Before Starfield, before Skyrim, before Fallout 3 and even before Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall has existed as a monument. It is by far the biggest game of Bethesda and now, it has been remastered by fans and released completely for free.
Daggerfall was originally released in 1996. It was an incredible moment in gaming history, a year in which video games proved that they were capable of achieving far greater achievements than anyone else. ever imagined. It was the year of groundbreaking titles like Super Mario 64, Quake and Pokémon Red and Blue. The potential of video games is exploding exponentially, and few games demonstrate this better than the second installment in the series. The Elder Scrolls of Bethesda.
Starfield of 2023 has about 1,000 planets for you to visit. Daggerfall in 1996 has 15,000 locations to explore. Spread across High Rock and Hammerfell, it has everything you’d expect from a The Elder Scrolls game, with free exploration, guilds to join, religions to believe in, a reputation system and all Of course, the ability to turn into a vampire or werewolf. All of this takes place in a game world the size of the United Kingdom, said to be more than 200,000 square kilometers.
Nothing can express the vastness of Daggerfall more than the photo below, when a Reddit user superimposed the map of Skyrim (2011) on top of the map of its predecessor released in 1996:
The small dot in the middle of the map is the map of Skyrim (2011)
That vastness and all the above mentioned features have now been recreated with improved and more beautiful graphics, along with full mod support in Daggerfall Unity. After 10 years of development, the team behind it announced the project’s completion on the last day of 2023. And the best part is that it’s completely free, thanks to Bethesda releasing the original game for free in 2023. 2009, to celebrate its 15th anniversary. In 2022, it added that free version of the game to Steam.
To play Daggerfall Unity, you need to download the base game from Steam, then download the Daggerfall Unity release, extract the latter, and link it to the former.
Then, if you’re a longtime Skyrim gamer, you can obviously install countless mods to enrich the game in your own way. However, even without installing anything, Daggerfall Unity still works perfectly when it comes out, at extremely high resolution, with a clean, sharp user interface.
Bethesda once announced that Daggerfall would be a game that people could play forever, with its massive scale and hundreds of hours of quests. However, perhaps the game’s developers themselves could not have imagined that after 27 years, it would be reborn to prove its longevity.