Indie Game Club Issue 8: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

Hi all, and welcome back to Indie Game Club! Today, I will be discussing the influential Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall by Bethesda. While this isn't an indie title, we also aim in this club to highlight free games that players may not know are accessible to them. If you are looking to play Daggerfall, you can download the game from Steam for free. I also recommend the incredible fan patch called Daggerfall Unity; however, use your own discretion when modding PC games.

Next month, we will be playing Moonring by Dene Carter. This is a traditional role-playing game in the same vein as Ultima or Nethack, but with all of your modern conveniences. If you want to play along, you can download the game on Steam for free.

Alright, with housekeeping out of the way, here's what I thought of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall!

Nathan Kelly

Being asked to create a character when you know very little about the challenges that await creates a troublesome undertaking. I find that my best work is done by simply role-playing a thematically appropriate character and moving on from there. I made a Kahjit Barbarian and proceeded to birth him into the world of Daggerfall without a second thought.

When you start a character in Daggerfall, you are dropped into a dungeon full of sinister monsters that will send you straight to the starting screen if you aren’t careful. This is an Elder Scrolls game, so it has just the very basic amenities when it comes to adventuring work. I played the Unity modded version of the game that expands on some of the tutorial, and I’m very glad that I did. You are given a brief overview of the inventory, and the game lets you swing your weapon a few times, but then you are at the mercy of the dungeon.

This starting dungeon will make or break players. It requires quick mastery of its combat and fancy footwork to make it through alive. For the first time in a long while, I caught myself making multiple save states so that I could traverse different paths in the introductory labyrinthine structure. If I had the gaming experience that I had roughly 2 years ago, I might have let the clunky controls and brutal difficulty send me packing to a different game. Recently, I’ve been in my dungeon-crawling era, and with that came the willpower to dive into these hallowed halls to find treasure and kill beasts.

After googling how to actually swing an axe in this game I was ready to slay each skeleton blocking my path and make it to the end of the tutorial. Gods, it has never felt so good to see the skybox on the outside of a dungeon. It felt good, really good. I can’t help but be excited to go back into more dungeons.

Leaving this dungeon peels back the initial layer to reveal a mammoth-sized mercenary immersive sim. Learning how to find your way around and talk to citizens is a little clunky in the modern era, but it's a breath of fresh air after scrounging through dank hallways. In Daggerfall, your main activities are shopping and questing. This is dungeon diving in possibly its simplest form, and I admire its mission to create this specific experience.

After questing for a while, it was apparent that I would never reach a good stopping point at which to write my impressions. This game is open-ended in every brilliant way, and I write this now so that I can return to Daggerfall and keep playing dungeons. At the price of free, I would recommend this to any and every fantasy nerd who can handle a large amount of save scumming and intense dungeon diving.