Daggerfall Unity
jjstraka34
Member Posts: 9,850
I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't give this a plug. If you are an Elder Scrolls fan, you may have reached back in time (or maybe played it at launch) and tried to dip your toe into the vast ocean that is Daggerfall. It remains perhaps the most ambitious fantasy life-simulator ever released. It also showed that even in it's infancy, Bethesda could not make their vast worlds without a sea of bugs plaguing it.
For the past few years, an ambitious modder and those who have joined his team have made HUGE headway on porting all of Daggerfall to the Unity Engine. The major hurdle has always been the magic system, and they seem to be nearly over that hurdle and on what they are calling the downhill portion of getting it even in parity to vanilla Daggerfall. As someone who has gotten out of the first dungeon in the past (which in an of itself is something most people never do) but little farther, I can tell you without question that this is EXACTLY the kind of modern modding effort that was needed to make this game more accessible to a wider audience. The main quest is currently completely playable, though there are still alot of features left to be added. Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if this gets out of alpha and into a fully functional beta by late spring. Give it a go:
https://www.dfworkshop.net/
For the past few years, an ambitious modder and those who have joined his team have made HUGE headway on porting all of Daggerfall to the Unity Engine. The major hurdle has always been the magic system, and they seem to be nearly over that hurdle and on what they are calling the downhill portion of getting it even in parity to vanilla Daggerfall. As someone who has gotten out of the first dungeon in the past (which in an of itself is something most people never do) but little farther, I can tell you without question that this is EXACTLY the kind of modern modding effort that was needed to make this game more accessible to a wider audience. The main quest is currently completely playable, though there are still alot of features left to be added. Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if this gets out of alpha and into a fully functional beta by late spring. Give it a go:
https://www.dfworkshop.net/
Post edited by jjstraka34 on
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https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiut8i63vPeAhUMMawKHX3_Bj4QjRx6BAgBEAU&url=https://imgur.com/gallery/9PATk&psig=AOvVaw1Q2ij4OmU4-EGym22wuzc1&ust=1543379403433957
Other than that, it just plays about 500% smoother. It still retains the feel of Daggerfall by keeping the sprites in DOS-era pixels but making the world itself far better. It's impossible to overstate how much cumbersome UI navigation you have to do in the original Daggerfall.
Again, they have just added spells to enemies and have about 70% of the player spells implemented. Once they get that done, it's on to stuff like polishing off the guild quests system, the law and court stuff, and things like vampirism and lycanthropy. Alot of these kind of projects get abandoned somewhere along the line (including an effort to get Daggerfall fully functional in the XL engine) but this doesn't seem like this is going to be one of them. The main developer has put way to much into it to abandon it when the finish line is in sight, and it seems like he has a good team around him. He is taking a break from the more grueling aspects for the next month to just do some bug-fixing, which in the long run is good, as the only thing that can prevent this from happening would be burnout.
In a few years maybe we'll see some mods that add yet more life to it.
Using Hand to Hand, Running, and Dodging as my primary skills. It works better than you would think.
Also, the old "immunity to magic" exploit doesn't work anymore. You will still get paralyzed and poisoned. Not sure what that feature does now.
The major bugs from the original are gone though. I distinctly remember the quest with the Oracle from Hammerfell being incompletable and I just finished it today.
You definitely notice the enhanced A.I right from the start. I think monsters from different factions fighting each other is a nice touch. I've saved myself once or twice so far by running into another enemy as I was being chased and getting the two to fight it out.
1. That damnable store music, and
2. HALT! HALT! HALT! HALT! HALT! HALT! HALT! HALT! HALT! HALT!
The mods for Daggerfall Unity have been trickling in and so far they don't disappoint. Alongside very nice looking graphics mods and various changes to the overland map, like mountains and valleys and random encounters, there are new factions and new uses for previously sub-par skills. Language skills in particular feel far more useful.
Most importantly to me, there are various quality of life changes to make things far less annoying. Optional quest markers inside of towns and dungeons is a big one.
Anyway, this is me speaking to the Queen of Sentinel in Hammerfell.
Yes. I actually personally find this more appealing, but to each their own.
Welp, killed my interest instantly. Having rolls to hit in a game that has hack and slash combat and let's you aim in first person in just bad design.
Not only does it have dice rolls, it is far more brutal and unforgiving. Daggerfall does not play around. You can easily encounter enemies you can't harm at all and your only option is to run and live to see another day. It comes from an era, as I'm sure you know, where games were far more difficult in general. Forget becoming the head of the Mages Guild in a handful of quests with no magic skills, they could end up kicking you out just because you failed a few quests. Permanently!
On the other hand, you have enough customizability in your stats to make missing common enemies relatively rare. Wanna start with 70-80 agility and gain levels quickly? Easily possible in the character creator. To say nothing of the more broken strategies.
Nothing mods couldn't fix for you. Harderfall for instance does away with hit rolls, making both the player and enemies hit each other no matter what. Though weapon material immunities of undead and daedra still apply.
The only mod I am still missing for Daggerfall Unity is playable orcs. The classic game actually had something like it, even if it required to override one of the other races to work. Hopefully modders will have better ways to pull custom races off now.
There is an imp in the within the first 5 minutes of the opening dungeon who can't be hit by anything less than a steel weapon (or a spell, of course) which you almost certainly won't have. This is still an era where the quality of you weapon mattered in whether you could even damage the enemy or not. You need at least a weapon of mithril quality to damage the higher level enemies.
Frankly, every RPG worth it's salt should have tiers of weaponry that work better against certain enemies. Resistances and weaknesses have gone by the wayside except in the most basic ways.
Daggerfall is actually pretty nuts with it's options. If you want to summon a Daedra for an artifact quest, you can do it exactly ONE day per YEAR. If you want to become a vampire, there are nine different clans, and you can undertake a quest to cure yourself by killing the brood master of that clan. You can not only be a werewolf, but a wereboar. You can borrow money from a bank to buy a house and ship, but if you don't make payments, you'll be arrested and taken to court. Where if you have high enough points in the requisite skills, you can lie your way out of a guilty verdict.
Morrowind is by no means lacking in features, but it doesn't even hold a candle to Daggerfall in open-ended gameplay. Really, nothing does or ever has. Alot of it is copy and pasted and pretty rudimentary, but it's no wonder a game of this scope was such a technical mess in 1996. And don't even get me started on the spellmaker (which Morrowind actually kept).
I had one decent playthrough in Unity (hand to hand fighter who spoke monster languages to calm them down, because why not) and am waiting to do another until some really nice overhauls are out. But it does seem to be on track to look like a completely new game eventually.
It's interesting that Morrowind, Skyrim, and even Daggerfall have vibrant and very active modding communities with massive projects going on in each of those but Oblivion seems more or less dead. I thought that one had some high points, I don't get the lack of interest.
All in all, Skyrim is by far the most modded game of all-time, followed by Fallout 4. Morrowind is being propped up by two projects, which are Rebirth and Tamriel Rebuilt, the former is basically a rebalancing of the original game, the other adding the entire province instead of just the island. Rebirth is basically finished, even if he does tweak it from time to time. Rebuilt will, realistically, never actually be done, even though it's still actively updated.
Daggerfall was not on my radar since it's too ancient, but this project sparks my interest. Need to know how good the story is, to even start contemplating to play it, though.
The main story is very good, in my opinion. I would put it at second best, behind Morrowind. There are multiple paths through the game as well as endings, more than any other Elder Scrolls game, and that puts a big point in its favor.
Side quests are automatically generated, but I tend to enjoy them, especially the Temple and Knighthood quests. Some will have you running around towns and talking to folks, while most others are lengthy dungeon crawls. Thankfully, Unity provides a lot of quality of life features to make things easier on you, from quest markers to the ability to teleport right to the object of your quest if you just want to get it over with.
Mods are easy to install, just drop em all into a single folder, and some offer whole new factions and questlines to explore, with more interaction.
1.) Daggerfall is the kind of game you have to play with the UESP Wiki at ready unless you want to dedicate your life to it. The tagline in 1996 "prepare to meet your new obsession" was no joke. Daggerfall is, 25 years later, the most extensive fantasy-life simulator that's ever been made, and it isn't even really close. The amount of guilds is just daunting. There are probably 50 skills to manage. Just the tip of the iceberg really. It's also even more evident to me that this game must have had a SERIOUS influence on the people who made the first MMOs like Meridian 59 and Everquest.
2.) You don't just need to be careful about how you make your character to survive the opening dungeon, but the random loot you get matters just as much or more. I have started a Nord Healer (which is as close as I can get to a Cleric, focusing on Restoration magic and blunt melee weapons). What you start with and the loot in the first room where you kill a rat is randomized. In my first attempt, I got a single iron mace and NO armor. I could barely kill the rat and bat, and killing the Thief just down the first hallway was......basically impossible. I rerolled, was more careful about stat allocation (even a +1 to hit made a incredible difference) and ended up with an Elven Flail in my pack from the start.
3.) I strongly recommend switching to the Unity option of click to attack, rather than the default of holding the right mouse button and moving the mouse back and forth to swing. The later method is just incredibly antiquated and unresponsive, even in the new engine. And since hitting is based on dice rolls anyway, it's really the only way to play imo if you don't want to drive yourself nuts. This mechanic was honestly more tolerable in Arena, surprisingly enough. It was always unbearable to me in Daggerfall.
4.) Every core series Elder Scrolls game besides Arena (the only one to use traditional EXP) and Skyrim (which is simplified enough to be foolproof) has a rather complex leveling system, and you can really screw yourself if you don't understand how to manipulate it and plan ahead. Daggerfall is the worst offender in this regard. You level up by getting 15 skill-ups in either your 3 Primary skills, two highest major skills, and highest minor skill. But the hidden part is this: there are also about two dozen Misc. skills (ranging from learning how to speak to giants to swimming). Some of these (like running, jumping and, for some reason, sneak, even when you aren't sneaking) level up ALOT. The kicker is, you can only ever get ONE skill to 100. Once that happens, all the others max out at 95 (without manipulating game mechanics). Even though they start in the single digits, it is VERY easy to let some of these creep up without noticing, and some people become a "Master" (getting to 100) in running or jumping without even trying. Point being, don't neglect your Primary and Major skills, and make damn sure they are sufficiently ahead of the stuff that levels up quickly in Misc. category.
5.) Caius Cosades explicitly tells you to do this in Morrowind once you locate him, perhaps because it isn't as clear here. The guilds in these two games are not the narrative, story-driven focused ones that would come to dominate Oblivion and Skyrim. They are guilds in the most classic sense, which is to say, you are meant to perform tasks for them to build up some gold, which you would be advised to use to train your skills, so you can HOPE to stand a chance of surviving against anything but a rodent or one humanoid enemy. Perhaps the best feature added by Unity is that you now get to chose from a list of available jobs, rather than having a random one given to you, where you would be just as likely to be told to go clear out a vampire lair as rid a house of rats.
6.) For god sakes, whatever you do, do NOT jump into a randomized dungeon quest in this game without learning a recall spell first. Set it at the entrance, no exceptions. It's easy to get sucked in and possibly ruin your whole game. I started out this afternoon investigating a rumor about a guy's reputation, which then turned into him being exposed for selling someone to a group of bandits, who he then wanted me to rescue and I then proceeded to spend at least two hours in this place. "Labyrinthian" doesn't even begin to describe them. I never did find the guy, and when I chanced upon the exit again (thankfully, Unity leaves a green marker at the entrance so you have some frame of reference), I high-tailed it to the city that is going to be my based of operations. Do not close doors after you open them. An open door and corpses are at least breadcrumb trails that you've been down the hallway or room before. Random quests for people you can let the time limit expire and it just leaves your quest log. If you fail a guild quest however, it hurts your reputation, and you can get kicked out. So it's advisable to do some guaranteed success quests before taking on the tougher stuff.
7.) As much as I appreciate Arena, it really feels like a tech demo and testing ground for the ideas and features that became a reality in Daggerfall. While the fetch quests in Daggerfall may seem antiquated by today's standards, they are practically Bioware-level compared to what is offered outside the main quest in Arena, which consist almost entirely of delivering items to a tavern or temple. Even the small advancements in the conversation interaction window and scaling down the individual towns to a manageable size, as well as color-coding taverns, shops, and guilds are the difference between enjoying yourself and engaging in needless tedium. I almost hate to say it, but there really isn't any reason to play Arena instead of this.
8.) Even if Bethesda got a ridiculous bug up their ass and decided to remaster Daggerfall, they could not and would not have done as good a job as the Daggerfall Unity team did. This is professional quality work, and it stands right up there with the Circle of Eight/Temple+ mods (for Temple of Elemental Evil) in making a superb game that was simply not able to be completed in most cases because of technical issues as good as it always should have been. It's just a wonderful thing that there are people willing to devote endless hours to this, for no pay, as a hobby and something they enjoy.
https://github.com/afritz1/OpenTESArena
This is still very early, but there is encouraging progress being made. The world now basically exists and is able to be traversed at leisure, including all the main quest dungeons. While NPCs and enemies are placed and in the the game, they aren't able to be interacted with, nor is there any combat, or actual character creation.
Still, the template now seems to be firmly in place. Already, you can see how the increased view distance will make this a better experience if it comes to fruition, and enemies won't just APPEAR at point blank range like they do in the DOS version. I truly hope this project reaches a conclusion, and I would actively support this guy monetarily if it helps it get to the finish line.