Matt Chat Visits Daggerfall

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 5, 2011

Man, this thing brought on the nostalgia. I tried re-playing Daggerfall a couple of years ago. I didn’t get very far. But when it was new, I bought it on release day, put up with its buggy madness, and enjoyed the ever-living crap out of the game.

I don’t know if it was as ambitious as its predecessor, The Elder-Scrolls: Arena (which curiously had no arena in it). I was in a roundtable at the Computer Game Developer’s Conference where the lead designer for Arena claimed he’d originally planned it as a party-based game. Thus the cover, I guess. But the other party members kept getting lost in the 3D environments, and so they dropped it and now, almost at the fifth game, The Elder Scrolls remains a solo-character RPG series.

I skipped Arena, myself, as that was back in the day when RPGs were a dime a dozen. But I was caught up by the Daggerfall hype, and except for the bugs (which were annoying but unfortunately expected in a game of this scope) I was not disappointed. It was a game world I pretty much lived in for a few months. And as a game developer, I was simultaneously fantasizing about the ways I could improve upon it. Given, of course, infinite time and resources.

It’s hard to play now. But I remember wishing, as I was playing Oblivion, that it played a little more like Daggerfall. I don’t remember if I felt that way about Morrowind or not.

Anyway – if you enjoy these videos (and have money left over after buying Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon), Matt is still requesting donations to help cover the time and expense. You can donate at:

http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/3793.

Filed Under: Retro - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

Demiath said,

For many years now I’ve been at best lukewarm about Bethesda RPGs as a subgenre (which is basically what it has become at this point), but TES2 at least has a lot of nostalgia going for it since I bought Daggerfall the year it was released (1996), after having read an enthusiastic review of the game in the very first Swedish issue of PC Gamer.

At the time my 15-year old self didn’t have much experience with hardcore RPGs (apart from the old-fashioned but ultimately far more accessible dungeon crawling of Dungeon Master 2), and I remember being frustrated almost to the point of tears by TES2’s seemingly endless first dungeon. With a little help from my more intelligent and gaming-savvy friends I eventually got into the game, though, and enjoyed experimenting with custom-made character classes, fooling around with the semi-randomized side quests and finding ways to (intentionally) break the game.

Unlike Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas I never finished the main quest in Daggerfall but as far as I’m concerned TES2 is Bethsoft’s only RPG classic, despite its many undeniable issues.
Calibrator said,

I actually bought Arena at the time and I didn’t really consider it a great game. Yes, it already had a big world but it felt like the space-game Elite in some way where everything was based on a random-feeling of sequence of seed numbers (planet names, which goods were available and at which price etc.).

Didn’t finish the game because of two reasons: It got boring and my PC must have gotten a CPU upgrade because the game became nearly unplayable (it’s not speed-aware).
Of course I could have made the new machine deliberately slower in some way but I didn’t bother because of the monotony of it.
The only truly positive memory I have of this game is slicing goblins in the dungeons – with a very satisfying sound effect.

I skipped Daggerfall, mostly because of the bugs and the low resolution which felt “old” at the time, but I’m still a huge fan of Morrowind and Oblivion, both of which cost more than 200 hours of my life. 😉

Knowing Bethesda’s publishing tactics I won’t buy Skyrim when it comes out, though. I’ll get the “GOTY”-edition with all add-ons etc. for cheap. This worked pretty well with Fallout 3…
It seems I’m not very susceptible to hype anymore, perhaps a sign that I get old! 😉
Joe Tortuga said,

I’ve been playing through all the Elder Scrolls games in preparation for Skyrim, and I have to say that I think Daggerfall is easily the most ambitious of all the ES games. Maybe the original designs of Arena were wider in scope and ambition than Daggerfall, but the final product only hints at it, and is the fertile ground that Daggerfall grew out of. They were trying so many new things in Daggerfall of which Morrowind and Oblivion are successful refinements, but add little, functionally.

OTOH, Daggerfall is often repetitive and frustrating to play because in a lot of ways its reach exceeds its grasp. Still, it was an impressive jump in scale an intricacy, and I think, the largest between any of their games.
Rampant Coyote said,

I am one of the few who did finish the main quest on Daggerfall… with a thief-acrobat, even (or whatever the class was called). Later I was told that was the hardest class to play in the game. Ah, well. I had a blast.

This may be the thing that limits me as a game developer: I give lots of extra credit to games for their ambition. I’d rather see a game shoot for the moon and miss than aim much lower. It’s probably why I was a bigger fan of Total Annihilation than Starcraft. Yes, after a while Daggerfall became awfully repetitive and it was clear that I’d seen 90% of everything the game had to offer. Maybe that’s why I finished with the main quest… it was how I could get custom human-generated content. 🙂
Andy_Panthro said,

I played Arena first, and really enjoyed it. As Calibrator said, it was very much like Elite.

I never completed it, nor Daggerfall, but that was possibly due to it’s expansive nature. I’d preferred the Ultima Underworld games (which I played around the same time), partially because I knew the background for those and also because they were a bit more focussed on a fairly linear quest.

I can understand why they chose to remove the majority of the “randomness” from the series, it’s certainly become more popular since then, and I actually did complete Oblivion (even though it was my least favourite). I also finished Fallout 3 and am now playing the far superior New Vegas.

I was having a little chat over at Ultima Aiera about minecraft, and an idea that came up was a minecraft-RPG, which would perhaps be a fitting successor to Daggerfall.

And on a final note, the one part of Arena/Daggerfall that sticks in my mind is the sound effects. I’ve heard the creaky door and the rat sounds so much I can recognise them anywhere! (and they do get used from time to time in lower budget TV shows and films!)
McTeddy said,

I spent more time on the Daggerfall DEMO than I do on most modern RPGs.

The Demo included an entire territory complete with random dungeons and quests. I must have spent 40+ hours just wandering around and joining new factions. (It probably didn’t hurt that I modified the data files to ensure I had everything I wanted on creation)

Sadly, I haven’t been able to get that game running well on my modern computers. I would love to play this again.
Xian said,

I played Arena, but never finished it. I played it right after Ultima Underworld, and Arena paled in comparison to me in storyline and gameplay. The only WOW! moment I really remember is emerging from the dungeon for the first time (UU was strictly a dungeon crawler) and seeing the wide open spaces and the falling snow. It got too repetitious and something else came along and I picked that up and never got back around to finishing it.

I was running into Daggerfall bugs in the starter dungeon. I played through the beginning half a dozen times, and each time when I came out of the dungeon and tried to go to a town I died. I am guessing that a rat or something poisoned me but my status gave no indication of that. Bethesda’s tech support told me the same thing when I called – something in the dungeon must have afflicted me but they didn’t know why there was no indication other than when I went to travel to the first town I was DOA. They suggested to give it another go, but I never was able to get past the beginning dungeon. I ended up taking it back to the retailer and getting as refund (back then you could still do that even if you had opened it) and picked up a different game to play instead.
Drav said,

Daggerfall is almost the perfect follow up to Darklands. It has the pre-set NPCs that Darklands desperately lacked (even if most of them are nothing to write home about), a superior character creation system, a faction system that lets you play your character however you want instead of being punished for being a baby-eating jerk, and full-3D environments in place of menu-driven locations. It’s too bad they didn’t do what Darklands did and construct the game around random encounters, while making the end goal for each quest fairly brief, as the repetitiveness of Daggerfall’s randomly generated dungeons comes close to killing the whole game.
Max said,

Ahh Daggerfall… Such nostalgia… It was a revelation to me when I started playing Arena – it had a world ,which was believable in scale and size. Huge bustling cities, towns and villages. Rainfall and snow, deserts and forests.

The only other game comparable was Elite series. Yes you could see the repetitive patterns if ,but at that point my imagination was filling all the blanks. It felt like a true virtual world , not a game for me. A feeling I tried to get in other games to no avail.

I am still sad no games of such scale and approach are made using today technology. I dreamed “Maybe one day…” At some point I gave up hope and shifted my focus on MMOs where real players would act instead of NPCs. Because procedural content is hard and good AI is even harder.

But alas just like Arena and Daggerfall were never replicated and focus shifted instead into more streamlined “on rails” experience (such as morrowind and oblivion) the MMOS shifted to themparks of EQ, WoW,Lotro and EQ from virtual worlds of UO and AC.It turned out designing systems for worlds is also hard 🙁
Andy_Panthro said,

@Drav:

I’d suggest Mount & Blade has the potential to be a good successor to Darklands. There are quite a few mods that add a lot of depth to it already, it just needs more to do in cities and such (questing/adventuring stuff).
UmberHulk said,

I couldn’t watch more than c. 5 minutes of the video. This Matt dude tries waaay too hard to be funny, failing pretty badly at that. He wasn’t witty or funny, he was irritating and tiresome. Even with all its bugs and old UIs, Daggerfall deserves a better revisit commentary. Much better.
Funtimes said,

Matt maybe you should have reviewed this game back in 96. Your not real funny. Despite the bugs in this game it was a groundbreaking piece of work that to this day is the common ground for a whole lot of RPGs.

If it takes you a couple hours to get out of the tutorial dungeon I suggest you stop playing RPG’s.
HoHoHo said,

Got to admit “cuirass” is funny sounding.