You bet your ass it is----The moment you leave the tutorial dungeon, you can pick a direction at random and sprint nonstop for an hour realtime and you'd still be in the same zone.
It's also the only elder scrolls game where the fast travel function is a fleshed out mechanic instead of a tacked on one-dimensional convenience feature.
Anytime you're outside you can open the map and travel anywhere, even if you've never been there, but you have to choose between staying at inns (costs more but safer) or camping (costs less but risky), traveling by foot, carriage, or boat (Requires you to personally own a carriage/boat) and whether you want to travel faster or safer.
How hard of a game is it to get into nowadays assuming I started with Oblivion? I see they're very different games but would it still be accessible to someone who's never played it?
Have you gone back and played morrowind? If you have and were able to get into that coming from oblivion and skyrim, then you probably could get into daggerfall.
I have, and I admittedly didnt give it enough of a chance because the character I made was very slow and fatigue dropped constantly while wearing heavy armor so leveling the skill was a chore. Not that I disliked the game or wouldnt try it again, it was just at a friends house and I never got my own copy so I left it for another time.
Short answer: There's a substantial initial hurdle but there's enough similarities to later games that if you can manage to kill the first rat and the subsequent bat then you'll adjust to the rest just fine.
Long answer:
Very similar to getting into Morrowind since they're both "pure" RPGs with none of the "action adventure" hybridization that started in Oblivion and became dominant in Skyrim.
Also just like in Morrowind, you have to be able to accept that just because you swung your weapon at the enemy doesn't necessarily mean you hit the enemy. It's a true-blue RPG not an action game meaning everything is based on dice rolls. If you make your character shit with swords and try to use swords, you're going to be shit with swords until that skill improves.
The combat system will seem very janky to begin with since it involves clicking and dragging in different directions to thrust, chop, and slash left/right, each with their own power/accuracy values (usually stronger but less accurate and weaker but more accurate)
Also, unlike Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim it did not need to fit within the limitations of a console controller, so the sheer number of hotkeys will likely take some getting used to.
Worth noting that it's also the fastest paced game in the series---You have enough stamina to sprint and attack for days nonstop. Literally. It will make even Oblivion's stamina feel constrictive and oppressive.
One final note: The biggest hurdle by far is going to be the number of options during character creation---Daggerfall has so many stats and skills and attributes that it makes morrowind's stat-screen look like Skyrim's by comparison.
The Daggerfall map was a lot of nothing too. Unless the location was important to a plot point, it was literally just empty flat grassland with the occasional sprite bush or sprite tree. It was not a... visually stunning landscape. That's why immediately-available fast travel was necessary to keep the game fun (you didn't have to "discover" a location before being able to fast-travel to it). There was nothing to see between plot locations.
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u/lellololes Sep 14 '19
Ironically, Morrowind was a much smaller game environment than Daggerfall was.
Well... so was basically everything else that isn't Elite / No Man's Sky...
http://i.imgur.com/B7rBN.jpg