The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfal thread

I just beat TES 2: Daggerfall. It's a game that's a combination between an early 3D dungeon crawler and a fantasy life simulator. You get a huge map the size of Great Britain that is relatively reactive and that you can do all kinds of quests in. The main quest follows you solving the mystery behind the death of the former king of the city state of Daggerfall, but it evolves into something much more political.

The game is freeware so you can get it.






There is also a Unity project focused on porting the game to Unity that isn't finished yet, but seeks to port it so it can have things like moddability which isn't really in Vanilla.

As with many others, I used to refer to the game as Buggerfall. I couldn't get the bloody thing to work properly. Clipping errors, crashes, and problems saving all plagued me in my attempts to play the game. I'm pretty sure the issues have since been patched out. The Unity remake looks pretty good, so I'll probably play that version after it's completed. 

I guess I never really progressed in the game that much. I certainly enjoyed playing it, but the vast majority of my time was spent looting random dungeons and selling stuff for gold and houses. Definitely an enjoyable experience however you approached it.

Yes, it is a pretty buggy game though. Worst one for me was how the pickpocketing system was completely broken.

I only completed Daggerfall once some time around mid 2008. Daggerfall Unity kind of re-sparked my interest in it, but this time I will be waiting for it to be finished first instead of rushing into it right now. However I am looking more forward to Open Morrowind, but in the meantime I have vanilla Morrowind with the Graphics and Sounds Overhaul V3 mod installed.

I had almost completed Daggerfall, but for some reason I quit, while at 75% or something (after I did the Orcish treaty quest).

Anyways, Daggerfall is my 3rd favourite game of all time.

It is huge, with plenty of dungeons to explore and many different enemies to kill.

The music is perfect for the mood and it builds the game's superb atmosphere. There is a track for every occasion and I love that.

Finally, who can forget this quote playing in the middle of the night, while ghosts have you on the run:

"VENGEANCE!"

About the Unity remake, it looks great, but I will wait until they finalize it (but I don't have my hopes up for that to happen anytime soon).

Daggerfall is the reason I can't stomach Morrowind. One step forward, five steps back. Some of the best dungeon crawling I've ever had in an RPG. Funtastic class creation kit. A reasonable leveling system. Ridiculous life simulation systems. Not the Imperial Cult faction. Reasonable default speed. At Least Morrowind had true 3D and actual content I guess.

Maybe I should just mod out the leveling system, but I didn't have to mod Arena, Daggerfall, or Skyrim to enjoy them. Not even community Patches!

While old, buggy and full of clunky systems, I prefer it to Morrowind's even clunkier systems that don't work together.

Daggerfall Unity looks promising, hope it doesn't end up like the XL projects.

4 hours ago, YukiHerz said:

While old, buggy and full of clunky systems, I prefer it to Morrowind's even clunkier systems that don't work together.

 

Daggerfall Unity looks promising, hope it doesn't end up like the XL projects.

Supposedly the XL projects are still in development. Who knows if they'll ever finish.

21 minutes ago, Ajora said:

 

Supposedly the XL projects are still in development. Who knows if they'll ever finish.

Where did you get that impression? I don't think we'll ever see anything.

The latest new I've read was in the project's issues section on GitHub: https://github.com/luciusDXL/XL-Engine/issues/22#issuecomment-309647973

And that was more than 6 months ago.

@Manuel-K The DaggerXL Beta is currently in progress after which the DarkXL Beta will be the next goal, with the game being fully complete-able in the next version. Once DarkXL reaches Beta, OutlawsXL and BloodXL will become available and will be actively developed.

The XL engine forums are a ghost town, where the only activity comes from spambots. The DaggerXL beta is not in progress; there hasn't been anything new since January 2016. Two full years of being dead. Two full years of total radio silence from Lucius. During these two years, the community lost patience and scattered. Klasodeth, who was supposed to release the source code if Lucius disappeared, also disappeared.

I never played it tbh, but if the gameplay is as horrendous as Morrowind's, and the levelling system as broken as it is on Oblivion, i don't think i will play it any time soon.

I personally don't find anything horrendous about Morrowind's gameplay overall, the only problem I had was the hit and miss system but you only really have to up the agility attribute. There's plenty of mods and engine modifiers available which change many gameplay elements in Morrowind.

Good thing Open Morrowind is being worked on so any problems people find with the game can get fixed.

37 minutes ago, Gez said:

The XL engine forums are a ghost town, where the only activity comes from spambots. The DaggerXL beta is not in progress; there hasn't been anything new since January 2016. Two full years of being dead. Two full years of total radio silence from Lucius. During these two years, the community lost patience and scattered. Klasodeth, who was supposed to release the source code if Lucius disappeared, also disappeared.

Exactly. Thank you for the summary. I was too tired and too lazy to type that up.

Obviously it's Lucius' choice to keep almost all source code private, although I think his main reason (no forks until everything is read) is not very good. It's sad that all the work went to waste. The second unfortunate choice was to reverse so many games at once. That makes it very hard to finish anything. IMO the first 80% are a lot easier than the remaining 20% of every project. That's the reason why he kept releasing several alphas between the various huge rewrites of the underlying framework.

1 hour ago, Avoozl said:

I personally don't find anything horrendous about Morrowind's gameplay overall, the only problem I had was the hit and miss system but you only really have to up the agility attribute.

Also watch out for your stamina! Or fatigue as it's counter-intuitively called in Morrowind. The green bar. It affects all actions. If it's nearly empty, you'll miss more often, your spells will fail, and so on. But every action (including running, jumping, etc.) drains it. Typically your advice for starting a Morrowind playthrough is to be running and jumping all the time, to increase your athletics and acrobatics score, which lets you boost your endurance and agility stats, which are always good. And that's the key to running around at 200 MPH while jumping over entire cities, which is what you should want to do. But that means you'll be very tired. In combat, take a breather. Don't attack when drained. Wait for the green bar to refill. It has a dramatic effect on your hit chance!

I'd like to get into Daggerfall, but I spend so much time and energy on Morrowind I dunno if I could do it again.

I have mixed feelings with Daggerfall. I played it a while ago and I really enjoyed messing around the cities, but going around procedurally generated dungeons made the game feel very same-y before long. Never got around to finish it, and I doubt I'll ever will.

My first true acquaintance with Daggerfall was in the form of the coverdisk Betony demo. It gives you a small region to explore with a selection of faction quests, and played like a real adventure. I picked a good fighter-type class and thus avoided a lot of problems you may get due to being unfamiliar with the particularities of game mechanics. As a played more and switched to the full version, I gradually learned more about how everything worked, as well as of the multifarious bugs and how to avoid them.

Generally, I find Daggerfall rather enjoyable once you understand the playing mechanics as well as the game's shortcomings. However you must be prepared to play it like a roguelike, that is, once you realise you've made a strategic mistake with overarching consequences you'll probably have to scrap your character and start anew. That, and also I have admit that when I only started playing I had exaggerated expectations about the role-playing part, as many aspects that sounded good on paper are either incompletely implemented, or don't work.

For example, there's a vast selection of clothing for your characters but apparel doesn't seem to affect anything: the character doesn't need protection from elements and NPCs also don't seem to mind how the player is dressed (if at all). There are outright game-breaking spells like Create Item which is essentially a cheat, and inconsistencies like torch items that don't do anything all the while you can illuminate dungeons with a Light spell if you have one.

Speaking of clothes, there's so much mess in the files I created a custom patch fixing the numerous instances, you can get it here (also included in DaggerfallSetup as an optional mod).

What I do like about Daggerfall is that it engages the player in some very extensive learning in order to master the game. There are so many aspects of gameplay, compounded by bugs and other idiosyncrasies, that you'll need to play a lot (and probably fail a lot) in order to get a consistent picture and plan strategies. At the same time you can actually just fool around and do whatever you want, which provides valuable experience (to the player, but also to the player character although the latter is less important in this respect), however you must be prepared to face consequences of a strategic mistake you might have made without knowing (like not securing poison antidotes and then running into enemies with poisoned weapons).

At any rate, Daggerfall is great for its high replay value resulting from emergent gameplay, although the random generated content becomes all too obvious soon enough. It's still fun, but demands some time investment to play properly, certainly not a coffee break game here.

15 hours ago, Avoozl said:

I personally don't find anything horrendous about Morrowind's gameplay overall, the only problem I had was the hit and miss system but you only really have to up the agility attribute. There's plenty of mods and engine modifiers available which change many gameplay elements in Morrowind.

 

Good thing Open Morrowind is being worked on so any problems people find with the game can get fixed.

14 hours ago, Gez said:

Also watch out for your stamina! Or fatigue as it's counter-intuitively called in Morrowind. The green bar. It affects all actions. If it's nearly empty, you'll miss more often, your spells will fail, and so on. But every action (including running, jumping, etc.) drains it. Typically your advice for starting a Morrowind playthrough is to be running and jumping all the time, to increase your athletics and acrobatics score, which lets you boost your endurance and agility stats, which are always good. And that's the key to running around at 200 MPH while jumping over entire cities, which is what you should want to do. But that means you'll be very tired. In combat, take a breather. Don't attack when drained. Wait for the green bar to refill. It has a dramatic effect on your hit chance!

Well, i might try again, as i did many times before, i've heard many good things about the game's universe and plot, so, if anything, i may try just for that.

Daggerfall's a weird beast. I consider it one of my favorite games even though I never managed to finish it, mostly due to the huge amount of bugs -- the farthest I ever got was the mummy dust quest, and I eventually stopped because I just couldn't find the quest item, but years later I found out that it looked exactly like (and had the same name as) a generic alchemical item, so I probably had found it and had it in my inventory the entire time.

The game was just so damn much fun though. 

I got the Elder Scrolls Anthology, so I've played every main entry in the series. So far the only game I've played to completion is Skyrim, but I think my favourite game in the series might be Morrowind.

When I played Daggerfall I didn't encounter any bugs, but that may have something to do with the fact that I didn't progress much further than the starting dungeon. I kind of got lost in the city of Daggerfall and couldn't figure out what to do, and because I had just gotten the Anthology at the time there were four other games begging for my attention. I should really return to that game at some point in the future, and play it through to completion.

And holy shit was I surprised when I accidentally discovered that I could strip my character nude! I guess Bethesda decided that they would let users install mods for that in the future.

1 hour ago, Skeletonpatch said:

And holy shit was I surprised when I accidentally discovered that I could strip my character nude! I guess Bethesda decided that they would let users install mods for that in the future.

Fun fact: Arena also uses the paper-doll system for character clothing (it depends on character class), and there's a nude body underneath (an extracted image may be seen here), but it's never actually displayed in-game as the player is not allowed to manipulate the clothes. Judging by one of the pre-release screenshots, the developers planned some more revealing outfits than what ended up on the menu in the full game, and this carried over to Daggerfall except now you can, you know, fully remove them. Childguard mode (selected during installation) will swap this to body sprites with permanent underwear but will also change other stuff like remove blood and replace monster corpses with bone piles.

On 2/1/2018 at 1:13 AM, Avoozl said:

I personally don't find anything horrendous about Morrowind's gameplay overall, the only problem I had was the hit and miss system but you only really have to up the agility attribute.

This.

Now, I've been pretty late to ES, in fact I started with Skyrim thanks to a friend from school, both him and his dad used to play it and various games in general. I was planning on picking up the older titles to play as well but my major problem is with Morrowind ever since I've learned about this (quite possibly) frustrating mechanic. I expect the combat to be frustrating at lower levels. It's basically the only problem that actively prevents me from getting into the game.

56 minutes ago, Agent6 said:

Now, I've been pretty late to ES, in fact I started with Skyrim thanks to a friend from school, both him and his dad used to play it and various games in general. I was planning on picking up the older titles to play as well but my major problem is with Morrowind ever since I've learned about this (quite possibly) frustrating mechanic. I expect the combat to be frustrating at lower levels. It's basically the only problem that actively prevents me from getting into the game.

My entry point in the series was pretty much the same as you, a friend at school introduced me to Skyrim. Eventually one of my cousins saw that I had played a lot of Skyrim on Steam and gave me his physical copy of the Elder Scrolls Anthology as a Christmas present, which is when I got to try the rest of the series.

If you're interested in Morrowind I'd say go for it, but make sure that you can return it in case it ends up not being your type of game. I enjoy the game a lot but I will acknowledge that it is not for everyone, I found the 'dated' mechanics quite refreshing but I know that there are probably a lot of people who can't stand them.

I would suggest that if you want to have the best possible experience with the game early on, don't go into the character creator blind. Research the different stats and skills and powers tied to each class and race so that you actually know what you're doing when you reach the docks of Seyda Neen. I expect that you will find the game more enjoyable from the get-go if you do. I went into the character creator blind and because of that my first character was a dud.

Played that many times but always after a while my saves got corrupted.

Usually I didn't even follow the main mission, so I never finished it.

I remember when a friend described the game to me, and I couldn't imagine there is a huge world in old DOS PCs where so many things can happen to your character, it sounded like a miracle. At the time I haven't played an openworld game before. But maybe it was an era where I had Pentium 2 or something, and there were later open world games, just was mostly into Doom and then some other retro stuff. So I gave it a try back then and was amazed. It amazes me more than Oblivion, Skyrim and what else, because you open the map and you see all those dots, even though it's all repeatitive procedural patterns.

How anyone could possibly finish this game (without looking on the internet for help) is beyond me.  A screenshot for this game should be on the wiki page for the word 'frustrating'.  Shamefully, it isn't too far from Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim as far as the quality of the game is concerned.  I wish they'd focus on the game first and then the frills, but that is why we're on a DOOM forum talking about Bethesda games instead of on a Bethesda gaming forum talking about DOOM.

14 hours ago, Opulent said:

How anyone could possibly finish this game (without looking on the internet for help) is beyond me.  A screenshot for this game should be on the wiki page for the word 'frustrating'.  Shamefully, it isn't too far from Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim as far as the quality of the game is concerned.  I wish they'd focus on the game first and then the frills, but that is why we're on a DOOM forum talking about Bethesda games instead of on a Bethesda gaming forum talking about DOOM.

True, i started playing the game, and althought it's actually pretty enjoyable, i can't go on playing for 20 minutes straight without looking for help on the internet, everything is so badly explained, just creating your character and character's class is already a shore, i spent at least two hours reading guides, wikis and the sort on atributes, skills and the like, and it's not like there's that much information on the internet anyways since the source code was never realeased and no one really knows (certainly at least) how most things work.

The game's also incredibly buggy it seems, when i found out how race's bonuses points to atributes don't actually apply i sincerely laughed out load.

It's not like everyone's first playthrought of Oblivion or Skyrim is questionless, but still, it's not anywhere as near as obscure as Daggerfall is.

The game still seems to be pretty good though, don't get me wrong, lol

15 hours ago, Opulent said:

instead of on a Bethesda gaming forum talking about DOOM.

You can do that, though.

I did play Daggerfall a lot a few years back. Unfortunately I never did finish it. Of course I wouldn't, it's massive, isn't it!?

Now the XL engine forum is buried under almost ten thousand new spam posts. I seriously doubt that anyone will do something about that.