The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is an action-adventure game where players embark on a thrilling adventure across over 160,000 square kilometers of land. The story revolves around court intrigue, with players choosing different factions to join and trigger various main and side quests. Players can use different weapons and skills to fight various enemies and monsters, defeating them to advance the plot and lead to different endings. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall also incorporates roguelike elements, where players will encounter completely different terrains and enemies while exploring dungeons, providing even more challenges.

Features:

Legendary Scope in Tamriel: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall stands as a landmark in open-world RPGs. Released in 1996, this installment sets players loose in the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell, offering one of the largest virtual worlds ever created, with a map stretching over 161,000 square kilometers. The game’s procedural generation ensures nearly endless towns, dungeons, and wilderness, creating a sense of exploration rarely matched even decades later.

Player Choice and Narrative Depth: Players assume the role of a custom avatar sent by Emperor Uriel Septim VII. The central questline involves court intrigue and supernatural mysteries, but how one approaches the story is up to them. Multiple factions, such as guilds, knightly orders, and covens, can be joined. The reputation system affects interactions and endings, with various moral paths and political stances available. Decisions made during both main and side quests can result in multiple endings, encouraging replayability.

Extensive Character Customization: Daggerfall’s character creation is exceptionally detailed. Players select from numerous races and backgrounds, or create custom classes by distributing skill points and assigning attributes such as magic abilities, starting spells, or equipment restrictions. Advancement occurs through skill use, a core feature of the Elder Scrolls series. The game offers a deep spell maker and enchanting system, giving substantial control over play style.

Legacy and Modern Playability: The game’s influence is apparent in later Elder Scrolls titles. Interest in Daggerfall has been revived by community efforts, such as the Daggerfall Unity project, which modernizes engine compatibility and enables high-resolution visuals and quality-of-life enhancements.

Highlights:

Numerous Quests: In this game, you have more than a few unique quests or missions. All of these missions are quite amazing and will test all of your skills. With each mission or quest, you can encounter new challenges and obstacles, which you have to tackle with all your fighting or stealth skills. The dungeon quests are very thrilling as the entire gameplay is based on these missions.

Build a City: As you are the warriors of your Emperor in the game, you have to take care of everything in the absence of the emperor. When you go into exile, the entire city has been ruined and it’s your duty to rebuild the city to its former glory. There are more than a few elements to help you rebuild the entire city to the empire and use it as your operational dungeon base.

Arena Battles: If you are tired of completing the difficult levels, then the Arena battles are for your help. With one-on-one Arena battles with random players from all over the world, you will have the ultimate fun. This is nothing but the showdown of your base and the skills. Also, you can invite your friends to join the arena and have battles with them.

Character Customization: The main characters in this game have quite a personality. Fortunately, there is the option for character customization, which provides a better experience. You can adjust all of the facial features, weapons, costumes, and many other things about the characters to make them look any way you want.

Strategies:

Pay Attention To Extra Character Details: Unlike most sequels that focus primarily on Attributes and Skills, Daggerfall does offer unique character “traits” that players can tinker with for both character and some mechanical effects. For instance, it may be recommended for Advantages to be set as expertise in the primary weapon type as well as “Increased Magery” to boost spell capacity. Likewise, Disadvantages could be set to Disease and Poison, so players have an easier time getting specific potions to counter these ailments.

The Mouse Is A Friend: Whereas the other Elder Scrolls games will have players attack with a click of the mouse, Daggerfall tried to be more creative on the immersion front. By the time players get into the game, they may want to alter the Controls. Under the Mouse setting, press Mouse Look so the game performs more similarly to other modern Bethesda titles.Not only that, but players need to remember that this time around, Daggerfall needs players to literally swing with the mouse in order to swing the sword. Bottom-Top is the easiest but weakest to do, whereas Top-Bottom is the strongest but hardest to pull off. Diagonals are stronger but much harder to connect. In turn, players are recommended to practice the neutral Horizontal direction slice instead.

Manipulate Distance In Combat: Given the rather primitive graphics and processing power the game uses, it’s no wonder combat can get a bit slow for players used to more fast-paced modern FPS titles. However, they can actually use this to their advantage in combat. As players notice, enemies have to walk towards them first and then stand before making an attack. It’s when enemies do this “combat pose” that players can quickly pace two steps backward and make enemies lose their momentum.Players can use this attack method to their advantage. For instance, since creatures need to pause on corners before turning, players can lure them to corners and attack while they’re stuck. In open spaces, players can outpace an enemy and then strafe to its side while maintaining eye contact, making it easier to attack them safely.

Get Access To Spells ASAP: The reason why it’s recommended for players to take Destruction and Restoration as part of their Primary and Major Skills is for easier access to the Mages Guild. When entering a major city like Aldingwall or Chesterwark, players can press the “R” and “Loiter A While” to make sure they’re in the area between 6:00 and 11:00, which is the time Mages Guilds are open in cities.

Player Comments:

How do you even properly review/rate daggerfall? How do you even review/rate real life?It's a medieval fantasy life-sim with all the cool and annoying parts of said medieval fantasy life-sim like becoming a reputable faction member and buying a house but also loans and kingdom politics. It will be painful at times, beautiful at others, frustrating and unforgiving always. It sucks I hate it but I also dont and its really cool (just like real life woah).I give it overdue loans out of 10.

Don't trust my steam play time. I first played this game in 1996 on windows 95 and between that and Daggerfall Unity I've put over 1,000 hours on this game over 3 decades. I just recently configured the game to launch from Steam. Daggerfall is my personal comfort game and I find playing it oddly soothing. I just love to zen out and slice through one dungeon after another. This game has a mood that has yet to be captured by anything else.I wouldn't recommend the DOS version due to the jank and low draw distance, but it is playable. Daggerfall Unity is my go to now and the game is much more accessable to a modern audience, especially with mods. Some elements are dated, just go in with an open mind and remember to save as often as possible. Remember, quick save is F9 and quick load is F11.

Don't be intimidated by the fact that a bat just murdered you in cold blood for no reason, or that there's a screeching skeleton chasing you around or even that you opened a door just to end up meeting face to face with a bear, because once you make it out of that first dungeon and step out into the world of Daggerfall, you'll probably be even more intimidated by the fact you just opened the map and that there's now a landmass the size of Great Britain for you to traverse, so you should probably read the manual, just so you don't get lost any further. All that aside, Daggerfall is an extremely ambitious game, not only for it's time, but even for the current scope of the game industry, it's like playing the developing pipe dream of a very imaginative team, with ideas so avant-garde, that it makes the game unlike any other you'll ever experience. While at times it shows itself to be too big for it's britches and ultimately lacking some polish, there's no two ways about this, it's a must play if you're an Elder Scrolls fan, not only for the game but getting to see the birthplace of a ton of lore is always a fun thing to do, and also a must play if you're into old soulful games made in an era where love for what you were doing came first and anything else came second.

Final Verdict:

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is an iconic action RPG computer game developed by Bethesda Softworks and released in 1996 for the MS-DOS platform. This is the sequel to the famous The Elder Scrolls: Arena and the second part of the legendary The Elder Scrolls series, which continues to delight gamers with its vast world and incredible freedom of action.