By Jim Rossignol on July 10th, 2009 at 8:13 am.
Bethesda have announced that their second Elder Scrolls game, Daggerfall, is now freeware. The classic RPG is notable for its enormity – being large and ambitious even by standards of the later games, even if it’s visually clunky today. You can pick it up here, and it’s under 150mb. You’ll also need DOSBox to get it working, as it’s quite literally that old. This announcement – made to celebrate fifteen years of the series – means that the first two Elder Scrolls games are both now free to play. You can pick up Arena at the same location.
10/07/2009 at 08:19 now wait just a sec says:
WONDERFUL, we’ve been waiting for that to happen since Arena became free!
10/07/2009 at 08:29 Yougiedeggs says:
Yaaay, now my copy is legal! JK
Love this game. Except the main quest dungeons. If you don’t have a walkthrough, just forget about it.
10/07/2009 at 08:30 cmd says:
Oh yesyesyes, this is sooo classic ^_^
10/07/2009 at 08:30 Lobotomist says:
Great news
10/07/2009 at 08:52 Bob says:
5 more years and Morrowind might be free! :D
I wish Rockstar would put out GTA 3 as free, like they have done with GTA 1 & 2
10/07/2009 at 08:53 pauleyc says:
Good news, at least it will save me the hassle of attaching an external drive to my Eee.
One of my favourite games, buggy as hell (I hope this downloadable version comes at least with the latest patch) but a great experience nevertheless.
10/07/2009 at 08:54 Heliocentric says:
One day anyone complaining about oblivion will be told to shut up because its free… One day.
10/07/2009 at 08:55 Bear says:
Great, now I can witness the great f- up of continuity shattering scale.
How I love that they made ALL the endings canon.
10/07/2009 at 09:02 WidowFactory says:
Am i the only one who couldn’t figure out how to get out of the dungeon place you start in? :( Couldn’t get the combat at all when I first played it about 8 years ago, always would be killed by a wayward rat or bat. Time to give it another go!
10/07/2009 at 09:03 Heliocentric says:
Is there a stack of daggerfall mods that would improve my experience?
10/07/2009 at 09:13 Bananaphone says:
According to Wikipedia…
Daggerfall is the largest Elder Scrolls game to date, featuring a game world estimated as being 161,600 square kilometres (62,394 square miles or 40,400,000 acres) with over 15,000 towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player’s character to explore.
That’s a big fuckin’ game.
10/07/2009 at 09:23 Stromko says:
Of course it has thousands of everything, it’s all random and all the same. A lot of the randomized dungeons from what I recall couldn’t be completed, they didn’t link up properly half the time in my experience. And, if you didn’t like Oblivion’s level scaling … Daggerfall was their first try at that kind of all-encompassing level scaled world.
What this means is if you don’t make a perfect build or you level up using the wrong skills, you’re absolutely toast against eveything once you level up some.
But I should shut up, because it’s free now. ;) (That would mean something if I didn’t still own Daggerfall)
10/07/2009 at 09:54 Lobotomist says:
I love randomised (big roguelike fan here) but Oblivion scaling is just plain wrong. I thought Dagerfall is old school – non scaling game :(
10/07/2009 at 10:07 Gothnak says:
I remember doing a huge quest for a legendary artifact in this. First get the quest from one of the Knights Guild. Go to huge far away dungeon, search it for an old lady (Takes hours). Old Lady is a witch, tells me to kidnap boy from town. Go to town, kidnap boy, kill guards. Go back to Dungeon, it has randomised itself including location of witch. Search for witch (takes hours).. Give her boy, she gives me an awesome magic shield, i’m a rogue, can’t wield shields…cry…
10/07/2009 at 10:07 Dominus says:
the best of the series!
10/07/2009 at 10:10 Rinox says:
@ Lobotomist:
Don’t worry, it’s not nearly as ridiculous as in Oblivion. In fact I never even really noticed it in Daggerfall and my builds weren’t perfect by any means (though it’s not like I invested heavily in the languages, climbing or etiquette and other pretty pointless skills either).
One thing’s for sure: the city guards always stay the same! Dangerous at first, a joke later on. “Halt Halt Halt Halt Halt (ad infinitum)”
10/07/2009 at 10:17 Dan (WR) says:
I loved Daggerfall when it came out and hold it in much higher regard than Morrowind and Oblivion. It’s almost certainly nostalgia speaking, but it just seemed much more atmospheric than the later games. Just wandering around city streets at night was oppressive and scary. It was an amazing experience for its day but I’m guessing it probably won’t hold up to players coming to it for the first time after playing Oblivion.
Also, it was bugged up the whazoo. I can’t count the number of times I got stuck in its random dungeons. I had to give up in the end. ;_;
10/07/2009 at 10:26 Tei says:
I supppose with a good tutorial and maybe some cheat/patch/mods all the problems with leveling could be fixed (patched? (cheated?)).
10/07/2009 at 10:33 mirdza says:
Wish they put out Battlespire for free.
10/07/2009 at 10:42 Pidesco says:
Now I just wish Bethesda would improve on Daggerfall’s freeform design. It’s a long time coming, I’d say. I’m getting tired of watered down sequels.
10/07/2009 at 10:44 Heliocentric says:
I just probed an faq on daggerfall as its a good way to guage the limitations of the game and avoid old school pitfalls. The begining reads, you’ll get a letter telling you to go to a random tavern in a random town.
I find it funny that you can get arena and daggerfall from the same place as that will never be the case in the game.
10/07/2009 at 11:09 Trite says:
Any mirrors? Downloading at 5 kB/s. And I think it timed out now, not progressing at all.
10/07/2009 at 11:11 Trite says:
Disregard that, Gamershell got it.
http://www.gamershell.com/download_48334.shtml
10/07/2009 at 11:13 alastair jack says:
wow this is downloading incredibly slow.. 4kb a second?!
10/07/2009 at 11:15 alastair jack says:
oh cheers Trite
10/07/2009 at 11:16 H says:
This was a fantastic game and I’m over the moon it’s free. It had fantastic depth and replayability and a lot of surprises. Become a vampire just to find out what happens, it took me by surprise.
10/07/2009 at 11:18 Morningoil says:
I don’t really have anything of use or interest to contribute. In fact this is almost going to amount to trolling. But am I not the only person to feel that Daggerfall is an ambitious and in some ways admirable but also a monstrously bad game? I mean just like nigh-unplayably terrible?
10/07/2009 at 11:27 Carra says:
Those are some hot pixels!
But I still have Oblivion to play through…
10/07/2009 at 11:45 Erlend M says:
I have many good memories of playing Daggerfall, but at the same time, I have to admit that the game is deeply flawed.
The worst part of the game is the dungeons. They’re absolutely huge, sprawling, unplanned (computer-generated instead of hand-placed like in later TES games), and tedious. It’s a step down from its predecessor Arena, which also had computer-generated dungeons, but of a more manageable size.
Daggerfall was also, as many have mentioned before me here, was really bugged. One exploit we found was to break into a jeweller’s at night to steal his stock. If you then exited the building, you could reenter it right away and find the shelves restocked, ripe for more stealing. That way, the sky (or more likely, the capacity of your pockets or cart) was the limit for how much you could steal from one shop alone. I could go on about the bugs, but a lot has been said before here.
Still, the game was ridiculously ambitious. There were literally thousands of settlements and dungeons to explore, and different parts of the world had entirely different environments, from the desert cities of Sentinel to trudging through the snow in Daggerfall province at winter. (By the way, the weather system was brilliantly atmospheric – something I missed in the later TES games.) Also, the gameworld was so huge that walking from one edge of the map to the other without fast travel would take you two weeks in real time – I believe Bethesda timed it.
Daggerfall can be seen as a flawed masterpiece, similar to many games that have come out of Eastern Europe in later years. Ridiculously ambitious, but far from sufficiently polished.
Oh, and…
“VEEENGEEEAAANCE”
10/07/2009 at 11:52 Rinox says:
:-D that howling at night in Daggerfall city freaked me out!
Another easy way to steal was to go into a store right before closing time, then waste a few in-game minutes until it was past closing time, save and reload the game. The merchant would be gone and you could just help yourself to everything without even picking a single lock, haha.
10/07/2009 at 12:28 leederkrenon says:
i will have to play this just to hear the snow music again. so amazing.
10/07/2009 at 12:34 Adrian says:
For everyone who has problems with dosbox:
First Create a folder called “OLDGAMES” on c
–> c:\OLDGAMES
then make a new folder for example called ELDER in that folder
–> c:\OLDGAMES\ELDER
put all your Elder Scolls Daggerfall files into that folder
then start dosbox and type
1. “MOUNT C C:\OLDGAMES”
now OLDGAMES folder is mounted as c: (dont ask why you do this)
2. type: “c:”
your command line should say c:\ instead of z:\ now
3. type: “CD ELDER”
now you have to select the executable of the game. it could be called “elder.exe”
for this just type the name of the executable
“elder.exe”
now your game should start.
10/07/2009 at 12:37 Adrian says:
Some old games need a setup first. for this just do the steps above but select the seup executable at the end. install the game preferably in the OLDGAMES folder. then do the above steps again but this time select your game executable at the end
10/07/2009 at 12:39 Trite says:
Adrian, There are instructions in PDF format on the Elder Scrolls site, in case you didn’t notice.
I died to the first giant rat there was. No matter how I mapped the controls, my character just didn’t swing the damn weapon. Oh well, I just don’t like Bethesda games, so no big loss here.
10/07/2009 at 13:00 Diogo Ribeiro says:
\o/ Daggerfall \o/
Probably the best Elder Scrolls title ever. Perhaps unsurprisingly, made by a very different team and built around a different design phylosophy.
If only the download wasn’t so slow. But the precious will be mine one day…
10/07/2009 at 13:17 Colthor says:
There’s a faster mirror on FileShack for anyone failing to get the game from Bethesda’s struggling server:
http://www.fileshack.com/file.x/14752/The+Elder+Scrolls+II:+Daggerfall+Free+Client
10/07/2009 at 13:18 Moriarty70 says:
The funny thing is, rummaging through my discs this week, I saw Daggerfall in the mix, right between two for Civ4
10/07/2009 at 13:23 Admiral Frosty says:
I’m surprised no ones mentioned that nudity. I played it years ago and found that there’s actually quite a lot, from undressing your paper doll, to finding random nude women in tavern rooms.
There was a mode to turn it off, but it also disabled blood. Bah, go figure.
10/07/2009 at 13:47 Forscythe says:
File this one under “Games that made me”. It’s the boundless, staggering ambition of Daggerfall that still impresses today. It has the all-inclusive mentality of the game design you scribble out at school with your friends.
Thus was Daggerfall delivered, late, buggy and incomplete, but what we got was impressive enough. The world of High Rock, and its cities, forests, deserts, oceans, isolated dungeons, great castles, forgotten cemeteries, is varied and remarkably atmospheric. The weather system (tied in with excellent music cues), day-night cycles, and calendar complete with seasons, holidays, and summoning dates were hugely innovative. These along with the well-developed principle characters, political situations, factions, systems of worship, and copious amounts of lore are backdrop to an intricate and intriguing main storyline. The character creation system was revolutionary.
The amount of choice you have in the game was even more so – choice of who your player is, at every level, and in every detail of your career (with a tremendous variety of different guilds and organizations to join, and sides to take), your reputation, your finances, your home, the ultimate resolution of the story, and even your clothes through an excellent paper doll system. Freedom pervades every aspect of the game: you even design your own potions, spells, and enchantments.
All of this perhaps overlooks the fact that actually playing Daggerfall too often consisted of epic, tedious crawls through its gigantic dungeons. Still, there was nothing like it then or now. Unmatched by its smoother, better-behaved descendants, Daggerfall is a glimpse — a flawed, imperfect glimpse — into what games could be without all of the compromises we’ve accepted and grown used to. It’s my favorite game of all time.
10/07/2009 at 14:05 Waste_Manager says:
I just don’t know if I can be bothered to play it. Re-visiting Morrowind at the minute anyway.
10/07/2009 at 14:16 Syneval says:
About the gigantic random dungeons …
A useful exploit is to cast a long-duration levitation spell on yourself, find a section of the corridor that opens up to a lower level, and use the jump exploit to fall between the polygon seams.
Now you’re floating outside the corridors, but ennemies will still aggro. It’s a great way to complete kill quests, as you can easily find your prey, aggro it, then re-enter the corridor through the same exploit and kill !
10/07/2009 at 14:50 Pidesco says:
always keep to the right was my dungeon navigating method.
10/07/2009 at 14:57 Heliocentric says:
Sounds like windows maze screen saver.
10/07/2009 at 15:00 Phlebas says:
Is this version patched at all? Or is there a helpful patch out there somewhere? I loved the game to bits but I don’t think I could face it again with the bugs it had before. Timed quests plus broken randomness making a fair percentage of them impossible plus penalties for any you fail to complete equals a lot of frustration.
10/07/2009 at 15:18 Colthor says:
A “DAG213″ patch is included in the download.
Oh, if anyone else gets stuck with it complaining about the lack of a CD run it with “FALL Z.CFG” rather than “DAGGER”.
10/07/2009 at 15:25 TDM says:
I keep running into “insert the CD” type errors with DOS Box. I got that even after following Adrian’s instructions. Any ideas?
10/07/2009 at 15:26 TDM says:
Well, uh, Colthor got it – my bad (I never refreshed the page?)
10/07/2009 at 15:30 Dave says:
My memory of Daggerfall involves a lot of crashing, and being arrested by magic guards because I arrived in a town at nighttime and didn’t get to an inn within 15 seconds. That game had the quickest time-to-uninstall of anything I’ve ever purchased.
Morrowind was where it was at.
10/07/2009 at 15:34 dhex says:
daggerfall was a hideous mess and i loved it to death. never been able to get my disc copy running in 2k or xp; i’m going to try this version again. it’s been ages…
10/07/2009 at 15:34 TDM says:
Except now…I can’t get any mouse input and can’t select my “home province.”
It has been far too long since I’ve used DOS.
10/07/2009 at 15:44 kiri says:
daggerfall will always be my first love with computer rpgs, still got my original box in my book shelf. scared the shit out of me as a preteen playing by myself in my parent’s basement, good times!
10/07/2009 at 15:52 Hoernchen says:
mechwarrior 4 freeware, too !!
10/07/2009 at 15:57 MrFake says:
Nostalgia!!
My childhood memories are equally split between glitch-stealing from stores, getting trapped in labyrinthine dungeons, and nudifying my friend’s character and overwriting all his saves.
I played again a few years ago and repeated two of those three things.
10/07/2009 at 16:12 alseT says:
Hmm I need some help from someone who has experience with DOSbox and DOS/32 Advanced specifically. I read on the elder scrolls wiki that the game is prone to save game corruption and using DOS/32 Advanced alleviates that problem a lot. Now I managed to install Daggerfall, but when I try to run “sb /r dagger.exe” it just gives me some information about the exe without modifying it whatsoever.
Some ideas would be greatly apreciated.
10/07/2009 at 16:16 Comment system, what comment system? says:
Awesome news.
The programmer in me wishes they open sourced the game while they were at it. The game is so legendary massive and has so many rarely explored nooks and crannies that the source would shed light on.
Also it would nice to update the thing to run on Windows with a better control scheme.
10/07/2009 at 16:23 Chis says:
Playing this for the first time, breaching the entrance for Privateer’s Hold and walking out into the darkness, the snow…
To Yagya’s “Rhythm Of Snow”. Beautiful.
10/07/2009 at 16:28 Colthor says:
@TDM:
You can workaround that one by starting the graphical installer thing (or presumably anything else that grabs the mouse properly), clicking so that DOSBox catches the mouse, then exiting and starting Daggerfall.
You can also disable the “autolock” option in DOSBox’s config, but that leaves the Windows cursor on screen too.
10/07/2009 at 16:32 Colthor says:
…Or you can just press CTRL+F10 to lock the mouse manually.
10/07/2009 at 16:34 Serondal says:
I still remember the first time I played this game. I accidently (okay I did it on purpose) killed a towns person and escaped the guards wrath with clever walking backwards and swinging skills :P Next thing a know some crazy assassin shows up and tells me I can join the dark brotherhood or die (Okay I killed 10 people! It was horrible)
10/07/2009 at 16:35 Chis says:
Apologies for the double-post, but here is someone’s attempt to make a from-scratch engine for Daggerfall, with high resolution etc:
http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/
10/07/2009 at 16:42 Dominic White says:
I personally file Daggerfall in the same mental space that I’ve put Jurassic Park: Tresspasser and Boiling Point. Hugely ambitious games that bit off way more than they could chew, and ended up nigh-unplayable, if interesting to muck around in.
There are so many things hilariously broken about Daggerfall. Even after the many patches, it was still common to find yourself failing a quest because it either never spawned the objective, or put it in an area of the dungeon completely isolated from the world, with absolutely no way to it.
Yeah, the game-world was a hojillion miles wide and there were a billion dungeons, but they all used the exact same tileset and were just the result of a (not particularly great) random number generator.
And yet people think I’m crazy when I say I actually liked Oblivion and Fallout 3. At least those games work.
10/07/2009 at 16:43 Lugribossk says:
Walking through the gates of Daggerfall city in the snow with that music playing, one of my top Gaming Made Me moments.
The 213 patch was the last one, if it’s included then it’s as bug-free as it’s going to get. Which is certainly playable, particularly if you use the cheat mode to teleport to quest locations in the random dungeons. (Just don’t forget to Mark the entrance so you can get back!)
10/07/2009 at 16:48 Serondal says:
@Lugriboskk -Ahem to using cheat mode to teleport to the random objective locations in the dungeons, that’s about the only way to beat the random ones unless you have a few hours on your hands and a huge amount of luck.
I sitll remember walking into a temple the first time and seeing a nude woman I was like “What kind of game is this?!?!?!! I love it!” My friend was able to climb over city walls to get into towns but every time I tried it I got launched 500 feet into the air and fell to my death O.o
Also the only Elder SCroll game you can buy a boat in and I believe there are tons of homes to buy in each city with no silly strings attached.
10/07/2009 at 16:50 roryok says:
I loved daggerfall. Fantastic game, and I totally agree that the later games were too tame. There was something about daggerfall – it didnt hold your hand. Morrowind and Oblivion are just too friendly to be a real adventure. I’d love to see them take more cues from this for the next elder scrolls game, specifically I would delight in the entire thing being randomly generated on install (not continuously like daggerfall). Imagine if your own tamriel was different to everyone elses – your towns, forests, dungeons, NPCs all individual. That would be a game with good replay value.
10/07/2009 at 16:53 roryok says:
come to think of it I think it was that very randomness that was what set it apart from later games. You were in a dungeon that no-one else had ever seen – no-one could help you but yourself.
10/07/2009 at 17:06 Nerd Rage says:
This game is great evidence that some aspects of the series have moved forward, others not so much. Character creation was awesome, from what I remember of it, but the game itself got real old real fast. Buggy dungeons that couldn’t be completed, and god help you if this happened on one of the main quests.
The dungeon “map” is pretty horrible, so you better have a good sense of direction if you’re going to go very deep into a dungeon – or a recall spell prepared. (Did this one have recall spells, or am I remembering a mage’s guild service?)
10/07/2009 at 17:08 Serondal says:
And the sense that you could totally ignore the main quest forever if you wanted to really felt real. Since quests were random and you could join a ton of diffrent guilds and it randomly generated the dungeons and locations of the dungeons on the maps you never had to worry about running out of quests to do or skills to gain ect.
Anyone else remember finding a werewolf locked in a cage to pratice your weapons skills with an iron weapon ? (since you had to have silver weapons to hurt a werewolf) just wailing on him until you were board out of your mind :P
Also I loved the sprite for the enchanter, a smith with a hammer glowing with magic that sent sparks flying when he hit the weapon he was making, very awesome.
10/07/2009 at 17:15 Ush says:
Oh my God this is great news! I was watching clips of the gameplay and wondering whether I should torrent it just the other day, and now I dont have to break the law. Hurrah!
10/07/2009 at 18:33 Serondal says:
Be prepared Ush, the game is a lot harder than Morrowind or Oblivion in the start but once you get the hang of it , it isn’t that bad. (until it is)
10/07/2009 at 18:46 Roosterfeet says:
How awesome would it be if someone could get this to run on a Palm Pre!
10/07/2009 at 19:34 DD says:
ohh god Daggerfall is a classic. One of the first games made were you can just wander around and find insane stuff around every corner. Plus the game is impossible.
10/07/2009 at 19:37 Serondal says:
Has anyone here actaully beat the game?
10/07/2009 at 20:52 drewski says:
One of my friends finished it.
I wasn’t good enough at gaming to get very far in this when I was a kid, but I still loved it. One of the few games I actually saved up my pennies to buy.
10/07/2009 at 20:56 Railick says:
I never finished it either. I played it for a long time and did a ton of quests for the dark brotherhood ect but I never got strong enough to go into the next quest dungeon (There were liches right inside the front door that could one shot kill me lol)
10/07/2009 at 21:01 TDM says:
@Colthor – thank you very much, by the way.
10/07/2009 at 22:27 elmuerte says:
Daggerfall was awesome (and buggy as awesome as it was). I don’t think I ever followed the main story for long. You had so much freedom that the main story didn’t matter that much.
10/07/2009 at 22:33 Railick says:
Any other game where you can take your clothes off and actaully be nude ? :P
10/07/2009 at 23:01 sinister agent says:
A “DAG213″ patch is included in the download.
Oh, if anyone else gets stuck with it complaining about the lack of a CD run it with “FALL Z.CFG” rather than “DAGGER”.
My thanks, sir. That was threatening to have me up all night.
10/07/2009 at 23:13 malkav11 says:
Daggerfall is so schizophrenic. There are all these lovely ideas – summoning rituals, lycanthropy and vampirism (yes, in Morrowind and vampirism in Oblivion also, but not to the same extent), etc etc. But they’re all flung into a giant pile on the ground and covered over in bugs and ceaseless genericism.
10/07/2009 at 23:14 malkav11 says:
Oh, and if Daggerfall had level scaling, I never noticed it – it didn’t really seem to care at any point (including the opening dungeon) if you could actually survive.
10/07/2009 at 23:20 Railick says:
Well obviously you could actaully survive otherwise no one would have ever beaten the game ;) I never ran into any game breaking bugs, just mostly amusing ones. The random dungeon that is impossible to beat bug never bothered me because the dungeons are so huge any way that if I didn’t find the quest item in a few hours I’d give up searching all together .
Actually there was one quest where you had to visit the Worm King I remember falling throuh the ground. I was very lucky because the Wurm King’s chamber was under me so I fell right into his lap :P My dad was watching when this happened and he was just like “What kind of game is this?!?”
11/07/2009 at 02:18 Greg says:
I liked whoever said above that this was a sorts of 50′s architecture, a future of gaming that never came true. I suppose Darklands is a sibling of sorts.
(I’m pretty sure I could still pick up the ebony dagger and do the starting dungeon straight away, seeing it again on the page of the guy who’s remaking it was a total madeleine moment)
11/07/2009 at 04:49 malkav11 says:
No, no, I don’t mean that the game would automatically be impossibly difficult, I just meant that it didn’t seem to have any sort of difficulty balancing to ensure that you had a reasonable chance of survival. So if you went somewhere and it happened to spawn things you couldn’t deal with….oops. So sorry.
11/07/2009 at 07:36 drewski says:
Yeah, you definitely needed a strong sense of survival in some of the random dungeons.
The enemies couldn’t go through doors though, could they? Easy enough to run away. A neat trick I also used to good effect in Morrowind, I was devastated when they took it out of Oblivion.
11/07/2009 at 08:18 Heliocentric says:
You can be chased through doors in morrowind but it was only if they had direct line of sight to you as you went through or something like that.
11/07/2009 at 12:22 Rinox says:
@ Serondal:
I beat it. This was before I even had a dial-up connection (yes we’re getting old) so I didn’t have the patched version of the game. You can imagine that it was quite the quest…it required a constant rotation of save games in order to outfox any (frequent) savegame corruption and, well, just tons and tons of patience. When I was still young and unemployed, those were in ample supply. :-)
I actually think I’ve pretty much done most of what you can do in the game. Beat it (trying all endings, too), owned several houses and a big boat (thanks to some creative loan swindles around the Illiac Bay), rose to the top of the ranks of every guild except one the Knightly Orders, been a lycantrophe (both a wereboar a werewolf) and a vampire and cured myself from both afflictions, summoned all the daedra princes and almost did all their quests, read all the books in the game, went exploring for witch covens in the mountains which offered very rare quests, got afflicted with pretty much every disease in the game (Brain Rot and the Plague were awful)…etc etc.
By the time I actually decided I wanted to tackle the final part of the MQ storyline I was nothing short of Godlike, extremely high level with gear that was almost entirely composed of Daedric artefacts from the summoning quests, with some additional powerful own enchantments. Turns out this was almost necessary – getting to the Mantella in the final dungeon is a very tricky path. But I had a lot more trouble with some other MQ dungeons like the one under Daggerfall castle. :-o
So yes, some people did waste their youth on finishing the game, haha. In the end I think I had the King of Worms ascend to Godhood (which then spooked me out in Oblivion to see him again as a pussy necromancer). The King of Worm’s dungeon/home in the Wrothgarian mountains was pretty cool…for the longest time I didn’t realize I was to open the tomb lid!
I went on some wild goose chases through the desert to find great dragon btw. Some of the books mention them as “if they indeed still roam the lands, the vast deserts are where they would be”. But I never found one and am pretty sure they’re not even in the game. Am I wrong? And I don’t mean dragonlings. :-)
11/07/2009 at 12:55 rei says:
I, too, spent way too many hours randomly wandering around Alik’r Desert, but unfortunately there’s nothing there. It’s one of the many intended features that never ended up being implemented. More info here: http://www.uesp.net/dagger/dfdragon.shtml
Would’ve saved me a lot of time and trouble had I had an internet connection back then to find out these things, but I suppose the possibility of there being something there is worth more, from a more romantic point of view.
11/07/2009 at 14:02 Ush says:
@ drewski
I think enemies can actually open doors in Daggerfall (found out the hard way with that damned Imp in the first dungeon last night). Or did you mean doors between loading areas like interiors/exteriors?
11/07/2009 at 21:51 JP says:
I missed this one back in the day, and tried to play it yesterday. Now, I’m very very comfortable delving into clunky retro games – I got through about half of System Shock 1 a few months back and the lack of mouselook didn’t bother me overmuch – but I found the combat in the first dungeon in Daggerfall just abysmal. Is swinging your sword really intended to be a painful gesture-driven thing? And the framerate – with identical DOSBox settings and cycles, Shock1 is at least playable, whereas Daggerfall struggles along at a slideshow, no matter how I tune the settings, causing me to miss those damn imps with my spells.
I guess I’m just spoiled from playing really nice ports of comparable generation games like Doom and Duke3D, where gameplay is smooth even if the graphics are (gloriously!) chunky. Anyone got any recommendations for how to improve it? I’m keenly interested in this kind of semi-procedural, incredibly vast lo-fi RPG… but it’s hard to get into.
11/07/2009 at 22:22 Nick says:
I quite like the gesture driven combat, the different swings do varying damage but also have different accuracy (or something similar). Poking will hit more but hurt less, downward slashes do the most damage but are the hardest to land.
I’m not sure why you are having framerate issues in DosBox as it has always worked fine for me, sorry =(
12/07/2009 at 01:14 JDP says:
As for the guards being Dangerous at first, they become rather laughable even at the beginning as long as you keep walking backwards. ><
13/07/2009 at 11:45 Woges says:
There’s an easy to install Windows XP version here:
http://talon.punt.nl/#458865
Which a poster pointed out on the rpgwatch forums that includes dosbox and updated controls patch so you can mouse look. Makes setting up the game on XP very easy indeed.
28/07/2009 at 23:25 UK_John says:
When people in this thread say ‘now my copy is legal, meaning they got it when it was illegal, are they banned? Or is piracy not the big problem everyone talks about?