemming from overly ambitious plans out of which some of us just manage to salvage some or a lot of enjoyment. :shrug:

Hey now, it may be unfinished, unpolished, and buggy, but a mess? That's going too far. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is a mess; Daggerfall, despite all the problems ("Hey guys, we don't need the main quest working the DAY we put the game out, do we?") got a lot of good reviews when it came out, and the playable parts and the scope of the ambition made up for a lot of the bugs.

To the OP, Daggerfall might not be right for you, and there's no reason to desperately try to like something you don't like. I don't know how much time I've wasted watching movies I'm "supposed" to like and struggling in vain to get much out of them. However, I think you might be approaching the game from the wrong angle. The design philosophy behind Daggerfall was "play through your mistakes"; getting owned by everything in the early stages is part of the fun. Unlike the other games, you can fail things as much as you want (except in the main quest) and the game goes on. I think I had the game for around two weeks before I successfully finished a quest (I might have been a little remedial in that regard), but for me simply surviving the monstrous dungeons was a big part of the game's appeal. The way the game makes you feel like you're a very small, insignificant part of the world, and the level of challenge in the early going, is probably my favorite part about the whole thing. Plus you've got an intriguing political storyline, excellent character creation, banks, books, boats, wagons, horses, houses, a nearly infinite number of cities and dungeons, werewolves and vampires (with quests), daedra summoning, and all sorts of other crazy nonsense. It's like they threw every idea anyone ever had for a CRPG into a blender and put the gooey, gelatinous results on a CD.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

Yes and no. Daggerfall really is my favorite game, but I've always seen it a lot like those old silent movies where the people try to fly ridiculous airplanes. Back when I played Daggerfall with my friends many years ago, we actually started using the word "Bethesda" as slang for well meaning but seriously flawed efforts. Like "I didn't get home until 3:30 last night, so I had to go Bethesda on my History essay."

When you've spent 15 years loving a game, you learn to laugh at it.

Now there's something I haven't seen on the forums before. A new definition for Bethesda, eh?