The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall · PC (MS-DOS) · 1996 · Impact: A commercial hit remembered for its instability
Bethesda built a world the size of Great Britain with 15,000 towns — and shipped it with so many bugs that it needed patch after patch. Players bought it anyway: 100,000 copies in two days.
Work on Daggerfall began immediately after Arena was released in March 1994. Bethesda set out to build something on a scale no role-playing game had attempted: a procedurally generated game world described as the size of Great Britain, roughly 209,000 square kilometres, containing 15,000 towns and a population of 750,000. The game was completed on 31 August 1996 and released in North America on 20 September. That scale came at a price. Like Arena before it, Daggerfall shipped with buggy code. Players encountered crashes and problems that could interrupt progress, and although Bethesda patched the game multiple times, many remained unhappy with its stability. Designer Julian LeFay later spoke of wanting to avoid "all the stupid patches we had for Daggerfall" on future projects. The bugs did not stop the game from succeeding. It sold more than 100,000 copies within two days of release and around 700,000 copies by mid-2000, and it was still selling four years after launch. Its freedom and scale set the template for the open-world Elder Scrolls games that followed, and in 2009, for the series' 15th anniversary, Bethesda made Daggerfall free to download.
Daggerfall is an early example of a trade-off that would follow open-world games for decades: the larger and more systemic the world, the harder it is to test every situation a player can create. Its success showed that many players would accept rough edges in return for that freedom — and its patches showed the cost.