I am now level 10 in Daggerfall and I can say this is the best crap game I've played in quite some time. I know there is a whole lot of love for this game, but I think a lot of that might be nostalgia. I know I'm one to talk, seeing as I keep insisting that people who haven't played Ultima IV should go out and give it a try. Still, I kept hearing that Daggerfall is the best game of the series and so far I can see reasons for why it is loved while struggling through its imperfections. Normally I would list all the positives and negatives in an itemized list, but right now I feel like explaining the good things and the bad things in a written narrative. Some things really come together in Daggerfall in a memorable way. But many other things seem badly or only partly implimented.
The game is not really a graphical improvement over Arena, but is instead enhanced in other ways. First, there are a lot more guilds with many a diverse quest to conduct. It truly is great to join multiple factions and move up the ranks, earning better benefits as you progress. You can also help out different royal families, currying favors in the court and earning wealth and magical items for your service. The Redguard areas and the northern regions look distinct from one another, and although you are adventuring in only a small section of Tamriel, the sense of scale makes the continent seem much bigger when compared to the previous game. The quests are a lot more interesting than in the previous game, and I've done work such as kidnapping, rescuing lost guild members, providing protection to people and towns, quests to avenge assassinated clients, searches for artifacts and so on. The bestiary also seems to have increased, and I've run into monsters not seen in Arena. All this is a marked improvement over Daggerfall's predecessor.
But while I praise the sense of scale, I also have to dismiss it as a bit of a trick. The dungeons seem very similar to one another with only small deviations. A castle and a tower that I had to explore had entire sections that looked the same as many of the underground dungeons I had already travelled through. And I do not mean the tiles. I'm talking about entire sections of a dungeon to include underground caverns, long stretches of corridors, and secret doors in the same locations. The guild quests at first seemed varied, but then your realize there are only a dozen or two in each faction, and that an auto-generate just changes the details up slightly. So I've been asked to go to a random town or dungeon several times in order to kill a random NPC many times, and same for rescuing a guild member from a dungeon, stealing an object from a temple, etc. So the game only gives an illusion of being so large through this automated quest generation.
The interface still sucks. You can change the keys, but the program is buggy and won't recognize my left mouse button for the swing weapon command. So often I am holding down the Z button, trying to move with the arrow keys, and moving my mouse to swing. Quite awkward. Again, I can rebind the keys, but haven't settled on a configuration I like. And I need to change it. I'm playing a thief-mage hybrid and I keep holding Alt to sneak, then press Enter to go from the movement mode to the manipulation mode, which actually makes me flip into windowed mode in DOSBox. This really sucks when I am in combat.
Being a full magic-user in this game sucks in comparison to Arena. In Arena you were a boss by the end of the game. In this game, magic is much more limited and potions that restore your spellpoints are harder to carry around. In Arena I carried dozens of them at one time, while in this game the weight of the potions results in me not being able to carry so many. I meant to depend more on my magic in this game, but because it's so hard to restore your spellpoints, I often depend on the trusty bow and sword, and I level up due to skill increases, so I've become more of a fighter with mage and thief skills. You can also rest in the fighter's guild, but not in the mage's guild, making it less likely to use a trainer to help build up the skill points in magic. I suppose I can just rest at the fighter's guild for 100 days and spam low level spells to improve my casting skill, but that seems kind of lame to me.
I spent most of my time trying to build up my character via the faction quests, but I'm quite bored of them by now. As a new recruit to the mage's guild, I was asked to go find some news about a magical outfit in a dungeon and to return and report. The quest took me forever, but when i finally found the notes about the item's location, I went back to town and then rested. I met the quest giver, but he didn't acknowledge the quest completion. I realized the quest wanted me to go and find the object itself and not just news of it, but by the time I went out and got it and returned, the quest giver said I was too late and kicked me out of the guild. Nice newbie quest, man... It took me a bit to get back into the mage's guilds good graces. I had just gotten excited about such quests again when I was told about a magical shield artifact. I spent hours exploring an unnecessarily huge dungeon in order to find the shield and bore it proudly to a tower holding an imprisoned sorceress I went to go free. I met a lich, who I guess was supposed to be quite tough, but his powerful spell just reflected off of my shield and killed him. Truly this artifact quest was more than worth the effort... then it broke soon after and disappeared from my inventory. I thought this was a bug and stopped playing just so I could figure out the fix. But nope. Artifacts only work for a short while and then they 'break' and disappear permanently. So screw the side quests. I'm ready to just get the main quest line over and be done.
This game is still extremely buggy. Monsters get generated on top of one another or inside furniture, jumping over chasms sometimes results in me falling forever through some tear in the fabric of space, my character sometimes will get his torso hung up on a platform, and the game just crashes for no reason.
I think mages get powerful later in this game only because the enemies they go against spam spells against them, and if a high level mage can cast magic absorption, he basically lets this happen in order to charge up his deadlier spells. In fact the enemy can do a lot of things the player can't. This includes spam magic attacks and breathe indefinitely underwater. I really hate it when your opponents don't share the same limitations of the player character.
The game improved on Arena by creating more realism with potions having weight and spellpoints being a bit more limited so you can't just spam magic all day. But because of this, it also lost quite a bit of the fun. And speaking of fun, the dungeons in Arena were also better. In the main quest, each had a story, with tidbits to discover hidden throughout. This one has more interesting background information in the main questline, but the dungeons are literally just copy and paste jobs.
To end on a good note, though, this game is tits. Oh, I'm sorry... I mean this game has tits. Lots of tits. A plethora of tits. Tits everywhere. I used to think that some of the modders went way out of their way to create nude patches for Oblivion and Skyrim, but now I realize they are just trying to return the game to its roots. I mean, go into the temples of lust or temples of air and you'll see what I mean. Hell, go to the government palaces and see what the residents have waiting for them in their bedrooms and you'll see what I mean. Some of those girls aren't wearing anything except collars. The poor things look cold. They need attention...
). Haven't found the thieves guild or assassins guild yet.
