Hello everyone. Are you enjoying your time in Skyrim? I certainly am. It’s easily the most beautiful and solid Elder Scrolls title to date. I’ve already invested 60 hours into the game and I feel like I’m only getting started. So what is with my blog title?

The majority of people coming to Skyrim have (probably) either never played an Elder Scrolls game before or have only played Oblivion. For these people, I can only imagine how amazing Skyrim is to them. However, Skyrim and Oblivion were not my first Elder Scrolls games. My first title was Daggerfall. I’ve personally experienced the evolution of the series over the past 15 years and it is a huge love/hate thing for me. Compared to Daggerfall, Skyrim feels like a lite version of an Elder Scrolls title. They made many sacrifices to the key features of previous titles in order to bring you the game you see today. This is a huge disappointment for me.

Before I go further into this, allow me to explain my preferences in these types of games. I love freedom. The more freedom you give me, the happier I am. The more stuff I can do, the better. I also am a fan of reasonable complexity and I like learning curves. So, my ideal video game would be as close to a P&P RPG as possible. That’s obviously not possible so I will take the closest thing I can get. My personal favorite video game of all time is Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis. It was true to the original Shadowrun and provided an insane amount of content and freedom. At least I thought it had an insane amount of content and freedom until I played Daggerfall (The Elder Scrolls II).

Daggerfall completely absorbed me. There were tens of thousands of square kilometers of land that was possible to travel. There were thousands of towns, dungeons, temples, and homes throughout the land and you could visit every single one. Towns and cities were literally the size of real towns and cities. The list of guilds you could join was crazy. The amount of abilities in Daggerfall were double that of Skyrim. The amount of spells was crazy and you could make your own custom spells. Daggerfall also wasn’t afraid of providing adult content. There was a fair amount of nudity, sexual content, and crazy gore that you’d never see in another Elder Scrolls game again.






Pick a province on the main map and then choose a dot or search for a specific place you want to go.


This is the map for the city of Daggerfall.




Because the land size was so huge, an instant travel system was the only viable means of travel in most cases. But unlike Oblivion and Skyrim, it was more than just a “click and poof”. You could purchase horses and also purchase wagons for the horse. You could also purchase boats. When you traveled, you had to select many options such as how you wanted to travel, whether you would stay at inns or camp out, and if you would travel carefully or recklessly. This determined your travel time, cost, and possible dangers you might encounter on the way.







This doesn’t even begin to cover the craziness of the game of Daggerfall. No other game has ever come close to matching the things that Daggerfall accomplished. Everything about that game was incredible with the sheer amount of stuff that was there. Unfortunately, there were plenty of negative things to counter the much of the good. Most of the stuff in the world was randomly generated. This meant that most of it was the same and that there was no point in actually trying to visit every possible place even if you could. The graphics were fairly outdated for the time and the combat system was nothing to be proud of. To top it all off the game was very buggy and was difficult or sometimes impossible to complete the main story. Daggerfall ignored quality for the sake of quantity and, for the most part, I loved it.

Then there was Morrowind (The Elder Scrolls III). I had hoped that Bethesda would build upon the Daggerfall formula, improve the graphics, increase the variety of content to encourage more exploration or cities and dungeons, and minimize the bugs. The last thing I wanted was for content to be stripped out. Morrowind was developed for both Xbox and PC and went in a completely different direction than Daggerfall.

There was a heavier focus on quality. They replaced Daggerfall’s huge generated world with a fair sized island that was built by hand. They replaced the randomly generated quests with scripted quests. They replaced the realistically sized towns and cities with “cities” that could barely be labeled a village in our world. The travel system was replaced with teleportation spells, boats, and silt striders (Morrowind’s taxi service). Since the land was easy to travel by foot, I approved of this new travel system.


This wasn’t terrible. It was just different. When I first played Morrowind, I had nothing but love and no regrets. I still had my stats, the majority of my abilities, the majority of my spells, my enchantment system, my spell creation system, my alchemy, etc. I could still disarm traps with spells. I could lockpick every single door in the game with lockpicks or spells. This seemed to be the perfect middle ground between quality and quantity. My freedom wasn’t gone, it was just replaced with a different system.

I loved focusing on speed and athletics while having permanent levitation and slowfall abilities ready. After beating the game, I grew my character to the point where I could fly over cities and nuke them with my retardedly overpowered customized destruction spells. I felt like a character out of Dragon Ball Z and it was great.








If you have my same experience, you can imagine my disappointment with Oblivion. They gutted so much. Where were my teleports? Where was my levitation and slowfall (and many other spells)? Why have more abilities been cut out or condensed? What the hell is this stupid instant travel? Why can’t I lockpick this door? Why do I need a special key? Why do I have to zone into cities? Morrowind only required you to zone into indoor areas. Why can’t I jump over this even though it’s obvious I should be able to? I felt.. extremely limited. I felt confined and restricted in comparison to previous titles.

Again, it wasn’t the most terrible thing in the world. The game was being consolized for the masses. Elder Scrolls was mainstream and therefore it had to be simple. Your average gamer couldn’t handle 5 minutes of Daggerfall. It could have been worse. I still had most of my abilities and stats. I had my limited spell creation and limited enchantment system. I couldn’t fly or slowfall but at least I could still max out my speed and athletics, down some skooma, and run like Superman. My freedom wasn’t entirely gone, so I sucked it up and enjoyed the game.

When Skyrim was announced I was terrified and excited at the same time. I knew what would happen. I knew it. Oh, beautiful Skyrim. How I love you and yet how I hate you. Why did you continue down this horrible path? You are such a good game. You deserve every bit of praise and love you get. You deserve all of the millions of sold copies. If only I hadn’t played the previous titles, I’d see you as a nearly perfect game. But I have been spoiled by my love for freedom and you have stripped me of most of the key ingredients of, not only previous Elder Scrolls titles, but of RPG video games in general.

Back in the day, when someone referred to an RPG, they were usually referring to a pen and paper game like Dungeons and Dragons. In these games, the players make their characters and take these characters into the world that the dungeon master describes. The players have an infinite amount of freedom in what they can or cannot attempt to do because the dungeon master can use his own judgement to determine potential outcomes. When someone makes a computer RPG, they usually tried to make this experience as close to the P&P games as possible but they obviously can’t allow for infinite freedom as the P&P games allow.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUZnFJfBJt0
This video sums up many of my opinions on the Daggerfall vs Morrowind vs Oblivion debate.




Skyrim has been completely stripped of main stats. This was a key ingredient to every single main Elder Scrolls game and the vast majority of RPG games in general. Skyrim’s skills have been stripped and condensed to a level that makes me cry. The amount of spells has been reduced to almost nothing in comparison to Daggerfall and Morrowind. I can’t even do something as simple as water walking or feather anymore (which is completely unacceptable). But far far worse than that is the lack of the spell creation. Being able to create my own spells was very much a key feature to Elder Scrolls game for me. No, the smithing system doesn’t make up for it.

I wish it stopped there but it doesn’t. It just keeps going. Athletics and acrobatics have been cut entirely. You have a preset speed for walking, running, and sprinting. Skooma doesn’t even help anymore. The enchantment system is extremely limited in comparison to previous titles. When you add that to the fact that all of my related issues with Oblivion have been kept and/or furthered in Skyrim, you have a game that I have a hard time calling The Elder Scrolls.

Daggerfall was pure quantity. Skyrim is pure quality. Daggerfall was closer to a real RPG. Skyrim is closer to an action/adventure game than a real RPG. It was made for the mainstream... the masses. It is similar to Diablo in this way. It is very simple and very easy to play. It doesn’t have many of the elements needed to be considered an RPG by the standards of the hardcore but it is still extremely fun and addictive. More people will love it this way than if they improved upon the Daggerfall formula.








I want to complain and hate Skyrim but I can’t. It’s just too good to hate. But I will always have a hard time calling it an Elder Scrolls game. Many people might disagree with me on this and that’s fine. This is simply my opinion. My niche is RPG freedom and reasonable complexity and my niche is dead. Oldschool style computer RPGs are dead. I hope to prove myself wrong on this someday but that’s a project for another day. I’ll end this by quoting Thomas Jefferson since quoting important historical people is a cool way to make you sound smarter.








For those of you interested in trying Daggerfall (Elder Scrolls 2) or Arena (Elder Scrolls 1), here's a link that sets up the game, dosbox, official patches, unofficial patches, and some mods. It's great for those that just want to install a file and play the game. Daggerfall works great for me on Windows 7 using this. Both of these titles are freeware so enjoy!

http://theelderscrolls.wiwiland.net/?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN