The Elder Scrolls II Daggerfall: What is the appeal of this game

[5545Trey]

Seriously, what is the appeal of a buggy, glitchy, difficulty unplayable game? I first play Daggerfall back in 2012, I was used to what it threw at me in terms of difficulty and combat, but the size of each dungeon and the many bugs and glitches that I would encounter every 30 seconds was just ridiculous. I never even came close to finishing the story due to how obviously rushed the game was (By the way, I would appreciate it if someone would tell me about the story. At this point, I do not even care about spoilers). It boggles my mind that people consider this to be the best entry in the franchise, I even enjoy Skyrim and Oblivion more than this garbage. The whole series is just stale and bland, and Morrowind is the only Elder Scrolls game that I can really enjoy, despite not having my attacks registered when the skill level for the weapon I am using is close to 100 and my agility is also very high.

 

[Gizmojunk]

I thought most [rational ] people considered Morrowind the best... But size and scope can add value sometimes. I have it installed, but I don't recall if I played it long enough to make it out of the first house. I think it lost credibility with me one time when I was watching a let's-play of it, and the guy was looting apartments, and got mauled by a tiger.

Overall, I would assume that the appeal of the TES franchise is, and has always been the world simulation... the simplistic ~but not so simple~ maintenance of a virtual fantasy world that lets the player pretend to be in it without too much effort on their part.

**Sadly... they tried the same crap with the Fallout IP, and so that's all we got.

 

[woo1108]

I think it's far better world simulator than oblivion or skyrim.
it has bigger world, bigger and non-linear dungeon, better enchant system, bank(+ weight of gold and check), better faction system, better rule.

bugs are really annoying but I don't think it's not important.
I have bunch of painful memories by bugs.
sometimes, I spent hours for nothing thanks to bugs(ex: quest target is inside of wall!).
but that doesn't make a game bad game because there are many way to avoid or prevent bugs.


Deep dungeon and spooky sounds makes adventure more exciting.
most dungeons are randomly generated and the mechanism of generating dungeon is much better than oblivion's(there are only 5 or 4 pattern in oblivion). even the dungeon is patternized, it takes lots of time to feel it before that every dungeon feel different.
after Daggerfall, dungeon became shorter and boring.
actually, Morrowind have some great dungeon and oblivion also have good dungeons(but both of them also have lazy dungeons) .
but compare to Daggerfall, their dungeon is just small caves.

mechanism of world is crude but feel more like real world compare to sequels.
there are factions which you can join, each factions has relationships with other factions, you can promote by your afforts, each factions have it's own services, etc. those systems are simplified at Morrowind, and taxidermied at oblivion and disappeared at skyrim.
and for money, Daggerfall is only game to give weight to gold.
since the golds are heavy, using bank is nessacery.
if you want to spent huge amount of gold, you can use check instead of bag of golds to do that.

in short, Daggerfall better dungeon and system compare to other TES series.


one thing I hate at Daggerfall is poor level scaling.
after level 14, there are tons of Vampire ancients who can kill me in 1 second.
and it is hard to find other weaker enemies.

 

[ZeusComplex]

Back around 2010, I challenged my self. The goal: Play every TES game (at that time) back to back in order to just see how they stacked up to each other. I failed, and it's this game's fault.

Seriously, I just don't get the appeal for this title.

Arena, while dated, was a fun dungeon romp that brought back memories of playing games like Eye of the Beholder. It was interesting to see how little lore Tamriel had at the time (human khajiit anyone?) and it was cool to see the proto versions of areas like Morrowind. The Arena version of Labyrinthian is miles better than the Skyrim version. I was in love with the dungeon delving and how tense and even scary it could be. Tough difficulty made the experience even sweeter. I didn't mind the class system either.

Daggerfall? Probably the best character system of the entire series. Almost everything else was just...meh? I feel like I could of enjoyed it better if it wasn't for one major flaw. I despise the map. Never before have I played a game who's map made it nigh impossible to navigate the dungeons. Trust me, this is a game that you need reliable maps for. This is probably the fault of the pregen dungeons and how they are built completely out of one tileset, with massive ramps or declines around every corner. Dungeons are a mess of rooms loosely connected together, and, save for Privateer's Hold, make no logical sense in their constructing. Oh the game had a wonderful faction system, a bad ass spell system, and a cool pen and paper feeling, but the dungeons just soured it for me. To this day, I keep telling myself that I am going to finish it, but when I boot it up, I remember why I dislike it so much. A pity, really. I feel like I'm missing out on a classic.

 

[Hassknecht]

The dungeons are really terrible. Built like a level from Descent, but longer and even more convoluted.

 

[woo1108]

A dungeon is criticised because it's too complex...
someone said " Genre of dungeon RPG is dead" I think he's right.

 

[Hassknecht]

The dungeons aren't bad because they're complex, they're bad because they're random. Quite literally random. Of course Daggerfall needed to fall back on random generation because of its incredible scale (still pretty much unbeaten to this day), but the dungeons just don't fit in very well into the game world. Daggerfall doesn't want to be a dungeon crawler, it wants to be an epic quest- and story-driven RPG. However, Daggerfall bit off way too much to swallow: You can't put in 750000 fully written NPCs. You can't fill a world twice the size of Great Britain with fleshed out dungeons and proper locations, so you fill the world with randomness. This limits the amount of quests you can give. So almost all the quests in Daggerfall are dungeon-crawls.
The problem is that Daggerfall is halfway between a classic dungeon-crawler and a more modern RPG. With the classic Rogue-like dungeon crawlers one didn't need a story. It was all about the action and the dungeons. They didn't need to make sense, because nobody gave a shit about the world. Daggerfall on the other hand tried to build a world with stories and factions and all that jazz. You are made to care about the world with quite a lot of lore and fluff, with complex rules right out of table top RPGs. But the gameplay is mostly dungeon-crawls, and it's hard to suspend your disbelief when you walk through a dungeon the size of an average city below a tiny ruin in the middle of nowhere, especially when the dungeon is laid out in a way no sane being would ever build anything. At its core Daggerfall remained a dungeon-crawler, but there's just too much around it to fully enjoy it for what it is. Daggerfall wants you to play it for its story, not for the dungeons. But it gives you nothing but dungeons.
Simply put, Daggerfall was way ahead of its time. Actually, I think its time is still not here, considering there's still no other RPG or other game (that I know of, adn that isn't an MMO) that has an actual full-scale game world.

 

[woo1108]

While dungeons of Daggerfall is randomly generated, it has it's own pattern.
if you learn the pattern of dungeon, it's just long dark passages.
although auto map is horribly created, dungeon itself are not so bad.
and as a tradition of TES, main quest dungeons are actually good.

 

[.Pixote.]

I can only imagine the dungeons are built by algorithm, can't some bright spark just rewrite the algorithm.