this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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I get that old games can be really hard to pick up, especially if they were before your time.
It basically comes down to two elements: the gameplay ambition and the world itself.
Arena and Daggerfall were wildly ambitious; and I don't just mean the scope of the world. They tried to bring a tabletop level of freedom to a real-time first-person RPG. The games had complex interconnected simulation systems long before anyone else attempted something like that again. This was largely the doing of Julian Lefay and Ted Peterson. Morrowind scaled that ambition way back. If it's the first TES game you played, it's easy to not realize how pared back it was compared it's predecessor. Each release after pared things back even further.
That is less important than the world, though. Lakshman and Peterson created a dark, sinister, thoroughly creepy world in the vein of Robert E Howard. It had deep lore, darkness, and unapologetic savage maturity that permeated everything. And it mattered. The world mattered. The lore affected everything... from sacred rights that could only be performed on certain days (which you discovered by reading lore-heavy texts), to huge dungeons both handmade and procedural and labyrinthine, to dark secrets that only revealed themselves in certain circumstances...
What Todd did is loot it and turn it into something else entirely. You can see this with Redfall, Todd Howard's cheery, bright, swash-buckling adventure game spinoff that utterly disregarded Peterson and Lakshman's lore and world-building. Vijay and Peterson had written a bible (which may still be floating around online) outlining the series through to Oblivion, which was supposed to be the literal end of the world and the darkest game in the series. We all know how that turned out.
Lefay and Peterson did return as contractors to work on Morrowind, which is why it still retains a bit of the character despite Todd's directorship and being stripped of some of the darker themes... but we can all see where things went after.
There has never been another game like Daggerfall. It was the first and last of it's kind.
Thanks for taking the time to spell it out for me. Were that Daggerfall found me as a kid, it sounds like it would have been exactly my thing. Even as a preteen I was already deep into dark, novelistic RPGs like Fallout 1+2 and (to a lesser extent) Strife and the early Baldur's Gate games.
Since someone in this thread reminded me of Daggerfall Unity I've been looking at some gameplay footage, which was quickly apparent to be the wrong way to take in the game even before you described its depth as textual and tantalisingly obscurantist. At this point in my life, masquerading as a breadwinning parental archetype, I'm thinking the best way for me to vicariously digest a portion of Daggerfall might be through the imperial library site (link).
Looking forward, it's impossible to come to any other conclusion about Todd Howard and his ilk being something like the Musk of great novelistic game franchises, buying and cheapening anything that captures the imagination and profiting immensely from it. Such voices are unwelcome in the conversation about games as art.
I still hold out hope that there are enough grown up bookworms like me to carry that torch as indie developers, though. Games like Disco Elysium still do get made, and as games get easier to produce over time it's not hard to believe that the more writerly among us can make use of the medium to good effect in the traditions established by Lefay and Peterson.