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).