It's still the best in the series.

[Anonymous No.5343337]

>massive open world roughly the size of england
>huge dungeons to truly become lost in, without bullshit linear routes with a quick path from the end back to the entrance
>dozens of skills to train
>join various guilds
>multiple endings
>later games are still using the same daedric artifacts as this one
>in fact later games are basically this one but smaller in every way and with updated graphics

[Anonymous No.5343352]

>>5343337
except most people get fed up rather soon with this game's torturous hyper-formulaic recapitulations.

best they could do back then but every town is the very same with just a different skin. it lacks unique scripted events as rich, engaging and unforeboding as life itself.

[Anonymous No.5343362]

>>5343337
Broken proc gen ruins the game, anytime you have to enter a dungeon is a pain point.

Morrowind remains the best in the series.

[Anonymous No.5343596]

>>5343337
It's definitely better than the later TES games, but it has some major problems. First and foremost, it really is just too much of the same thing. Sure, it's the size of England, but an England in which every town, city, and person are identical.

I think for me it is tied with Arena for #1.

[Anonymous No.5343620]

>>5343337
I've been playing Might and Magic lately to get my fix, is Daggerfall supreem? I just fired up Morrowind in terms of Elder Scrolls, and I'm finding it's not bad but I find the fighting is a bit janky.
Is Daggerfall's level system anything like the clusterfuck that was Oblivion? I'm not even really familiar with Morrowind's yet, that's how little I've played, I guess.

[Anonymous No.5343649]

>>5343337
>huge dungeons to truly become lost in, without bullshit linear routes with a quick path from the end back to the entrance
We seem to be in the minority in this respect, but I am in complete agreement with you there: Daggerfall's dungeons are my favorite in the series overall and the highlight of the game for me. Yes, they're easy to get lost in if you're not paying attention but I think how overwhelming they are is often overstated, because they're still plenty manageable if you take it slow and mark your map as you go. Yes, there are some that are broken, but they're fairly rare. A lot of people just assume they're dealing with a broken dungeon when really there's some trick they missed to reach a new location. The only downside is the repetition since there's around ~60 total layouts reused among all of them that you'll soon memorize.
>dozens of skills to train
More than 1/4 of which are individual creature language skills. If you consolidated that dead weight into one catchall "languages" skill then Daggerfall would have just 27 skills; exactly Morrowind's skill count.
>join various guilds
But truly just six, with several minor variations on two of them to pad it out. Morrowind meanwhile sports 10 (11 in GOTY edition) fully fledged unique guilds, making for much more guild content overall.
>and with updated graphics
And updated gameplay and world design as well. I love the game but really, NPCs are billboards with minimal interaction (can't even be attacked or pickpocketed! that only works on the random villagers outside which by their nature cannot be affiliated with any faction, service, or quest, and there's no reason to since none of them have inventories to loot or even the capability to fight back or witness crimes etc.) without a single unique line of dialogue outside of the main quest. You'd think Nulfaga, Gortwog, or even the damned King of Worms might share some perspective of their own on at least one single topic, but you'd be wrong.

[Anonymous No.5343653]

>>5343649
So am I right to just sort of stick with Morrowind? I liked Oblivion and found Skyrim to be a humongous watering down of the entire game Oblivion was (right down to "there's even just less trees and foliage") but I'm playing into Morrowind and liking it so far.

[Anonymous No.5343656]

>>5343649
>More than 1/4 of which are individual creature language skills. If you consolidated that dead weight into one catchall "languages" skill then Daggerfall would have just 27 skills; exactly Morrowind's skill count.
It's almost certainly better that they removed it, but I wonder what Morrowind would have been like with the languages thing.

[Anonymous No.5343680]

>>5343653
My point wasn't to shit on the game, as I mentioned I love it and think everyone should give it a try. Just the common arguments you see that it's somehow the same as the later TES games but with more stuff is misleading as hell - a nice way of saying simply false - and will give people the wrong impression when they jump in.

As for the leveling system, it depends on what you mean. The actual level up system is a little different. Instead of your attributes getting bonuses based on the skills you use, you get a random number of points to spend (4-6 I think? It's a narrow range somewhere around there anyway) as you please. This means you don't have to play around grinding misc skills to get the maximum multipliers like you do in Morrowind and Oblivion, which have the same basic level up system as each other. If you mean the level scaling specifically, then it's pretty similar in that stronger items and enemies will appear at higher levels and the "human" enemies (the ones with a Class name as their identifier) will keep scaling with your level indefinitely. But unlike Oblivion the unique artifacts rewarded in certain quests (most often the Daedric quests) are not scaled to your level, so you don't get fucked by grabbing them too early. In fact due to Daggerfall's quest system you can actually repeat those quests and get as many of the same artifact if you want.

I'm kind of rambling at this point but there's just so much to these games that can be discussed. The short version of the point I want to make is yes: go ahead and download it and give it a try. If you liked Morrowind more than Oblivion and Oblivion more than Skyrim, then there's a good chance you'll find a lot to like in Daggerfall too. It's a different kind of game and isn't one that really rewards exploration in the same way that the later TES games do, but it excels at making you feel like a small person in a huge world as you slowly make a name for yourself through your deeds.

[Anonymous No.5343690]

>>5343620
The fighting is similar to Morrowind but you hold down the right mouse button while swinging the mouse to attack instead of holding a movement direction and left clicking. Level system is better because it doesn't encourage the fucked up reverse-roleplaying of Oblivion but it does encourage savescumming the health and ap rng. I never bothered with that and didn't suffer for it. It's a fun game. Idk about best in the series but once I unlocked the enchanter in the mages guild it became so fun to create a bunch of crazy items. stuff that gave you extra mana at night or enhanced any skill or had a bunch of disadvantages added to support even more positive enchants. It's a cool system and theres a lot of accessory slots that let you take advantage of it.
If you buff your merchant skill enough you can buy items for negative gold which is fucking hilarious.

[Anonymous No.5343714]

>>5343656
Battlespire's whole gimmick was that you could talk to all the enemies in the game, and some of them could offer dialogue trees that turned them into allies or made them stop attacking you. I imagine it'd have been something like that. I'm of the opinion that more skills are always better even if they aren't always fully realized and justifiable majors, but Bethesda went with a different philosophy.

Although it's somewhat ironic that despite losing the language skills Morrowind was the first mainline game to actually let you talk to enemies in the first place. If you cast calm on anything you can try to initiate dialogue, which works on every NPC and even some creatures. Some creepy dialogue from the ash creatures and sleepers can only ever be seen by doing that. If you've got a good speechcraft skill you can even persuade the NPCs to stay friendly even after the calm effect dissipates.

[Anonymous No.5343748]

I shit on JRPGs a lot but this is another level of autism. At least JRPGs are written. This "game" is mostly just randomly generated stuff. Talk about soulless.

[Anonymous No.5343761]

>>5343748
Go sit on a cactus.

[Anonymous No.5343848]

>>5343337
Something I miss about this and Arena: weapon material actually mattered. It wasn't enough to have a silver or magic weapon, you needed a weapon of higher quality material to hurt more powerful enemies. Nowadays, you just needed to enchant an iron weapon to be able to kill anything with weapon resistances barring essential characters and characters with the "ghost" property in oblivion's case. I have not played Skyrim or Online, so I don't know if that ever got reverse. Never played Redguard, either, or got very far in Battlespire, so I don't know if something like weapon material still mattered.

[Anonymous No.5343908]

>>5343761
Because I'm right? More than half of the game was algorithmically created?

[Anonymous No.5343917]

>>5343337
I won't say best, but i'll put it this way
>Arena was an basic proc-gen buggy and in every way worse ripoff of Ultima: Underworld, the best dungeon crawler of all time
>Daggerfall was the first game in the series that had some of its own personality.

Still not a fan of the proc gen dungeons though.

[Anonymous No.5343928]

>>5343748
The main quest is good though, most dungeons are unique. Especially the final quest was great. The whole game should've been like that.

That one palace dungeon with the magic bars and all the switches and elevators though, that was way worse than any of the randomly generated shit.

[Anonymous No.5343950]

I disagree, good sir, I personally think that Redguard is when The Elder Scrolls finally started getting a shape of its own. Unlike other prior games, this was designed by a man of the name "Todd Howard". That chap has a bright future, I can tell you that!

[Anonymous No.5345927]

>>5343848
>I have not played Skyrim or Online, so I don't know if that ever got reverse.
Skyrim scrapped the whole idea of immunities/resistances to mundane materials and unenchanted weapons. However for undead, vampires, and werewolves Skyrim did introduce a weakness to silver specifically, which was strong enough to make it the most effective material against those enemies. So that played a similar role.