homework notes ⁽²⁾

I wanted to make this another Homework Notes post, in which I list off all the things that I noticed while playing a classic CRPG from the mid-90s to early 2000s that would be good lessons to remember when creating a game of my own. But it really wouldn't deserve that title. I played Daggerfall for a total of three hours. Two hours making it out of the first dungeon, and then one more hour progressing the story in the overworld. Which seems like it's probably not enough to properly rate and review a game of this scope. But I just can't make myself go back to it. Daggerfall is without a doubt the worst game I have ever played. And by a huge margin. This is just atrociously bad. I would love to mention the things about it that I did find interesting or inspiring enough to say something good about them. But there just isn't a single thing about this whole experience I had that wasn't awful. In the unity engine, the outside world sometimes manages to look a bit evocative, but that's not part of the original game. It's not "it's an old game and you're playing…

Years ago, I played a little bit of Fallout 2, which gave me a basic understanding of the game's gemeplay, but I didn't really enjoy it and I stopped playing after something like two or three hours. But I had watched several in-depth videos on the first Fallout in particular over the last year, that widely praised it for its accomplishments and dove deeper into its gameplay mechanics. So when I started thinking about what kind of game I would want to make, and zeroing in on some kind of isometric RPG, Fallout was one of the main references for how I want to approach things. Though I'm not really that much interested in the series, having played Fallout at least once will surely be hugely valuable in the future. This really is part of the necessary homework to get into developing this kind of game. Having now played some 10-12 hours of Fallout, I have to say my most objective assessment would be "I am not enjoying the game. To phrase my overall perception in the most positive way, I think that looking at Fallout side to side with Baldur's Gate is like looking at Nosferatu and Casablanca. Nosferatu…