Former The Elder Scrolls designer Ted Peterson loves the fan-made remakes and ports to games like Daggerfall, but says it’s a shame videogames need this treatment while movies don’t. Fans of Bethesda’s fantasy RPG series have been porting, enhancing, or completely rebuilding the games for years, and they show no signs of slowing down. Getting more modern versions of these games is great, but it is bittersweet when you realize that for some classics, these are the only real ways you can easily play them today.
Mods and other player creations have kept us busy while we wait for the Elder Scrolls 6 release date, but there’s still an awful lot to be gained from trying out games like Daggerfall in their original form. With an RPG map over 200,000 square kilometers in size, which houses over 15,000 towns and cities, this version of Tamriel is teeming with life.
But for a long time, trying to play Daggerfall in its original incarnation was hard. Originally released in 1996, it only made it to Steam in 2022. By that time, a lot of newer players, perhaps coming to The Elder Scrolls after Oblivion or Skyrim, might have found Daggerfall’s design and presentation more than a little dated. That paved the way for Daggerfall Unity.
A fan-made remaster and port that completely rebuilds Bethesda’s epic using the Unity game engine, with last year’s 1.0 launch, it’s better than ever. You can download Daggerfall free on Steam, install the Unity port, and play the classic with a lighting boost, high-resolution widescreen, increased draw distance, and smoother controls. But why does it have to be this way with games? Peterson, whose credits also include Oblivion, Morrowind, and the original Elder Scrolls game, Arena, recognizes the brilliance of Daggerfall Unity, but also a strange phenomenon in gaming.
“Oh my god, Daggerfall Unity has been the best,” Peterson tells VideoGamer. “It’s great, obviously. I really appreciate it. [But] it’s funny because no one had to recreate Casablanca to say, ‘Oh my god, look at this movie from 70 years ago’. You just go, ‘Yeah, it was of the era and the dialogue is great, and the chemistry is great’, and nobody says, ‘It’s fine for the era’.
“It’s bizarre,” Peterson continues. “I mean no one could play Daggerfall for ten years. Maybe even longer. They could do DOSBox, but it would be flaky and weird. [Daggerfall Unity] totally reinvigorated people’s interest and people saying, ‘Hey, this was actually a decent game!’ I think we knew we were doing something special at the time, but that’s the way I feel right now, Honestly, maybe a Daggerfall reboot at some point might be fine. Obviously, at this point, Bethesda owns it all, so if they want to do it, then they’ll do it.”
Right now, Peterson is working on the Daggerfall-inspired RPG The Wayward Realms. The team at OnceLost Games has pages of pre-written lore that underpin a procedurally generated world, one that features no traditional main quest. Instead, you’re exploring handcrafted experiences and random encounters to shape the world around you. We got a dense gameplay trailer for The Wayward Realms last year, but right now the game is still “coming soon” on Steam.
We also have all the best fantasy games and best open-world games you can play on PC today, if you want something a little more modern than Daggerfall.
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