The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall was the second game in The Elder Scrolls series. It was released in 1996 for MS-DOS, a whole 2 years after its initially planned release date, making it vaporware in a manner similar to the better-known example, Duke Nukem Forever.

Gameplay
As with all primary Elder Scrolls games, Daggerfall is an open world "sandbox" game set in the fantasy realm of Tamriel, and the player is able to explore at will, with no requirements to actually follow any quest lines or even fill specific character archetypes, although there is an overlying 'main quest line' that the player can follow to eventually beat the game.

As typical of the genre, the game is full of gory elements and also is considered risque in that it features sexual topics and optional full frontal nudity, a shock amongst many during the time of its release. To make the game more readily available for younger players, the game comes with an option for a password protected "childgard" feature that will hide all blood, corpses (showing instead the skeleton), disables sexual topics, and ensuring that the player, when "nude", will always be wearing undergarments; however, this fails to remove all nudity seen in-game.

Size scale
Bethesda Software claimed that the scale of the game was analogous to the real life size of Great Britain: roughly around 229,848 square kilometers (88,745 square miles); however this is an exaggeration, as the game size limits are in actuality 161,600 square kilometers, or 62,394 square miles. Why they exaggerated is not well understood, as this size is still incredibly impressive. Another shocking bit of trivia is that the world of Tamriel in this game contains 15,000 towns, cities, villages and dungeons to explore, meaning the player likely will not end up exploring the entire world. By comparison, Todd Howard, game director and executive producer for Bethesda, the game's sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, is 0.01% the size of Daggerfall, although most of Daggerfall's terrain was randomly generated.

The explorable part of Morrowind, Vvardenfell, is 9.3 square miles, or 24 square kilometers. By comparison, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is approximately 22 square miles, or 56.97 square kilometers, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is 14.3 square miles, or 37.1 square kilometers, with a quarter of this terrain as unplayable, as it is stuck behind invisible borders.