The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is the second installment of Bethesda's legendary series and, at the time of its release, was one of the most expansive RPGs ever made — the game world of the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell was procedurally generated and included thousands of towns, villages, and dungeons. The player creates their own character, choosing a race, class, and set of skills, and then sets out into an open world full of factions, quests, and political intrigue.

The game offers unprecedented freedom of movement and approach to quests — it is possible to become a member of the thieves' guild, mages, fighting orders, or even vampires, with decisions affecting the further development of the story. Technically, it was a very ambitious project with a 3D environment, which placed heavy demands on the PCs of the time and was notoriously known for its technical flaws and bugs at launch. Despite this, it offered an unusual degree of simulation of the world, weather, and time of day.

Daggerfall is now regarded as a groundbreaking, if roughly polished, step toward open-world RPGs, one that influenced the direction of the entire Elder Scrolls series and the genre in general with its emphasis on player freedom. Due to its technical imperfections and lack of clarity, playing it today is mainly a matter for enthusiasts and historians of the genre, though community fixes and modern engines like Daggerfall Unity continue to extend its life and bring it closer to new generations of players. The scale of the game was truly unprecedented in 1996 — the game world included hundreds of thousands of individual locations and hundreds of side characters, which required an enormous amount of content generated partly procedurally and partly by hand. This scale became both a strength and a source of repetitive, generic content, a trade-off Bethesda was well aware of and gradually addressed in later installments of the series with a smaller but hand-crafted world. Nevertheless, Daggerfall remains to this day a reference point that Bethesda itself and the media repeatedly return to when discussing how large an open-world RPG should actually be.