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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.
"-- 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 set up a torrent!
Because at 2.5k/sec, I think we're about to break their servers.
SOME of the bugs were fixed, but unfortunately it will still a super buggy and sometimes unstable game. I'm glad to see them releasing it, but of course source would have been nice (so we could fix the bugs on it!) I loved this game at the same time. It was a little more hardcore than Oblivion in many ways. Big stuff would just kill you (no equal leveling) and if you were vampire you lasted pretty much NO time during the day. Climbing everything, as buggy as it was- was pretty awesome too. Some stuff however was just outright glitched. It was the type of thing that drove me initially CRAZY when I was 11 playing it, because I'd spend hours just walking sometimes to 'see what was out there' on some islands or whatever. This game proved that bigger isnt' always better, because its impossible to populate everything with interesting stuff.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
>>The game was so buggy it isn't worth free
To be honest, it got better.
After 40 patches or so.
Honestly, it's better than either Morrowind or Oblivion. The sheer amount of twinkery you can do with the custom classes and magic item creation is just ridiculous and awesome.
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've played through all of Morrowind (Before the expansions), and Oblivion when it came out too. Unless you actually played all the way through DF before the other ones, I can see where you wouldn't really understand the differences.
For me, the main difference was the randomly generated towns. They weren't completely random, but they were /different/ every time you started a new game and then stayed the same for that entire play through. Also, you randomly uncovered points of interest through conversations and quests that could be re-visited if you wanted to, but were also tied to your current game. You could also properly buy houses, ships, horses and carts (And they weren't introduced via a patch/mod either, they actually planned for this). There were bookstores which contained literally libraries of interesting books, pamphlets, papers and scrolls. I know they exist in Oblivion too, but it's not the same. In oblivion you go up to a vendor and tell him "Sell!" "Buy!" and get a long list of his inventory. In DF you walked up to the bookshelf and browsed the contents, taking the items you wanted into your inventory.
There's other things like that. The magic/enchant system in DF is way superior to MW/OB's that it's not really comparable. Playing with them in those two is like playing with miniature model trains/planes whereas in DF you were playing with full-sized scale working replicas.
Even the people in the game were random, you couldn't always expect the same npcs to be holding the same positions with the same attitudes every play through. Each game forced you to explore it, and truly felt alive and not some scripted paradise like the other two. I'm not saying it didn't have it's flaws, but I just don't see how a few mods (And I have played with quite a few mods for MW/OB) can re-create or surpass what I really enjoyed about it (Which was no two games being the same).