It also has the largest game world ever!
Fun fact. Outside of 3 or 4 cities and maybe 14 dungeons, all of Daggerfall was randomly generated by Bethesda. Problem? The random world generator they used sucked.
* Most of the world in Daggerfall is empty. Completely, absolutely, 100% devoid of content. The wilderness is a mostly flat, sometimes hilly, expanse of nothing. You can explore in the wilderness, but you will never find anything, and you will never actually do anything there.
* Most of the world of Daggerfall is actually repeated. There's only about 100 unique building layouts in the game. NPC and building names are randomized, sure, but the actual layouts are identical. Meaning that, if you have a city with ten inns, at best you've only got three unique building layouts.
* All of the little manor farms and single house villages are also essentially useless because nothing ever happens there.
* You can get random quests and find things outside of the three main cities, but from a strictly gameplay perspective, you don't have any real reason for ever going outside of them because no matter where you go you're going to be finding the exact same things and doing the exact same random quests.
So, really, if you take all of the dead space and repeated things out of Daggerfall, it's not a very large game at all.
More reasons that Daggerfall's absolute shit and doesn't deserve to be on any best-of lists short of "Best Examples of How Not To Design A Game."
* Most of the promised features were never actually implemented.
* This would be less of an issue if the features that HAD been implemented were actually interesting, but they're not. The spell maker and enchantment maker are actually pretty cool, but... Outside of those, you have random quests and dungeon crawling. There. That's pretty much the entire feature set.
* The dungeons are awful. They're randomly generated messes, they glitch frequently and drop quest objectives through the floor, they take *forever* to get through, because they were randomly generated a lot of them actually have ways that'll get you permanently stuck, there's no real puzzle solving in them, there's no real interactivity in them...
* There's honestly nothing to do in the game BESIDES taking on random quests (which aren't really random, per se; they're more randomly selected with the details randomized, and they're linked to your level and guild rank, meaning you're probably going to be doing the same quest a bunch of times in a row).
* You also need to join guilds and do random quests to get your... likability/reputation high enough to get the main story quests, which is also problematic because guild advancement is slow and any given dungeon will likely take you 3-5 hours to complete.
* Dungeons are randomly constructed from dungeon blocks, rendering them really repetitive. They also rarely have any good loot, for that matter, and whatever in game rewards you get for doing them is otherwise minor...
* Except for the guild/reputation rank advances, which are actually necessary, so the game is really nothing more than a grindfest to get your reputation up. Which is lame.
* The quests are all fetch quests and they're not fun. The ones that are more ornate than fetch quests bug out and break about half the time.
* There's something like 30 skills in the game. About half of them are either useless or don't work right.
* You can get a house and a boat, except boats don't work right, and the house is empty and unfurnishable and if you put any objects in the cupboards they're the game is likely to glitch and remove them.
All good points. But I still thought it was fun! :)
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