I thought I would highlight this project in case anyone finds it interesting. The guy heading this project is forking the Daggerfall Unity engine to add in all of Tamriel. The map that he is...
I thought I would highlight this project in case anyone finds it interesting. The guy heading this project is forking the Daggerfall Unity engine to add in all of Tamriel. The map that he is currently working on for this project is over 94x the size of the vanilla Daggerfall map.
Edit: for scale the vanilla Daggerfall map is roughly equivalent in size to Great Britain
The Discord is also somewhat active, and you can view progress and discussion around the Project there: https://discord.gg/HJSgJKxK
I've not played a lot of Daggerfall, as I wasn't too interested in it when I was younger and decided to wait until the Unity project hit 1.0 to try that out, which happened when I was trying desperately to find a job and didn't have time for games. In the ~10 hours I've put in, the game really clicked for me and I could see myself sinking in a lot of hours role-playing different characters, especially with the extra features and improvements mods add to the base game.
This project also sparked a really cool sense of that I could go somewhere in Tamriel that no one else had visited yet (in this mod). It also got me interested in contributing to the mod in some way eventually. Maybe even adding in some custom towns or something down the line when I have some more time to work on projects I'm personally interested in.
The creator of the project does have some particular ideas on how he wants this implemented, and when he is finished the game will be much different than vanilla Daggerfall. My hope is that some of the changes he wants to implement will be forgeable on and off, but we'll see how things shape up or if someone mods the fork when he is finished to add other options to it.
The original Daggerfall game had a built-in fast travel system which most people leaned in to cover the vast distances. While it is possible to walk everywhere or ride a horse, it can take a...
The original Daggerfall game had a built-in fast travel system which most people leaned in to cover the vast distances. While it is possible to walk everywhere or ride a horse, it can take a while. There is a video of someone walking from one corner for the map to the other in the vanilla game, which iirc took them ~70 hours to do.
The creator of Project N is opposed to fast travel and certain modern conveniences, and while he is the one that is creating this project, and he can do what he wants, I do hope that he leaves some forms of fast travel as a toggleable system. Some suggestions I saw were limiting fast travel to specific forms of transit (i.e. going to a port to use a ship, or joining a caravan that travels from certain points), but we'll see what the final result is.
Neat! I used to keenly follow the development of Tamriel Rebuilt (for the uninitiated, a mod that originally had the same goal as a mod for TES III: Morrowind), while there are obviously a lot of...
Neat!
I used to keenly follow the development of Tamriel Rebuilt (for the uninitiated, a mod that originally had the same goal as a mod for TES III: Morrowind), while there are obviously a lot of parallels I think this project is especially interesting considering the technical challenges and Arneb's considered design choices - their plans to deviate from the vanilla game in particular seem well thought out rather than feature creep, which is a great early sign.
I've dabbled with Daggerfall a few times, both emulated via DosBox and Daggerfall Unity. I've enjoyed it from the perspective of a TES fan but it hasn't quite 'clicked' for me yet. Looks like I'll need to give it another go. Would love to hear any tips/perspectives from anyone else who has gotten in to Daggerfall retroactively.
I put maybe around 250 hours into Daggerfall after finishing Morrowind (and the chunk of Tamriel Rebuilt that was released, which was most of the province) in the mid 2000s and wanting more TES,...
Exemplary
I put maybe around 250 hours into Daggerfall after finishing Morrowind (and the chunk of Tamriel Rebuilt that was released, which was most of the province) in the mid 2000s and wanting more TES, so it was quite a bit of time after its 1996 release.
if you're a person who can immerse yourself in a character and really role-play within the world, deciding on a character arc, you'll likely have fun with it. I am not that person and this is why in ultimately fell off the game.
In contrast to @Beardyhat, I am very much this person, so I had a great time with it despite its flaws (which I'll get to).
Beardy is 100% right that this game only really clicks if you make your own fun. But Daggerfall gives you a TON of room to do so, more than any other game I've ever played. It's meant by design to be the PC equivalent of a TTRPG, so if all you want to do is kill monsters and tick off quest boxes, you'll be pretty underwhelmed. If you have an idea of who you want your character to "be"--their backstory, their morality, the kind of reputation they want to have (which is a thing), their factional preferences, their general vibe--and take your time exploring the story and the world while actually roleplaying the character as much as the game allows, the game really opens up some really interesting experiences. And having an idea is important because character creation and the skill system is so deep that it's impossible to be good at everything--you really need to decide who you're gonna be, and what you decide will completely dictate how the game plays out.
Example: there's a quest you can randomly get where an imp Daedra several towns over has set himself up as Mayor and someone contracts you to get rid of it. If you want, you can just fast travel to the town, walk in the front door of the Mayor's residence, blast the imp with a fireball, and fast travel back to get the reward. Standard RPG stuff....but not very fun and not at all what Daggerfall is designed to do.
When I got the quest, I arrived in town in the afternoon and decided I would wait until nightfall to see if I could catch the imp unaware, as I was playing a Dunmer nightblade (rogue with Illusion magic). So to kill time, I spent a few in-game hours shopping for clothes, browsing a bookstore, and dropping off some armor to get repaired. When night fell, instead of barging through the locked front door, which is a crime if the guards see you breaking and entering, I cast a Chameleon cantrip to reduce detection and free-climbed up the back of the stone tower with my high Climbing skill. As I suspected, there was an exit door on the tower's roof, also locked but no guards around. I attempted to pick the lock but my skill was too low and after a couple of attempts I ended up accidentally breaking the lock. Crap, I said, and in instinctual frustration I just swung my swords a couple of times at the door. This had two effects: it dropped my Chameleon spell, and the door swung open. So I had access now, but no invisibility to guarantee sneaking up on the imp and no mana left to cast it again because I always play low-magic characters in TES.
I made my way down the tower a floor or two and found the imp. I failed my Sneak check so the imp was aware of me but didn't immediately attack. So instead of my original plan of backstabbing it, I used my Impish language skill (which is a thing!) to try to see if I could talk it into leaving. It said no, and attacked. I killed the imp after a short fight.
All good, right? Well, no--remember how I said bashing the lock dropped my Chameleon spell? A couple in-game days later while in an inn on my way to Wayrest I received a letter that a member of the Thieves' Guild saw me that night breaking and entering the Mayor's residence and gave me a choice: join them, or become regarded as competition and die. My rogue character does not play well with others and is not a fan of authority, so I trashed the letter and didn't dignify it with a response. They were as good as their word though. For several in-game weeks later I had to keep my head on a swivel any time I set foot in a town at night, because they regularly sent assassins after me. Not every town and not every night, but often, until I figured out how to clear the bounty on my head, which was its own adventure.
That was just one very minor side quest, nothing to do with the main story, and it spiraled into what became a much longer story of fighting Guild assassins on city rooftops at night while figuring out how I was going to keep them off my back to safely get to the secret meeting with a noblewoman at a certain tavern in Wayrest at the appointed day and time, because time matters and if you don't get there for the meeting then it alters the main quest.
When Daggerfall is firing on all cylinders and you're willing to meet it halfway with your RP motivation and imagination, everything is like this and it delivers an experience that literally no other PC game ever made does. Morrowind comes close IMO and is probably my all-time favorite game, but isn't nearly as complex with truly "emergent gameplay" as Daggerfall can get with its various interlocking story and world mechanics. What you choose to do (or not do) often has direct consequences that lead naturally into more complex stories and the farther you get into it and the more choices you make, the more the overall narrative really starts to feel like playing in a really sticky TTRPG campaign and not like you're just showing up to run on the rail of someone else's story.
Unfortunately, it must be said, a lot of those cylinders can and do misfire. Daggerfall has a lot of bugs, some completely game-breaking. Sometimes suspension of disbelief is a little forced when you're entering the Mages' Guild to claim a contract or a royal hall to petition a king for something and all of the static 2D NPC sprites look like absolute dogshit, even for 1996. Dungeons are incredibly long and complex and it's very easy to get lost or stuck with no way out even with the rotatable 3D dungeon map you have. You're also going to clip through dungeon floors semi-regularly, so keep your save games updated and in rolling stages in case your last save screwed you. Some mechanics like buying a house you can't furnish or investing in a shop that doesn't generate meaningful income are interesting ideas that don't have any real practical value and feel very unfinished. The game can become extremely frustrating when its several dozen evergreen background systems end up conflicting in weird ways or simply breaking the game entirely and making you reinstall, which will happen at least once.
But man, when it all clicks? There is absolutely no comparable PC gaming experience anywhere.
Daggerfall was a bit of a White Whale for me after first playing the demo off the PC Gamer demo disk in 1996. I finally got around to actually playing it a couple of years ago via Daggerfall...
Daggerfall was a bit of a White Whale for me after first playing the demo off the PC Gamer demo disk in 1996.
I finally got around to actually playing it a couple of years ago via Daggerfall Unity, with a bunch of mods mostly on my Steam Deck. I probably put like 25 or so hours into it but eventually fell off, though I think about going back quite a bit.
It's a fun game and it is fun to be in the world, but it's a game where you kind of have to make your own fun. Quests are generally not super interesting or involved, the world is very samey, no matter where you go, there's nothing to really see out in the world. The dungeons end up all being very similar, though they're still pretty fun to explore and this is where the real meat of the game is, dungeon crawling.
So with all that, if you're a person who can immerse yourself in a character and really role-play within the world, deciding on a character arc, you'll likely have fun with it. I am not that person and this is why in ultimately fell off the game. Daggerfall still holds a special place in my heart and I still find it charming, I still want to go back and dabble around in the world, but it's not a game that I'm going to play for hundreds of hours. And while this project seems pretty interesting, I don't have much interest in it, because again, it's largely going to be more of the same with what is already there. Daggerfall has such a huge world because it's mostly Proc Gen and all the things that come along with that.
This is amazing and I can't wait to try it out. The first TES game, Arena, included all of Tamriel, and did have the same thing where you could technically walk to different cities and see more or...
This is amazing and I can't wait to try it out. The first TES game, Arena, included all of Tamriel, and did have the same thing where you could technically walk to different cities and see more or less nothing the entire time, but it was far smaller than Daggerfall. I can imagine that this would be one of the only canon sources of many of the countries in-game.
Edit: now that I read up on it, it looks like the creator did use the Arena map and TES lore as well as existing mods. I love seeing the other mod authors jumping in to give advice or offer help.
I think the manual might have implied that you could walk between cities in Arena, but what actually happens if you leave a city and walk for long enough is that the surrounding countryside wraps...
I think the manual might have implied that you could walk between cities in Arena, but what actually happens if you leave a city and walk for long enough is that the surrounding countryside wraps around and repeats over and over again. I'm guessing the designers were hoping that hiking players would give up before they noticed.
Hah, I can't believe I fell for it. I did, in fact, give up and just fast travel. I just assumed that it would take hours and even I was not that stubborn.
Hah, I can't believe I fell for it. I did, in fact, give up and just fast travel. I just assumed that it would take hours and even I was not that stubborn.
Interesting project, although a lack of land to explore isn't exactly among my chief criticisms of the original game. My main gripe with it is rather that it doesn't use its size very effectively....
Interesting project, although a lack of land to explore isn't exactly among my chief criticisms of the original game. My main gripe with it is rather that it doesn't use its size very effectively. I can travel hundreds of kilometers in it, but the ways in which it makes a difference are either very obscure, subtle or skin deep.
That said, I still like that it doesn't shy away from its scale. Towns in later games in the series feel like wild west movie prop towns by comparison: very game-like and oriented towards advancing the various narratives of the game. In Daggerfall they feel more realistic in a way: massive population living in hundreds of houses, most of which are absolutely uninteresting to you because not every NPC and location in the game is there to serve as the subject of some questline. It's just that the quest and dialogue systems don't quite support that level of ambition. NPCs give canned/template responses to every question, the quests are all from a handful of "go to x, get y and bring it to z" type templates. Everything is the same.
I agree with you on the original game having a lack of things to see. I've seen videos showcasing mods that really add variety to the terrain and make exploring more interesting (i.e. this Enhance...
I agree with you on the original game having a lack of things to see. I've seen videos showcasing mods that really add variety to the terrain and make exploring more interesting (i.e. this Enhance and Eroded Terrian mod or World of Daggerfall which adds more discoverable locations in the wilderness and looks to add variety to the terrain as well).
I don't think I played enough to really get annoyed at the NPC interaction, but I also think that it is something that mods really add to as well. I feel like the base game had such ambition, and with the completion of the Daggerfall Unity project it opens the doors for additional projects to fork the code and build on it or mods to expand upon what is there.
I thought I would highlight this project in case anyone finds it interesting. The guy heading this project is forking the Daggerfall Unity engine to add in all of Tamriel. The map that he is currently working on for this project is over 94x the size of the vanilla Daggerfall map.
Edit: for scale the vanilla Daggerfall map is roughly equivalent in size to Great Britain
Here is a link to the Daggerfall Workshop Forum post that he also links to in this Reddit post announcing the project: https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?t=6460
The Discord is also somewhat active, and you can view progress and discussion around the Project there: https://discord.gg/HJSgJKxK
I've not played a lot of Daggerfall, as I wasn't too interested in it when I was younger and decided to wait until the Unity project hit 1.0 to try that out, which happened when I was trying desperately to find a job and didn't have time for games. In the ~10 hours I've put in, the game really clicked for me and I could see myself sinking in a lot of hours role-playing different characters, especially with the extra features and improvements mods add to the base game.
This project also sparked a really cool sense of that I could go somewhere in Tamriel that no one else had visited yet (in this mod). It also got me interested in contributing to the mod in some way eventually. Maybe even adding in some custom towns or something down the line when I have some more time to work on projects I'm personally interested in.
The creator of the project does have some particular ideas on how he wants this implemented, and when he is finished the game will be much different than vanilla Daggerfall. My hope is that some of the changes he wants to implement will be forgeable on and off, but we'll see how things shape up or if someone mods the fork when he is finished to add other options to it.
How is this even explorable in a world without vehicles like planes or trains?
The original Daggerfall game had a built-in fast travel system which most people leaned in to cover the vast distances. While it is possible to walk everywhere or ride a horse, it can take a while. There is a video of someone walking from one corner for the map to the other in the vanilla game, which iirc took them ~70 hours to do.
The creator of Project N is opposed to fast travel and certain modern conveniences, and while he is the one that is creating this project, and he can do what he wants, I do hope that he leaves some forms of fast travel as a toggleable system. Some suggestions I saw were limiting fast travel to specific forms of transit (i.e. going to a port to use a ship, or joining a caravan that travels from certain points), but we'll see what the final result is.
Neat!
I used to keenly follow the development of Tamriel Rebuilt (for the uninitiated, a mod that originally had the same goal as a mod for TES III: Morrowind), while there are obviously a lot of parallels I think this project is especially interesting considering the technical challenges and Arneb's considered design choices - their plans to deviate from the vanilla game in particular seem well thought out rather than feature creep, which is a great early sign.
I've dabbled with Daggerfall a few times, both emulated via DosBox and Daggerfall Unity. I've enjoyed it from the perspective of a TES fan but it hasn't quite 'clicked' for me yet. Looks like I'll need to give it another go. Would love to hear any tips/perspectives from anyone else who has gotten in to Daggerfall retroactively.
I put maybe around 250 hours into Daggerfall after finishing Morrowind (and the chunk of Tamriel Rebuilt that was released, which was most of the province) in the mid 2000s and wanting more TES, so it was quite a bit of time after its 1996 release.
In contrast to @Beardyhat, I am very much this person, so I had a great time with it despite its flaws (which I'll get to).
Beardy is 100% right that this game only really clicks if you make your own fun. But Daggerfall gives you a TON of room to do so, more than any other game I've ever played. It's meant by design to be the PC equivalent of a TTRPG, so if all you want to do is kill monsters and tick off quest boxes, you'll be pretty underwhelmed. If you have an idea of who you want your character to "be"--their backstory, their morality, the kind of reputation they want to have (which is a thing), their factional preferences, their general vibe--and take your time exploring the story and the world while actually roleplaying the character as much as the game allows, the game really opens up some really interesting experiences. And having an idea is important because character creation and the skill system is so deep that it's impossible to be good at everything--you really need to decide who you're gonna be, and what you decide will completely dictate how the game plays out.
Example: there's a quest you can randomly get where an imp Daedra several towns over has set himself up as Mayor and someone contracts you to get rid of it. If you want, you can just fast travel to the town, walk in the front door of the Mayor's residence, blast the imp with a fireball, and fast travel back to get the reward. Standard RPG stuff....but not very fun and not at all what Daggerfall is designed to do.
When I got the quest, I arrived in town in the afternoon and decided I would wait until nightfall to see if I could catch the imp unaware, as I was playing a Dunmer nightblade (rogue with Illusion magic). So to kill time, I spent a few in-game hours shopping for clothes, browsing a bookstore, and dropping off some armor to get repaired. When night fell, instead of barging through the locked front door, which is a crime if the guards see you breaking and entering, I cast a Chameleon cantrip to reduce detection and free-climbed up the back of the stone tower with my high Climbing skill. As I suspected, there was an exit door on the tower's roof, also locked but no guards around. I attempted to pick the lock but my skill was too low and after a couple of attempts I ended up accidentally breaking the lock. Crap, I said, and in instinctual frustration I just swung my swords a couple of times at the door. This had two effects: it dropped my Chameleon spell, and the door swung open. So I had access now, but no invisibility to guarantee sneaking up on the imp and no mana left to cast it again because I always play low-magic characters in TES.
I made my way down the tower a floor or two and found the imp. I failed my Sneak check so the imp was aware of me but didn't immediately attack. So instead of my original plan of backstabbing it, I used my Impish language skill (which is a thing!) to try to see if I could talk it into leaving. It said no, and attacked. I killed the imp after a short fight.
All good, right? Well, no--remember how I said bashing the lock dropped my Chameleon spell? A couple in-game days later while in an inn on my way to Wayrest I received a letter that a member of the Thieves' Guild saw me that night breaking and entering the Mayor's residence and gave me a choice: join them, or become regarded as competition and die. My rogue character does not play well with others and is not a fan of authority, so I trashed the letter and didn't dignify it with a response. They were as good as their word though. For several in-game weeks later I had to keep my head on a swivel any time I set foot in a town at night, because they regularly sent assassins after me. Not every town and not every night, but often, until I figured out how to clear the bounty on my head, which was its own adventure.
That was just one very minor side quest, nothing to do with the main story, and it spiraled into what became a much longer story of fighting Guild assassins on city rooftops at night while figuring out how I was going to keep them off my back to safely get to the secret meeting with a noblewoman at a certain tavern in Wayrest at the appointed day and time, because time matters and if you don't get there for the meeting then it alters the main quest.
When Daggerfall is firing on all cylinders and you're willing to meet it halfway with your RP motivation and imagination, everything is like this and it delivers an experience that literally no other PC game ever made does. Morrowind comes close IMO and is probably my all-time favorite game, but isn't nearly as complex with truly "emergent gameplay" as Daggerfall can get with its various interlocking story and world mechanics. What you choose to do (or not do) often has direct consequences that lead naturally into more complex stories and the farther you get into it and the more choices you make, the more the overall narrative really starts to feel like playing in a really sticky TTRPG campaign and not like you're just showing up to run on the rail of someone else's story.
Unfortunately, it must be said, a lot of those cylinders can and do misfire. Daggerfall has a lot of bugs, some completely game-breaking. Sometimes suspension of disbelief is a little forced when you're entering the Mages' Guild to claim a contract or a royal hall to petition a king for something and all of the static 2D NPC sprites look like absolute dogshit, even for 1996. Dungeons are incredibly long and complex and it's very easy to get lost or stuck with no way out even with the rotatable 3D dungeon map you have. You're also going to clip through dungeon floors semi-regularly, so keep your save games updated and in rolling stages in case your last save screwed you. Some mechanics like buying a house you can't furnish or investing in a shop that doesn't generate meaningful income are interesting ideas that don't have any real practical value and feel very unfinished. The game can become extremely frustrating when its several dozen evergreen background systems end up conflicting in weird ways or simply breaking the game entirely and making you reinstall, which will happen at least once.
But man, when it all clicks? There is absolutely no comparable PC gaming experience anywhere.
Daggerfall was a bit of a White Whale for me after first playing the demo off the PC Gamer demo disk in 1996.
I finally got around to actually playing it a couple of years ago via Daggerfall Unity, with a bunch of mods mostly on my Steam Deck. I probably put like 25 or so hours into it but eventually fell off, though I think about going back quite a bit.
It's a fun game and it is fun to be in the world, but it's a game where you kind of have to make your own fun. Quests are generally not super interesting or involved, the world is very samey, no matter where you go, there's nothing to really see out in the world. The dungeons end up all being very similar, though they're still pretty fun to explore and this is where the real meat of the game is, dungeon crawling.
So with all that, if you're a person who can immerse yourself in a character and really role-play within the world, deciding on a character arc, you'll likely have fun with it. I am not that person and this is why in ultimately fell off the game. Daggerfall still holds a special place in my heart and I still find it charming, I still want to go back and dabble around in the world, but it's not a game that I'm going to play for hundreds of hours. And while this project seems pretty interesting, I don't have much interest in it, because again, it's largely going to be more of the same with what is already there. Daggerfall has such a huge world because it's mostly Proc Gen and all the things that come along with that.
This is amazing and I can't wait to try it out. The first TES game, Arena, included all of Tamriel, and did have the same thing where you could technically walk to different cities and see more or less nothing the entire time, but it was far smaller than Daggerfall. I can imagine that this would be one of the only canon sources of many of the countries in-game.
Edit: now that I read up on it, it looks like the creator did use the Arena map and TES lore as well as existing mods. I love seeing the other mod authors jumping in to give advice or offer help.
I think the manual might have implied that you could walk between cities in Arena, but what actually happens if you leave a city and walk for long enough is that the surrounding countryside wraps around and repeats over and over again. I'm guessing the designers were hoping that hiking players would give up before they noticed.
Hah, I can't believe I fell for it. I did, in fact, give up and just fast travel. I just assumed that it would take hours and even I was not that stubborn.
Interesting project, although a lack of land to explore isn't exactly among my chief criticisms of the original game. My main gripe with it is rather that it doesn't use its size very effectively. I can travel hundreds of kilometers in it, but the ways in which it makes a difference are either very obscure, subtle or skin deep.
That said, I still like that it doesn't shy away from its scale. Towns in later games in the series feel like wild west movie prop towns by comparison: very game-like and oriented towards advancing the various narratives of the game. In Daggerfall they feel more realistic in a way: massive population living in hundreds of houses, most of which are absolutely uninteresting to you because not every NPC and location in the game is there to serve as the subject of some questline. It's just that the quest and dialogue systems don't quite support that level of ambition. NPCs give canned/template responses to every question, the quests are all from a handful of "go to x, get y and bring it to z" type templates. Everything is the same.
I agree with you on the original game having a lack of things to see. I've seen videos showcasing mods that really add variety to the terrain and make exploring more interesting (i.e. this Enhance and Eroded Terrian mod or World of Daggerfall which adds more discoverable locations in the wilderness and looks to add variety to the terrain as well).
I don't think I played enough to really get annoyed at the NPC interaction, but I also think that it is something that mods really add to as well. I feel like the base game had such ambition, and with the completion of the Daggerfall Unity project it opens the doors for additional projects to fork the code and build on it or mods to expand upon what is there.