You Can Now Get The Biggest ‘Elder Scrolls’ Game Ever, For Free
Listen up, the biggest Elder Scrolls, scratch that, the biggest Bethesda game ever is free, right now: Daggerfall Unity awaits.
Bethesda is a developer best known for being an adventurer like you until they took an arrow in the knee. But before guards mocked you for someone stealing your sweet roll in Skyrim, before the Deathclaw-packed Wasteland of Fallout 3, before Patrick Stewart proclaimed you the only one who could save the world from the Daedra in Oblivion, before even the cliff-racer fueled apocalypse of Morrowind, there was Daggerfall.
And while Daggerfall isn’t the first entry in the Elder Scrolls series (that dubious honor belongs to The Elder Scrolls: Arena, a game as infamous for its instability and bugs — a Bethesda tradition — as it was for its bikini katana warrior cover art, see below), it’s certainly the one that really kicked the gate wide open, like Aragorn coming into Helm’s Deep.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall was a massive game. Truly mind-bogglingly huge. It was the biggest game Bethesda ever produced in terms of the size of the world. To illustrate just how huge the game is: Skyrim takes place over around 37 kilometers of real-world space. The Elder Scrolls Online, the MMO Elder Scrolls game, weighs in at an estimated 400 kilometers, according to popular ranking, but Daggerfall is estimated to take up around 161,600 kilometers. Almost the size of the UK.
And now, you can play it in full, with updated graphics, mod support, and everything else you’d want in an Elder Scrolls game. All of it is entirely free in the form of Daggerfall Unity.
Daggerfall Unity – 10 Years In The Making
The very last day of last year saw the release of Daggerfall Unity, an “open-source recreation of Daggerfall in the Unity engine.” This means updated graphics, to a certain extent, “boosted by modern engine and lighting”, so that things look much smoother than you might remember if you played the original.
If you’re wondering how Daggerfall could be so huge, a big part of that lies in its procedural generation system, which boasts 15,000 cities, towns, villages, and dungeons for characters to explore.
Alongside the massive amounts of exploration, there are guilds to join, quests to go on, factions to get embroiled in, either for or against, and so on. You can also create your own spells once you join the Mages Guild. The whole nine yards, really.
And then several thousand more yards on top of it. Best of all, the game comes complete with mod support and is absolutely free. You can download it and start playing right now!
Tamriel awaits!
