Daggerfall - Retrospective @ PC World

Dhruin

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There's a short retrospective on Daggerfall at PC World (with a link to a guide to get it running in Win7):
What Daggerfall lacks in accessibility it more than makes up for with variety and freedom of choice: At one point you can choose to save a local villager from a rampaging band of werewolves, or join with the beasts and become a werewolf yourself. Sneaky skills such as lockpicking and pickpocketing allow budding vagabonds to get rich quick, but ply your thieving skills poorly and you’ll attract the ire of local guardsmen. Ply the skills exceptionally well and you might be invited to join the Thieves’ Guild, which opens up an entirely new branch of quests to complete and loot to collect--but brands you an enemy of rival guilds. The possibilities seem endless, and while this sort of open-ended gameplay inevitably leads all but the most focused players to spend hours wandering the world aimlessly, that’s not always a bad thing. In my experience, exploring all the nooks and crannies of a virtual world is half the fun of playing an expansive RPG like this.
More information.
 
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Daggerfall is one of the games I remember fondly in spite of the flaws, and there were many. I can honestly say it's the most ambitious game I ever played. I think the design concept Bethesda had (and still does to some extent) of having the computer generate everything is way ahead of where the technology is even today, let alone in the early 90s.

Still, I put many, many hours in this game. The main quest had a lot of political intrigue and the game had some very significant choice and consequence, albeit in the 11th hour.

I realize this sort of thing has gone the way of the dodo bird and turn based combat, but one of the most fun things for me to do in Daggerfall was to spend a lot of timing creating and tweaking my character.

I haven't tried to run it at all lately but I imagine the hoops you have to get through to get it to work on Windows 7 are a headache. I am keeping an eye on how DaggerXL is progressing however.
 
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I never understood the love of Daggerfall.

I almost passed on Morrowind because of how bored I was with Daggerfall. I'm glad I didn't though. Morrowind was unique and it was great. It's only been made better over the years through the tireless efforts of the modders out there.

Thank god for geeks who have a ton of time on their hands. I love them all :)
 
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It worked for me, I must have spent countless hours in this world. I sometimes think: imagine this had been an open source project, like roguelikes or muds, (and released with powerful editors like the later TES games) - I drool just thinking of what this game would be like now, after 15 years of development.
 
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It worked for me as well. I remember stepping out into the snow after the first starter-dungeon en thinking: "Oh... now *this* I'm going to be playing for a while". The vast world and all it's possibilities were astounding at the time. I started to loathe the dungeon-generator after a while though.
 
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I loved Daggerfall. I think it was the ultimate explorer's game with some great character and spell tweaking. They don't make 'em like that anymore.
LB
 
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I haven't tried to run it at all lately but I imagine the hoops you have to get through to get it to work on Windows 7 are a headache. I am keeping an eye on how DaggerXL is progressing however.

Thnx for that link !
One day i like to play that game.
 
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Started it a couple of times back in the day, but never really got into it like I did Morrowind some years later. Perhaps it's worth looking at and trying again sometime, as I'd like to see what I missed and create an interesting character.
 
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I loved Daggerfall. I think it was the ultimate explorer's game with some great character and spell tweaking. They don't make 'em like that anymore.
LB

Yay!

I too loved Daggerfall. For me, it was a revelation! For the first time I saw REAL sized cities, not some mere symbolic cities with 4-5 houses. And PEOPLE walked in it. And there was riding on horseback and cart & carriage, and seasons! Man, in winter was snow, in autumn fog and rain and sunshine in summer! It was so awesome. And it was the first time a real sized world. I loved it, despite the bugs and issues. For me, it was a HUGE step forward in creating real worlds. So many stories, so many things going on. A real explorers dream.

YEY DAGGERFALL!
 
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For those that played the latest version (2.23 ?). Is it still gamestopping bugged?
 
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I've been toying with the idea of giving Daggerfall another try lately, and this inspired me to reinstall it. Of course, I'll probably get distracted by something else soon, but it might be a fun little distraction for a while.

I wonder how many people working on Skyrim have ever played Daggerfall. How many even played Morrowind, for that matter?
 
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I loved Daggerfall for it's large expansive world, spell creator, and vast amount of dungeons and lands. To this day I still remember playing it on my old P133 pc.

The only issue I had was that it felt like an endless world. I had a difficult time dealing with what seemed to me as a game with no true ending. Being a more or less completest type, I never did finish it. I do have it installed on my laptop and every now and then I jump in for a quick hack and slash.
 
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Yes, Daggerfall wasn't my thing. I love the theory of it, but the reality of randomly generated towns and inescapable dungeons just didn't work for me.

Same here. Really liked Morrowind and Oblivion but Daggerfall was -with all due respect- an epic piece of doo-doo :blush: .
 
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The only Bethesda-related RPGs I like are Daggerfall (which I played back in 1996) and New Vegas. Yes, I know Obsidian developed the latter; but the game relies so heavily on the Fallout 3 framework it might as well have been developed by Todd "I can't get through the first dungeon of TES2" Howard and his soulless automatons and underacheiving underlings (...which makes it all the more surprising that it actually is fun to play).

While I definitely belong to the category of RPG gamers who see Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3 as representing everything that is evil about modern RPG development (and have thus never been convinced by the abstract, scholastic arguments with which some people single out TES3 as somehow astronomically superior to the two other titles), but I should probably add that Daggerfall was no masterpiece, either; it was just much more impressive and forward-thinking for its time than TES3-TES4 or F3 ever were.
 
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For those that played the latest version (2.23 ?). Is it still gamestopping bugged?

That was the version I played through and I was able to get all the way through. Other than the occasional falling through the dungeon walls and into, pardon the pun, oblivion I don't remember any major issues. Of course this was also a bajillion years ago so my memory may be a bit faulty on that, but I definitely was able to finish it.

The only issue I had was that it felt like an endless world. I had a difficult time dealing with what seemed to me as a game with no true ending. Being a more or less completest type, I never did finish it.

If you stay focused, and I realize in a game of this type it's hard sometimes, it actually does have an ending and a pretty decent one because you get to decide which faction you are going to aid and that can drastically change the state of things in the end.

Of course at the time I played we didn't know about the Warp of the West. :p
 
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That was the version I played through and I was able to get all the way through. Other than the occasional falling through the dungeon walls and into, pardon the pun, oblivion I don't remember any major issues. Of course this was also a bajillion years ago so my memory may be a bit faulty on that, but I definitely was able to finish it.


Good to hear. Then i will give it a try.
 
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I found an easy way to run daggerfall on win 7 !!

hi all!

hey!
I found an incredible easy way to run daggerfall on my windows 7 dual core computer!!
[probably vista too!]

at
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Files

is a program where someone went to the trouble to make a marrage between dosbox and daggerfall so that the install is a "one click" install, and to play is also just to click the shortcut, in short, just like a "real" windows game!

I think he got his inspiration, myself, from gog games, where they take an old dos game and preconfigure the dosbox for it such that the dosbox is part of the game so there there is no fiddling with dosbox commands each time the game is run.

DaggerfallSetup.exe 23 January 2010 118 MB

DaggerfallSetup is a ready to play Daggerfall install compatible with modern Windows Systems. The game already includes patch 2.13 and the official CompUSA Special Edition questpack, and will work with an already configured DosBox. You can install all unofficial fixes at this time via options, as well as new quests and translations.

but no dosbox is needed, at all, dosbox is part of this install.

then look at all of the other mods for this game on the same page and yes, you can install most of them into your install!

the install link, above, takes you to the homepage where the actual program can be downloaded.

http://theelderscrolls.wiwiland.net/?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN

Components Detail
Each component can be selected or not individually. Official component must be installed.
DOSBox is version 0.74. The Setup was done with Inno Setup 5.4.2.

All components are listed with the name of originals autors. Thanks for their work.

You can see more details in English on theses files on the UESP web page

Official Components
Daggerfall.
The Patch 2.13 with Fixmaps.exe.
The Questpack "CompUSA Special Edition" (Addquest).
Fixsave 1.75 : Game save repair. Repairs damaged save games which may cause errors in Daggerfall.
Unofficial Components
Fixes


[optional]
FixedQuests by Donald Tipdon, Fixes : Quests bug-fix.
DFQFIX 3.0 by PLRDLF : Quests bug-fix.
Q0C00Y03 Fix by GhanBuriGhan : Quest bug-fix.
SPELL.STD Fix by Nwart: Spell Bug-fix.
MAGIC.DEF Fix by DelphiSnake : Spell Bug-fix.
FACTIONFIX 1.2 by PLRDLF : Faction-Database bug-fix.
BIOG00T0.TXT Fix by Uniblab : Fix the faulty Mage's Biography file.
POLITIC.PAK Fix v2 by Uniblab : Fix for Wrothgarian Mountains enclave.
DagSkills 0.96 by Ferital : Fix skills and attributes rising.
Dunmerfall 0.1 by Andrew Polis & ELOdry : Fix Dark Elves skins for Barenziah, Morgiah & Helseth (Come from AndyFall).
DOS32 Advanced DOS Extender 9.1.2 by Narech K. : Avoid savegames corruption.
Quests packs

Xtra Quests 1,2,3,SE,Patch by Skeleton Man : 40 quests.
Live by the sword by GhanBuriGhan : 5 Fighters Guild quests.
FixedQuests by Donald Tipdon, New Quests : 5 Thieves Guild quests.
Pack #1A by Azileron : 7 Mages Guild quests.
Translations

as you can see, there is a lot here plus the daggerfall game! this site even has a forum to read.

I am amazed at how there are so many people who can take a game and twiddle with it to make it better or more bug-free.

I had no idea that this existed until i stumbled across it while googling daggerfall.

I installed it and added a few more mods, including even sme of "Andyfall" total conversion, from the wiki site, then I began to play daggerfall and thus I created my character and then entered the cave at the game beginning, saved the game. the music sounds good too.

hooray!

freestone
 
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Ah okay. I may have to give that a try. I see that it's got some of Ghan's old fixes there. Also that CompUSA pack. I think that was one of the earliest store specific DLC (well proto-DLC really) that I can recall. It seemed odd then but now that sort of thing is quite commonplace.
 
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