Ursa, Kala:
I think you folks may be putting a little bit of nostalgic gloss on Daggerfall. The scope was indeed vast, but as "diamonds in the rough" go, that one was pretty damn rough.
Where to begin....
How about with elevators you had to continually jump up and down on so they wouldn't leave you behind if the game paused to load in mid-ascent? Stairs you could fall straight through?
Worse, randomly-generated dungeons that could not be completed due to a broken "teleport" key, requiring you to exit one area via bug, levitate over to the other, isolated part of the dungeon, reenter via the same bug, acquire whatever you'd been sent for, and then teleport back?
Bethesda is famous for releasing massive works that are utterly crawling with bugs, and Daggerfall was certainly the case in point for years, but it's not as though bugs were all that was wrong. What about a character generator so very free-form that you could (and I did) create characters who could throw mega-powerful fireballs at their own toes, rapid-fire, powpowpow, and not only survive without a scratch but reabsorb all the magic while everybody around them perished?
What about an entire population of female townspeople ostentatiously drawn to appeal to the kind of pimple-pocked zombie who goes around groaning, "Boobs ..."? A Dark Brotherhood indistinguishable from the fighter's guild? A curse of lycanthropy that made you a decent werewolf if and only if you specialized in hand to hand? Arrows that were dependable only if fired at creatures that were on exactly the same vertical plane as you were?
Ten thousand identical liches to lay to rest? Old women in dire need of sleep mysteriously overlaid with town guards? Stores you could casually bust into with half-decent Lockpick, filled to the brim with ebony and daedric, whose shelves you could merrily offload into your cart, come back the next day and re-sell to the same merchant you robbed, then go do a quest, come back, and do it all again? A Sneak skill that fooled no one whose back wasn't to you-- with or without walls in the way? Ancient vampires that spawned at char lvl. 1, and could, would, and did insta-cast their entire spellbooks, reducing the player character to a pile of digital innards quivering on the dungeon floor?
More bugs, of a subtler but more devastating sort: a short (if intriguing), level-dependent main quest that broke half-- nay, ALL the time? Do you have any idea how many hours I poured into that game without ever being able to finish the half of the quest that didn't involve laying Lysandus to rest? And I only managed to lay him to rest once, for all eight or nine characters I raised to nigh-godly heights-- again, because the quests didn't activate....
I loved Daggerfall, in spite of all this, and I still want my gold pieces that actually have weight, my bank accounts, my letters of credit, my cart full of loot, and my skill-dependent guilds (last seen in Morrowind; reward for return, no questions asked). I definitely want my stupid ass to sink like a bag of gold ingots if I step into deep water in full ebony plate without bothering to purchase a Buoyancy spell. Seriously: daedric boots should work like concrete galoshes. Sleeping with the slaughterfish is an appropriate conclusion to going in swimming in 80 pounds of armor.
That, I miss. I also miss Morrowind's detailed storytelling (but not the lousy balancing of, for instance, Solstheim and Vardenfell) and interestingly alien setting, but I don't miss missing when I'd clearly scored a hit, or all the NPCs who never went to sleep. Nor do I miss nerfed-to-uselessness magic....
In the end, Oblivion and Skyrim are both simultaneously narrower than their predecessors and closer to living, breathing worlds. Being able to bust into a home and strip the shelves of belongings, fearing all the while that the owner is going to wake up and catch you in the act, is a world away from Daggerfall's ridiculously-profitable thievery. Stalking and killing a mark in a nigh-living city full of far more than buxom sprites may seem like a "technical" achievement, but from a stealth-game lover's perspective, it's an achievement that makes the difference between "assassinating" a lich with bad AI at the end of yet another dungeon crawl and neatly plucking one hapless townsperson out from under the watchful eyes of all the sheepdogs the count/jarl can hire.
And no, the Morag Tong in Morrowind wasn't a patch on that-- especially with those "writs of execution" that you could freely apply to any random citizen you pleased, whether s/he was your target or not.
Looking back, I have a few regrets (Bethesda, fix teh swimming, plz), but not bloody many. I like realistic bow-fire (Daggerfall-pfft; Morrwind-meh; Oblivion-decent; Skyrim-brilliant), solid stealth mechanics (ditto, on all counts), and worlds as "real" as they can be made.
Skyrim's not close to perfect, but it's a sight closer than Daggerfall. ... Minus the zero-mass gold and the "everybody swims like a naked Argonian" thing, of course. I feel little nostalgia for a nifty, yet irreparably broken, past.
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Topic: Welp, there goes all the Elder Scrolls players from the EVE community... (Read 34631 times)