Daggerfall

[caption id="attachment_198" align="aligncenter" width="288" caption="Daggerfall\'s box art."]Game of the Day series.

If Ultima 3's world is to be considered massive then Daggerfall's is larger than you can imagine. Sure a lot is randomized based on computer algorithms and it isn't always natural-feeling, but the fact that you'll never visit every since town is impressive. It was even more impressive back in 1996 when I first experienced it and to this day there are parts of it that remain unmatched.

In the beginning of the game you are an unknown escaping from an odd dungeon prison after your ship wrecks. You must then follow a series of quests to solve some great world mystery, I think it has to do with rulers being challenged or overthrown. I can't remember, the side activities consumed me, and I never finished the main quest, even though I gave another half-hearted attempt a couple years ago.

The music, excepting the towns, is spacious, tonal, and tied to the type of area you're in plus the weather. Dungeons, thus, have their own set of tracks to choose from whereas the outside areas will be different depending on if you're seeing rain, snow, or sunshine. Even the best sun, however, is muted by the requisite fog. Load screens appeared when changing from outside to in, or vice versa, but never beyond that. This means you could set out walking from one location and eventually reach it, without ever suffering through a pathetic and arbitrary progress meter.

To achieve so much on such limited hardware, this is prior to accelerated consumer video cards after all, the game used 2D sprites in its 3D world powered by the original Quake engine. This is both a blessing and a curse since the sprites look decent in screenshots, but tend to have a more limited array of motions and types of display. It made directional viewing off the normal horizon of the eyes even more akward, and clipping bugs tainted some of the more mysterious moments. When you can see the edge of something before it pops out of a room, there's less surprise.

Still, it is one of the few games I could say I became truly immmersed in and played as a part of rather than a puppetmaster looking in. It didn't matter the kind of character, but only that I did what I chose and went along with getting lost, catching a disease, following some orders, etc. I'm still waiting for an Elder Scrolls game to bring back climbing, randomized guild quests, sprawling underground dungeons, teleportation spell for getting out of them, wagons for your crap, and more generated material than you can shake a stick at!

Bethesda recently announced Daggerfall is free for anyone to download and play, but the downside is it was programmed (poorly) for a DOS/Windows 95 machine. That is to say it was a DOS game that ran better under Windows 95 than within true DOS. You can, however, grab a copy of DOSbox which will allow you to emulate it on any modern platform -- mostly. The game is still buggy as heck and emulation is imperfect, so I recommend it only for the most nostalgic of fans (such as myself).