Someone tell me what the fuck is so special about Daggerfall

[kingcomrade]

The sooner people get off their high horses about how their game tastes equate with intelligence or sophistication, the better.

I don't think Bryce's ego could take that kind of hit.

 

[Naked_Lunch]

Ultima VII by the bare-bones definition (stats and stuff) is pretty much a very-weak RPG. You have three major stats (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence), and then three combat skills (Melee [str] Ranged [dex] Magic [int]). Yes, you can lockpick and bash down doors and steal, but you have no specific skills for them, instead they're determined by your stats (Stealing and picklocking is dex, bashing is strength). So your builds are limited to the infamous warrior, thief, mage archetypes.

The thing is, though, Ultima VII is about the character and world interaction, both of which it excels in to near-perfection. You may be limited statwise to just a warrior, but you can play a rake-wielding warrior who wears nothing but a cape. You can play a magician who tosses blackrock at enemies and then blows them up with Rudyom's wand (eXult's pause feature comes real handy with this).

Ultima VII is more of an action-adventure game than an RPG, and it's RPG aspects (stats and skill variety) are admittiabley poor. That said, it's still my favorite game of all time and everything else about it by far makes up for the bland stat system.

 

[elander_]

duplicate

 

[elander_]

As it happens, I don't particularly like Ultima VII.

Who cares. You probably don't have the inteligence to enjoy it anyway. I just used it as a counter-example and as i have said before i may have enjoyed it if i had invested more time exploring it's gameplay. Classics games grow up on you the more you play them. Too bad you missed my point like the patetic talking anus you are.

But your Daggerfall : Fallout comparison is the dumbest thing I've read on a forum often plagued by idiots, so it was worth calling out.

Please spare me the objective arguments just give me the superficial and idiotic ass opinions.

Daggerfall is a sprawling first-person action-based hack n' slash RPG

So combat is action instead of turn-base. Big deal. Turn-base helps but it is not essential to role-playing. Dialog for example and thief gameplay doesn't need turn-base.

with most of its content randomly, haphazardly generated,

Wrong Daggerfall mixes custom made content with pre-generated and later hand tweeked content. The idea was to make a realistic land size and realistic size cities. In some cities you find hand-tweeked places. You just have to look for them.

Hey and don't forget Daggerfall map had more than 20 kingdoms. Each one with hundreds of cities of small towns. They were planed to have town sieges as world events, kingdoms attacking each other and plagues. Ok so this doesn't mater but it shows some of the bold features they were trying to innovate.

with no meaningful character interaction,

I'm sure you didn't even tried to play the guilds or the commoners quests. It's true that in comparision to Fallout and Planescape nothing beats those games. It's not as good as Ultima 7 either. Is this a suprise? But character reaction is adequate with everything a decent crpg needs to have. Reputation reactions per kingdom/faction/guild/person, quest reactions, rumors, class reactions, etc

a crappy story,

Your opinion and just a mater of preference. So completely irrlevant to judge Daggerfall objectively.

and a hackneyed setting.

Youre fucking kiding right? Thats actualy one of the few points were it beats Fallout. How much lore do you read in Fallout? You get about half a douzen video tapes with descriptions of the past plus the stories npcs tell you. Daggerfall has about 40 books describing history, lineage, politics, scholarship, secret societies. The strong point of Fallout is character interaction and role-playing. It's a shame that they never had the opurtunity to develop the seting in Fallout.

On the other side Fallout has most of it's setting in the game itself, on the people conversations, the art, the places, the quests, etc. It's very well done i admit that but the amount of content that is described in Daggerfall books is much more elaborated.

Sold as akin to a FPS, it was hocked by people at a LAN gaming spot I occasionally played at in pre-Internet days as "like Quake with magic," which, will idiotic, sheds a little light on how "focused" it was at the RPG crowd.

What does the way it was sold means when you have the game to judge to yourself. They also delivered the Bethony demo were you can play an entire island with douzens of cities, dungeons, guilds, shops and twons people quests. So don't know what you want to imply with this dumbfuckery.

Fallout is a small, carefully hand-crafted third person turn-based RPG. The dialogue is sharp, the characters are memorable. Quests are designed to be solved in multiple ways. Combat is optional.

I agree with all this but Daggerfall had the merit of innovating and creating role-playing mechanics without actualy following turn-base and classic isometric seting.

Daggerfall chargen for example is the best chargen for any 3d crpg and comparable to Fallout in quality. While you have perks in Fallout you have advantages and disadvantages in Daggerfall. Both systems come from GURPS and Daggerfall mixes GURPS with D&D classes while Fallout is more similar to GURPS. On the other side Daggerfall lets the player build a biography that has impact in the future on character reactions, initial loot, spells and other stuff.

Also combat is optional in Daggerfall if you ignore the main-quest. You can keep leveling by playing a thief or a scholar.

Daggerfall shares more in common with Diablo, frankly, since they share a common root in Nethack.

No it follows the classic tradition in dungeon crawling and in this mater is completely different than Diablo. The game has small rooms, huge central room hubs with a certain theme, caves, traps, treasure rooms, air pits for climbing, all the stuff needed to support different classes but with traditional gameplay balance more familiar to games like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. You need to rest a lot and you +5 levels per huge dungeon maximum.

As for the contention that Daggerfall permits roleplaying, I suppose that's true if what you want to roleplay is a guy who likes to join clubs and kill rats in people's basements. You've got a lot of choice of clubs and basements, though, so it takes all kinds.

There are many quests that are more elaborate than just killing rats however you will also find many quests as simply as those. You are free to refuse or even abandon them in the middle with a cost in reputation. You probably don't realize that Daggerfall rp mechanics works differently than team turnbase in Baldurs Gate or multiple solution quests in Fallout. Which makes me think if you ever bother yourself trying or just wanted to go trough the main quest playing the game and fighting things like a Neverwinter Nights players do.

In Daggerfall they used guilds and templated quests. You can efectively role-play one of the trinity of classes: thief, mage, warrior plus the extra assassin with special quests for them. Don't expect to find multiple solutions to problems if you take a thieves guild quest. You must choose the guilds that can offer quests suitable to your character or try the commoners who offer a mix of them all. You don't actualy join the thieves guild. They come to you after you robe some people by pickpocketing them. The same with the assassins but you have to kill inocents. To become an hunter you need to be a vampire first and that doesn't happen just like that. But you already know all this don't you since you played Daggerfall.

My recollection is that I got about halfway through Daggerfall. I ultimately quit when I jumped down a hole, saved over my game, and subsequently discovered I had no way out (lacking levitation). (Which does establish I'm an idiot, I suppose.)

There are such things as patches and control keys to teleport you to the last standing position. Also you have 6 different save slots. LOL

 

[WouldBeCreator]

You probably don't have the inteligence to enjoy it anyway

'nuff said.

 

[DarkSign]

Wrong Daggerfall mixes custom made content with pre-generated and later hand tweeked content. The idea was to make a realistic land size and realistic size cities. In some cities you find hand-tweeked places. You just have to look for them.

Exactly what Hellgate: London is professing to do.

 

[mrhappy1991]

Despite being buggy, a little too dungeon based, and sometimes repetitive, Daggerall still made a great world and atmosphere. It had so many facets that made it so alive. Like its been said, a lot of its value also lies in the potential for improvemant in sequals. Morrowind, while still a great RPG, took a completely different direction and abandoned many of the ideas and half implemented or almost implemented features in daggerfall (ie languages, huge scale world, holidays, dynamic plagues, warfare and economy etc.), and was somewhat dissapionting because of it.

 

[kingcomrade]

Youre fucking kiding right? Thats actualy one of the few points were it beats Fallout. How much lore do you read in Fallout? You get about half a douzen video tapes with descriptions of the past plus the stories npcs tell you. Daggerfall has about 40 books describing history, lineage, politics, scholarship, secret societies. The strong point of Fallout is character interaction and role-playing. It's a shame that they never had the opurtunity to develop the seting in Fallout.

Now it's my turn to say, you're fucking kiding(sic) right?

There are 2.5 billion fanfics about Final Fantasy 7, does that mean that its setting is fully expounded upon because there's lots of text? How about Warcraft? Look up the word hackneyed.

Fallout's setting is infinitely more creative than yet another fantasy kingdom. Just because someone wrote a short fanfic about why the afternoon elves have yellow skin instead of blue skin doesn't make the setting any less trite.

 

[Naked_Lunch]

Fallout had a good reason for things not being that "developed" (I disagree I think it was a pretty in-depth setting, but that's not the issue here): The entire world was fucking blown to pieces. That's why such little is known about That Place or This Area because hey, most of the people who lived in That Place, along with That Place itself, were nuked to smoking ashes.

 

[Gambler]

Daggerfall has about 40 books describing history

Imagine that Daggerfall would have no in-game books. Would that affect the rest of the game somehow? No, it would not. Those books are irrelevant.

To make it clear, I'm not a big fan of Fallout either, but at least I have finished both F1 and F2. I have quit Daggerfall out of boredom. It's repetitive.

I don't think you've really played it enough. There is plenty of emotional investment by the designers which is plainly apparent.

Maybe. How much is enough? Some crazy fan once said that I don't have the right to say anything about the game until I've played 600 (six hundred) hours. That does not exactly count in game's favor. I don't like random generation, especially when it comes to quests.

 

[Twinfalls]

There are 2.5 billion fanfics about Final Fantasy 7, does that mean that its setting is fully expounded upon because there's lots of text?

Fallout's setting is infinitely more creative than yet another fantasy kingdom. Just because someone wrote a short fanfic about why the afternoon elves have yellow skin instead of blue skin doesn't make the setting any less trite.

2 things:

- Trying to say 'Fallout's backstory/'lore' is better than Daggerfall's or vv, is just pointless. Both are extremely well done for what they sought to achieve.

- Daggerfall's lore/backstory is not merely 'fanfic', nor is it merely 'hackneyed'. You need to play the game properly to appreciate that the world fleshed out by Peterson et al was something quite special in PC gaming - and has been capitalised on to this day by New Bethesda.

 

[Lumpy]

There are 2.5 billion fanfics about Final Fantasy 7, does that mean that its setting is fully expounded upon because there's lots of text?

Fallout's setting is infinitely more creative than yet another fantasy kingdom. Just because someone wrote a short fanfic about why the afternoon elves have yellow skin instead of blue skin doesn't make the setting any less trite.

2 things:

- Trying to say 'Fallout's backstory/'lore' is better than Daggerfall's or vv, is just pointless. Both are extremely well done for what they sought to achieve.

- Daggerfall's lore/backstory is not merely 'fanfic', nor is it merely 'hackneyed'. You need to play the game properly to appreciate that the world fleshed out by Peterson et al was something quite special in PC gaming - and has been capitalised on to this day by New Bethesda.

You can't really have an in depth setting for a futuristic game set in the real world. KC, tell me, how is another setting with radiation and mutants better than another setting with kingdoms and elves? (and this time, try to figure out what game we are debating about)
And Twinfalls, do you mean Morrowind's lore was a dumbing down of the Daggerfall one? Oblivion, yes, raped the lore - actually, it moderately abused it - but Morrowind's lore was awesome, and did not contradict Daggerfall's.

 

[Twinfalls]

No, you're right - MW's lore was pretty cool.

Pity the game was so utterly joyless.

 

[elander_]

Daggerfall has about 40 books describing history

Imagine that Daggerfall would have no in-game books. Would that affect the rest of the game somehow? No, it would not. Those books are irrelevant.

The game is more enjoyable that way. If we were talking about Halo, books would be almost irrrelevant but it is a crpg so books tell the story of the world you can only obtain from dialog otherwise. You can get a lot of hidden insight about politics by doing quests for the nobility and the main quest. This politicaly incorrect info is not in books except perhaps the Barenziah volume. Im not sure about it but i think the real barenziah is not available in wayrest where she is queen, only in the other kingdoms. In the same way you won't know from books whats the story of the first-born chield of the queen of sentinel or the dirties between king lysandus and the king of sentinel on the war for betony. This can only be known by questing. So books are only there to do what they should and that is tell the official version of the words history.

In fact in Fallout there isn't much history to tell because everything was blown up to pieces. There are books and magazines but it's a shame we can't read or look at them. I don't see how people can be very interested in history and trying to find what really happened before the Fallout. But that would be some interesting objective for a rp Fallout player to pursuit don't you think?

 

[LlamaGod]

But that would be some interesting objective for a rp Fallout player to pursuit don't you think?

Oh boy, another 'Roleplaying is reading books and pretending you're afraid of water' dipshits.

And surprise, they're in Daggerfalls defense.

 

[elander_]

Oh boy, another 'Roleplaying is reading books and pretending you're afraid of water' dipshits.

Oh boy another 'we don't need books in crpgs' dipshits.

 

[MINIGUNWIELDER]

Oh God another moron hissyfit/catfight.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

Different strokes for different people. Why is that concept so hard to grasp?

 

[LlamaGod]

Oh boy, another 'Roleplaying is reading books and pretending you're afraid of water' dipshits.

Oh boy another 'we don't need books in crpgs' dipshits.

books are a crutch for designers too shitty to deeply detail their game world as part of the main game, instead segmenting it into books that you are at option to read and can ignore totally.

Ultima has a better, richer and more detailed game world than Elder Scrolls and you never need to actually read books to learn it all.

 

[Twinfalls]

Oh for fuck's sakes CowPat, why must you turn everything into 'Ultima is better, nyah nyah'?

What are you, 12? A goddam stupid fanboy who deserves to be beaten soundly and kept off the net for a year, perhaps?

Is Ultima really a 'richer game world'? Have you really looked at the amount of TES stuff that's been cooked up by the original writers? I doubt it.

Stop doing yourself a disservice by being so parochial, and acknowledge quality where it stands, whatever its flavour.

 

[LlamaGod]

I do that because people overrate the fuck out of Daggerfall. It's a shitty RPG with shitty gameplay.

Everyone likes it for things that dont even fucking matter and half the shit is a result of Bethesda just being too crappy to fluidly design a game.

It isn't a good RPG or even a good game and you retards are all full of nostalgia and jacking off over shit like books and 'potential'.

 

[bryce777]

Ultima is better. Daggerfall was still pretty good except for the bugs, though.

It was just enough to be a down payment on something really awesome, and instead we got morrowing.

 

[Twinfalls]

Gah.

'Ultima is better' is completely spurious, a red herring thrown in by llamaboy (who the fuck in this thread ever suggested 'Daggerfall is teh better than Ultima', and what the fuck does such a comparison serve - and on what terms?), and yet you all suck it right up.

 

[bryce777]

Gah.

'Ultima is better' is completely spurious, a red herring thrown in by llamaboy (who the fuck in this thread ever suggested 'Daggerfall is teh better than Ultima', and what the fuck does such a comparison serve - and on what terms?), and yet you all suck it right up.

I didn't say it wasn't irrelevant. Daggerfall, as I said, ahd its own merits.

 

[Naked_Lunch]

Ultima lore and Daggerfall lore are two pretty different things and hard to compare. You can see how Brittannia evolves and grows because the game IS the story of Brittannia and it's hero, you, the Avatar. You make the lore. I always had fun in the Ultima games talking to people or reading books that talked about my past adventures because hey, I really DID do that. It creates the impression of a truly living, breathing world. And it's brilliant.

From what I've seen/played Daggerfall's lore is a bit more static and instead of being your personal tale, it seems more of the BIG PICTURE sort of thing so it makes sense for DF's history and whatnot to be put into old musty tomes in libraries and chit and made enitrely optional because in the long run, does it matter? You can live life without ever reading a history textbook and it wouldn't make a big difference (just generalizing here, so shut up).

Or maybe I'm just a moron. Discuss.