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.

i like the idea of daggerfall. enough so that i've tried playing it numerous times, keen on trying to understand what its most fervent enjoyers find so magical about it. i've always come out of it feeling like, well, the time i might have appreciated this game has long passed me by. or even more accurately, that time has never truly existed and likely never will. i was playing chrono trigger, quake, and super mario 64 while a much nerdier friend of mine pretty much only cared about daggerfall (so much so that he sold me his fairly new playstation with a handful of games like resident evil and king's field really cheaply). given that i still love the games i found more interesting back then—especially when most of the praise i see for it nowadays is "it's very, very big and full of endless copy-pasted npcs who give you the dullest quests imaginable" or perhaps "tits"—it's ever more difficult for me to imagine an alternate timeline where i switched places with my friend.

so, again: the core idea of daggerfall really appeals to me. a vast, open world with enormous and labyrinthine underground crypts full of screaming skeletons. crude 3d environments with even cruder prerendered sprites. let's go. but then it becomes clear just how empty it is both spatially and in terms of character. morrowind is a fucking revelation compared to this. morrowind is one of my very favorite games. daggerfall, though... it's practically a barebones prototype (and i'll grant it due credit there) for what would become an actual game with an actual soul and vision. if you were to ask me: play ultima underworld instead of this monumental time-waster and then skip ahead to morrowind (perhaps stopping along the way for deus ex, arx fatalis, etc).

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.

A really interesting specimen of a dungeon crawler, especially with the procedural generation of 88,745 square miles of land. It can be very unforgiving at times (especially in the early stages of the game), but there is a lot of room for creativity with character builds and custom spells, etc. It's super interesting to go back and play especially if you're a Skyrim or Oblivion fan. A huge amount of the lore started to show itself in this game, as well as some familiar faces. It might be worth a play for some people just for that fact. Otherwise, if you're into mid 90s dungeon crawlers, this is basically a must. If you are thinking of playing it, PLEASE play Daggerfall Unity rather than a DOS version of this game. It's a fantastic port with years of development and a cultivated modding community. It's an experience in and of itself! There's a page on Backloggd for it if you're curious!

Daggerfall has some excellent atmosphere, just the right amount of 90's DOS stink that I'm a sucker for. Frankly, the combat is whack and not very fun, but I'm willing to put up with it to a point. There's a lot of cool features and freedom, but very quickly the game starts to boil down to endless dungeon crawling bookended by dialogue boxes.

The dungeons themselves aren't very fun or interesting for the most part - A few manage to stick out, but almost all overstay their welcome by a long shot. Had i grown up with this game when it was new, I could see it taking up most of my free-time, but the more modern Elder Scrolls games are simply more fun to play.

I played the Unity port, but am writing my review on this version; While the Unity port makes this game more accessible than ever, I want to assess the game design and not so much the technology behind it. About 20 hours was spent in this game.