this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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Two decades.
Daggerfall was way, way, way ahead of its time… but when Vijay, Peterson, & LeFay left Bethesda it was all downhill. Morrowind was a pale shadow of Daggerfall, and it only went downhill from there as each release stripped back progressively more and more of Elder Scroll’s ambition and personality. Who was responsible for all this anti-ambitious anti-progress? Todd Howard.
Morrowind has never been a pale shadow of Daggerfall. It's just another take on the RPG genre, and a masterful one.
Of course, it's not a RPG sandbox like Daggerfall was and that might put off the early Elder Scrolls fans, but it's superior to its big brother on numerous accounts : story lines, lore, immersion, quests, etc.
Morrowind is a handcrafted marvel with manually placed details everywhere that make the game fascinating and fun to explore, unlike Daggerfall which was big, but repetitive due to its procedural system.
See, this is what I'm talking about. We have entire generations of people parroting this nonsense because they started with Morrowind and never actually played Daggerfall. It's incredibly sad.
'I'm idolizing my childhood so you must be too' is not productive, to put it lightly. Daggerfall has a comically large empty world full of nearly-identical comically large empty towns. It sends you to dungeons that are hideously complex, which is a nice change of pace, but not exactly great to play through. Dialog is a lot more freeform, for better and for worse, and I could at least allow that dialog gets streamlined more harshly in every game.
Look: Daggerfall was ambitious. Its reach exceeded its grasp, by a lot - but it fuckin' tried. That's admirable, and something to strive for now that knowledge and technology have advanced so far. But it doesn't make a jank relic with sink-or-swim gameplay the bestest thing evar. It certainly doesn't make the homogeneous medieval aesthetic have more personality than mushroom castles, meteorite prisons, and a crab-dome city.
I didn't start with Morrowind but Oblivion so you can't blame nostalgia for my opinion, and I have spent around 50-100h on Daggerfall. Now that your point is invalid, do you want to try something else?