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.