Github page: https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity/releases
Installation: https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2360
This was an ambitious project that I vaguely remember reading about some time ago. The old Bethesda game, Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, has been recreated as open source inside the Unity engine. Not that I want to toot the horn of Unity after the clusterfuck that is their business practices of late, but the creator of this project made excellent use of it giving an old game new life.
I played this back when it originally came out and it was an instant hit in my life. The character creator was something I’d never seen before, especially with custom characters. I replayed that opening dungeon more times than the rest of the game as a whole because I wanted to try a new class build so often. (I wonder if this is why I always made alts in World of Warcraft..huh, maybe.)
The game is an old school RPG that is hard as fuck. The combat gets better as you play but starting out it sucks swinging the mouse back and forth in different patterns with a low damage and low hit% weapon. I had forgotten just how hard this game could be after I didn’t save for 30 minutes and ended up dying to a simple skeleton that I just couldn’t land a hit on to save my life. The original game was full of bugs that at times made the game dramatically easier due to enemies sometimes not attacking back when struck. (I took advantage of this many times back in the day by going to castle guards and attacking, looting, leaving, and repeating.)
With that said, the creator of this recreation has implemented all of the previously “unofficial” patches (Bethesda never fixes their own games), fixes, and best mods. These additions make the game playable without crashing, so far in my experience through several hours I haven’t crashed the game even once! Some of the mods even take a lot of the tedium out of exploration by making the dungeons smaller. This you would think would ruin the game experience or make it too easy but if you played the original you know how mind boggling and confusingly large some of these dungeons used to be. Since this was also before quality in-game maps for games, the maps were just as confusing to read while you were in a dungeon. Any mod that makes dungeons more reasonable is a welcome change.
It went 1.0 three weeks ago and Interkarma and the other contributors really developed something special. It’s available on Windows, Linux and Mac, go check out this amazing and refreshing recreation of Daggerfall today!