The internet creates a very strange kind of closeness, doesn’t it? There are, on my Steam friends list, numerous people who just dropped off the Earth one day. One guy has been gone for a year. Another, 3646 days. If these were people I knew in real life, this kind of thing would have me filing a police report. The distance of a computer screen means that these people I used to see and perhaps speak to every day are just gone now. I hope they return.
But it happens outside the confines of my Steam friends list, too. Two years ago games YouTuber/Bethesda shitposter Micky D uploaded a Fallout video and promptly vanished, only rearing his head again a few days ago to celebrate the Oblivion remaster before dropping an unhinged new video: Can You Play Daggerfall Without Leaving Daggerfall?
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The premise is simple enough: fire up The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, sprint out of the opening dungeon, make your way across the game’s absurdly enormous map (literally the size of Great Britain) to the titular city, then lock yourself inside and never come out. The goal is to somehow amass a million gold—enough to buy the most expensive house in town—without ever stepping outside. This is a painful process. I am glad I did not have to do it but instead just watched a very amusing video about it.
Micky D eventually accomplished his happy task, although he ended up trapped in his new home’s loft by a disappearing staircase bug that feels like some kind of message from god.
But the experience sent me down a rabbit hole of challenge videos for Elder Scrolls games that I’ve not thought about in a very long time. Like the guys who play the first part of Morrowind without being able to see, or without walking, or who try to literally kill god at level 1.
I love this stuff, even though it’s not the kind of thing I would ever do myself (well, maybe for content). It feels like a kind of stress testing: forcing a game into an entirely new shape and seeing if it holds up, and at the same time revealing entirely new qualities in it that you might not even have noticed before.
For instance, that if you have a good enough knowledge of the layout of Morrowind’s opening level, you can finagle your way out of it blind by paying attention to where the directional audio cues come from (or, well, almost. Our hero eventually had to write out the necessary keystrokes step-by-step, but the principle is sound).
It’s a testament to the flexibility and, well, admirable brokenness of these classic Elder Scrolls games, and that’s before you get into adding in mods that let you do things like make everyone in the game a zombie. You’re not meant to be able to murder a god at level 1 and you’re not meant to be able to spend your entire life amassing a fortune in a single town in a map the size of Britain, but these games’ systems are so slippery, so strange, and so unrestricted that it becomes doable anyway.
I imagine wiser developers might never put a set of arrows in that could kill literally anything in one hit, nor would they let you permanently kill someone integral to the main plot. But the fact that they did, in a fit of youthful indiscretion, means players are still layering on absolutely baffling challenges atop the game the devs actually meant to make two decades (or more) after they came out. I can’t help but love those imperfections.
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