Daggerfall Unity might be the most grateful I've been for a piece of software. Daggerfall is such a lovely and realized fantasy-life sim imbued with enjoyable dungeon crawling and incredible scale! It still stands as one of the few games that evokes the sensation of being a small, insignificant inhabitant of a vast world and lets you make your own story. This flavor of game hasn't ever been replicated, even by it's own successors. It's such a relief for it to have a feature complete and accessible port after all this time.

Even more heartwarming than the unity port is the plethora of mods that followed! Daggerfall's promise of a massive world was more than fufilled, but said world is kind of empty and a little shallow. If you visit the nexus page, you'll find dozens of projects to decorate, terraform, and liven up the Iliac Bay and they're all pretty easy to install too! I don't know, it just brightens my eyes to see so much excitement for a game that felt completely left behind by it's successors.

Play Daggerfall!

An improvement over The Elder Scrolls: Arena in every way, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is an entertaining game, but not at all what I expected.

Before I played this game, I had heard how it boasted the largest video game map, equivalent to the size of the UK. I also heard how much possibility this game offered you in your playstyle, with a deep character system and a larger variety of content. However, I found this game to primarily be a dungeon crawler with HEAVY procedural generation, and it has very little in common with the games that popularized The Elder Scrolls, starting with Morrowind.

Although understandable for the age of the game and its ambitious scope, I found the procedural content, particularly the quests and the ridiculously large and complex dungeons, to be uninteresting and at times frustrating. Also, being an old game, there are a lot of difficult and straight up broken mechanics that necessitate cheating to get through it. And despite the game having quite a lot of complex systems for its time, a lot of it is not fully functional due to the amount of cut content, from what I've seen.

While the most talked-about aspects of the game didn't hit for me quite as hard as most other people, I still appreciate the heck out of this game. It's got a great vibe with its music and environments. It's got a surprising amount of interesting loot, from weapon types to magical artifacts. Most surprising of all, it has great lore that carries forward to the other Elder Scrolls games, such as characters and events that are still referenced in the series today. This is a very ambitious game for its time and it's impossible to not see that.

Like I said with Arena, Daggerfall is a must play for fans of The Elder Scrolls series who want to see how the series evolved over time. However, unless you have literally nothing else to play, I wouldn't recommend spending too much time with this game as most of it is procedural and lacks the handcrafted care that later titles are known for.