Daggerfall - Released for Free

That is kind of cool..Iw as looking at it and thinking...gee what is different...I guess it is only to run on newer operating systems?

I am playing daggerfall with dosbox now....I need to find a mark and recall spell bad..
 
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I bought this back in 97, WTF are they doing releasing it only now?
 
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This looks quite impressive. If it turns out to be as good as it looks, I might actually give Daggerfall a real try.

I had already wanted to do an Elder Scrolls run later this year or early in 2010, where I plan on (re)playing through Morrowind and Oblivion + all the expansions and DLC.
 
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daggerxl has a demo ready now

"The first demo of DaggerXL is now out, to read about it and download go to the Downloads page. While several features are still missing, this establishes a good amount of the dungeon crawling gameplay. This includes: Stat system with character screen; inventory system with inventory screen; basic (incomplete) UI; looting treasure and bodies as well as the ability to drop items; melee combat using stats, armor, weapon, skills, enemy stats (such as AC) and types of swings made (different mouse movements) to determine the outcome; enemy AI and movement; collision and player physics; interactive objects such as elevators, switches and doors; and lighting and authentic rendering. Other game play features missing in this demo will continue to be worked on as I approach the second demo which will include a different environment – the city!

So try out the demo but remember to read the directions first. Daggerfall must be fully patched to play because DaggerXL uses data from the data files and the executable itself."
 
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Thanks zzajin. This is a pleasant surprise, he must have updated the page soon after I had checked on it yesterday. I'm downloading it now....


*Edit* Meh... I can't get the demo to work with the XP version of Daggerfall I have installed.
 
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Thanks for the summary of things to do there. I never got any letters (I don't think I played long enough to recieve them) I did get a message when I killed an innocent saying something along the lines of "Someone saw you or maybe I'm thinking of Morrowind".

If I ever get any free time maybe I'll give this another shot. Howerver, there are too many better games out there right now.

You're welcome

You get the first letter (from lady Brisienna Magnussen?) around level 5, and if you miss out on seeing her within a month I think you bork the main quest.

That little message is typical of how the game communicates things, and when it is tied to a crime you'll soon see guards shout "HALT!":D When you get a letter you get a similar message stating something like "a page in royal liveries hand you a letter with the seal of lord snootybottoms" or "a beggar slips you a note" or whatever. One letter is even delivered inside an enemy that you have to kill for it:p

At any rate I find the game conceptually cool but the execution is somewhat lacking, and some of the flaws (extremely unbalanced, level scaling over the top) are sort of Bethsoft trademarks. The main quest is more complex and interesting than later iterations IMHO, but overall I still think Morrowind is their best game by far.
 
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The game was flawed in the extreme, and I'm surprised to see this much love for a game with that amount of design oversights and technical issues.

I suspect it's about the concept more than the execution, as is hinted at above this post.

The game sort of resembles Frontier in terms of ambition, but Frontier was made by a single guy many years before - and it didn't have too many bugs. Now THAT was impressive in terms of sheer scale and working features.

Daggerfall simply overreached and fell flat - but that's just me.
 
Frontier is an extremely good comparison both in concept (because Daggerfall is just like elite with a generated world and random guild/independent missions plus a few hand-crafted storyline missions) and was also terribly buggy even with the final patches, just like Daggerfall. Elite and Elite 2 that preceded it were OTOH pretty low on the bugcount.

I think the reason for the love is that the game was pretty unique for the time. The only similar games in terms of open-endedness I can think of are Darklands (also very buggy on release and 1-2 years older, but it has IMHO aged MUCH better due to having a 2-d engine) and Mount and Blade (which is more than a decade younger).

For those who want to try out Frontier there is a version that runs on Windows that is called jjffe (jade something) and requires the data files from frontier, but since Braben has frontier available for download that shouldnt be a problemm
 
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Frontier is an extremely good comparison both in concept (because Daggerfall is just like elite with a generated world and random guild/independent missions plus a few hand-crafted storyline missions) and was also terribly buggy even with the final patches, just like Daggerfall. Elite and Elite 2 that preceded it were OTOH pretty low on the bugcount.

I think the reason for the love is that the game was pretty unique for the time. The only similar games in terms of open-endedness I can think of are Darklands (also very buggy on release and 1-2 years older, but it has IMHO aged MUCH better due to having a 2-d engine) and Mount and Blade (which is more than a decade younger).

For those who want to try out Frontier there is a version that runs on Windows that is called jjffe (jade something) and requires the data files from frontier, but since Braben has frontier available for download that shouldnt be a problemm

Frontier WAS Elite 2 - which is why I said it was low on bug-count.

You're thinking of Frontier - First Encounters, which was terribly buggy upon release.
 
Frontier WAS Elite 2 - which is why I said it was low on bug-count.

You're thinking of Frontier - First Encounters, which was terribly buggy upon release.

You are right, I confused the titles:) FFE is the better fit for Daggerfall though, as it has both a handmade main quest and ugly mid 90s 3d with blocky textures.:D

Anyway I still think Darklands is a better game than Daggerfall if one wants an RPG of the type.
 
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You are right, I confused up the titles:) FFE is also the better fit for Daggerfall as it has both a handmade main quest and ugly mid 90s 3d with blocky textures.:D

True enough, but I used Frontier as an example of huge scope done right. In terms of when it was released, it was quite a feat.

One guy coding it all in assembler - basically pure math and moving stuff from one place in memory to another without high-level syntax. That's pretty amazing, when you think about it.
 
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True enough, but I used Frontier as an example of huge scope done right. In terms of when it was released, it was quite a feat.

One guy coding it all in assembler - basically pure math and moving stuff from one place in memory to another with high-level syntax. That's pretty amazing, when you think about it.

It reminds me of a demo. Compact code (a few hundred kb at a time when games usually took up a few floppies?) and a huge generated world.:) But I think Braben already got his formula right with Elite prior to that, Frontier was more evolution than revolution (with a "real world, factions and newtonian physics), and FFE was the same evolution sidetracked:D
 
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It reminds me of a demo. Compact code (a few hundred kb at a time when games usually took up a few floppies?) and a huge generated world.:) But I think Braben already got his formula right with Elite prior to that, Frontier was more evolution than revolution (with a "real world, factions and newtonian physics), and FFE was the same evolution sidetracked:D

A true revolution is extremely rare in gaming, I guess.

I'd say the jump from Elite to Frontier was positively GIGANTIC - and if only he'd added a main storyline to motivate players, the game would have been a true revolution. FFE tried this, but ultimately failed due to bugs and a bland implementation.
 
One guy coding it all in assembler - basically pure math and moving stuff from one place in memory to another with high-level syntax. That's pretty amazing, when you think about it.

Having done some assembly in college and later having to code some 'thunks' to connect external 16-bit DLL's to some 32-bit C++ code I had written ... I have loads of respect for anyone writing mass amounts of assembler.
 
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The game was flawed in the extreme, and I'm surprised to see this much love for a game with that amount of design oversights and technical issues.

I suspect it's about the concept more than the execution, as is hinted at above this post.

I agree wholeheartedly. I could never understand how some people are so insistent that DF was the pinnacle of the series. I really enjoyed playing the demo back when it was released, but it didn't take me very long to get burned out on the game. Morrowind certainly stayed entertaining to me for a much longer time.

I thought that perhaps playing it again after all these years might give me a different perspective. It has only strengthened my original opinion - that DF was an incredible display of ambitiousness, but simply has far too many flaws to be considered a true classic.
 
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I bought this back in 97, WTF are they doing releasing it only now?

15 year anniversary, remember?

This ois one of the occations when I believe that doing some actual thinking would have answered that in itself ... Plus some researching, of course.

It's like "I've let the pig drink alcohol, now it is dead, why is this ?" kind of things.
 
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