What should have happened with Daggerfall but didn't (and what I hope will happen with Wayward Realms)

[jayhova]

No one disputes that Daggerfall is a very large, nearly blank slate. The games that came immediately after were supposed to be expansions. Imagine if
Battlespire had been an actual place somewhere in the game space of Daggerfall or perhaps near it in an expanded space. Imagine if the updated sprites were added back into Daggerfall as improvements. Imagine exiting the Battlespire to go to Wayrest. Of course, this did not happen because Battlespire was an attempt to make a Daggerfall-like game multiplayer. It failed hard. So much so that Bethsoft refused to he anything to do with multiplayer for decades.

Now let's briefly look at what happened. After Morrowind came out there were 2 expansions. Both of these explanations added new territory to the game because they could not fit into the existing game space. One of the expansions required some sleight of hand to do this.

Imagine if Morrowind had been created in a similar fashion to Daggerfall. The expansions could have been placed in the same game space as the original game. At that point, the expansions would have been less like expansions and more like modules. Modules could add characters and some locations and boom!, several more hours of gameplay.

It occurs that this could happen with DFU. You could have a MODule. Essentially, an individual quest line. The MODule might require other Mods as dependencies to work.

[Werewolf]

That sounds fascinating and I imagine that as the modding scene evolves we’ll see that. Would’ve been interesting to see how it would’ve been like had Battlespire been a Daggerfall expansion rather then standalone. Seems to me that post-Daggerfall, pre-Morrowind Bethesda was an absolute mess of mismanagement. With spin-offs that did poorly instead of an Elder Scrolls 3, the Daggerfall devs leaving with the poor conditions, etc. How hard would it have been just to make an Elder Scrolls 3? The fact that it took until 2002 is just insane. Back then game sequels took a few years to come out tops yet it took over five years for Morrowind to happen. I mean using a higher budget and bigger team then Daggerfall and Bethesda makes an action spin-off Redguard? The heck?

But yes the modules idea is fascinating and a map expansion is easily the mod that would get Daggerfall Unity the most outside attention and thus increase in popularity

[jayhova]

I talked about this here.