daggerfall was such a mind-boggling game in my childhood when it came out, just so unbelievably different from anything else around at the time

like youd do the initial dungeon like a normal dungeon crawl game (always taking the ebony dagger backstory option so you could actually kill that fucking imp), and then get thrust into this ridiculous open world that seemed to want to let you do absolutely anything you wanted. go to any one of hundreds of cities and towns full of houses and shops and guilds and palaces and temples and do endless quests to level yourself up in a vast horde of different organisations. all these buildings with complete interiors, and shops with inventories actually on shelves so you could break in at night and steal their shit, and you could use banks and buy houses and horses and carts and ships, and join weird cults and there were guards and bounty systems and people everywhere and a sense that this was a big world going on around you mostly indifferent to your existence. and you could be one of a million possible character types with a million different skills, some obviously ludicrously overpowered and some obviously completely pointless and with all sorts of strange strengths and weaknesses, and you could make your own spells and get turned into a vampire or whatever. and wildernesses full of monsters and giant dungeons and all sorts of shit. and you could even do the story quests although i never really bothered, though i do remember the king of worms bits being cool as shit when i was a kid. it wanted to let you do everything.

but at the same time it was the absolute jankiest piece of shit with just broken systems everywhere and everywhere was kinda the same cos it was procedurally generated and my overwhelming memory of it is being in a tiny isolated shack in the desert in the middle of absolute nowhere and stealing a few coins or something and two seconds later like five guards in full plate armour burst in yelling halt halt halt halt. and the dungeons were just painfully oversized to the point of becoming unbearable, and even with the remarkably good 3d map it was near-impossible to find your way around. it was like a tech demo for the game i most wanted in the world, but that never reached its potential. and then years later morrowind came along and holy shit it was everything daggerfall wanted to be but wasnt quite. but i will always have a soft spot for daggerfall for just how incredibly ambitious the thing was, even when they couldnt always follow through