GOG’s bespoke cut of The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall gets delisted tomorrow, so you’ve got a day to grab it for free as the store works out how ‘to publish and maintain such projects better’ in future
There’s something about Elder Scrolls games. For years, one of the most popular ways for newbies to get into Morrowind was a mod collection called the Morrowind Sound and Graphics Overhaul (MGSO), which bundled up a bunch of gameplay and graphics mods in an easy installer to give the game a ‘modern’ makeover. Problem was it wasn’t great, to the point that even its original creator eventually came out and asked people not to use it.
So it goes with Morrowind’s predecessor—The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall. Daggerfall is a weird, wide, rambling thing, and absolutely still worth playing in 2025, especially since it’s now free. But if you were to just Google an easy way to play it, chances are you’ll stumble across the 2022 Daggerfall GOG Cut, a version of Daggerfall with the GOG stamp of approval, bundled up with a bunch of mods to make it feel a bit more approachable in the modern era.
Problem is, just like MGSO, it’s not great. In most ways, it’s inferior to just downloading the genuinely excellent Daggerfall Unity by itself and running the game straight from there. The GOG Cut is outdated, the mods it includes aren’t their most recent versions, and some of them don’t quite mesh. It’s been the bête noire of the Daggerfall community for a while now, and so GOG has come out and announced it’s delisting the whole thing tomorrow, February 12, at 2 pm GMT.
In a post on the GOG forums yesterday, company spokesperson king_kunat told players that GOG was delisting the Daggerfall GOG Cut because “at this time, the pack is outdated and no longer fulfills its purpose of providing a hassle-free modded experience to the game.”
Anyone who already has the Daggerfall GOG Cut in their library—and anyone who adds it before the deadline on February 12—will get to keep it, but otherwise? That’s the end of the road, buddy. Honestly, it’s for the best. The community’s complaints about the package weren’t wrong. What’s more, king_kunat says GOG is “working on a solution that will allow us to publish and maintain such projects better in the future, so stay tuned!”
Which I find very intriguing indeed. As someone who still regularly revisits old games—replays of Deus Ex, Bloodlines, KOTOR, the original System Shocks, and plenty more besides—I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m fed up with the faff of finding out which community patch is now the de facto best and which quality of life mods are considered total necessities every time I go back to a classic. I could just play the OGs in their original, fuzzy, 4:3 resolutions and with their original charming crashes, sure, but also I don’t hate myself (in that precise way).
So if GOG is trying to figure out a way to make that process a bit less of a pain, sign me right up. For a long time I’ve longed for a world where Steam Workshop got magically switched on for all my favourite classics, so that keeping them in a ready-to-go state was as simple as subscribing to a few mods and never thinking about it again. That’s not happened, but hey, maybe GOG has an alternative up its sleeve? I live in hope.
But the start of that journey is the end of the GOG cut of Daggerfall. If you want to grab it for posterity’s sake, you should make sure you grab it before it gets yoinked off the store tomorrow.
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