I did it! I beat
Daggerfall! Uh, what to say about it...well, for one thing, it's way too big. It is kind of refreshing at first to see the world presented in a more realistic size than it has been in other TES games, but there's no actual benefit to it as far as the gameplay goes, and it wears out its welcome very soon. Just shuffling around the layouts of these settlements doesn't make them unique enough to merit a visit. They're all still full of the same people dispensing the same generic quests and offering the same generic thoughts when spoken to. And speaking of generic locations repeated thousands of times, fuck these dungeons. I don't think I can express strongly enough how horrendous they are. Every single one of them is a labyrinthian nightmare full of dead ends, multiple floors, hidden switches, hidden teleporters, hidden doors, locked doors, hidden locked doors, and swarms of enemies attacking you at all times. Literally every single one. There are no easy dungeons, and there are no short ones. They all turn on beast mode and demand that you spend several frustrating hours trying to navigate each one, unless you do what I eventually did and use cheats to skip to the quest-relevant locations once inside.
It's also full of bugs and glitches, even after twenty years and numerous official and unofficial patches. Especially for quests involving those fucking dungeons. My favorite bug was one that happened during an optional part of the main quest, where a villainous noble tries to have you murdered. The quest ends when you confront one of the participants in the scheme, who sheepishly admits that he was paid to have you killed and gives you some money as a form of apology. The kicker is that this accomplice was supposed to be a random generic NPC, similar to most quests in the game, but due to some issue or another, the NPC always ends up being the king of the fledgling Orc kingdom. Basically, the last person in the world who'd be helping a corrupt Breton noble murder an enemy for petty cash. Well done, Bethesda. Anyway, make sure you save frequently if you play this, which also helps because of how easy it is to fuck up quests, including the main quest, due to human error. If you accidentally sell a quest item, you can't buy it back, so you're completely fucked. Most quests also have a pretty tough time limit, which is no saving.
On the notion of the story and lore. I like how the setup avoids immediately placing the world in great peril and declaring you the only true hero of destiny who can put an end to the chaos. Really doing that, too, not just pretending to the way
Morrowind did. The Lysandus subplot isn't all that interesting - lift the curse, avenge his death, blah blah generic fantasy - but the other subplot, with the letter and the Totem, was really cool. The twist involving the letter's contents was genuinely surprising, but also made perfect narrative sense, and I especially loved the little touch of everyone sending you letters making their offers for the Totem. It was also interesting to see the lore of the series prior to its revamping with
Redguard and the PGE. It's been improved dramatically since then, needless to say, although some of the books are pretty neat in their own right. My favorite was
King Edward, which unfortunately makes fuck-all sense in terms of lore, even simply as a work of historical fiction.