Someone tell me what the fuck is so special about Daggerfall

[sheek]

Morrowind was better than Daggerfall.

And I hate everything TES.

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

Tits.

No, really.

 

[Moggs]

Yeah, as much as I wanted to like both Daggerfall and Arena, they just weren't fun. I have to say I didn't see a whole lot of roleplaying opportunities either...

 

[Falcore19]

I agree with Section8. You have to judge games according to their era. It was ambitious for it's time. I'm not saying it was awesome, it had many flaws, but it was fun for a while.

Some games like Daggerfall fail the test of time. Certain games were awesome when they got out, but 10 years later, they are not interesting for many reasons(been cloned to death by other companies, have outdated engines, obsolete battle systems, graphics, etc). It's like watching a movie from 1940 : sometimes it's so out of touch with our era that you just can't find anything interesting with it.

 

[Naked_Lunch]

Daggerfall for me is the quintessential looks good on paper, fails in execution game. When I first read the Mobygames overview and later the Avault review, I was pretty pumped and looked all over for the game. I got it, and spurred by VD's constant ejaculations (oh, a pun!) over it, I was ready to experience total awesomeness.

The first dungeon was okay, I guess. Like Pat said, the starting equipment shit is fucked. I also didn't like the combat too much it was just like sliding my mouse around hoping the game would register it's movement and swing my sword.

I got out of the dungeon and walked north for about 20 minutes before I realized that I wasn't going anywhere. I had to fast travel everywhere, and I found that to be annyoing. I like having hte whole world to explore as long as it's INTERESTING. Daggerfall may as well have been hub based a la Bloodlines. You never have to wander around the map, it's all there for you.

The skill system and character system is cool, and I especially like the music but it just needed a souls and some meat. Daggerfall is like a bigass pile of bones, theres a lot shit but nothing in it.

 

[El Dee]

I had told myself if I could ever dig up an affordable copy of DF I would get it, but after reading this thread it seems more like one of those "you had to be there at that time" deals. This reminds me of my experience with the first Lands of Lore game. Back when I played it in '94 I thought it was great, but recently I found it and ran it on DosBox and I was like 'meh'.

Unfortunately I didn't own a computer from '95 to 2000, so it seems I missed out on a lot of cool games. Though I did acquire Fallout recently and have been enjoying it.

 

[Vault Dweller]

I got out of the dungeon and walked north for about 20 minutes before I realized that I wasn't going anywhere. I had to fast travel everywhere, and I found that to be annyoing. I like having hte whole world to explore as long as it's INTERESTING. Daggerfall may as well have been hub based a la Bloodlines. You never have to wander around the map, it's all there for you.

Actually, you can walk everywhere and reach locations without fast travel.

The skill system and character system is cool, and I especially like the music but it just needed a souls and some meat. Daggerfall is like a bigass pile of bones, theres a lot shit but nothing in it.

I disagree. Like I told Dhruin, the great thing about the game is that Bethesda designed a great character system and built a game around it. The game had walls and air shafts to climb, open halls and platforms to levitate, underwater corridors to swim, pits to jump over, tons of guilds & quests, as simple as they were, catering to your character and his/her abilities.

 

[Naked_Lunch]

Actually, you can walk everywhere and reach locations without fast travel.

Yeah, but what's the point when it's the same shit for literally miles and miles?

disagree. Like I told Dhruin, the great thing about the game is that Bethesda designed a great character system and built a game around it. The game had walls and air shafts to climb, open halls and platforms to levitate, underwater corridors to swim, pits to jump over, tons of guilds & quests, as simple as they were, catering to your character and his/her abilities.

Those are all dungeon based or combat based abilites. I'd like the option to play as a smooth diplomat or a merchant, but the game seems geared towards dungeon crawling. I haven't expiremented with magic that much, I just know that casting it is a pain in the ass.

 

[crufty]

I've always felt the secret to having fun with Daggerfall is to play with an action oriented character concept--your own, preferrably, and not one of the default classes.

I didn't always have fun with Daggerfall. It's not the best game of all time. But as far as worlds went, it was pretty detailed. But it was also ridiculous. And often times flat. However, if you looked at it as, like another poster put it, a 3-D roguellike, it could be pretty intense.

The quests are legendary (in my mind anyway) for being really silly. You'll brave dungeons that take 12 hours at a time to explore, with ridiculous monsters and loot, all to retrieve a pair of cloth boots for some dame in a town.

I have the original. Is it worth firing up again?

 

[Volourn]

Daggerfall, like all ES games, sucks the big one. Sure, they're large and 'in charge'. But, they are boring, flat,and with no dpeth, no soul, and no heart. The writing is atrocious - worst ever. There is no dialogue - and, no, that isn't dialogue what they have.. those are lists.

Anyone who likes DF (or any ES game) doesn't know what a TRUE RPG is.


Period.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Actually, you can walk everywhere and reach locations without fast travel.

Yeah, but what's the point when it's the same shit for literally miles and miles?

That was in response to "I can't walk to places". DF is not the most graphically intense game ever made.

Those are all dungeon based or combat based abilites. I'd like the option to play as a smooth diplomat or a merchant, but the game seems geared towards dungeon crawling. I haven't expiremented with magic that much, I just know that casting it is a pain in the ass.

Well, the action-ness of DF was never disputed. However, the action aspect was very implemented from the role-playing point of view.

I have the original. Is it worth firing up again?

Depends on your own preference. I replayed it 6 months ago. No regrets.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Okay, here's the big explanation in analogy form. Pat, when your dog refuses to shit outside because it's winter, the only place for him to shit is indoors. So, accepting that, you're happiest when your dog shits on the newspaper(Daggerfall) as opposed to on the carpet(Morrowind) or in your bed(Oblivion).

Clear enough?

 

[LlamaGod]

I'd rather not have the dog at all, is what i'm saying.

Because it's the lesser evil doesn't mean it has to be appriciated.



Also: I can judge games 'for their time' perfectly. Daggerfall has always been a terrible game. There was better before it.

When did Nethack come out, anyways?

 

[bryce777]

Well, the fun that I personally got was to enchant the shit out of items til I had a magic pool of 1750 and then enchanting a sword that absorbs magic and then going lich hunting, or usuing your ludicrous mana to cast spells that cost 500 points but can destroy everything on the screen.

 

[Keldryn]

I've got to side with those who think Daggerfall is boring and soulless.

I bought it when it first came out... 1996 maybe? I was really into it at first, but after about 20 hours I started to feel like something was lacking. I'd done a handful of guild quests, and one or two of the main storyline quests, but I was already feeling like I'd done everything. Once the guilds started giving me quests to kill a different monster in a different randomly-generated dungeon on a different part of the map, I got bored. And those non-quest-related dungeons were sprawling and repetitive and seemed to go on forever. Daggerfall gets a lot of praise for having a realistically-sized world, but the existence of hundreds of endlessly sprawling dungeons doesn't make a lot of sense.

Everything in the world feels the same. Yes, there are thousands of NPCs, but none of them have any personality whatsoever, there are a limited number of character graphics per area, and they tend to say the same things. Towns are realistically-sized, but that makes them incredibly tedious to navigate and find what you're looking for. And one town in a certain province never really felt that different to me from any other town in the same province. Yes, Daggerfall (and Arena before it) was ambitious, but even the much smaller, hand-crafted Morrowind still feels rather soulless and repetitive to me. Ultima VII had a comparatively much smaller world, with a very scaled-down population, but it felt alive. It had a soul. Yes, Britain only had perhaps 20-25 buildings and 30-40 people, but it took hours to explore everything and talk to everybody. Daggerfall feels like playing an MMORPG by myself. I couldn't make that analogy at the time, obviously, because there weren't really any MMORPGs (maybe Meridan 59, but I never played it).

Thousands of potential quests don't mean much when they are all variations of "go to dungeon X and retrieve Y for me" or "go to dungeon X and kill monster Y for me." Or replace "dungeon X" with "X's house." I tried walking from one town to another once, because they looked to be very close together on the map. After half an hour of incredibly tedious walking, I hadn't gone even half of the distance. Just half an hour of looking at the same tree sprites over and over. No monsters. No weather changes. Nothing. I can't imagine ever not using fast travel in Daggerfall. And the horse? Wow, paste a poorly-drawn, non-animated horse's head at the bottom of the screen and make me move faster. That was pretty laughable. Part of good game design is knowing what not to include if you can't pull it off well.

And of course the bugs were legendary. I fell through the floor and into the void countless times in dungeons. The version I bought had this nifty "feature" where you could simply click on the border next to your attributes (where the arrows appear on level-up) and increase them at any time. I'm pretty sure the first patch fixed that though.

Daggerfall is also the only game every to completely trash my computer. I played it on my old 486-33, and I had three hard drives on the system: a 240MB, a 40MB, and an 80MB. While playing Daggerfall, my system froze completely, and I had to power down the system and restart. Except my PC wouldn't boot up of the hard drive anymore. I tried to run Norton Disk Doctor, but it couldn't read the drives. Even FDISK reported that there were no partitions on any of the three drives. I ended up having to repartition all three drives and I lost everything. Of course, I can't reasonably blame Daggerfall for this. I think.

 

[crufty]

Hack, 1985 begat Nethack, 1987. Thats almost 20 years of development, tweaks, and refinements.

Depends on your own preference. I replayed it 6 months ago. No regrets.

Will I cringe at the graphics and sound? I had started up some of my favs from the early '90s, and they just didn't age. U7, as the canonnical example, aged very well. Bards Tale, Wasteland, U6, imhho, didn't.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Will I cringe at the graphics and sound?

The graphics are alright. The sound is great, especially the Daggerfall (town) midis.

 

[Slylandro]

U7, as the canonnical example, aged very well. Bards Tale, Wasteland, U6, imhho, didn't.

Wasteland's repetitive and frequent combat makes the game a bit of a chore for me. I didn't play the game a second time because of it. I'd say in all other respects it's aged pretty well though, the atmosphere and the character system are all pretty good even today.

 

[Thrawn05]

Those are all dungeon based or combat based abilites. I'd like the option to play as a smooth diplomat or a merchant, but the game seems geared towards dungeon crawling. I haven't expiremented with magic that much, I just know that casting it is a pain in the ass.

I do agree magic casting is a pain in the ass, and most of my custom characters are immune to the paralyzing spell since I found that spell to be most overused and annoying spell, but you can play as a diplomate. Add some language skills to your character. You can talk your way of out of combat depending on which languages you picked.

I've been playing a character for the past couple of weeks that has no combat skills. I've been making some good money from that character.

 

[crufty]

Wasteland's repetitive and frequent combat makes the game a bit of a chore for me. I didn't play the game a second time because of it. I'd say in all other respects it's aged pretty well though, the atmosphere and the character system are all pretty good even today.

There is much to be said about Wasteland. But...the graphics. I've had a real problem sitting through C/EGA graphics these days. Color me shallow, I know. I have the same problem with old NES games. The original Castlevania? Loved it. 20 years later? ehh..

 

[Zomg]

I've said before that I think Daggerfall is more of a great idea than a great game. One thing, though, that I really fucking appreciated, was a game that actually understood the concept of a stranger, someone with whom you never talk to or interact, yet who continues to exist. There's something perverse about the "Talk to everyone, OK!" formulation of nearly every other RPG. It's narratively idiotic, unrealistic, and damn dull. Think about trying to do a game set in a coherent or real city - say a '40s Los Angeles noir RPG - with the traditional microcosm, talk-to-everyone system. It's either going to be completely stupid or a weedy, attenuated microhub system as in Bloodlines. Now, Daggerfall didn't do the second necessary job, putting interesting NPCs inside that sea of strangers, but it was a good step.

 

[Romanian_Dude2005]

I personaly prefer Morrowind over Daggerfall, but preformance-wise Daggerfall is much more superior and complex

Mmm.

Seriously, I think the reason it's so popular is the whole 'life another life' thing, if that concept can be taken seriously ever again since New Bethesda and Oblivion.

Actualy the main reason it's so popular it's because it added a new leveling system to RPGs worldwide (well not that many RPGs). Yes I mean skill training, Daggerfall was the first game to use the training system over the experience-based one in DnD games and personaly it did it much more better then any other game I played.

 

[Zomg]

Totally untrue. Even Wasteland has learn-by-doing, and I doubt it was the first.

 

[Keldryn]

Totally untrue. Even Wasteland has learn-by-doing, and I doubt it was the first.

True enough. Dungeon Master did it as well, but I think that might have come after Wasteland. Though not by long. I think it was '86 or '87 on the Atari ST and Amiga. Was a damn amazing-looking game at the time.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Dungeon Master was the first one I played that did the learn by use system. I'm pretty sure it came out in '87. Wasteland came out the same year, IIRC. I'm not sure if there were any before those two, though.