User:TigerBlazer/sandbox/1

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, or also simply known as Daggerfall, is a role-playing game developed by Bethesda Softworks and Flashpoint Productions as part of the Elder Scrolls series. It is the sequel to 1994's The Elder Scrolls: Arena. The game follows the player character in the High Rock and Hammerfell regions of Tamriel on a quest to free the ghost of King Lysandus. The game is notable for having much more complex mechanics than it's predecessor and having one of the largest game worlds on record. It released on September 20, 1996 to a positive reception from critics, and won several awards, including "Role-Playing Game of the Year" from CGW. It was made freeware along with Arena in 2009, and an official release of the fan-made Unity port was put onto the digital store GOG.com on June 15, 2022.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) As detailed more below, while many of it's idea work against Daggerfall as often as they make the game work for it, the main thing that Daggerfall has that many RPGs before or since it's release don't is the large scope and ambition behind the entire game.
 * 2) One of the largest open worlds ever created for a video game. The game has a a combination of around 15,000 towns, cities, dungeons, locations of interest stretched across over 200,000 square kilometers of land and sea on a 1:1 scale, together with a population of over 750,000 across the whole game. Putting all that together, this means that the world of Daggerfall is almost equal to the size of the entire country of Great Britain, which not only is huge by today's standards, but was nigh impossible to accomplish given the technology at the time of 1996.
 * 3) * While the game doesn't cover the entire continent of Tamriel like it's predecessor did, it also makes the game more focused from a lore and location perspective. The smaller land mass allowed the developers to truly develop the two regions covered much more than any of the providence's of Arena, thanks to the large amount of books and information given through gameplay that makes these worlds feel much more lived in by comparison.
 * 4) Quite possibly the most deep character creation and progression ever put into a game in The Elder Scrolls, and one of the most complex for an RPG in general.
 * 5) *While not the biggest part, the player is able to select any of the provinces of Tamriel to chose their race, each of which will give them a different ability (Argonians can breathe underwater longer, Nords have better resistance to cold, etc) that'll give you an edge in a small aspect of the gameplay.
 * 6) *The player will have 3 different options for class generation. One where they will answer questions to determine their class based on their answers, one where they chose from the eighteen classes given to them, and the last option being creating your own class from scratch. No matter what you get, you'll end up with a set of primary, major, and minor skills from the 35 different skills the player can pursue in, and each set will give the player a varying degree of extra skill in the ones chosen/given. For example, the Barbarian class has primary skills in Blunt Weapon, Long Blade, and Axe (which make them the most skilled in those skills), while the skills they have assigned for major and minor still give them an advantage, but not as large. Any other remaining skills will start very low with a small amount of edge depending on attributes given (see below).
 * 7) **One other area of the class generation, whether it's custom or pre-determined, is that each class will have advantages and disadvantages and starting health, all of which will not only affect how difficult some areas of the game are for the player, but also determine how often they level up and progress their character further. In essence, a character with more advantages and higher starting health will level up much slower than a character with low health and more disadvantages. This puts an extra layer of planning for how often you want to advance your stats while keeping yourself highly skilled enough to survive the brutal first hours of the game.
 * 8) *The most unique feature of character creation that has since been lost to the series is producing a background for the character that will determine their place in the world, as well as affecting their skill-set slightly. You can chose a background that best suits your character, or create your own for more creative control. If the latter is chosen, you'll be asked questions about your character's background ("As a child, your nickname was ___." and "Since childhood, you have saved ___.") to what your relations with denizens in the world are ("What god, if any, do you worship?" and "You are friendlier than most with ___."). While they may seem minor, not only does the game actually write yourself a backstory (that can be viewed in the character screen), but also determines what you start the game with, how you're treated by certain people, and adjusts certain skills. It basically helps create an experience for you all before you even exit the starter dungeon.
 * 9) *Lastly, the character will adjust their starting attributes from a list of 8, which will determine starting health, fatigue, and carry weight along with adjusting various skills. You'll lastly chose a name for yourself and make any final adjustments to anything you messed up on in creation.
 * 10) Along with being a massive world, Daggerfall is also a game that is very much grounded in realism. Basically, it closely balances its size with its mechanics, and feels like you are actually living in a living, breathing world that is fully realized despite the low resolution graphics.
 * 11) *The thousands of towns, cities, and homesteads of the in-game world are all of varying sizes, with some being much more important to the world than others. This is usually matched up by the amount of special locations that are in each town like guilds and pubs, and the population the locations have in general (cities having hundreds of denizens while smaller homesteads can have less than ten at times).
 * 12) *Each of the randomly generated NPCs will have a unique name and treat the player differently. Some will be willing to talk with the player and willing to give them directions, some will not want to talk to them at all (sometimes due to their race), and some will only talk to them based on their conversational manner (Polite, Normal, and Blunt), which where the Etiquette skill comes in. In addition, each NPC is randomly rolled to know certain local and regional rumors and locations, and the player will often have to talk to another NPC for information if the one they are talking to doesn't know the subject.
 * 13) **In fact, a large part of the background given to the player (see pointer #3) made during character creation will come into play, mainly for major NPCs in an area. Some characters choosing not to talk to the player at all if they don't have a good enough status, while some will tend to say many good things about the player depending on their background and what they've done for that specific social class.
 * 14) *The various dungeons the player can find are often given a different setting to give off a different mood or use a small amount of environmental story-telling. Some dungeons will just be a door placed in the ground in a small lump in the ground, while some are entered via a large castle, or even located in a destroyed homestead or temple.
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Bad Qualities

 * 1) Unfortunately, much of the positives Daggerfall has with it's design and scope are also what pushes against it from really reaching the true potential it has an a role-playing game.
 * 2) * The ginormous world means that there are very few hand-crafted areas to explore and quests created by the actual game designers themselves, meaning most of the game is done entirely by procedural generation. Along with that, the lack of a lot of depth in most of the locations leads to every region and town in the game having a samey feeling, with the exception of what guilds you are going to find. This also means that most of these locations exist purely for being places to encounter during a quest. In comparison to the latter Morrowind, that game had a drastically smaller world but also put hand-crafted care into its locations that made the game feel like much more of a living world. The massive size of Daggerfall will inevitably lead to many locations lacking anything to make the world feel really lived in.
 * 3) ** Another issue with the game's overall size is the dungeons, which are both large and randomly-generated. While they are fun to explore, the two details that makes them what they are means that 1) The size will often mean the player can spend anywhere from 1 to 4 hours exploring, which will sometimes lead to the player getting easily lost and/or feel repetition of the design. And secondly, 2) the randomly-generated nature may also mean rooms will be generated that have no real exit or entrance or meaning that an important item or character might be found either near the beginning or after hours of exploring, by which point issue 1 will kick in.
 * 4) *** The dungeon-crawling is also a very common quests to receive, so this can also make dungeons exhausting to complete due to how often they are presented.
 * 5) *The large amount of skills available to the player and that can be leveled up also means that the system isn't entirely balanced. Some skills such as Running and Climbing can easily be spammed and can level your character up quickly, while language skills like Giantish and Dragoinish are rarely used at all due to how little you can actually encounter those enemies (alone with never really being clearly shown how to use them).
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 * 7) The user interface in the original version of the game has not aged well at all, and can make playing the game at all vert frustrating in the original version.
 * 8) *The game is can be controlled with both the mouse and the keyboard, often both at the same time, in a rather awkward way. The main issue is the mouse and keyboard can both be used to move the characters. While this did work with Arena due to it relying on playing on a two-dimensional space, Daggerfall upgrades the same user interface from said game into a full three-dimensional world. Not only does this make it more difficult to navigate since the world is much more slanted and large, but this also means 360 mouse look is non-existent due to mouse being tied with movement. This in turn means actually looking itself is done on keyboard, which is a much more cumbersome task than it should be.
 * 9) *Due to the mouse being used to control the game as much as the keyboard is, about a quarter of the screen is taken up with a bar with icons the player can click on to quickly access menus or items without needing the keyboard. However, this is a feature that's really unnecessary since it can both make the environment harder to fully see since the bar intrudes upon the gameplay itself, and it also makes accessing things take much more time.
 * 10) *The combat can be hit or miss for some players, due to combat requiring the player to hold the attack button and moving the mouse around to perform various moves such as swinging and thrusting. The menu bar explained above also makes it much harder to do this action, since you can't perform this action at all if you move your mouse into the menu, which can prevent yourself from performing an attack for a second or two.
 * 11) Certain player builds can either make the game difficult to play or even makes it impossible to get past the starting dungeon due to the game's notorious difficulty, since prioritizing in certain skills like Spriggan and Merchantile as primary or major skills will often be worthless to the player in the opening hours and are only really useful late game. Meanwhile, skills such as Long Blade and Lockpicking taken up early will carry you through the whole game. And sometimes, not choosing some skills at all like Stealth and Medical will be detrimental later on and can be extremely hard to even build up, especially in the later game once training skills becomes more expensive due to the player's high level.
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Reception
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