The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is a video game that consists of 2 releases
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall from Bethesda Softworks is an enormous RPG and sequel to The Elder Scrolls: Arena. It includes a massive gameworld and pioneering freeform play. It was well received for these factors, but was criticised for a crippling number of bugs.
Overview
Daggerfall is a computer RPG released by Bethesda Softworks in 1996. It was followed by two spin-offs; An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire and The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, and eventually a sequel in May 2002, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the most recent game in the franchise, released in 2006. It received many awards including several Game of the Year awards.
The World
Daggerfall features arguably the largest game world to date, containing 161,600 square kilometers (40,400,000 acres) of explorabale land and over 15,000 towns, cities and villages. According to Todd Howard, Morrowind's land area is 0.01% the size of Daggerfall. This was down to an algorithm that generated terrain, and although it led to possibly the largest game world created, lacked much detail overall because the majority of the environment is procedurally generated. The tendency in the design of the following Elder Scrolls games has been to move away from size and concentrate on detail. Morrowind and Oblivion's smaller but more detailed worlds are in general more lifelike than an enormous environment with similar shops and people.
The size of the world is so significant that it merited a place in the Games edition of the Guiness Book of World Records, stating that the world has an estimated 63,125 square miles of land.
Features
Transport in such a large area would take a prohibitively long time, so there are alternate modes of transport and a fast-travel feature. Ships allow for free transport by sea (as opposed to paying fares for the privelege). The ship can also be accessed at any time in the inventory menu, transporting you into the middle of huge ocean aboard your craft. You may also use a riding horse and a horse and cart, which are also accessible from the inventory menu. This leads to surreal moments when you can, for instance, use magic to levitate over city walls, then pull the horse supposedly out of your pocket and ride around town. Unlike in the later games, gold in Daggerfall has weight, so players must use the banking system in order to prevent their holdings from weighing them down. The bank charges 1% to take in this money, and issues letters of credit, which have neglible weight. Banks also allow you the chance to buy property in the towns in which that particular bank is located, buy ships, and take out loans. All of this must be done by magic, because banks all over the world instantly know how much money you have, and all places in the world recognize letters of credit.
Also unlike its sequel Morrowind, Daggerfall had a wall-climbing system. If the player was skilled enough they could scale flat surfaces. This lead to great ways to circumvent obstacles, but also could get you stuck way too high to jump down, and it would sometimes lead to you being stuck in The Void.
When dungeon hacking, you are treated to dungeons that are crazy-immense in size. Like just mind-bogglingly big. They tend to have a certain type of enemy spawned in them, so one place might be a den of vampires, while another will mostly have natural critters of the giant variety. It can take days to explore these procedurally generated monstrosities, although the strange combination dungeon elements, randomly combined, with underwater areas, special passageways and secret panels always allows a player to find something interesting. It's just that those who are dead-set on finding every possible tunnel and room will sometimes go a bit crazy trying to complete the thing, even with the sometimes helpful three-dimensional dungeon automap. These dungeons, when compared to the later dungeons in the Elder Scrolls series, are daunting to say the least, but can be argued to have more charm in their audacity than can the diminuative dungeons that came later.
This is not to say there are not plot-related places. There are several dungeons which were hand-made to provide specific traps, treasures, and encounters in service of the game's plot. There are several endings based on how the player attacks the problems facing the empire.
Bugs
Daggerfall was infamous for its proliferation of major bugs and glitches, usually attributed to a rush to bring the game to shelves. Incredibly, there was a bug evident in the release version of the game which prevented the player from finishing the main questline. The majority of these bugs have been fixed with the final patch. However the ability to fall through the floor and the occasional save corruption still exist so saving in multiple slots is recommended. There are also other bugs and exploits which still exist despite the final patch being issued, although some in the homebrew community have managed to address certain issues with later, non-official fixes.Generally speaking, the most ruinous of bugs was the dreaded Void. Diagonal surfaces, stairs, and certain other terrain forms had clipping problems which would cause a character to fall THROUGH solid surfaces, plummeting to their death far below in the box-like playing field that a dungeon or building resided. Players could survive this in various ways, but it was often impossible to return to a dungeon without teleportation or levitation spells.
Since the re-release of the free version no new bugs have been fixed, with the last official patch being frozen at "213." Players are thus encouraged to save often, and in different save slots. Players can export their save folders to accomodate for new ones should they decide they want to use more than the six provided.
While not a bug, there are certain ways to ruin your chances to finish the main quest of the game, so it's advisable not to talk to anyone in the three main castles so as not to accidentally refuse a quest which would be necessary for the game's completion.
Availability
Daggerfall is available for free download at the official Elder Scrolls website (along with a patch that updates it to the latest official release, "213"). It requires DOSbox to run properly on non-DOS machines, though Bethesda has included a handy install guide for those who use Windows XP and DOSBox, downloadable from the same page as their release of Daggerfall.
| Game Name | The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall |
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| Original US Release |
Aug. 30, 1996
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| Original US Release |
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| Aliases | Elder Scrolls 2 |
| ESRB |
ESRB: M
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