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.

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 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 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.