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Quick Info
Mods available?	Many
Year released	1996
Available from	Steam Bethesda Daggerfall Workshop
Category	Rpg
Time to Beat	32.5 Hours
Played?	Ongoing - modded playthrough
Game length provided by HowLongToBeat

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The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is an open world role playing game published in 1996 by Bethesda Softworks. The sequel to The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the game is a single player open world dungeon crawler. While some games of today have much more complex systems and methods for allowing folks to interact with a game world, Daggerfall is the perfect vehicle for an imaginative player who wants to live out a fantasy adventure.

The game is available for free from many sources and is supported by a huge modding community. For many people, the best way to experience Daggerfall today is through Daggerfall Unity, a complete recreation of the game in the Unity game engine. Daggerfall Unity can be played on it's own, or further built upon with a multitudes of mods.

Table of Contents

Why should this game be played?

This game is part of the foundation of modern RPGs. At the time, the game was one of the most advanced and largest of it's kind and made a lasting impact on the genre. The game isn't just about completing a singular main quest with some side distractions (although there is nothing wrong with playing like this), but instead players are encouraged to create a character and roleplay as any other adventure in the world.

For those who like to sink into games and develop a character around an idea, Daggerfall has you covered. The character creation system is in-depth, providing a number of premade classes or the ability to create a custom class from a GURPS inspired system. When creating a custom class players can select their primary / major / minor skills, tweak the number of hit points received per level, add special advantages / disadvantages inherit to the class and set the weight of various reputations the class might hold with the broad areas of society in Daggerfall. All of these selections are balanced out by how quickly or slowly the class will level up over time.

Entering the world, players are thrown into a short but brutal starting dungeon (no hand holding here). Once you are through the dungeon, the world is open for exploration. While there are elements of the main quest that are time-sensitive, whether you choose to do the main quest or not, it will always be there for another playthrough. This is about living through the character and experiencing all the different things the game offer.

Once the world opens up, Daggerfall is big - like really big. According to Wikipedia, the gameworld is around 209,331 square kilometers or close to the size of Great Britain. There are around 15,000 towns in the game, inhabited by about 750,000 npcs. This all sounds very impressive (and it is for a game from 96'), players will quickly realize that few of these many many points of interest actually hold anything truly unique. This isn't necessarily a bad thing though, adventures can stay focused to one area of the map, or mods can be layered into the game to further differentiate areas of Daggerfall and create new experiences. Even if some of the towns are repetative, or conversations with npcs kind of the same, there is still much to do within the game. There are guilds or knightly orders to join, quests to do, an extensive beastairy to hunt, dungeons to explore, spells to craft, gear to gather and a great roleplaying adventure to unfold.

Where to get the game

Daggerfall is available from multiple sources, listed below. In order to play Daggerfall Unity, you will need to have both the original game and the Daggerfall Unity package. Luckily, the game is free from all sources! Best to download the game files from Bethesda and then get the Unity files from the Workshop.

• Steam
• Bethesda
• Daggerfall Workshop - Unity version available here

Which one should I play?

For most folks, you will want to load up the Unity version of Daggerfall, which introduces quality of life features to the game. Additional mods can be layered ontop of Unity, expanding on gameplay and modifying your experience. For a person who hasn't played through the original Daggerfall before, I would suggest browsing through some of the resources linked below and then if your interest is still piqued, give the vanilla version of Unity a try. Once you determine if the gameplay loop works for you, additional mods can be added on through your playthrough (although some mods are not compatible with games saved prior to their installation) or for subsequent playthroughs.

What are the Biggest Differences Between Standard Daggerfall and Unity version?

The biggest benefit of the Unity version is stable performance on modern systems, fixed bugs, enhanced graphics and more game settings. The original Daggerfall game is a classic without a doubt, but would only be worth a playthrough to re-experience a specific bit of nostalgia. The Unity version also allows players to build upon their experience by adding mods that improve terrain, enhance graphics, add new systems or quests, more monsters... the list goes on and on.

Installing the Game

Installing Daggerfall on a modern system is very easy these days, due to ongoing work of the community and preservation efforts. The link below will provide a three step process for installing Daggerfall and Daggerfall Unity. Release 1.1 of Daggerfall Unity now has the ability to create a "portable install", which enables the client to read settings and saves from within the installation directory, as opposed to the computers user settings directory (typically /appdata/). This makes it much easier to manage mods and other additional resources. Look for the "portable install" information under Feature Showcase on the Daggerfall Unity releases page, this setup should be used for step #2 of the install guide.

• Installing Daggerfall Unity - Daggerfall Workshop Forum
• Daggerfall Unity Release

Modding DFU

The majority of mods are available from Nexus Mods. While there are other places to obtain them from, this is probably the easiest site to find everything you are looking for. Nexus Mods does throttle download speeds for non-premium users, but most DFU mods are small enough where this will only be a slight annoyance. I've also taken the route of subscribing for a month, downloading all the mods I want for a particular game and then cancelling my sub until the next time I need to download a bunch of mods. Probably not necessary for Daggerfall mods, but handy to do when you want to download 3000 skyrim mods at once.

• Daggerfall Unity - Nexus Mods

Mod installation

Installing mods for DFU is very straightforward. Once you've downloaded the mods, they can be placed into the appropriate folder in the DFU /streamingassets directory. Many of the mods on Nexus Mods will have installation instructions on the page, and if you cannot find specific instructions, checking the comments on the mods will usually provide you with an answer.

• DFU Mod Installation How-To - Daggerfall Workshop Forum

Modlists

Determining the modlist that should be run is 100% personal preference. Mods for the game can range from bug fixes to complete overhauls. For a first time player, you may wish to start out with a more vanilla experience and then add more challenge or content in future playthroughs. A couple resources for figuring out modlists are available below, ranging from simple to complete overhaul.

• What Mods Should I Use for a First Time Playthrough? - Reddit thread
• DFU Mod Builds by JWLAR - Google Sheet

Additional Resources

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