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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.
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.
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.
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I didn't play it when it came out, but I tried it today... and the interface is so sluggish as to be painful. My computer isn't totally up-to-date, but I'm pretty sure it can handle 486-level material pretty easily. It's very distracting, much less responsive than Ultima Underworld on a 386 (yes, I'm speaking from experience here). Don't think I'll be doing any more of it.
>>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.
For an assembly programmer, the binaries are the source code! Mwahahaha!
From what I understand, dosbox emulates the CPU as well. DOSemu should run it at your CPU's speed, but I haven't used it since Linux kernel 2.0.x days. Lately I have thought about getting some of my old DOS games going, but haven't put much effort into it. Though DOSemu seems broken on 2.6--I get "LOWRAM mmap: Invalid argument / Segmentation fault" It could be a permissions problem though...(haven't tried it as root yet) The page says it was last updated in 2007, so maybe it was updated to 2.6?
This post from the Arch Linux forums may help: kernel 2.6.30 upgrade causes dosemu to segfault. It seems dosemu doesn't work with .30 but .31 version from git does work? Looks like they have a configuration suggestion too...
Then again, you may have problems with speed. Quite a while back, I tried Syndicate Wars, and it ran at about 10x speed. Way too fast. I think DOSbox solved that by emulating the CPU, so everything the game sees works like it did on an old computer. Though since it is emulating, it takes many processing cycles to do on emulated processing cycle, which means your 2.0 GHz computer may only be able to run it at say (just a wild guess), the same speed as a 100 MHz machine. Probably not even that. So I don't see a 1996 game working too well.
I would guess the easiest way would be to use an older computer and install FreeDOS or something on it. You know, that 900 MHz one collecting dust in your closet. Then you don't have to worry about emulating crap. ;-) But then you may still run into the super speed issue. This is partly why old computers had a "turbo" switch--some programs assumed the processor was at a specific speed. Some programs assumed the MIPS / clock speed was constant. 486 was below 1 MIPS/MHz, Pentium was about 2 MIPS/MHz, todays CPUs are probably much higher before you even get to the multiple cores. I think some just detect if it is a 486 or pentium and do their calculations. They don't know anything about newer CPUs, so it doesn't work...
Though DOSemu seems broken on 2.6--I get "LOWRAM mmap: Invalid argument / Segmentation fault" It could be a permissions problem though...(haven't tried it as root yet)
Recent kernels don't let you mmap the first 64k of address space by default for security reasons, and this breaks stuff like DOSemu. You probably need to "echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr" as root.
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 : )