Then there was the story, which started off a “simple” ghostbusting mission but turned into something quite different. But being able to create my own character and see through their eyes, with way more choice than in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, was a big draw. I’d never really engaged with the Ultima series, partly because I thought the Avatar was as dull as ditchwater. Was this enough to make me uninstall Daggerfall and fling the CD out of the window? No, and it’s a testament to the game’s strengths that I was willing to overlook some of this tedium. The fourth time this happened, I wondered just how unlucky one person could be. On another occasion, I was given a cursed ring that, in turn, brought the wrath of a mummy down upon me. However, a few hours later, I was offered the same quest and was greeted by a different vampire clan leader. The coven leader rewarded me with the tantalizing promise that our paths would cross again, which I took as kicking off a whole vampire questline. I slaughtered the blood-sucking badass the local vampire clan sent after me, and after finding a note amongst their remains, I decided instead to hand the item over to the vampires. I remember grinning when a group of vampire hunters foolishly trusted me to courier a vampire-slaying artifact. Think some of Skyrim’s dungeons look familiar? Daggerfall’s procedurally generated dungeons were worse, and thanks to issues with the way the chunks of dungeon slotted together, there was a real risk of falling into an endless abyss.Īnd then there were the sidequests that, when you encountered them the second or third time around, started to lose their appeal. The titular city was a joy to explore, but the “unique locations,” while technically unique, bore a striking resemblance to each other. However, the more you played Daggerfall, the more you started to notice how uninteresting the world was. Certainly, there was no shortage of dungeons to use as destinations. It wasn’t just the locations that were procedurally generated, either the game’s sidequests were generated on the fly. I used to just roam, encountering small town after small town and dungeon after dungeon. I remember being astounded, and a little intimidated, by how massive the game was. Naturally, the program used to create them would have rules to ensure the dungeons “worked,” and hey presto – thousands of non-story dungeons.Īnd for a while, that worked. They then made that Daggerfall’s default, so that everyone got the same massive map.īut hang on… How do you procedurally generate dungeons? Well, you chunk your dungeons into specific room types and then let the computer mix and match those locations. What Bethesda did with Daggerfall was procedurally generate the bulk of the world’s map – not in-game, but back at Bethesda HQ. Skyrim, by contrast, has around 200 dungeons, and even a few of those look a little samey. But Daggerfall really was something else, sporting over 15,000 locations and over 4,000 dungeons. If you’ve played any of Ubisoft’s recent open-world titles, you might think you know what I’m talking about – vast worlds filled with busywork and not an awful lot else. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has its dragons, but Daggerfall’s tale was more politically charged, ultimately revolving around an invention that could alter the balance of power.įinally, and most importantly, Daggerfall proved that bigger isn’t always better, particularly when procedural generation is involved, and it’s this lesson that Bethesda needs to bear in mind when crafting The Elder Scrolls VI. Secondly, it proved you didn’t need some vast world-ending threat for a story to be gripping. Firstly, it proved that The Elder Scrolls: Arena wasn’t a fluke and that Bethesda had the chops to deliver a challenging but engaging open-world RPG. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, a major accomplishment by most standards, proved several things.
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