Unplayable nowadays.
Quest repeats
gameplay repeats
dungeon repeats
only plus is open world is LARGE even look today.

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, released in 1996, was a groundbreaking RPG for its time, boasting a colossal open world that was revolutionary for its era. While it laid the foundation for the iconic Elder Scrolls series, it comes with both commendable strengths and notable weaknesses.

One of Daggerfall's most impressive aspects is the sheer scale of its game world. Covering a staggering 62,000 square miles, it offers an unparalleled sense of exploration and freedom. The procedural generation of cities and dungeons adds to the sense of vastness, ensuring that no two playthroughs are exactly alike. The scope of this ambitious undertaking is undoubtedly commendable.

The character creation and role-playing mechanics in Daggerfall are also noteworthy. Players have the freedom to shape their characters' backgrounds, selecting from a wide range of races, classes, and skills, providing countless possibilities for customizing the hero's journey.

Moreover, the depth of lore and world-building in Daggerfall is exemplary, with rich storytelling and immersive quests that keep players engaged for hours on end. The political intrigue, factions, and various storylines contribute to a captivating experience, especially for those who appreciate intricate narratives.

On the other hand, Daggerfall's vastness and procedural generation come at a price. The game's graphics, even by 1996 standards, are outdated and lack the polish seen in modern RPGs. The massive game world can also lead to a daunting and often confusing experience for new players, who may feel lost or overwhelmed without clear direction.

Furthermore, Daggerfall suffers from numerous bugs and technical issues that were prevalent in games of its time. Although understandable given the era's limitations, these technical shortcomings can hinder the overall enjoyment of the game.


TL;DR: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is a pioneering RPG with an enormous open world, offering freedom and exploration. Customizable character creation and rich lore contribute to a captivating experience. However, outdated graphics, technical issues, and lack of guidance may deter some modern players. A classic gem for RPG enthusiasts interested in gaming history.

It's definitely an improvement over Arena, but I still hate the time limit in quests. This game's story missions for some reason are scrambled to the point where you can choose one of 3 quests but if you accidentally choose the one that is supposed to be the ending, RIP the other two and it was very frustrating. The story is just royal families drama for the most part, which I'm never a fan of. Nonetheless, I appreciate how the ending part of the game deviates from that and how the endings were acknowledged in later entries. Overall; it's ok. The gameplay is great and enjoyable once it clicks with you, but the story.. idk it never clicked with me lol

Do yourself a favor and play this with the Unity version because you CAN get softlocked due to random generation.

The main gameplay loop in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is the same as The Elder Scrolls: Arena, which is dungeon crawling. But unlike Arena, Daggerfall's loop can still be enjoyed, especially if you're using the Daggerfall Unity mod.

That said, the first dungeon is ruthless and requires either min-maxing at character creation or avoiding mobs altogether (there are imps that you literally can't damage with equipment you can find in said dungeon) which I thought was really weird.

The biggest issue of Daggerfall is that the randomly generated dungeons are many times broken. The first quest I took to go to a dungeon gave me a broken dungeon where I couldn't complete the quest, which I only found out after being there for hours and clearing it out completely. This can be very frustrating and I feel like this would've been a good game even to this day if the procedural generation was more robust. Which it isn't.

Daggerfall is, in the grand scheme of things, fairly middling, and solves very few of the problems Arena had. The combat is still stiff, the automatically generated dungeons and landscapes make exploration feel tame and pointless yet again, and many mechanics still feel included purely for quantity's sake, which is not great. There is one massive improvement that really helped mitigate the damages the stiff gameplay caused thoguh, and that's the added control options, allowing for easy rebinding of keys and adjusting the game to look and feel way better. The map screen is also way better.

While the interaction part of the game has eged rather poorly, Daggerfall is actually not bad as an excercise in worldbuilding. Unlike the first game, the world exists and breathes outside of the main quest. There are different factions to interact with, history books to read, and a more dynamic core story that makes everything feel just slighty more cohesive and thought through. A lot of it is still very dry, but I can applaud the effort. However, all the design flaws largely make these things more fun to think about than actually play through, and it doesn't help that the game frequently breaks down and refuses to let you advance, requiring one to google the right console commands. The game is overall a less miserable experience than its predecessor, but that's largely by default.

The Elder Scrolls II Daggerfall is a vast improvement over its predecessor, Daggerfall takes everything that worked in Arena and improves it. The towns of Daggerfall now feel like actual locations, with distinct landmarks and layouts that actually make a lick of sense, the map for these towns is also much more useful, with NPCs helping out to find locations in a less random manner. The main quest line is now a completely non-linear adventure with the plot being more about discovery than going through points A to B, this makes the game much more replayable than Arena by default. The world itself is now actually explorable, as the towns are all connected in one giant world, however, similarly to Arena, the (now not so) endless void between towns is entirely pointless and can be completely ignored by using fast travel.

The gameplay itself is also vastly improved upon, your movement options have expanded to allow better stealth mechanics, climbing, and more thought-out platforming/jumping. Alongside this the dungeons are completely overhauled, gone are the flat, layer-by-layer dungeons of Arena, now we have randomly generated sprawling dungeons with tunnels and paths intersecting layers, going up and down and all around at all times, huge open halls to explore and endless corridors of secrets to uncover. The only downside to this is some minor sidequests can lead to these gigantic dungeons, but in moderation, these dungeons are a blast.

The soundtrack for this game takes a lot of tracks from Arena, and remixes/expands upon them along with adding quite a few of its own original tracks, all of which set a great tone to the game, along with just sounding great.

For my playthrough I decided to be a Mage this time around, the default classes in Daggerfall leave a lot to be desired and do not particularly suit any playstyle so its best to simply create a custom class. The spells in Daggerfall are once again, great, with some more op spells removed, such as passwall. Rather than simply buying spells, you have the option to make your own, which is awesome, but also makes buying spells totally obsolete, as you can simply create all your spells to your liking. There is also now a better enchanting system, with passive enchants, use on enchants, etc. building off Arenas enchantments which were simply spells attached to items, this system is near game-breaking but is fun for late game. There is also an alchemy system, with ingredients you collect throughout the game, but I personally didn't even touch this mechanic as I had spells to cover me rather than potion effects.

The main issue I have seen discussed about Daggerfall, is the aforementioned giant dungeons, but also the unstableness/bugs of the original release, for that reason I opted to use the Unity remake of Daggerfall for my playthrough, and due to the apparent glitchy nature of the original, I would advise this version be the definitive version, as it is a feature complete remake, simply with more optimisation and options.

Daggerfall is a fantastic sequel and a great game, the seeds that were planted for the Elder Scrolls series in Arena are beginning to grow in Daggerfall and it was a pleasure to revisit this piece in Elder Scrolls history.

certainly has a lot more going for it in sheer content (stuff like guilds, temples, etc.) and is closer to being an actual RPG when compared to Arena, yet for all its improvements it is still mired in familiar shitty labyrinthine dungeon non-design (seriously, they're largely just procgen prefabs duct-taped together!) and tedium the extent of which i am hoping is not defining of the Elder Scrolls series beyond the first 2 (3? 4? Battlespire? Redguard?) games. combat is joker-laughably superior, having enemies which generally don't have 1 tick delay attack speed (even if they still one-shot you) and letting you rest largely uninterrupted. new to the series in this entry is an often bullshit main quest that either breaks or is so obscure that the devs (and Todd?) are practically asking you to purchase the strategy guide (or, in modern times, look up the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages). overall just Arena but nontrivially superior, which is an incredibly low bar. an interesting piece of history. sorry for all the parentheticals.

Daggerfall sem duvidas é um jogo extremamente superior ao Arena, mas não quer dizer que é ótimo, é divertido, as mecânicas das dungeons, loot, as armas, a exploração do mapa ENORME, o jogo é repleto de mecânicas, só que muitas não são boas. O combate é estranho, a possibilidade de acertar um inimigo ou não é aleatória, dungeons são meio confusas e grandes demais, as quests são confusas, o jogo da leves travadas, um dia eu ainda jogo a versão Unity que dizem ser melhor, ate então, uma vez ou outra eu volto pra jogar um pouco de Daggerfall.

Mas se você gosta de um bom e velho RPG RAIZ, eu te recomendo a versão da Unity, Daggerfall é extremamente fiel ao um RPG de mesa.

The scale of this game and the fact that basically everything outside of story dungeons and certain locations is randomly generated for each playthrough is absolutely insane, but that leads to a lot of weird dungeon layouts. It feels more Elder Scrollsy than Arena did with more books, a bunch of different factions that have relationships with each other (even if they basically all serve the same purpose as randomized quest givers) and retroactively being one of the weirdest games in the series narratively thanks to its Numidium-powered reality warping shenanigans. Sometimes the dungeons can be downright noneuclidian in their design, but overall a fun time and easier to get into than Arena. I would recommend checking out Daggerfall Unity instead of trying to play the original through DOSBox, though.