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Monday, April 16, 2012

The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall

My Rating: 8/10
Gamespot User Rating: 8.6/10

Okay so maybe this game is very dated (1996) but in my mind it is one of the most ambitious RPGs I've ever played. It is the only Elder Scrolls game (other than the first one, Arena, which included the entire continent of Tamriel) that included multiple provinces. Those provinces were also designed to scale and divided into kingdoms. I have found two different readily agreed upon figures on the size of the actual game world, twice the size of Great Britain, and half the size of Great Britain, both figures agree that Morrowind was 0.01% the size of the game world of Daggerfall. Most of that landmass, mind you, is randomly generated.

This game had fast travel, which for some reason was taken out of Morrowind. And this ain't your modern fast travel, it's REAL travel, since the game world is so large, you have options, you have a speed option (cautiously or recklessly) a transport option (horse/foot or ship) and an option on whether or not you want to camp out or stay at inns, changing the in game travel time and the price. All towns are initally considered as discovered (which is good because with the map size you can wander off in one direction for long enough to get bored without seeing anything at all if you're unlucky) and a lot of simple crypts are initially discovered. To find dungeons you either have to wander aimlessly, or find a map in a treasure pile or off a corpse.

Gold in this game has weight, but that is why there is a bank! Each kingdom has it's own bank, which has it's upsides and downsides, downside being they aren't connected, you deposit money in one kingdom, you have to go back to that kingdom to get it. Upside being you can borrow money, the banks are not connected, you borrow money from one kingdom, you can just never go back there (whether or not they send people after you I haven't found out yet) From the banks you can also buy houses (which also was taken out in Morrowind) and boats...and by boat, I mean a big ass ship. The only real advantage to having a boat is if you fast travel by boat it now becomes free (which is the fastest way to fast travel, somehow you can even use it on land) and any items you drop on your boat stay there, where anywhere else in the world they disappear after you leave and come back. From banks, if you really want to carry all your gold around you can get letters of credit, which count as that much gold at a shop (shops can also issue a letter of credit if you sell them stuff worth a lot)

The features that it has in common with other Elder scrolls games is making your own enchanted items, making your own spells, joining guilds and temples for bonuses and miscellaneous quests, horses (and it even has mounted combat), etc.

The upside is that Bethesda has released this game for free on www.elderscrolls.com I personally downloaded it in a torrent because it came already set up with dos box (which you will more than likely need, especially if you have windows 7 or windows Vista) They also have the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena available there too, but I haven't played that one much, not a huge fan of the old click the side of the screen to turn and move forward RPGs.

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