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.
Related Stories:
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!
mechwarrior 4 freeware, too !!
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
…Or you can just press CTRL+F10 to lock the mouse manually.
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)
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/
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.
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!)
@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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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!
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)
How awesome would it be if someone could get this to run on a Palm Pre!
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.
Has anyone here actaully beat the game?
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.
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)
@Colthor – thank you very much, by the way.
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.
Any other game where you can take your clothes off and actaully be nude ? :P
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.
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.
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.
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?!?”
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)
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.
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.
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.
@ 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. :-)
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.
@ 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?
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.
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 =(
As for the guards being Dangerous at first, they become rather laughable even at the beginning as long as you keep walking backwards. ><
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.
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?