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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.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I completed the game in its time, without any cheating or teleporting. And without even applying cheap character creation strategies like certain race-resistance combinations (I did choose the constraint not to wear leather and chain armour, but those are features and should be obvious by the second time you create a character). So yes, it is difficult, but definitely not impossible.
People nowadays are too spoiled and used to easy games. The thing about ancient liches and vampires was fighting a lot of fights, clearing a lot of dungeons and collecting a lots of items and spells until you were experienced and equipped enough to fight them. And once you could do that, it felt like a truly epic fight. Not like in Oblivion, where enemies are just scaled so you can fight them.
I advise everyone to play this game. In my opinion it is the best CRPG of all time (and I've played most known CRPG's since the times of Might and Magic I and Ultima I).