The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall is the sequel to the role playing game Arena which, depending on who you asked was a great game or a complete rp-failure. The most criticized points of Arena were that there was virtually no _real_ NPC interaction and that the dungeon crawls were repetitive and very similar (besides the huge amount of bugs that plagued it during its initial release). Daggerfall attempts to correct some of it's predecessor's shortcomings and preserve its legacies as well.

The Elder Scrolls series is set in the world of Tamriel, which is in turn divided into seperate territories (each ruled by a different race) which are part of an empire run from the appropiatly named Imperial Provence. Daggerfall itself is set focused around the kingdoms surrounding the Iliac Bay: Daggerfall, Sentinel and Wayrest being the major players. You are on a mission from the Emperor to resolve the mysterious circumstances revolving around the death of the King of Daggerfall and also to retrieve a letter to the Queen that may prove to be embarassing to the Emperor. In the beginning of the game you are struck by a storm and land in a cave which serves as a primer dungeon for the game.

Where Daggerfall shines is in its character generation. Daggerfall uses a primarily Skill based system of level advancement. As your skills improve with usage and training, so do your levels (and in turn your attributes). The ability to make custom classess with advantages and disadvantages is a great addition to the realm of roleplaying games.

As for the game itself, it is an action game where you wave the mouse around the screen trying to hit something based on your skills. The is a quest generator that will make random quests for you and generate random dungeons where these take place. The random quests, while novel at first and with greater variety than Arena in both purpose of quest and location, does get aggrivating and reduces most of the game to a mindless dungeon crawl (albeit with interesting scenery). There are alot of objects in the dungeons that look nice but are ultimately unusable (i wish i could crank all those torture instruments... yum!). There are also main quests which advance the story line, and they are hardcoded into the program and seem to arrive during the course of the game more or less consistantly. These quests are nice but after hours of random questing to improve skills/gather equipment, most of them seem to be more of the same. There is also an intricate reputation system in the game, and your ability to get what you want from NPCs improves as you get well known, much like Darklands. Of course you can also make enemies who send assassins after you (which is tres cool) and join guilds and such- a well thought out system. Unfortunately, where it fails you is with the NPC character interaction. Character interaction in the game is a more or less unappealing menu of keywords you spit at NPCs, like Arena but with more variety. Boring. Other bad points include the multitude of bugs in the inital release, patches that help in some ways and make more bugs in others, and faults in the quest generator that make some quests uncompleteable.

In summary, Daggerfall is a good game, but only a must buy for obsessive dungeon crawlers.

Rating: Worst -> 1 2 3 4 5 6 _7_ 8 9 10 <- Best (7/10)

+ Awesome character generation
+ Spellmaker, Itemmaker
+ Large, large, large world to explore
+ Well implemented reputation system
+ Nice acting
+ Good skill based advancement system
+ Be a vampire, werewolf, etc!
- Bugs, lots
- Some uncompleteable quests
- Boring huge dungeons
- Too much randomness
- Non-Player Character interaction blows