The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall Unity:

Do you long for a traditional role playing game where you can actually play any role you desires without being strung into some plot the devs forced you to partake in? Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is where it is at. Compared to it's successors, this one plays more like a proper rpg and less of an action game with role playing elements. The game can have a step learning curve, especially for those coming from later Elder Scroll games like Oblivion or Skyrim. Morrowind Chads might transition in easier as the combat is mostly based off stats and dice rolls (like a traditional role playing game). You start off and create a character of any specific race, skills, abilities, weaknesses, history, and relationships with the many factions in the game.

You are then thrown into a dungeon and are expected to find your way out into the massive world of the Illiac Bay, which consist of both High Rock, and Northern Hammerfell. While this dungeon may be challenging at first, if you are willing to learn the mechanics and press on, you will soon be able to master this dungeon to the point where in your next play-through (and believe me, there are many ways you can play this game), you will know the exact approach you will take to exit out of this dungeon. Once you escape, you will then be free to go anywhere in the world. The world of Daggerfall is one of the largest worlds ever produced in a video game. There are so many dungeons, villages, towns, and cities to explore. This is of course, achieved with something called procedural generation. The majority of the dungeons, towns, cities, npcs, and quests were all randomly generated during development. With the exception of the main quest dungeons and cities, most of the stuff you will encounter will be completely random. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it fits in with the whole dice roll mechanic of a role playing game where essentially, this game will serve as a sort of virtual dungeon master for your roleplaying character, it also means that not everything is going to be perfect. When this game was first launched, it was plagued with plenty of game breaking issues to the point where it was sometimes unplayable.

Luckily, the Daggerfall Unity Port (the one I play with) fixes a lot of these bugs making the game very stable (if not more resource heavy though you can tweak the settings to suit your computer resources). Not only that, but there is also a nice revival of mod support adding new quests, gameplay features, and graphical enchantments to really make the game shine. With all that put together into one FREE package, Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall is one of the best games in the Elder Scrolls series after Morrowind. Of course, the random generated nature of the game might turn some people off and there isn't any handcrafted qualities to some of the worlds and quests but that's where your imagination comes in. You have to use your imagination and your abilities to play out a role appropriately to really get the most out of this game, and that's why I love it so much. It even runs on Linux which is a huge plus in my book. I can't wait to see what the developers of the Daggerfall Unity project go from here, but so far, playing this game has been a real joy for me. A real classic in my book.

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