T w e n t y S i d e d
You know the drill. Just like last time, post your questions about Daggerfall below and I’ll go through and answer them.
But first, a sample of gameplay:
I’m not sure how long I’ve been in this dungeon for. A couple hours? It started out as a series of narrow sloping tunnels and then turned into a giant cavern…full…of…towers? Which is odd, because I’m relatively certain this was supposed to be a fort. Also I was sent here to kill orcs and this place is chock-a-bursting with werewolves.
Oh, it’s a room full of chains and torture devices. This can’t be that other room full of chains and torture devices–there were two half-naked female corpses in there from the assassins I killed–so this means I am, in fact, finding new areas. That’s a huge relief. Let’s check the map just for the hell of it.
Now, from this chunkily-rotating jagged 3D map of a winding multilevel dungeon with only one isometric angle that refuses to load anything but a very tight locus of content, I can conclude that I am currently in a dungeon. From this data point I can further induce that I am sick of the dungeon and that I want to leave.
I found a chain and clicked on it. Now I’m levitating. I’m not sure how that works, but I can use it to get down into this little pyramid thing. How will I get *out* of the pyramid thing? I couldn’t guess. It’s quite possible that I’ve just completely screwed myself and that there is no earthly way for my character to get out again. It’d be one thing if there was a vertical wall to climb, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
A monster type I’ve never seen before is shooting spells at me. I kill it. It would seem that it is not, in fact, an orc.
There is definitely no way out of here.
Hey, on the bright side, now I get to go back three hours ago. If I’m very careful, and follow my notes precisely, maybe I can get lost in the same direction as last time.
I am neither careful nor precise. I wind up down a different passage and end up in another big cavern. Across a giant gap I can see more towers, more tunnels. I am sick at the prospect of having another complex the size of the one I just clambered out of to explore, and begin to reflect on the many ways this game resents my not being a wizard who can teleport himself home immediately. Oh, and here’s a spider that I have to wrestle my camera to an awkward angle to kill. Interesting nature fact: spiders are not orcs.
You know, if I’m down here much longer, this quest is going to expire.
And now, your questions:
Daemian Lucifer asked: When you’ve finished the main quest, how much of the game have you explored, approximately?
Depending on your accounting, anywhere from far less than 1% to approximately 85%. You’ll see a truly negligible percentage of the game’s rooms, fields, forests, NPCs, and towns–this is probably true no matter how much you’ve played–but you’ll see a very high percentage of the game’s actual assets.
Over the course of the main quest you’ll see (I believe) every handmade dungeon, many of the game’s monsters, and you’ll most likely interact with every kind of shop or service the game offers. There will be other factions with some flavor (more on that later), and there’s some suprises you can stumble on (like accidentally becoming a wereshark), but you’ve still seen most of what the game really has to offer.
James Porter asked: The FMV at the beginning of Daggerfall is kinda awesome to me, in an old school DnD opening kind of way. In fact, I dig it so much, I will go so far as to say that I prefer the Daggerfall Uriel Septim's performance to Patrick Steward in Oblivion. Do you have a preference?
FMVs suit the aesthetics of older games because they help fill the gap between what parts of the simulation the game can and cannot render. They provide a strong and absolute image to help the rest of the less-realized assets be interpreted. These days I’d say it’s better for AAA to maintain consistency, since their visuals are about as high quality as the original FMVs, but I’d say there’s an argument for their selective use in indie titles.
And yes, I have to admit, I admire its old-school sensibility as well. But the kitsch isn’t really the selling point of the franchise–I’d prefer to see it in another series than in this one.
MichaelGC asked: There was mention of a ghostly king, a letter, and the Queen of Daggerfall all playing a part, but I wasn't sure how those fitted in with wandering lost around endless dungeons filled with towers and pyramids and the wrong type of foes.
So, does the dungeon-wandering progress or have an impact on the story at all, or is that all “side”-content?
I’d argue it informs the player’s final decision somewhat by demonstrating the destructiveness and cattiness of politics in the Bay, but no direct impact that I’m aware of, no.
Grey Cap asked: How much does the crazy stupid dungeon design resemble the Blackreach in Skyrim? Because the whole “there's a bunch of castles here in this unreasonably huge cave” seems similar. An evolution of the same ideas? Or just a coincidence?
No, no similarity at all. It’s not an aesthetic, it’s a limitation of how they create their dungeons. It might or might not come off as charming, but it shouldn’t be given a lot of credit.
Rutheus asked: Was I the only person who played this and ended up with sweet gear and a horrid level?
The game seems to expect you to do a lot of sidequesting. And yes, in classic old-school style, it is often possible to obtain equipment that eclipses your actual abilities.
Fabrimuch asked: What's the most bizarre aspect of Daggerfall that was abandoned by later insallments? Was it the khajit porn literature?
I wouldn’t say that kind of weirdness was totally abandoned, just significantly softened. Besides–that’s not the weirdest thing in this game by a long shot.
It’s a very tough call, but I’d say the fixation on breasts in the weirdest thing in this game. The absurdity of wandering down the hall from a dominatrix and finding a formal brassiere in a chest is the part of this game that feels most incongruous to the rest of the franchise, where you’re rarely meant to feel singled out or seen differently on account of your gender.
John asked: Do the various guilds serve any purpose other than to act as a source of random and frequently impossible quests?
Nope.
Da Mage asked: What aspect/s of Daggerfall's design would you like to see be updated and reintroduced to the series?
Tough question. Honestly, if you let me reintroduce something from Daggerfall into the next TES game, it’d probably be something that was also in Morrowind, but I get the sense that’s not the question you’re asking here. So I’m going to go with the ridiculously hands-on, in-depth class creation system. Unlikely, since as of Skyrim we don’t have any classes whatsoever.
bigben01985 asked (regarding quest expiry): Is that a thing? And if so, were there more sandbox-y open world giant dungeon games that did this?
It was a thing. The only game I’ve played that’s vaguely comparable to Daggerfall is the relatively obscure contemporary Realms of Arkania, and to be honest, I don’t remember if quests in that game expire or not–I don’t believe they do, but I’d have to dig it up and try it again.
Primogentior asked: Given the current Indie trend of resurrecting old gamestyles, could a game the scale of Daggerfall come back in the modern era? would the modern ability to actually generate quest targets in the quest location counter its charming brokenness? has it already and I've missed it?
Besides the fact that the indie games industry is incredibly bleak and this project is unlikely to succeed, there’s nothing particularly stopping a modern remake. It may have been made already, or a hundred thousand of them may have been made already come out, a quarter of them free to play, and we just haven’t heard about them because see point 1.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
I think the weirdest part here is that this seems entirely in keeping with the lore of Elder Scrolls.
When you finished the main quest,how much of the game have you explored?Approximately.
Actually,let me expand that.You mention here “a monster you havent encountered previously”.How many of the monsters have you seen out of the total?I assume the game doesnt just procedurally make those,since it was made before spore.
On the first question, I would honestly and seriously say “less than 1%”; probably less than 0.1%. Yes, the game’s that huge (with useless filler content, but still). Consider you only need to go to…4 or 5 countries out of almost 50, and you don’t need to go to more than, say, the capital cities and some dozen/odd smaller towns in each, while each *has* hundreds if not thousands of villages, hamlets, cairns, hovels, palaces and covens – not counting any dungeon types.
On the second question, errr, maybe a third? Honestly, there’s more “hidden away” in Daggerfall than was there to be found in Skyrim, surface-wise, type-wise and mechanics-wise. Of course, most of it’s procedurally generated repetitive crap, but like in Fallout and so, there’s plenty of hidden secrets *if* you know where to look. Sadly, the game’s so huge it’s almost impossible to find more than one or two on a regular play-through, by chance.
Regarding the size of the game and how much you actually explore, I recall reading that someone had done the calculations and figured that if you were to walk from one side of the map to the other, it would take about three weeks of real time.
Daggerfall is vast. Somewhat repetitive, but vast.
Yeah, but the walking from one end of the map to the other is a bit like a similar stat for Arcanum. It sounds really impressive, but there’s absolutely no reason to do it, because the world is empty.
(Okay, in Arcanum you could use that to sequence break, but other than that…)
It’s not like the later Elder Scrolls games where you’d always be finding neat stuff along the way, or seeing interesting things. In Daggerfall you’d be walking along with about 20 meters viability, with no changes aside from the occasional tree or rock. If you were extremely lucky you might accidentally walk past a dungeon entrance, but getting to those by accident would be like walking in a random direction in the real world and accidentally finding a gas station in pea soup fog.
So this should be an easy question. The FMV at the beginning of Daggerfall is kinda awesome to me, in an old school DnD opening kind of way. In fact, I dig it so much, I will go so far as to say that I prefer the Daggerfall Uriel Septim’s performance to Patrick Steward in Oblivion. Do you have a preference?
I’m still not over the fact that they gave Patrick Stewart that godawful “close shut the gates of Oblivion!” line. Every time I hear that or even think about it I wind up shouting “IS THERE SOME OTHER WAY TO CLOSE SOMETHING YOU TWATS?!” Close left? Close backwards?! WHAT?!?!
Close shut indeed.
So, to answer your question, Daggerfall wins.
On a side note DDO has a similar line about “you can now descend down”. DESCENDING AUTOMATICALLY IMPLIES GOING DOWN.
Redundant sentence is redundant.
Sorry as a professional editor this kind of stuff bugs the crapola out of me.
I assumed that was a callout to (I think it started with) Ultima III where there were two separate keys for stairs/ladders. You had (K)limb and (D)escend down.
That bugged me every. Single. Time.
They gave Stewart some really bad lines. To contrast, in Daggerfall’s opening, the actor has the line “Close the marble jaws of Oblivion”.
I like that line, mainly because its a peak into the underlying weirdness TES has within it. Like Oblivion is basically hell, but some interesting word choice gives that feeling that Oblivion is more than just fire and brimstone.
Sounds almost as bad as Hitman: Absolution.
Anyway – to the extent that there is one, what’s the main plot of Df? There was mention of a ghostly king, a letter, and the Queen of Daggerfall all playing a part, but I wasn’t sure how those fitted in with wandering lost around endless dungeons filled with towers and pyramids and the wrong type of foes.
So, does the dungeon-wandering progress or have an impact on the story at all, or is that all “side”-content? Is there an ending/epilogue type-effort where e.g. someone says: “Hail Adventurer! You have done the thing which stood as wafer-thin justification for all this dungeon-wandering! They said this thing could not be done, but you!; you have proved them all wrong!! As a reward, go to this castle we buried underground for some reason and kill all the golems that you won’t find there.”
In Daggerfall? Shit’s just there. There are thousands of dungeons, and basically no reason to go into more than about ten of them for the main quest, but there’s about 20 or so factions that will infinitely send you to a random dungeon to kill a random amount of a random thing that might not be the standard monster table for that dungeon and so are rarer than hen’s testicles.
The main plot is that there’s a giant robot (yes, really) and everyone wants it, you choose one of nine factions to get it but the “canon” answer is that they all got it at once and time broke and it all went a bit strange and then some, all, or none of the factions still existed.
Has anyone game tried that procedural approach to questing,but with some sensible rules?For example if you are tasked to hunt # of X,then the place you are sent to will first spawn at least # of X,and then fill the rest with random stuff.
If the question is “procedural generation”, the answer is “Dwarf Fortress”. Questing in adventure mode generally involves getting sent to kill a specific monster or individual by someone wronged by it, and they send you to where that monster is actually located.
Dwarf Fortress populates the monsters first, and if they get killed you can’t get the quest to kill one.
The computers of Daggerfall’s era couldn’t do what Dwarf Fortress needs.
If the question involved the phrase “sensible rules”, and your answer was “Dwarf Fortress”, that should probably be some kind of red flag. In general, and most especially in the meaning of sensible goals as being achievable, like quest monsters being present. Dwarf Fortress is awesome, but it is not sensible.
Dwarf Fortress is like the Lord of The Rings of video games: Huge, needlessly complicated, impenetrable, and created primarily to satisfy the creator’s whims.
Oh the things it asks you to kill will be there, but if they’re not from the standard dungeon table they’ll be hidden randomly somewhere at the arse end of an ungodly huge dungeon full of mostly wrong enemies.
Also, some of the dungeons are mostly or partly underwater so if you can’t breathe underwater you might as well go home.
Thats why I said sensible rules.So you wont get sent to a dungeon you cannot complete,or where the stuff you need is located in the 99th floor of 100.
Well, jumping a bit ahead, but Skyrim had a far fairer take on that same system with its bounties.
You get asked to kill a bandit he/she’s going to be in a bandit den. You get sent after a dragon and its usually hanging around one of the word-walls. Bears are in or around caves.
And so on.
Don’t remember any instances of being asked to kill ghosts in the local wolf den or similar, so hey, Bethesda are learning at least.
Pretty sure Din’s Curse and/or Depths of Peril has this sort of mechanic, but it’s been a while so I’m not really sure.
This same giant robot will go on to feature prominently in the plot of Morrowind. And depending on who you believe, may have also resulted in the ascension of Talos to godhood.
Yes, really.
True, the main bad guy from Morrowind is even building his own giant robot, based off of the Daggerfall one.
And then way later, Morrowind’s lead writer wrote a comic about the Daggerfall bot coming back in the 5th era and destroying the world, and the only people that survived were the Dark Elves and Kahjit slaves living on the moon.
Stuff like this is why I can never get too angry at Elder Scrolls lore. Sometimes, it’s such humdrum standard fantasy claptrap, and then sometimes it’s like “oh btw there’s robots and time travel and Khajiit on one of the moons, which are literally, not figuratively, the corpse of a god”.
Wait,when you guys say robot,you mean a golem infused with special magical artifact?Its not an actual robots with wires inside?Right?…Right?
The former. Numidium was a robot, in the same way the various Dwemer automatons are robots.
Offcourse that is you’re a sane person and stick to the lore from the games.
If you’re completely bonkers and listen to Kirkbride, then who the hell knows what since he came up with stupid crap like Pelinal Whitestrake being an insane, time-travelling cyborg/android.
I wouldn’t put it him to suddenly claim the Dwemer invented nanomachines.
I haven’t actually read c0da, but I also heard the plot had to deal with the moon Dark Elves had to deal with Vivec’s televised propaganda.
I think I probably should at some point, but I was looking for the actual “comic” part of the comic, and apparently that hasnt been done in 2 years.
Stupid crap? I think you mean Wonderful Insanity.
Yeah, I kinda dig the weird myself. I think Kirkbride probably goes a bit to far for a casual observance. Once in a while though, that’s exactly what I want. I wouldn’t put a quality judgement on it.
To be fair, the brilliant part with Kirkbride isn’t, actually, Kirkbride himself. It’s that his work was stuck right next to Nelson’s very grounded stuff. (At least I think it was Nelson who was doing the really grounded work with Morrowind.)
When you stick the two competing themes next to each other, you end up with the really bonkers setting that feels like a plausible world. Instead of being some weird Alice In Wonderland headtrip or Standard Fantasy Setting #467.
I didn’t know that Nelson, but I definitely noticed that most of the crazy stuff had been seemingly reigned in. I can accept that explanation, since c0da always rubbed me as something I only kinda half liked.
I just googled Mark Nelson, and now you got me feeling kinda bad. That a pretty rocky career it seems
Don’t the Dwemer automatons have soulgems inside? Or is that a game or mod specific thing?
A bit like that.
Except a thousand feet tall.
And capable of warping space and time and rewriting reality (though that’s not actually terribly rare in the Elder Scrolls to be fair).
Well in Morrowind, I believe the lights are suppose to be electrical lights, as opposed to gas lights. So they had some wires.
They probably used magic or something, but you probably would to, given the option.
Yes, 3/5ths of the existing Elder Scrolls games revolve around, or have plots resultant from, one actual giant robot.
4/5ths, if you want to be indirect enough. Daggerfall had it’s one, Morrowind had Vivec trying to build one. Stopping Vivec brought down the Tribunal, which weakened the barriers between the worlds enough for the Oblivion crisis to happen, and while Anduin probably would have appeared regardless, the Thalmor and Stormcloak rebellion part of Skyrim’s main story wouldn’t have happened if there was still a strong central government in the Empire.
Mines not a Daggerfall related question, but I was wondering if you’re going to be making a few posts (or perhaps a couple of videos?) for Battlespire and Redguard? I only played the demo for each back in the day, and I was wondering if they’re any good at all (expecting no), and how they fit into the general TES timeline/lore (if at all).
As another person that was always a bit curious about the lore slash story in those two but could never find copies, I think I’ll second that question.
both now for sale at gog.com…if you dare.
You are a cruel individual Bubble. I like that about you.
Hey now, I could point to the plot summary on TvTropes, too. Now *that* would be evil. This is just slightly mischievous o:)
I’d rather Rutskarn battled through them for me… I don’t remember being inspired by the demo for either back in the day.
How much does the crazy stupid dungeon design resemble the Blackreach in Skyrim? Because the whole “there’s a bunch of castles here in this unreasonably huge cave” seems similar. An evolution of the same ideas? Or just a coincidence?
Blackreach almost makes sense if you squint your eyes and look at it funny. Daggerfall dungeons are procedurally generated nonsense that abuse the z-axis and go on forever.
The short version is HAHA no.
The dungeons in Daggerfall are 3D geomorphs. Each morph was made like a 6th grade DM using all the squares on a sheet of graph paper(only a slight exaggeration). Now take, I don’t know, 6 of these things at random and put them in a pile. Congratulations! You’ve made a dungeon in Daggerfall. Or a castle, they are built the same way. The questline dungeons aren’t random but are built with the same tile set only more of them (someone made an editor where you can use 32 of the dang things) which kinda cancels the good, not random, with the bad, there are more.
Sherpa
I…really need to stop reading IPISYDHT as I DIPSHIT. It’s very distracting.
I always read it as “ISHYGDDT”. Which, given the two games so displayed, are equally as fitting as the real initialism.
I played Daggerfall as my first Elder Scrolls game, because I was young(er) and without much in the way of money that I could spend on games (and parents who were wary of the M rating), and it can be downloaded for free from the Bethesda website.
This game made me scared to go in a dungeon. I would spend an ingame month stealing tens of thousands of dollars of goods in Daggerfall, Daggerfall (the creatively named capital), and then maybe go do a dungeon, where I would still barely survive, despite having, say, mithril gear at level 4. Not that there was a need for my insane levels of crime, because you can just go to one of twenty tiny countries, borrow as much money as the bank will let you, and then never go back to that country again. Way to teach us valuable morals, Bethesda.
My question is this:
Was I the only person who played this and ended up with sweet gear and a horrid level?
I mostly did Fighter’s Guild-type quests, because most of them were to the tune of “Go to Billy Joe’s house and kill the giant spider that is inexplicably in his attic”. The Mage’s Guild was the evil one. “Oh, you want to get a higher rank than Acolyte? Well… Smartypants over there let a Storm Atronach get away, and it’s terrorizing nearby villages from its labyrinthian dungeon lair that inexplicably looks like a tomb. Go kill that powerful monster in 3 days and we MIGHT let you become an Apprentice.” If I hadn’t needed access to the spell creator I would never have gone near that guild again.
The last time I played it, I wanted to be a sort-of paladin so I joined a temple. The first quest was to defend it from thieves, so I waited until after nightfall and sure enough there were thieves. Because of the way the game works, it looked like only one thief, until I killed a few when I realised it was a stack-of-doom that Civ4 would be proud of. I died shortly afterwards.
Oh yeah! That was the other type of quest that the Mage’s Guild would issue, and I had a similar experience. All of the Mage’s Guild and temple quests seemed like hazing/trolling on their part.
But you had to reach higher ranks to get access to useful stuff like purchasing enchanted weapons, buying better spells, trainers, etc.
What’s the most bizarre aspect of Daggerfall that was abandoned by later insallments? Was it the khajit porn literature?
That got replaced with Carry On level smut about Argonians.
And a quest where you, male or female; man, mer, or beast, have to strip for the entertainment of the author of said smut.
Bizarre aspects of Daggerfall?
Banks where your money is actually safe.
I am only slightly sorry.But only the player’s money. The fastest way to get money was to go to a random tiny country and borrow a mountain of cash from their banks, then never go back to that country.
Good grief, with that and the hazing/trolling undertones of the quests, maybe the devs wanted to allude to the sketchy side of businesses and trust in individuals!
Do the various guilds serve any purpose other than to act as a source of random and frequently impossible quests?
Well I’ve been lurking on these posts for years, good a time as any to try one of these “comment” things. My question for Professor Rutskarn is as follows:
Of all the strange or worthless features and/or skills that were promptly dropped after Daggerfall, which would you most like them to take another crack at? Y’know, with actual effort this time.
What aspect/s of Daggerfall’s design would you like to see be updated and reintroduced to the series? Eg: Banking, this fast travel system, politics as MQ, the fighting system…
Daggerfall is the only game in The Elder Scrolls where the in-game insanity matches the lore insanity, so I’d have to go with a return of that.
Wait what? Is that a thing? And if so, were there more sandbox-y open world giant dungeon games that did this?
Yes, though I feel they were put in for the off chance you couldn’t complete the randomly generated quest. You would just wait for it to timeout and get a new one.
On the other hand, failing a quest by expiry would give you negative standing with the quest giver which meant that it would count against your ability to rank up in a faction, which was the only reason to do quests anyway…
Some of us also appreciated the context the quests gave to the world exploration, the scope of the gameworld could be overwhelming. Also, thank goodness for teleportation spells, placing a marker at the questgiver spared you finding your way back out of the depths of a dungeon.
Given the current Indie trend of resurrecting old gamestyles, could a game the scale of Daggerfall come back in the modern era? would the modern ability to actually generate quest targets in the quest location counter its charming brokenness? has it already and I’ve missed it?
Man, every time my eye falls on “IPISYDHT” my brain reads it as “HI DIPS*IT” :(
You and Timelady (see her earlier comment above) _really_ need to get together. ;-D
I hate when that happens. And you go to get on the bus, and the driver’s all like: “We’re going to need a bigger bus! Ha ha ha.” Nightmare.