Daggerfall was better than Morrowind? Tell me why.

[Thrawn05]

A lot of the stuff in DF such as Vamperism and owning your own boat, are really eastereggs. They weren't meant to be part of the gameplay, just some little extra stuff they threw in there. Many of them were never finished or even started, such as Bard songs.

What are you talking about? I never heard of any Bard songs feature that was planed in the game. I know that a map similar to Fallout and a survival skill was planned. That towns would be ocasionaly under siege or aflicted by plagues and kingdoms would attack each other. But nothing about any Bard songs or Bard gameplay. Do you remenber anything that was said about it?

http://til.gamingsource.net/dogate/daggerfacts.shtml

Read the last part.

 

[Xi]

Daggerfall created an illusion of being in a huge world. For some people that's all they needed to really enjoy it. Morrowind was big in compairson to other games, but by Daggerfall standards, it was weak.

Morrowind offered less but did not give the amount of quality needed to overcome the lack of quantity in a lot of cases.

NPC's are about the same across the board in both games. Dull.

Combat was better in Daggerfall. Mainly because enemies could be tough if you weren't ready for the battle. In Morrowind you were a god, and nothing could kill you after 10-20 hours of play. Daggerfall was more strategic in this sense.

Going into a dungeon in Daggerfall was scary business. The feeling of being lost and fighting for your life were very real. Morrowind didn't have this aspect at all. The randomness was frustrating, but created a better illusion for the player.

Daggerfall had superior magic, and a better spellmaker/enchanting. Morrowind had a better alchemy system.

I liked Morrowind, but I thought Daggerfall was a better game. Hopefully Oblivion takes a step in the right direction this time.

 

[elander_]

http://til.gamingsource.net/dogate/daggerfacts.shtml
Read the last part.

Very cool. Im learning about this for the first time after playing Daggerfall so many times. :D

Now what else there is to say. The major difference between Daggerfall and Morrowind / Oblivion was that Daggerfall devs were trying to achieve true art. Something like this:

"Tedders told me that it was a remnant of another never implemented feature - bard songs. The idea was that when the PC went into the tavern, the bard would be singing a tune, composed of several distinct rhyme schemes -- maybe ABABABCC or something -- with phrases grabbed to rhyme."

Some random poems:

"Fowls in the wood
I would if I could
O, that would be good
Let us do as we should
Would you, would you, would?
Does your sword so drip with blood?
Like a babe in the wood
I saw thee in my neighborhood
Knock, knock, knock on wood
Love, why cannot I be good?
The stem, petals, and bud

Just one face in the crowd
I pick thee out of the crowd
Sing it now, sing it loud!
Why must thou cry out loud?
My love, my love, be not proud
My love, I fear, is very proud
Lay upon my grave a shroud
The clouds look like a gray shroud
Praps I am somewhat over-endowed"

While Morrowind and Oblivion will be more like a product. That is something like a can of bear you use to fullfil your imidiate needs and then forget about it.

In several years people will still be remenbering Daggerfall and Fallout as important gaming achievements when the fanboys have already forgoten about Morrowind and Oblivion products completely. Fallout 3 will be the same shit. It may end up being fun for enough people to fill Beth pockets for a while but completely uninspired.

 

[Blacklung]

A lot of people made fun of MW as a hiking simulator, but I'll have to say that this is a whole lot better than a repeating slide show simulator. I'll be fair and say that MW, because of piece-mail placing of models, did have a good deal of repetitive designs in the dungeons and homes. Still I never got the same feeling of De Ja Vu that I get from DF.

Maybe this is because I'm a little OCD and thus pay a great amount of attention to detail...I would notice that MW's rooms had different items placed everywhere, that there was a skeleton against the wall, a jug turned over, small but stupid little changes like that even if I knew the room structure, color, was exactly the same, but that was enough to not make it feel TOO familiar. Shitty way of changing it up, but still it worked for me.

In Daggerfall though, there aren't any of those little "out-of-place" touches. Same rooms, just they link into other same rooms, with the same amount of treasure and the same amount of monsters. I actually can predict what to expect because I've seen the room before. I know this tavern is going to have these people, this house is going to have this furniture, that this switch is going to activate this grate or elevator, etc.

Think of MW as the suburbs...sure, a lot of the houses are the same in their inside and outside architexture, and the stores are probably going to be laid out in similar fashions and distances from the residential areas. However, the people look different, the houses are decorated different, the stores sell somewhat different things, things are the same but different. In DF, the people are going to look the same, the houses are going to have the same things in them based on their size, and the stores are just going sell the same thing based on their type. Things are the same and things are the same.

Edit: And just as suburb life holds you over until life gets interesting, MW held my RPGing until something better came along...sadly I'm still waiting.

 

[elander_]

Are we discussing house decoration or rpgs in this thread? But you are not right when you say that Morrowind was so unique. Most houses in Balmora where almost identical. The cantons in Vivec where almost copies of each other. You go into a serwer and you have seen them all. I could have tolerated this if Morrowind had much better role-playing.

Please tell me in what rpg aspects did Morrowind or Oblivion will innovate? When i buy an rpg im looking for role-playing not for greatly decorated interiors, tons of uber swords and different ways to hack and slash enemies and pass trough bosses.

 

[Data4]

I share a lot of the same opinions as others in this thread, so I won't repeat them. I will say that I was disappointed in Morrowind because I thought it would be an expansion ON (not "of") and refinement of the things we saw in Daggerfall. I was hoping for a similar scale, with the hope that advances in computer technology would give more substance to the areas that were a barren wasteland in Daggerfall.

Bethesda's ideas were quite the opposite. Instead of going with medium graphics for the time while building on the foundations they laid in Daggerfall, they went for the graphics oomph, and let everything else take a back seat.

Todd Howard said the games are basically dungeon hacks, so how does that explain the absolutely shitty dungeon design of Morrowind? Those were the biggest disappointments. Enter a random hole in the ground, have a random Dunmer chick run after you with a "NOW YOU DIE!!", slay her and whatever others are there, steal some saltrice and kwama eggs and maybe a rusty dagger or two, and you're done. Blah. Yeah, Daggerfall's dungeons were kind of kooky, but you could spend an entire multi-hour session of gaming in one of them and feel like you really accomplished something in the end.

-D4

 

[Blacklung]

Are we discussing house decoration or rpgs in this thread? But you are not right when you say that Morrowind was so unique. Most houses in Balmora where almost identical. The cantons in Vivec where almost copies of each other. You go into a serwer and you have seen them all. I could have tolerated this if Morrowind had much better role-playing.

Please tell me in what rpg aspects did Morrowind or Oblivion will innovate? When i buy an rpg im looking for role-playing not for greatly decorated interiors, tons of uber swords and different ways to hack and slash enemies and pass trough bosses.

I'm not saying Morrowind was truly unique in the constructions of the towns, homes, dungeons, etc., just moreso than DF.

Also, I'm not saying that MW is the greatest game of all time, or that Oblivion will be as well. If you think so, you must have me confused with some "fanboy." I'm merely trying to fish the waters of the strict comparison between Morrowind and Daggerfall. Not Daggerfall and Oblivion, or Morrowind and Oblivion, or Fallout and Oblivion, or whatever else thing.

People just keep saying DF is better than MW because MW was a let down of their expectations as the innovator of all RPG's (not all, just most). I don't care whether you were let down or not, I just want to know simply:

DF as is vs. MW as is, which is better based purely on good points, bad points.

 

[Twinfalls]

In Daggerfall though, there aren't any of those little "out-of-place" touches. Same rooms, just they link into other same rooms, with the same amount of treasure and the same amount of monsters. I actually can predict what to expect because I've seen the room before. I know this tavern is going to have these people, this house is going to have this furniture, that this switch is going to activate this grate or elevator, etc.

Firstly, this is not quite true - rooms are not 'identical' in DF, there are different NPCs in every room. There is more variety overall, when you look at regional differences between architecture and people, than in MW.

Secondly, and more importantly - you fail to understand the whole point of how Daggerfall is to be enjoyed. The 'repetition' in DF must be considered in the context of the sheer vastness of the game world. If any game is to be played with a 'live another life' and 'you are there' mindset, it is Daggerfall, and not Morrowind.

Play it with a 'I am really here' outlook, allow your imagination to fill in the unique details that you need, and realise that the game facilitates a huge experience, one that Morrowind simply gives up on, right from the outset.

You must be able to use your imagination to get the most out of Daggerfall. If you are able to do so, only then will you realise how superior it is to Morrowind. And this is without even considering how much more roleplaying there is in the game with all the extra skills, options, etc.

 

[Dogar]

Sure Daggerfall was good at facilitating the imagination. Since there was so little soul within the game the player pretty much had to resort to imagination to make the game enjoyable. The large world suspended disbelief, and was good for that much. But creating "unique details" such as pretending that you're engaging a NPC in a nuanced and enjoyable conversation on the topic of Iliac Bay politics, when really you simply clicked the "What's news?" dialogue option doesn't make for good gameplay. You'd be better off shedding the game entirely and moving entirely into the world of your own imagination.

 

[Twinfalls]

And how exactly does Morrowind improve upon it in that regard?

 

[Dogar]

It doesn't, what did I say that impied that I thought it did? In my opinion Morrowind isn't as good as Daggerfall. I just don't think Daggerfall was much of a game to begin with.

Yes, I know it's partially off-topic. Big deal.

 

[elander_]

People just keep saying DF is better than MW because MW was a let down of their expectations as the innovator of all RPG's (not all, just most). I don't care whether you were let down or not, I just want to know simply:

DF as is vs. MW as is, which is better based purely on good points, bad points.

You just have to play Daggerfall long enough and do enough quests to realize why Df is a more role-playing game. All those "useless" features, skills and complex char gen are part of what makes Df a superior role-playing game. As it is Morrowind is nothing better than Diablo or Dungeon Siege. I sugest you try to play Daggerfall thieves guild again with a thief character and also try the witches, commoners and merchants quests and those quests that are less simple or don't involve going into a dungeon. You will need to have at least one weapon skill even if you play as a thief to do the main quest dungeons so choose long blade and you are ready.

A friend of mine once told me he hated the dungeon crawling part so he just activated the cheat to jump to the right locations in huge dungeons. Except for the main quests you don't have to do dungeon crawl quests unless you want to. You can refuse and ignore quests you don't want to do with a minimal reputation penality.

Here's some Morrowind dumb downs just to clarify things:

> Biography in Daggerfall did have an influence in many things in the game. You can even receive more gold than normal in loots if you choose certain answers.

In Morrowind there is no biography generation.

> You can roll and adjust all your stats at chargen. Plus you can edit all your skill primary/major/minor skills, redistribute skill points and balance your char advantages / disadvantages when creating a custom class.

In Morrowind you can only choose your major/minor skills. They have powers which is a dumbed down replacement for lack of biography generation and lack of a/ds.

> In Daggerfall you have reputation per faction and per kingdom. If your rep gets bad with the law of a certain kingdom it doens't change in neutral kingdoms and can even imporove to enemies of that kingdom. There were about 100 different factions in Daggerfall which had a indirect influence in the game. Some guilds are hidden and inaccessible until you do the right thing.

Morrowind law system was just surreal. You just pay money and solve your problems. Another Tod Howard thing where commiting crimes is just a joke. Plus everyone knows where the thieves guild or the assassins guild are. People even point directions to it.

> There are tons of exotic skills important to non combat classes and to non-magic users that were removed: etiquete, streetwise, climbing, swimming, languages. Most of these are social skills. A lot of skills were mixed. Some i agree like having less weapon skills. Others like mixing pickpocket into and lockpick into security is a bit dumb.

Some skills were added to Morrowind but most offer more options to combat. Spliting heavy and light armor and providing a shield skill was a good addition however. Alchemy was also a nice addition.

There are a lot of other features that if they were continued in future Tes games it would make the series really something to play.

The Daggerfall world was huge and with a much more rich political map than Morrowind. There were more than a douzen of kingdoms in the Illiac each one having more than a thousand cities, dungeons, small towns, farms, homes, ruined castles, cemiteries, temples, witch coves, bandit camps, etc

The world was suposed to be dynamic with kingdoms breaking alliances and going into war. Vampire clans would ravage entire cities and bring the plague everywhere. See for example mount&blade with its dynamic world, war parties ravaging the land, and kingdoms fighting against each other. This is an example how good gameplay and originality can pay off.

Classes like Acrobat, Healer, Ranger, the survival skill, Thief, Bard were suposed to provide a different life-style. Something different than just hack-and-slash. A bard for example could get some money in taverns and get more dialog clues with his superior social skills. Thief almost did it but some abilities like hide in shadows were bugged. But still there are plenty of quests were being a thief alone pays off and you can keep picking those quests. They will change slightly every time you pick them and it's not just the place and names that change. Sometime the offender and crime motivation also changes. It's all part of the template system created for Daggerfall. The decision to have the player dungeon crawl all main quests was just a VERY bad decision.

So instead of improving on this they decided to take a step backwards. Morrowind was not much better than Dungeon Siege or Diablo for an rpg. Oblivion will be not much better than Arena. Maybe one day they will get some ambition and try to make a game like Daggerfall was suposed to be. But i doubt because of what people think of what sells these days is to have hack-and-salsh gameplay and fluf classes focused only on combat. The world must be static and stories must be linear not to "frustrate" the player too much and make storytelling more linear and "intense" acording to the opinion of some people who never wrote a book. The problem is that all this goes against what makes a good rpg. So instead they just do adventure games and call them rpgs because you can dress-up in a lot different ways, choose your face and attributes for a different combat style. Man even adventure games in the old days were inteligent than this.

 

[Atrokkus]

Both games are shitty, as long as I'm concerned.

 

[Twinfalls]

Thanks for that well articulated contribution, metallix!

 

[Atrokkus]

Anytime!

 

[elander_]

Both games are shitty, as long as I'm concerned.

I never said Morrowind was a absolute piece of shit. But for an action adventure game Redguard and even Battlespire were much better without pretending to be a crpg. At least they had some decent dialogs.

Now go tell your mommy to turn on the xibox for you and play pokemon or dragon ball z little joe.

 

[Thrawn05]

The Daggerfall world was huge and with a much more rich political map than Morrowind. There were more than a douzen of kingdoms in the Illiac each one having more than a thousand cities, dungeons, small towns, farms, homes, ruined castles, cemiteries, temples, witch coves, bandit camps, etc

Don't I know it. I huffed it on horse from Daggerfall to Waywest. I just wanted to see how it would play without fast travel. It was fun going from one town to another. It took me a good amount of time (hehe) but I did it.

In MW, I walked from Vivec to Sanctus Shrine in 1 hour, 12 minutes.

 

[Imbecile]

Play it with a 'I am really here' outlook, allow your imagination to fill in the unique details that you need, and realise that the game facilitates a huge experience, one that Morrowind simply gives up on, right from the outset.
.

Havent the TES fanboys been mocked for precisely this "use your imagination" outlook?

 

[franc kaos]

I think it helped to play the game in its time, where there was nothing to compare it to (except maybe Ultima Underworld 2 - not sure of the dates), and I've not played DF in years (lost original game disk and haven't found a copy yet), so most of this is memory, and apologies if I've got anything wrong.

Daggerfall: Size of Great Britain
Morrowind: Size of a small city

DF: Intricate plotted quest (x3) with different outcomes
MW: Save the world, kill the bad guy

DF: Could refuse quest and be offered a different one. Fuck up in one guild, join another.
MW: If you refused (or even 'failed') a quest you couldn't progress any further in the few guilds available.

DF: Basic timetable with shops and city walls closed at night.
MW: The eternal now (even at night).

DF: Character creation with enough skills to create a truly personalised avatar.
MW: Starsigns (sigh), generic skillset, about five ugly, ugly faces to choose from...

DF: Dungeons you would have to plan for, stock up on items, and could spend RT days in.
MW: Dungeons that might be called cellars.

Someone said that DF was soulless, that is something I would accuse MW of. With DF they tried to create something never done before, they fell far short of the mark, but the soul of the developers was there in every similiar random quest generated, every news item about this royal household warring with that nation, with every randomly named NPC cardboard cutout.

Compared to MWs 3 dimensional cardboard cutouts who no longer even disappeared at night. A to B to C main quest that had one resolution. It's one major news story about the emporors ill health and the possibilities of troops withdrawing from MWs shores.

DF: Political intrigues and layered stories coated in a not great kill/get/escort random generator.
MW: One story, one outcome coated in a not great hand crafted kill/get/escort construction set.

 

[Section8]

In MW, I walked from Vivec to Sanctus Shrine in 1 hour, 12 minutes.

Now that was a great quest. It played on the strengths of the game (Exploration, Solitary adventuring) and made you avoid the weaknesses (Wiki, Interior cells) and such. Plus it was one of the few quests where I felt as though I was actually a character with a personality, taking a vow of silence out of religious reverence.

Well both had their flaws but atleast they improved on the worst points. Fedex is better then random generated fedex, small but often supricing - if you take the time to look - dungeons are better then random mazes, ect.

Okay, how do you come to this conclusion? If you're not going to have quality, at least have quantity. The simple nature of DFs quests and NPCs is pretty forgivable, since there's so much at hand that you can find something that interests you, and you can choose to avoid that which doesn't. In Morrowind, you're stuck with the same limited set of bland, uninspired quests every fucking time.

Also, I'd say that random generation of content is the key element behind the success of games like Diablo.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Missed that post yesterday:

...but you could still do critical strike/backstabs in MW, though it was tied into the sneak skill much more directly than in DF.

You do see the difference between a skill and a generic action? Following your logic, we might as well have 3 skills: Fighter, Mage, Thief and have all kinda abilities kinda tied into them.

The problem here is that Ken Rolston is a dumbfuck who doesn't understand how a decent character system should work ("the design goal was to have no skill that wasn't suitable as your main skill"). As a result all supportive skills that actually define and bring flavor to characters have been absorbed by main skills, which created generic as fuck characters.

Compare:
DF thief: short blade, sneaking, climbing, critical strike, backstab, swimming
MW thief: short blade, sneaking, athletics
OB thief: blade, sneaking, athletics

Ok, first of all, the medical skill didn't do diddly squat except speed up your healing during rest.

Isn't that how healing is supposed to work? I know we've been spoiled by insta-healing in games, but healing during rest makes much more sense. In a game where you can spend days in dungeons, often being interrupted when resting, medicince worked well. Granted, it would have been nice if .... (since that apply to many features in DF, I won't bother filling in the details, but the point is I'd rather have many features that could have been implemented better, than a handful of excellent features)

Swimming, ok yes, it had interesting mechanic of encumberance keeping you from floating and they mucked that up in MW. However, I fail to see why you link this directly to the warrior since a rogue or mage could be equally good, if not better swimmers considering they wear less...or were you trying to say that the warriors can't swim, this is unclear.

It was an example of a character, nothing more. You look at skills as isolated features, I look at them as character defining tools.

Also, you could still be a non magic warrior in MW, just raise those acrobatics and jump like the dickens (climbing would've help I'll admit).

You are surely jesting with me. You could play as a non-magic character in DF because you could do what magic characters could, but in different ways. That was not the case in MW.

... to learn their language peacefully...you mostly learned it by killing them.

See above about many flawed skills vs few perfect skills.

I'll admit, the checks and balances system was much better in Daggerfall, but you could still easily gain so much money and create mass amounts of ultra powerful items, raise your skills extremely high (albeit it took longer).

And your point here is?

Also, whereas DF allowed every character class to wear every type of armor with really no problems or experience, MW actually had different armor class skills which rewarded you for staying with light, medium, or heavy armors.

Too bad there was no real difference between light and heavy armor. If there was no Glass Armor, Light Armor skill would have been completely useless.

Weakness in holy places, yes but of course it depends on your opinion of what a vampire is in TES and whether or not TES lore really has any "holy" places or things, but let's not open that can of worms anymore.

Why not? Who said anything about vampires? And if DF had holy places, they sure as fuck have a place in TES lore.

And, I believe that in MW, faster healing was simply tied to endurance (as it also was in DF, but had a skill too...Medicine.), it was there, but it just didn't have a skill.

You already know my position on skills vs generic abilities.

All of which had you doing the same thing over and over again.

First, even different variations of the same thing beat the crap out of the same idiotic quests in MW. Second, DF random quests had way more variety than MW's handcrafted quests.

I can't say that MW did much better at the FEDEX style of questing which plagues many games today, but at least it attempted to put a little bit more story into the quests.

Attempted but failed miserably.

Then again, I play more on the field of slightly better limited number quests, than repetitive, boring, infinite quests.

90% of MW quests were god-fucking-awful. That's pretty much a fact. Bethesda should be ashamed that these quests were actually handcrafted.

MW's dungeon's were much more detailed...

MW "dungeons" were cellars, as someone noted in this thread. DF dungeons were actually scary-ass, fear-inspiring, deadly-to-the-unprepared dungeons.

Maybe teleportation is nice, but sometimes I wonder if it's a bit too much of a cheat.

It was a life-saver in the dungeons. I don't think it was a cheat. It was a mage's way, just like sneaking is a thief's way. Magic should be more than blasting someone with a fireball. It makes sense to customize a teleportation spell and mark the location you are going to teleport to.

Just my personal opinion here of course.

Likewise.

... but simply enjoyed MW than I am enjoying DF now.

Good for you.

 

[Solik]

Too bad there was no real difference between light and heavy armor. If there was no Glass Armor, Light Armor skill would have been completely useless.

Sorry for sniping, but that's not really true. Equipment weight meant a lot in MW. If you were carrying a lot, you would move slow and have very little jump distance. Not good for a spear or ranged weapon user or an acrobat. Armor tended to be, for me, the heaviest stuff in my inventory. Low-strength characters or characters that relied on speed often couldn't afford the weight penalty of armor beyond light without some great Feather resources (powerful spell, which means a magic-user, or tons of potions, which equals weight or Alchemist -- and then alchemists had to carry around heavy alchemical tools).

 

[Sabregirl]

Solik is partially right on that one although once the (tribunal I think) patch was applied you could use training of your misc skills to any of your stats so there were few actual "low strength" characters for long. And the races always started out with such weak preferences that playing an orc vs. playing a short (presumably wimpy) wood elf made little difference. Some mods made some much more interesting changes in that vien.

Still, the AR range in light armor was just plain broken. I never did manage to make a char that could use acrobatics effectively. Any armor at all (light or no) in inventory just seemed to kill any jump that you had, only magic enhancement allowed you to do anything interesting.

-S

 

[Vault Dweller]

Too bad there was no real difference between light and heavy armor. If there was no Glass Armor, Light Armor skill would have been completely useless.

Sorry for sniping, but that's not really true. Equipment weight meant a lot in MW.

I said "no REAL difference".

 

[Thrawn05]

Solik is partially right on that one although once the (tribunal I think) patch was applied you could use training of your misc skills to any of your stats so there were few actual "low strength" characters for long. And the races always started out with such weak preferences that playing an orc vs. playing a short (presumably wimpy) wood elf made little difference. Some mods made some much more interesting changes in that vien.

Still, the AR range in light armor was just plain broken. I never did manage to make a char that could use acrobatics effectively. Any armor at all (light or no) in inventory just seemed to kill any jump that you had, only magic enhancement allowed you to do anything interesting.

-S

From vanilla MW, all stats contribute to bonuses to attributes, it's just that major and minor skills were the ones that leveled you up.

To help with jumping, you not only needed a good acrobatic skill, but also low encumbrance (which means a high strength value).

So with say 100 acrobatic skills and 100 in strength, even in daedric armor you can jump pretty damn high. Now add some points to athletics and speed and you got yourself a really nimble character.

I do agree with light armor being broken in that fur, netch leather and wolf skin armors were too weak and rather rare. I do understand the lore of Nordic fur and wolf skin armors being rare since they are not the “local” type of armor, but still they needed to be beefed up a bit, since any points in unarmored skill really killed them.