Daggerfall remains, to this day, one of the best games ever made. I still have my original boxed copy, and several pre-patched CDs that Bethesda would mail out back in the day. I replay it a few times a year, because it’s held up so well and there is nothing else that scratches the same itch.
I frequently wonder what Bethesda would be like today if Peterson, Lakshman, and Lefay had stayed at the company and Todd had been chased out, instead. Those three created The Elder Scrolls from scratch - lore, gameplay concepts, all of it. They had a TES Bible covering the story from Arena to Oblivion… and one by one, Todd excised all their influence from the franchise.
I miss the oppressive, grimdark atmosphere and lore, the complex world simulation, the unprecedented freedom, the unflinching maturity, and the epic, massive dungeon crawls.
I don’t see anyone trying to make a game like that again, ever. Certainly not Todd Howard’s Bethesda.
They moved away with procedural generation when they worked on the creation kit first released with Morrowind, which has gotten a lot of use since then: Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4. So, uhm, I don’t think it had gone that bad for BGS just because it’s latest release is a flawed update of the engine.
Daggerfall is a fun slog where everything is pseudo procedurally generated and the boredom aspect comes when you become aware of the general repetitiveness of the engine, but it is very grindable because it is essentially all radiant quests and because it has very dynamic systems - which also work out to very exploitable systems to easily reach godlike power with little effort. Because you don’t have to listen to exposition and can just go nuts on the gameplay, it’s very replayable. Unfortunately, they seem to want to go back to the Daggerfall procedural generation system without really having the engine, which was designed to move away from that, configured for it, and it’s going to be much harder.
Daggerfall remains, to this day, one of the best games ever made. I still have my original boxed copy, and several pre-patched CDs that Bethesda would mail out back in the day. I replay it a few times a year, because it’s held up so well and there is nothing else that scratches the same itch.
I frequently wonder what Bethesda would be like today if Peterson, Lakshman, and Lefay had stayed at the company and Todd had been chased out, instead. Those three created The Elder Scrolls from scratch - lore, gameplay concepts, all of it. They had a TES Bible covering the story from Arena to Oblivion… and one by one, Todd excised all their influence from the franchise.
I miss the oppressive, grimdark atmosphere and lore, the complex world simulation, the unprecedented freedom, the unflinching maturity, and the epic, massive dungeon crawls.
I don’t see anyone trying to make a game like that again, ever. Certainly not Todd Howard’s Bethesda.
Grimdark? That’s not the way I remember it.
They moved away with procedural generation when they worked on the creation kit first released with Morrowind, which has gotten a lot of use since then: Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4. So, uhm, I don’t think it had gone that bad for BGS just because it’s latest release is a flawed update of the engine.
Daggerfall is a fun slog where everything is pseudo procedurally generated and the boredom aspect comes when you become aware of the general repetitiveness of the engine, but it is very grindable because it is essentially all radiant quests and because it has very dynamic systems - which also work out to very exploitable systems to easily reach godlike power with little effort. Because you don’t have to listen to exposition and can just go nuts on the gameplay, it’s very replayable. Unfortunately, they seem to want to go back to the Daggerfall procedural generation system without really having the engine, which was designed to move away from that, configured for it, and it’s going to be much harder.