Elder Scrolls, The - Daggerfall

Opening Daggerfall means stepping into a world where you can easily get lost — literally and figuratively. Back in 1996, Bethesda pulled from its hat an RPG so sprawling and bloated with ambition that after ten hours you might still have no idea where you're actually going. And surprisingly, that's precisely what makes it a fascinating oddity.

It's a medieval fantasy world of Tamriel, where you take on the role of an anonymous adventurer and have to sort out your own fate. Specific quests work on the principle of "figure it out yourself" — guilds, quests, factions, secrets. The map is so enormous that it practically plays itself: dungeons are procedurally generated, some worse than others, and navigation without a compass is sometimes pure lottery. You're completely alone with your sword, dog skin, and understanding of how this thing even works.

It plays like a rich RPG, except that richness sometimes manifests as sheer bewilderment. Character creation is nice, the skill system works reasonably well, but combat is slow and utterly devoid of any slick polish. Graphics-wise it's flat, audio comes from the speakers of that era, and yet you feel something magnetic there — the sense of a real, uncut world, not a corridor between cutscenes.

We remember Daggerfall today as the beginning of something grand, but also as a monument to ambitious code left on the cutting room floor. It created a cult following of heretics who play it to this day. The remnants of its graphics have aged ungracefully, procedural dungeon generation works automatically and faceless, but there's something in it that newer Scrolls have lost: the feeling of a truly alien, unimaginable world.

Playing it today means a forest-walking simulator with occasional monsters. It's not a game for pure relaxation. But if you're curious about how the thing called "open world RPG" began, what playing without a tutorial and without handholding looked like, what happens if you get lost — here you have it in its original form.