Daggerfall

Daggerfall is the seccond Elder Scrolls game. It came out in 1996 and although some may feel the grapics are dated I personally love those cruncy pixels.

Warning before you play, unless you turn player nudity off in Daggerfall unity, you will see topless women. Pixelated they may be, safe for work they are not. However, if you turn off player nudity you will be unable to access certain quests and certain enemies will not appear.

Anyway, that aside Daggerfall takes place in an expansive world that cotains hundreds of locations. The easiest way to show this scale is via the screenshots below.

How big is Daggerfall?

This is a street in a town. Here you will find NPC's who will be rude to you, various animals, wells, statues and wagons.

This is a map of the town. Temples, knightly orders and guilds are shown in blue, shops in red and inns in green. Houses, castles and walls in brown. The colours can be changed in the Daggerfall unity menus for accessability or asthetic needs. As you find places they become labelled.

This is a map of Daggerfall showing all towns. Dungeons, homes and temples are filtered out.

This is a map of the world and each country contains hundreds of towns, dungeons and temples.

Daggerfall is big. The dungeons are also sprawling labyrinths of procedurally generated rooms. Infact, much of the game world is generated this way, which is what allows the game to be so big in the first place.

Character building

There are many options for classes and skills in Daggerfall. The Unoffical Elder Scrolls Pages has a good guide. And there are also many skills, again the UESP has a good guide to this.

But beyond mechanics Daggerfall's class system and skill system are designed to facilitate role-playing. For example your character's history is detemined by answering questions about their background.

Also, you will be spending more time than you think choosing clothes for your character. You can also ajust the clothes more extensively than other scrolls games. Shirts can be tucked in, cloaks can have their hoods pulled up and down, over-jackets can be taken off and on. There's also quite a few clothing colours to pick from as well.

Tips to play Daggerfall.

• Daggerfall is hard. You will likely die a lot in the first dungeon before you find your feet.
• You aren't supposed to be able to kill every enemy in the first dungeon.
• Make a new save for any side quests in the case you bite off more than you can chew.
• If using unity, turn on smaller dungeons.
• If you're low level you aren't ready to dungeon crawl.
• You will want healing or restoration as a minor or major skill.

Daggerfall puts the 'R' in RPG. It also doesn't hold your hand and spoon feed you quests and plot which for me is a nice change. Skyrim felt far too easy, it thought I wasn't even competent enough to find a book in a room without a quest marker. The story felt like it was rushing you along whereas Daggerfall lets you take things at your own pace. It is also nice to not be the most important person in the game world, because it feels like the world exists outside of the players actions.

Now I have got into it I also really enjoy the combat. You can't just whack things repeatedly with a sword , you have to actually use tactics and decide if this is a fight you can win or not. It is a steep difficulty curve but it is more satisfying than feeling like you're fighting cotton candy, which is a problem I have with Skyrim at times.

You can download the game direct from Bethesda but will need an emulator. Or you can download from Steam. I strongly advise using Daggerfall Unity as it will improve the gameplay and allow for mods.