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Bethesda Releases Daggerfall For Free
On Thursday, Bethesda announced that for the 15th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls series, they were releasing The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall for free. They aren't providing support for the game anymore, but they posted a detailed description of how to get the game running in DOSBox. Fans of the series can now easily relive the experience of getting completely lost in those enormous dungeons. Save often.
... well not really, since this game is soooo old, but still its a huge HUGE gameworld. Really. It's big. Can't wait to play it. It makes Oblivion look like Sesame Street.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
You know what would be really cool?
The source.
Not to say I am ungrateful for the release ... it would just be really cool to be able to try to extend the game, breath some new life into it and such.
"-- for tomorrow, you sail for the kingdom... of Daggerfall." Many, many enjoyable hours I spent playing this game when I could (should) have been working on my thesis. Chief complaint: The repetitive dungeons, stitched together seemingly near-randomly from prefabbed bits and pieces that were repeated endlessly. Still, a great game.
"The deep-fried Mars bar is a symptom of a wider crisis." -- Nutritionist Ann Ralph, on the Scottish diet
Someone at Bethesda must have found the old floppies laying around.
I think this is a great idea, Bethesda release the very first one for free already so it is not surprising that they would release this one as well.
However I highly doubt that anyone who has never played it before will get much enjoyment out of it. The graphics are terrible and the game is riddled with bugs. The real enjoyment will be the reminiscing of the good old days and seeing how much you remember.
I will definately have to give this game another try for old time sake.
Someone set up a torrent!
Because at 2.5k/sec, I think we're about to break their servers.
The game was so buggy it isn't worth free
How did I not get it on the front page. :P Oh well. I wonder what Beth will do for their 20th Anniversary. . .
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...Didn't someone mod a dungeon from Daggerfall into Oblivion - Cybiades, something like that?
Answer my own question.... Tesnexus
Not sure if it is actually a ported dungeon, but the textures would certainly indicate that to be the case.
If that dungeon is any indication of the game proper, and not just a high level one...damn.
Why do so many DOSBox tutorials tell you that you have to mount the directory every time you just want to play the game?
I set up my DOSBox.conf to have an autoexec section like this:
So now I just store all my DOS games in that C_DRIVE folder and they're right there when I open DOSBox. I also make batch files so that I don't have to cd to whatever directory and remember the executable name for the main EXE. I mean, if I want to play Master of Magic, I have it set up so that I just type "mom" which runs MOM.BAT and opens it up for me.
Which reminds me, Master of Magic is another fun old game to play under DOSBox. At least, if you can still find a copy of it anywhere.
I haven't played Daggerfall (yet) on DOSBox, but I have played other games and one of the things you may have to do is to fiddle with the CPU section of DOSBox.conf until you get it running at a reasonable speed.
It probably won't help you much, but mine looks like this:
That "cycleup"/"cycledown" bit is important, too. Because you can just experiment by adjusting the cycles up and down while playing the game until the game plays at about the right speed, then go back and put the value you found via experiment into your DOSBox.conf file.
It's impossible to play and have a hope of finishing unless you're power gaming. None of the main classes actually seem like their made so you could play as them. Unless you already have detailed knowledge of the game, there's not much point in trying to finish it.
That said, there's a feature in the latest patch that allows you to teleport to major areas in dungeons. Don't know how you could play without it. I mean, did anyone ever manage to survive an encounter with an ancient lich or an ancient vampire or a powerful daedra lord?
Then there's also the issue of all the randomly generated dungeons looking like octopuses mating, and that there are way, way too many fetch the foo quests. "Please, I'll help you with your quest to rid Dagerfall of the vengeful spirit, but could you please fetch me my adamantium underpants? I think I left them in a nearby dungeon infested with monsters..."
I always wanted to play daggerfall after it being hyped and hyped back in the day. I was always a big fan of Ultima and japanese RPGs and even enjoyed a good bit of eye of the beholder II. I never got to play daggerfall until years later I found it on some abandonware site. The first thing I noticed was how generic every NPC basically was. Even the story NPCs were about as flat as a cardboard cutout. Secondly the dungeouns were incredibly random and boring. For those of you that think that morrowind was like walking through a database (as one slashdotter pointed out) playing daggerfall is like playing through a randomly generated database. NPC interaction is pretty similar to Morrowind, where generic npcs pretty much have the same response, though the amount of information they give is far more interesting in Morrowind. Do the towns even have the same layout when you revisit them? Not that it matters, they all pretty much look exactly the same. This is the one thing that Morrowind really improved on and they created such a large (relative to other 3d games) cohesive world, and while I have never played Oblivion, I was really immediately turned off by the terrain generation. I loved how in Morrowind you could explore every nook and cranny and find little hidden caves, tombs, camps, and secrets everywhere. I loved the exploration. Maybe when I get a better computer running again I'll have to check out Oblivion, though I'd really love to check out Fallout 3, though I am immensely saddened that Fallout never got the sequel it deserved. The one from the original team. Outside of the fallout name, Bethesda could have just made a post apocalyptic rpg and it would have sold very well just based on their name alone. Hell, Fallout was a spiritual successor to Wasteland.
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Actually, this game is already decently playable on a (amd) 486. And flies on a P200. What you're seeing is dosbox emulation overhead.
I disagree with your "so poorly optimized" statement. This thing does 3d with texturized surfaces and large view distance, AI, and who knows what else, all in SOFTWARE. It even has realtime ambient lighting - and still runs fine on a 486! For me, Daggerfall has the most awesome sw engine I've ever seen.
This game was actually challenging. These days game designers are so worried that you won't see 100% of their work, that they make the game easy.
As a result, most games today are more "sandbox" than they are "game" and the whole thing just gets boring.
I wish Bethesda would make another extremely challenging game. They need to stop worrying so much about easing players into a nice, unchallenging bath -- and give players more depth, more complexity and more challenge.
Somewhere along the line, Bethesda concluded that console gamers are too stupid to play games like Daggerfall. This is what has ruined their more recent games. While they're still enjoyable -- they're not the kind of thing that drives you to know what's beyond the next mountain... and to spend a day figuring out how to equip yourself in order to get there...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
As far as I know, nothing in Daggerfall was randomly generated at runtime. It's as static as Morrowind or Oblivion, just less varied.
The randomly generated terrain they talk about in Oblivion is purely limited to vegetation. So, a hill that was in one game is still in another game. It'll always be a hill. But that tree or bunch of trees on the hill might be positioned differently, or they might not even be there at all on another game. There's really very little that is random about it at all. Even the "random" encounters always happen on the same spots with the same levelled critters attacking you with more or less the same equipment. Even the treasure in the caves was more or less the same every playthrough.
This was one of the first PC RPG's that I played. I was amazed at how expansive everything was, how you could climb anything, and how you could make your character a variety of classes. The day and night effects were great too, as well as how you could kill anyone. I never played Oblivion, but thinking of all the great Dagger Fall memories, maybe I should go buy it?
What do you old school Dagger Falls fans think of the newer Elder scrolls?
That's interesting. I've been really wanting to try out Oblivion. Sooner or later I'll get around to it. I still feel a need to play all the way through Morrowind first, which I got a pretty late start on... (so much to do)
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I see. That is basically JIT compilation, yes? Is there a noticable delay on startup? Maybe I'll try out the latest version to see how well it works. If DOSBox doesn't use something slow like the shared memory extensions in X for video which DOSemu uses, maybe it will be faster anyway.
Thanks for the info.
Is to release the entire source.
If for no other reason than people can learn of how they solved a problem (better, how they FAILED to solve it!).
Then it could be ported to other systems, other graphics engines, bugs could be fixed, etc.
Whatever you do, forget the built-in design of Oblivion and install Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, which makes the game feel a lot more traditional. High level bosses are no longer beatable at level 1, low level critters are no longer a threat at high levels.
Which makes a lot more sense then Bethesda's design. Unfortunately, it doesn't fix Shivering Isles. So you may wish to go do Shivering Isles content first.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I might actually start playing games on the thing...
Please, some inspired iPhone hacker... take up the challenge!
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/
Well on the way to being a usable replacement engine, built with modern tools, instead of some 10+ year old codebase.
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