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Style: Daggerfall is an attempt to fuse the classic 3D dungeon games (a la Wizardry) with the 1st-person shooters of the '90's (a la Doom).
You control and develop one character. The plot is a role-playing adventure and there are fantasy themes. Combat is realtime.
Series: Daggerfall is part of the "Elder Scrolls" trilogy of adventure CRPG's by game developer Bethesda Softworks.
I believe the original adventure,
Arena, was the very first first-person CRPG, though it wasn't memorable for anything besides that. Daggerfall's sequels,
Morrowind and
Oblivion,
retain the slightly aimless approach to gaming freedom but give players better-thought-out areas to explore and more interesting development
arcs to pursue, and without the crippling bugs that plagued Daggerfall. There's no interdependency between
these games, no reason why playing Daggerfall would improve anyone's enjoyment of Morrowind. If you haven't played any of these games
and are thinking about Daggerfall, I'd strongly urge you to buy Morrowind or Oblivion instead. Daggerfall's bugs are beyond inconvenient,
and there's nothing it did better than its sequels do.
Finding Daggerfall: This game is long out of print. CDAccess and
Amazon.com frequently have used copies for sale, but they are generally
overpriced; you may want to check Ebay for a better deal. Daggerfall is no longer available as abandonware at the request of the game producers (who were
undoubtedly trying to preserve the "Elder Scrolls" copyright for Morrowind's sake).
Getting Daggerfall to Work: Daggerfall is one of the hardest games in existence to get working on a modern system.
If you're running XP, Vista, or Windows 7, you will need to use a DOS emulator (like DOSBox) in order to play Daggerfall, and you may need to
create a special boot disk as well, and even then, the game will run slow and the sound will probably not work. All of this pales in comparison to
the technical problems the game had from the get-o, though. Daggerfall is very poorly programmed and will often cause system lock-ups and crashes.
Worse, the randomly-generated 3D dungeons are so poorly done that they often end up with monsters and treasure overlaid by walls (so that you
cannot reach them, which is especially bad if that was the randomly generated quest item!) and cracks in the floor you can step through and become
permanently stuck. There are a bevy of patches
and savegame fixers linked from this site which may help some of the bug issues, but
there are going to be problems no matter what you do.
Hints For Daggerfall: I do not have a walkthrough page for Daggerfall myself--because so much of the game is randomly generated,
there would hardly be a point. All seventeen steps in the main quest and all six optional mini-quests are detailed on the
Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages. You could also buy a
Daggerfall Hint Book, if you prefer.
Pitfalls In Daggerfall: Gird yourself for bugs, and lots of them. The most recent
patch may help with the system crashes and lockups. Nothing will help with the badly generated
dungeons. Save before accepting any quest, and restore if the dungeon you go into is screwed up. (Unfortunately it can take an hour or more to learn this, but that's just
the price of playing this game.)
Game Length: It really depends on whether you find repeated quests to fetch randomly generated objects from randomly generated
dungeons to be any fun or not. If you hear that and think "Wow, awesome!" then you'll get 100 hours or more out of Daggerfall.
If you hear that and think "I might as well run errands to the grocery store," then this is going to be a 40-hour affair for you, and you won't enjoy half of it. There are
only about 20 real quests in the game, and they are all very short.
Age-Appropriateness: I think this game predates the rating system, and it's out of print, so it won't have been given one after the fact. It's certainly
not for kids younger than 13, though. There is a fair amount of gratuitous nudity in the game, which it's possible to disable at the control screen (basically, with nudity disabled,
temple dancers are wearing bikinis and your character's paperdoll has underwear on beneath his or her clothing, whereas with nudity enabled the temple dancers are bare-breasted
and your character gets naked whenever you change clothing. Weird.) The "history" texts you find scattered around are also oddly sprinkled with tales of explicit sex.
(Disappointing)
Plot and Quests: The main plot is a moderately interesting palace intrigue with several steps, most of which
are unfortunately of the fed-ex variety (ferrying letters between important personages or fetching items from those dratted dungeons). At the end you do get to choose which faction
to give the talisman to, each of which produces a slightly different ending (always a plus). There are only a few side quests with actual content, and hundreds of boring
computer-generated ones.
Puzzles and Mental Challenges: There are few puzzles and barely any chances to use your brain at all in this game.
The main quest involves a little bit of deduction. Dungeoneering is rote. The biggest challenge in this game is navigation. The automap doesn't function well underground,
and the illogical random 3D tunnels can be difficult to map by hand or maneuver around.
Characters: You get one character in this game who is completely customizable both in terms of skills and appearance
(though non-Caucasian humans are still a bit lacking.) There are few chances to develop this character or make decisions on his or her behalf.
There are no NPCs in Daggerfall besides the dozen or so political folks involved in the intrigue (none of whom has what you'd exactly call a well-developed character)
and the hundreds of faceless, randomly generated and randomly named townsfolk (none of whom has anything you'd call a character at all).
Gameworld: On the positive side, this is a large gameworld with much attention to detail (I have never
seen so many different types of clothing for sale in a computer game). The game designers have obviously put a good amount of thought into what kind of things a player
might be interested in doing, and adapting the game so he can try it. (You can, for example, infect yourself with lycanthropy by letting a werewolf bite you.) On the negative,
the world is repetitive, uncreative and excessively computer-generated. There's never anything interesting happening in any town anywhere; they are different only
in that their buildings are randomly rearranged. Townsfolk all look the same and have the same pointless comments to make if you try talking to them. Names, too, are randomly
selected from a list, and you may find two different women named Carolyrra Hawkwing in the same village. And another in the next. And the next. All of Tamriel has this
monotonous, almost robotic feel to it.
Gameplay (Leveling, Spells, etc.): This score would probably be higher if the game were programmed more adequately.
Character creation and skill development is fun, and you get a lot more character options than in many CRPG's. The item enchantment system is also very good. However, even
patched and repatched, several of the gameplay elements (particularly the spellcasting system) are crippled by bugs.
Interface (Movement, Inventory Management, etc.): The interface is a generally adequate mid-nineties toolbar.
Movement is 3D rather than tile-based, and doesn't always handle this (at the time) new technology very adeptly. Armor, clothing, and weapons are extremely varied in
appearance, which makes inventory management unusually nice for a CRPG. Combat is unpleasant and buggy, and the automap doesn't work consistently in dungeons, a
devastating flaw--having to repeatedly map these random nonsensical three-dimensional tunnel complexes by hand gets to be like nails on a chalkboard.
Ambience (Graphics, Sound, etc.): The graphics are dated but tolerable. Weather effects are intrusive and
unrealistic-looking. As your character moves or turns, your view of the world bumps and jogs in a vaguely nauseating way. Monsters and NPCs are highly pixellated
sprites, and the closer you get to them, the larger those pixels get. The cookie-cutter sameness of the towns and their inhabitants keeps the detailed gameworld from
ever acquiring a truly immersive feel, and the lack of creativity keeps it from imparting any mood.
Lora's Recommendations: It's hard to think of anyone I'd actually recommend this game to. If you have nostalgic feelings
about Daggerfall
from ten years ago, playing it again today may be something of a disappointing shock, like the time I made the mistake of watching old "Speed Racer" cartoons and
realizing they weren't half as good as I'd remembered. If you never played it in the first place, I don't know why you'd really want to start now. There's nothing it does
that its sequels, Morrowind and
Oblivion, don't do faster and with fewer bugs.
Try Baldur's Gate 2 or Wizardry 8
if you're looking for a really well-done CRPG; if you're in search of some nostalgic old-school fun, you might want to revisit the
Realms of Arkania Trilogy or the
Ultima Collection, both of which have held up a little better over the years
than Daggerfall.
If You Loved Daggerfall: Then you would probably really love
Morrowind; however, if you played this game recently and
really enjoyed it, you really shouldn't ever have to pay for a game again, since you obviously have the patience, technical knowhow, and love of the classics to
play abandonware to your heart's content. If you can get Daggerfall working on a modern system, you can get just about
any old DOS game running, and there are hundreds to choose from. If you have an ethical objection to abandonware, there are some great collections of old classics
available for sale--some of the best are the Ultima Collection,
Ultimate Wizardry Archive, and
Might and Magic Platinum Edition. On the other hand, if you loved
Daggerfall in 1996 and were wondering if anything good had come along in the genre in the past ten years, you're in for a real treat. Try
Morrowind or Oblivion, or try the excellent modern CRPGs
Baldur's Gate 2 and Wizardry 8.
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