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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 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
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.
The game was almost unplayable without patches.
But after patches, it was great. It was like the ultimate free-form rpg possible.
Custom classes (with some very unbalanced setups), Custom Spells, Custom Magical Items, etc.
I think i spent so much time doing everything else, that I only got like 1/2 way into the main quest after like 200 hours of play.
The troll with karma.
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..."
Windows users can also make a shortcut to launch the game directly:
Target: "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.73\dosbox.exe" c:\games\magic\magic.exe
I still have my original manuals for Master of Magic, plus the 2" thick Prima Strategy Guide, chock full of tables and calculations. If ever a game needed to be open-sourced, this is the one, because I'd hate for anyone to have to re-code all those game rules again.
Cynicism, like dogmatism, can be an excuse for intellectual laziness. - Susan Shirk
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 : )
Well, I'm one of those old school fans and I think Daggerfall was clearly the best game in the saga, and it has been getting worse since then.
Morrowind (Elder Scrolls III) is a very good game, and definitely worth buying. It still has the flexibility and freedom that made Daggerfall great, as well as a complex plot with lots of factions that you can join. However, the world design philosophy is different. The dungeons are no longer so huge and randomly generated, all the map is crafted by hand. This means that there is more attention to detail, but anyway I preferred the sheer hugeness of Daggerfall. Compared to that, Morrowind felt just small (it's still bigger than most games from other franchises, though). The character creation system was also not as deep as Daggerfall's, and we hardcore CRPG fans like our character creation systems. And the immersion, although very good, was not as good as Daggerfall because Daggerfall's soundtrack must be one of the best videogame soundtracks of all time (despite being plain MIDI). So my personal evaluation of Morrowind is: very good game, very respectable, but quite worse than Daggerfall at least for me (I'm aware that other people prefer the hand-crafted attention to detail to the vastness of the randomly-generated world, and I can understand that opinion, but I know plenty of CRPG's that have that attention to detail and Daggerfall was giving me something different, that no other CRPG had, and Morrowind abandoned).
As for Oblivion (Elder Scrolls IV), unfortunately, I think it's just crap. I'm really sad to have to say this, because I had an enormous respect for the Elder Scrolls saga, but I'm afraid they just screwed up with this one. The graphics are impressive, the world is really nice, but the game just feels bland and uninteresting. And the reason for this can pretty much be summed up in two words: level scaling. Enemies in the game are adjusting according to your level, which kills all the excitement in the game. You can go slay the hugest enemies when you're level 1 because their strength will be according to your level (and they will drop crappy items, too); and when you're high-level you have to be careful of even the lamest enemies, and even the same petty bandits you fought at the beginning will be on par with you and drop posh armour. So there is no longer the thrill of going to a red dragon lair, getting slaughtered, and wondering how you're going to defeat it... returning 20 levels later to crush all the dragons.
I must say that I'm not against level scaling in general, but I think if it is applied it must be done with moderation, and it's extremely hard to do it right. ADOM is an example of an excellent game with level scaling, but this is because it applies it in a very slight way: enemies tend to get somewhat tougher over time as they get experienced, but in the end dragons are still dragons, and rats are still rats (and anyway the thing still has its drawbacks... google uberjackal effect). In Oblivion, they applied level scaling up to a point where every location in the world has the same difficulty, and where you are never surprised by finding an out-of-depth item or monster because everything is uniform, and this makes the game feel just dull. In fact, the best way to finish the game (I haven't tried it personally, but there are numerous accounts all over the internet) is trying not to level and staying all the time at level 1, for God's sake. That's a flawed design if I've ever seen one.
I wouldn't recommend you to play Oblivion unless you're a game designer and you have a professional interest in seeing what not to do, and how to totally screw up a game that could be great by a couple of horrible design choices. It's also a curious example of a game that gets top scores in the reviews but then bores the hell out of actual players, simply because the first impressions are great (they were great for me, too) until you begin to realise that there is something terribly wrong with the gameplay, which c
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?