The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is a 1996 action role-playing game published by Bethesda Softworks. It is the second part of the Elder Scrolls series and was released on September 20, 1996, for MS-DOS. It came after the 1994 game The Elder Scrolls: Arena. The story follows a player character who is sent by the Emperor to free the ghost of King Lysandus from being trapped in the world and to find out what happened to a letter sent from the Emperor to the former queen of Daggerfall.

Compared to its earlier game, Arena, players in Daggerfall can only explore two provinces in Tamriel: High Rock and Hammerfell. The game includes 15,000 cities, towns, villages, and dungeons for players to explore. Instead of using an experience-point system like Arena, Daggerfall rewards players for using role-playing elements in the game. It offers more ways to customize characters, including an improved character creation system and a class creation system inspired by a game system called GURPS. This allows players to create their own classes and assign skills.

The game was successful in both reviews and sales, with about 700,000 copies sold by 2000. It was followed by The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in 2002. In 2009, to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls series, Daggerfall was made free to download from the Bethesda website.

Gameplay

Daggerfall, like other games in The Elder Scrolls series, is set on the fictional continent of Tamriel, where players can travel between the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell. Players are not required to follow specific storylines or take on particular roles, letting them choose how they want to play the game.

The game includes more than 15,000 cities, towns, villages, and dungeons for players to explore, offering many choices for buying a home. In addition to exploring, players can join various guilds, orders, and religions, each with unique quests and tasks. Participating in these groups helps players earn ranks and build a reputation, which influences how non-playable characters (NPCs) and other groups in the game view them. A special feature of Daggerfall is the ability to create custom spells using the game’s spell-creation system, which becomes available after joining the Mages Guild. This system lets players design spells with different effects, and the game automatically calculates the magic cost based on the power of the effects chosen. Similar to spell creation, players can also enchant equipment. They can craft or find different items and then enchant them. Players may also choose to become a vampire, werewolf, or wereboar.

The combat system uses mouse movement to control the direction and impact of weapon swings during close combat. Daggerfall includes a variety of enemies, with the Daedra being the strongest, making exploration challenging. To complete the game, players must visit at least 6–8 of the 47 explorable areas in the game.

Plot

Daggerfall is located in the Iliac Bay, between the regions of High Rock and Hammerfell. The player is sent to this area by the Emperor. The Emperor has two tasks for the player: First, the player must free the ghost of King Lysandus from his earthly prison. Second, the player must find a letter that the Emperor sent to the former queen of Daggerfall. This letter explains that Lysandus’s mother, Nulfaga, knows where the Mantella is. The Mantella is a key needed to rebuild the first Numidium, a powerful brass golem made by ancient dwarves. Tiber Septim, who started the Empire, once took the Numidium from the dark elves of Morrowind and used it to stop an aggressive elvish group long ago.

The Emperor wants the player to help the Blades, a group of warriors, recover the Numidium for the Empire. To do this, the player must first find out who killed King Lysandus and put his ghost to rest. After this, the player must steal the totem of Tiber Septim from King Gothryd of Daggerfall and free the Mantella from a prison in Aetherius. Once the Mantella is obtained, the player has six choices about what to do with it.

Daggerfall has several possible endings:

• If the player gives the Mantella to the Underking, he gains its power, enters eternal rest, and creates a large area where magic cannot be used.
• If an orc named Gortworg succeeds, he uses the Numidium to destroy Imperial forces and the Bay Kings, the rulers of the Iliac Bay’s provinces. The Underking later arrives to destroy the Numidium and dies. Gortworg then creates Orsinium, a kingdom for orcs.
• If the Blades succeed, they rebuild the Numidium, defeat the Bay Kings and orcs, and unite all of Tamriel’s provinces under the Empire.
• If any Bay King wins, that king uses the Numidium to defeat the others just before the Underking destroys him and the Numidium.
• If Mannimarco, the leader of the Necromancers, receives the Mantella, he uses it to become a god.
• A planned ending, described in The Daggerfall Chronicles and other guides, was not included in the game: If the player activates the Mantella while holding the totem (a device that controls the Numidium), the Numidium will kill the player, go out of control, and be destroyed by Imperial forces.

Development

Work on The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall started right after The Elder Scrolls: Arena was released in March 1994. Ted Peterson was chosen to be the lead game designer for the project. The game was first called Mournhold and was set in the province of Morrowind. However, the setting was later changed to the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell, which are in the northwest part of Tamriel.

By mid-1994, the game was renamed Daggerfall. At first, developers planned to connect it with Arena and one or two other games, similar to how Might and Magic: World of Xeen was connected. However, the experience-point system from Arena was replaced with a system that rewards players for role-playing their characters. Daggerfall includes an improved character creation system. This system allows players to choose from the basic classes in Arena, as well as create their own classes and assign their own skills. Players could also select GURPS-inspired bonuses, disadvantages, or disabilities.

At first, Daggerfall used a 2.5D raycast engine, but this was later replaced with XnGine, one of the first true 3D engines. The game world in Daggerfall was described as being "the size of Great Britain," or about 209,331 square kilometers. This world included 15,000 towns and a population of 750,000. Julian LeFay said, "The whole idea with Daggerfall was that, like a pen-and-paper role-playing game, you could play for years. You know, keep the same characters, keep on doing stuff." A YouTube channel called "How Big is the Map?" walked across the entire map, a task that took 69 hours.

Ted Peterson said that Daggerfall was only slightly influenced by video games from that time because "they simply weren't very interesting." He mentioned playing games like King's Quest, Doom, and Sam & Max Hit the Road while working on Daggerfall, but he said these games did not greatly affect the story or design. The most important influences came from books and games that Julian LeFay or Ted Peterson were reading or playing at the time. For example, The Man in the Iron Mask by Dumas inspired a quest where the player had to find a missing prince, and Vampire: The Masquerade inspired the idea of vampire tribes in the game.

MediaTech West, a company based in Olympia, Washington, helped develop Daggerfall. MediaTech West was later bought by Bethesda in 1995.

Daggerfall was completed on August 31, 1996, about three years after development began. It was released in North America on September 20, 1996, and in the United Kingdom on November 1, 1996. Like Arena, Daggerfall had many bugs when it was first released. Although many patches were made to fix the problems, users were still unhappy with the game's stability. The desire to avoid the many patches for Daggerfall led to a more careful release schedule in the future. After Daggerfall was released, Ted Peterson left Bethesda and worked for several companies in Los Angeles and San Francisco, including Film Roman, AnyRiver Entertainment, Activision, and Savage Entertainment.

Although Daggerfall did not include official tools for modifying the game, fans created their own tools to access the game's content soon after its release. These tools allowed players to add new quests, improve graphics, and add new gameplay features. Examples of these fan-made additions include AndyFall and DaedraFall.

After Bethesda stopped supporting Daggerfall, some mod makers fixed bugs in the latest official version using community patches or new versions of the game engine. Examples of these efforts include the DFQFIX quest-fix pack and HackFall. DaggerfallSetup is a community-made installer that helps run Daggerfall on modern Windows computers using the DOSBox emulator. This project includes many official and unofficial patches, as well as fan translations in languages such as French, Russian, Spanish, and German.

There are also fan-made projects that rewrite Daggerfall's game engine to work on modern computers. One of these projects is the XL Engine, which started in June 2009 as DaggerXL. In 2011, DaggerXL was merged with another project called DarkXL to become the XL Engine. The goal of the project was to update the game for modern computers and include features that were not included in the original 1996 release. By August 2012, DaggerXL supported character creation, all provinces and dungeons, and user-defined display settings. In April 2018, the source code for the XL Engine was released under the MIT license on GitHub. In April 2020, the project's creator, luciusDXL, announced that the XL Engine would no longer be developed.

Daggerfall Unity is another open-source project that recreates Daggerfall using the Unity game engine. It began development in August 2014 and is the most complete version of Daggerfall available. Daggerfall Unity uses updated graphics and mechanics, and it supports modding through Nexus Mods. As of May 2020, the project was still being developed, with Alpha 0.10.23 released on May 8, 2020. In July 2019, the first Alpha version was made available for download. Unlike DaggerXL, Daggerfall Unity allows players to complete the game from start to finish with all the core features of the original Daggerfall. In June 2022, Daggerfall Unity was published on GOG.com with some mods pre-installed. On December 31, 2023, the project was officially declared complete.

Reception

On September 20, Daggerfall was released to stores with about 120,000 copies. The game sold more than 100,000 copies in two days, which was better than Bethesda’s expectations. Many stores ran out of copies quickly. A second shipment of Daggerfall arrived on September 24, but it was smaller than the first due to production limits. In the United States, Daggerfall ranked fourth on PC Data’s September 1996 computer game sales chart. It dropped to sixth place in October and fell to 16th place in November.

By mid-2000, Bethesda’s marketing director, Pete Hines, reported that Daggerfall sold about 700,000 copies and was still selling four years after its release. He called it the company’s biggest success at that time.

Daggerfall received strong praise from critics and performed better than its predecessor in awards. Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer US named it the best computer role-playing game (CRPG) of 1996. It also won the Spotlight Award for “Adventure/RPG Game of the Year” from the Game Developers Conference. Though it was nominated for the best CRPG by GameSpot and Computer Games Strategy Plus, it lost to Diablo. Computer Gaming World noted that the game was not perfect but was revolutionary.

PC Gamer US reviewer Michael Wolf called Daggerfall “about as close to reality (or is that fantasy?) as you can get in a computer game.” He pointed out bugs and writing mistakes but praised the game as one of the most realistic and detailed RPGs available. Before its release, Computer Gaming World ranked Daggerfall as the eighth top vaporware title in history, meaning it was delayed for too long. Despite frustration with the delay, the publication later gave it a 4.5/5 rating.

In PC Magazine, Michael E. Ryan called Daggerfall “revolutionary” and compared it to Origin’s Ultima IV, one of the best RPGs ever made. He noted the game had many bugs that surprised the magazine’s staff, but he said players became “hopelessly addicted” to its endless possibilities. A reviewer from Next Generation wrote that Daggerfall “comes as close as anything ever has” to simulating real life and said the long wait for the game was “worth it.”

James Flynn of PC Gamer UK praised the game’s size and depth but said it was very slow and too large to handle without collapsing under its own weight. He criticized the game’s visuals, calling them unattractive and unclear. Andy Backer of Computer Games Strategy Plus called Daggerfall a “flawed masterpiece” but believed it could be the best CRPG of all time.

Charlie Brooker of PC Zone said Daggerfall’s idea of simulating a virtual world was strong but argued the game failed because technology at the time could not create an interesting single-player world. Andy Butcher of Arcane magazine gave Daggerfall a 7 out of 10, saying its size and scope could be rewarding if players were willing to spend time with it. He noted that tabletop RPGs have a referee to guide players, which Daggerfall lacked.

Game Revolution called Daggerfall “easily the RPG of the year” and “one of the BEST roleplaying games in history (so far).” Trent Ward of GameSpot said Bethesda had returned to the style of old-school RPGs and created a game that would take even experienced players months to complete. PC Gamer Magazine listed Daggerfall among the most ambitious PC games.

In 1997, PC Gamer US ranked Daggerfall as the 50th best game of all time, while PC Gamer UK placed it at No. 33. Both praised it as a great RPG but criticized its many bugs. PC Gamer US called it “a superlative RPG,” while PC Gamer UK said it was “so vastly massive that it threatens to collapse under its own gargantuan weight.”

In 1997, Media Technology Limited, Bethesda Softworks’ parent company, sued U.S. senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl for comments they made about Daggerfall’s suitability for children. Lieberman and Kohl called the lawsuit a publicity stunt to boost sales.