The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall review

pcgamer.com:

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls, we're publishing our original reviews of each main game in the series from our archives. This review first ran in PC Gamer UK issue 35, back in September 1996.

As with Arena , the sheer size and freedom offered from the series becomes its key selling point—here James admits to playing the game for more than 70 hours and still not feeling like he'd made a dent. While Daggerfall picks up a couple of extra points over its predecessor, it just misses breaking the 90% barrier—its ageing presentation holding it back. «Quite how they've managed to produce such an ugly grey look with Spectrum fonts is a mystery.» If you'd like to experience Daggerfall yourself, we've got a step-by-step guide to playing this slice of Elder Scrolls history on modern PCs.

Developer Bethesda Softworks
Minimum system 486DX2/66, 8Mb RAM
Recommended Pentium 100, SVGA
Sound support All major cards
Release date September 20, 1996

If you had to give a percentage score to your life to date, what would it be? Consider school, the worst ever jobs, parents, friends, sport… all the successes and failures that have been crammed into the past 25 years or so. Now imagine playing Daggerfall, and you'll probably have to use a similar process to arrive at a mark.

I've been playing Daggerfall for about 70 hours now and have got absolutely nowhere. The feeling, as I have to say 'enough is enough', is one of those impossible-to-pinpoint ones of reward and satisfaction with a little frustration added to the emotional broth for good measure. It's the sort that wanders your way after a few days of real-life time that have been challenging and passed enjoyably but, well, have achieved nothing that you'd give yourself a self-congratulatory back-slap for.

So is it any good? Yes. Very. But it's also very, very slow. It's not quite as structure-less as Elite, but almost. At the start of the game you find yourself sitting in a dungeon and, you reason, Priority