Daggerfall - Retrospective @ PC World

I started playing DF on DOSBox a few years ago, and my saves or the game got corrupted. I couldn't attack any more. Never went back. I'd like to though.

Demiath said:

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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Ok, I love you. My poor english could not have written it, but it is very close to my opinion. Once again : I am waiting for a "Daggerfall 2" to come by. Not by Bethesda, obviously.

I would give it a try, but I remember the endless random dungeons and... nah thanks.

well, well:

Live by the sword by GhanBuriGhan : 5 Fighters Guild quests.

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Good to see that thing is still out there.

And very unfortunate that Tiptons tools I used to create that little mod have apparently gone the way of the Dodo - at least they were untraceable when I looked for them some years ago, and my own copy had fallen prey to a HD crash…

Daggerfall Tools, Mods, Patches:

http://slushpool.fortunecity.com/

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

http://meepo.dnsalias.org/df/index.html

http://www.dfworkshop.net/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dfcode/

HiddenX said:

Daggerfall Tools, Mods, Patches:

http://slushpool.fortunecity.com/

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Ah, I see they have a version of the Template tool. I first thought they are missing the documentation, but its in the questing.html file. Thats really neat. Almost feel like making a little quest for old times sake...

I remember how excited I was when I first bought daggerfall and read through the manual waiting for a chance to play it, anticipating all the great things it talked about. I remember how disapointed I was when I actually played it and found it was horribly buggy and some of the things in the manual werent even in the game. Of course that was the original out of box version, obviously after a few patches it went from horribly unplayable and incompete to merely extremely buggy and incomplete.

Anyway I can understand how some people loved the extremely open world, but to me it was more like they decided to add everything under the sun but never took the time to polish or flesh anything out.

I also remember always wondering what the hell was up with the naked women wandering around everywhere in the game. I always wondered why one of the conversation options wasn't "Why the hell are you naked?"

fadedc said:

I also remember always wondering what the hell was up with the naked women wandering around everywhere in the game. I always wondered why one of the conversation options wasn't "Why the hell are you naked?"

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I don't remember any wandering outside. The ones in the Inns were prostitutes and the ones in the temples were pagan priestesses so it made sense to me.

Of course as of Oblivion women who devote themselves to the imperial religion would probably wear full nun's habit now.

Motoki said:

Of course as of Oblivion women who devote themselves to the imperial religion would probably wear full nun's habit now.

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Yet another part of the conversion from a more swords and sorcery style to uber-generic "hey, remember Lord of the Rings?!" one.

Daggerfall. The concept looked so cool, but I soon found out that

1) The manual had little to do with the contents of the game. With the exception of the intro dungeon walkthrough the documentation was shit.

2) Level scaling per excellence. Oblivion level ridiculous with human opponents going from leather to daedric armour and rats being replaced by ancient vampires everywhere.

3) All the faction reputations the game keeps track of (do a quest for the knights in country A and the witches in country B will be pissed at you) and other potentially interesting stuff was unused.

4) The random quests got repetitive and sometimes ended up silly (didnt I KILL Lord Kavar a few months ago?)

5) All those cities with castles and whatnot and the NPCs in those castles did nothing. And here I wanted to serve the ruling family of some obscure duchy....

6) Bugs. Even with the patches Daggerfall was horribly unstable.

The game had a few cool aspects though:

Many quests could be resolved in multiple ways (do I take the fleeing couple to a priest that can marry them or to the girls father to stop the bloody thing?).

Some of the random quests (e g daedra-possessed children) were a bit unpredictable. Sometimes there really was a daedra, sometimes it was just a scam.

The main quest had a bunch of branching points and was in a way a lot more complex and interesting than in later Bethsoft titles.

The result was that I only played the game until level 10-15 or so before restarting and trying a different character build. After a few restarts I got bored with not really getting anywhere. Back around 2000 I downloaded a walkthrough just to check out the main quest.

5) All those cities with castles and whatnot and the NPCs in those castles did nothing. And here I wanted to serve the ruling family of some obscure duchy….

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That right there is when I stopped playing. I put up with it because it had some really neat ideas in it. I went to a few towns. Managed to get into the mages guild somehow. I think I had to lockpick it or something. Did a few quests for them (I think). wandered around the countryside. Found a castle. Went in there. Saw everyone standing around with no clue as to what I should do.

So I gave up. I was bored to no end by then and something better was released.

Motoki said:

I don't remember any wandering outside. The ones in the Inns were prostitutes and the ones in the temples were pagan priestesses so it made sense to me.

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Well true people in that game wore clothes on the city streets, but everywhere else seemed to be completely clothing optional, but of course just for women. It didn't matter if you were in a temple or the living room of a family house. There was never really any context or lore to explain it.

If one wanted to talk about all Daggerfall's flaws one could probably fill a tome.
I suppose it did something right, however, that kept me playing for years.
But I guess its biggest problem is that nobody saw it worthwhile to explore its potential further and to perfect its formula. Even its sequel mostly took the exact opposite approach - other than the fact that it was, compared to other games, big and extensive, Morrowind was in many ways the anti-Daggerfall... which seemed to work with less hitches.

I always believed that we needed another game like Daggerfall. One done carefully and properly - not a mere crude copy of it. If only to finally find out if Daggerfall's shortcomings were indeed inherent to its particular formula. Many people seem to accept that as the only possible explanation for its many issues, but I'm far from convinced. Perhaps they were mere 'baby diseases' that would have been cured had the game's design philosophy been given the chance to mature.

The anti-Daggerfall was fun and it made sense. Give me that any day over whatever they wanted me to do in Daggerfall. The exploration in Daggerfall was boring as opposed to Morrowind which I knew what was going on. I could explore and have my time rewarded by actually giving me places to go and people to see. Daggerfall only rewarded my exploration with more confusion or nothing at all.

I found it to be broken in terms of bugs and overall feature implementation - so ultimately I don't think it worked well as a game.

However, there's no denying that it was vastly ambitious - and that they managed to do some impressive things with the stuff that did work.

I'm still dreaming of the day when technology and design evolution will be able to handle the simulation aspects required to create a content-saturated game set in the entire world of Tamriel.

I'd consider that the ultimate goal for the TES series.

Suprisingly little love for Daggerfall here. I too liked Morrowind significantly better, but certainly not on all accounts. The main quest structure in Daggerfall, but also its premise was more interesing, e.g. The character generation, but also the spell and item maker were the best implementation within the series IMHO, especially the cool disadvantages system in chargen.
And at a time when other games just showed cramped hallways, the open world was just mind-blowing, simply because it was there.

I will post my opinion after i get this thing to run




good game for it's era but randomly generated stuff is always a no no in the Great Black Tagos's book of gaming

DArtagnan said:

I'm still dreaming of the day when technology and design evolution will be able to handle the simulation aspects required to create a content-saturated game set in the entire world of Tamriel.

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That would be a nightmare for a completist like me. I'd be playing it for years…

I don't think a game world of that size will ever be necessary though, or even desired by most.

DArtagnan said:

I'm still dreaming of the day when technology and design evolution will be able to handle the simulation aspects required to create a content-saturated game set in the entire world of Tamriel.

I'd consider that the ultimate goal for the TES series.

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For me to, at first when I heard about movement sensors from consoles and before even knowing it was named Skyrim, I expected it to be implemented using this feature.

JDR13 said:

That would be a nightmare for a completist like me. I'd be playing it for years…

I don't think a game world of that size will ever be necessary though, or even desired by most.

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It's supposed to be heaven for a completist

Otherwise, you're doing something wrong!