Nostalgia for a game you hardly ever played?

[Seferoth]

This might be a weird topic, but something i wanted to talk about. First things first, i did not have any nostalgia feelings for Daggerfall, i started my TES journey with Morrowind at a time when i despised western RPG's and First person games...those were my 2 most hated genres. Only thing why i even got Morrowind was because when i got my first Xbox i took some games to trade in a game shop(not gamestop) and i was left with 15 euros extra and you had to use them there, so i took used Morrowind GOTY edition because i liked the cover of the game. Well it blew my f***ing mind, never had i experienced freedom like that before. I ended up playing it for 3500 hours, 3000 hours on Xbox. Then came Oblivion which surpassed Morrowind for me and became my favorite game of all time(until DFU), a game that i have played over 5500 hours.

So, back to the topic here. I first played Daggerfall in 2011...i think(dosbox, daggerfallsetup). I played it about 15-20 hours and i did like it, but it was still buggy, outdated in many ways,pretty ugly to look at(my opinion at the time), clumsy to control, but even back then i though "if this game is ever remade it would be best game ever". Which leads up to November of this month when i decided to check at what condition the DFU Project was(i had checked the project now and then before) and was very surprised to see that it's feature complete, more bug free than classic and is very much playable.

So, i downloaded it and installed a bunch of graphics mods like D.R.E.A.M, enhanced sky, post processing effects and better interior lighting. I did not even check how the game looked without them(this is important). So, about few days ago i decided to do a secondary install where i only installed the most basic mods i personally need(No Dice,Unleveled Mobs,Tedious Travel) and i went and booted up the game and BANG! I was hit with a very surprising wave of immersion/atmosphere when i saw the game, for whatever reason the vanilla graphics seemed to fill me with...nostalgia? I do recognize the feel of nostalgia and that is precisely what it is...but why? Why am i feeling nostalgic for something i hardly played in the past? I only played it 15-20 hours and that was purely testing, nothing serious. So, if anyone has any similar experiences please write them below, or if you have something to add to my story or any questions, post them below too.

[james2k]

I feel the same for Morrowind. I only played it years after playing Oblivion, and I found it really clunky so I could never really get into it. But I know so much about the game and the story from fans of it and reading TES lore, and I've seen so many memes of it that it almost feels like I did play it. It weirdly enough has a special place in my heart despite me playing maybe 20 hours of it max.

[Orbarth]

Daggerfall was the 1st videogame (along with Duke Nukem 3D ) that i purchased once i had been able to afford a PC
So i find it interesting to read opinions about this game from people that didn't played it in its time.

[MrFlibble]

Yes, I had this feeling. I grew up in the 90s but did not have a PC for a long time (and never had any console at all), and only had sporadic access to video game magazines which my school friends would lend me from time to time. I played a limited number of games, StarCraft having been my number one favourive for a very long time.

As I got more or less regular Internet access in the early 2000s I started to look for info about the games from my childhood that I had never played but only heard about, and other games that I had entirely missed. This turned out to be a very exciting hobby on its own, and additionally I could try a lot of games from that time for no cost as they had freely distributable shareware releases or demo versions. I discovered DOSBox which greatly improved the experience with DOS games even when they kinda-sorta ran natively in Windows.

I always loved Duke Nukem 3D and started checking out other games published by Apogee/3D Realms, and sometime around 2006 I discovered Rise of the Triad, a game that I think I had never heard about before at that point (of course I had played Wolfenstein 3-D, but not this game). Now by then I had experienced many DOS games which were not familiar to me from the 90s but made a very good impression (e.g. Epic MegaGames Tyrian) but this one immediately filled me with a very odd feeling of nostalgia, I cannot even really tell why. Maybe it was a general mood I had back then, but the game's music and visuals produced a very peculiar impression on me, bringing back childhood memories from around the time it came out. I could easily imagine how awesome it would have been to play ROTT when it came out on contemporary hardware, and there is an atmosphere in the game that in some aspects actually surpasses Doom.

Even more oddly, some art assets of the game evoked in me childhood memories of real places and experiences, including the sunset sky from the first level, and some brick textures that reminded me, vaguely, of certain brick buildings I had seen as a child. Perhaps in a way that shouldn't be surprising because these assets were based on photographs of real places that were taken around the time of my childhood memories

I think the only other game that kinda-sorta made a similar impression (but much less pronounced) is the first Need for Speed, although in this case I had played NFSII sometime in the early 2000s at our IT classes at school

Thinking of it, one additional factor with ROTT might have been that, while I was not familiar with it, I had heard the music from the first level because it is used as placeholder music in LameDuke, an officially released development version of Duke Nukem 3D - which I also have nostalgic feelings for, but I had played Duke3D in the 90s as I mentioned above.

For most other oldies, Daggerfall included, it's more of a nostalgia for a certain art style, e.g. low-resolution sprites for many in-game objects (tress and people, etc.), the general look of low-resolution graphics etc.