Review RPG Codex Retrospective Review: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996)

[Crooked Bee]

Tags: Bethesda Softworks; Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

After reviewing Arena, the Elder Scrolls game that started it all, esteemed community member Deuce Traveler now moves on to the 1996 The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall. Daggerfall is famous, or infamous, for both its scope and its sprawling randomized dungeons, which I dearly loved, but how does it fare today?

Deuce Traveler has all the answers.

Ah, Daggerfall. Both stunning in its depth and a hot mess when it comes to its glaring bugs. It's a game which doesn’t deserve the hype lavished on it by its nostalgic fans, despite being groundbreaking for its time. I spent months playing it, and my feelings continually wavered between frustration and amazement. I found Arena to be more fun, but Daggerfall to be better structured. I found Morrowind to be more immersive, but Daggerfall’s main plot to be more interesting. There is one thing that most of us can agree upon, though - it’s a better game than Oblivion.

[...] No review of Daggerfall is truly complete without mentioning the massive amount of pixelated boobs that this game provides. And no, I’m not talking about fools. I’m talking tits, jugs, gazongas, hooters, knockers, fun bags, bazoombas, cha-chas, num-nums, cantaloupes, flapdoodles, mounds, torpedoes, rack, neeners, soombas, mammaries and milk bombs. They are simply everywhere, although they do change from location to location. If you're a religious type, the finest examples can be found in temples dedicated to Kynareth, goddess of air, and Dibella, goddess of love (and there are also barechested men in Dibella’s temples for all the female gamers out there). The sophisticated aficionado can also find a varied assortment of bare sweater puppies in personal chambers inside castles, at some mage guilds, on monsters in dungeons and among the daedra princesses. Unfortunately, we would have to wait until The Witcher to get in-game collectible cards, but there’s always CTRL-F5 in DOSBox. I used to think that some of those Oblivion mods went a bit over the top, but after playing Daggerfall, it's tempting to view them as a return to form.

[...] I will admit that some of the side quests are complex in clever ways. One quest that stood out for me was a Knights of the Dragon quest where I was asked to help a witch hiding in the depths of a dungeon. Upon finding her, she tasked me with locating and delivering a young girl to her to so that she could become the witch's apprentice. I took up the quest, but when I approached the girl she screamed for help and I found myself in a running battle with the nearby guards who followed me all the way to the dungeon. After delivering the girl, I still had to fight my way out of the dungeon, I took a reputation hit with the local people, and the next time I talked to a random child I was told off by the little tyke. All this was quite clever, but also a bit messed up. The leadership of the Knights of the Dragon distrusts magic-users, so why this was one of their faction quests is still a mystery to me. Once I realized I was kidnapping the girl, I could have turned her over to the authorities and asked for forgiveness, but that would have resulted in a loss of reputation points with the knighthood for the failed quest, instead of being rewarded for making the more moral, citizen-friendly decision. Also, the witch was near an underwater cavern, so to get to her I had to swim through a crowd of soldiers who were standing in place waiting for me on the pool floor without drowning. Have I mentioned that the citizens of Daggerfall's cities can walk on water? In summary, the copy-and-paste nature of Daggerfall's side quests and dungeons leads to an endless stream of glitches and nonsensical moments that emphasizes the game's design flaws, harming immersion more than it helps it.​

Read the full article: RPG Codex Retrospective Review: The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall (1996)

 

[Tramboi]

The rand() game.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Cool! Glad to see this is up! My next review might take awhile because Morrowind is kind of a large game.

 

[Perkel]

good review !

 

[Darth Roxor]

Wow, has this article even gone through an editor?!

 

[Luzur]

Good enough for us, since i doubt anyone except codexers will read it anyway.

 

[Overboard]

It's a game which doesn’t deserve the hype lavished on it by its nostalgic fans, despite being groundbreaking for its time.

Perhaps the hype is/was because it was groundbreaking for it's time, not to mention still being a pretty damn good game?

 

[HiddenX]

Good review Deuce Traveler - I hope to see more retro-reviews from you!

 

[warmonger3]

If anyone wants to play there is a pretty easy setup with a slew of fan made patches and content for modern systems here: http://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN

 

[Sceptic]

Good review even if I disagree with a lot of the points brought up.

It's a game which doesn’t deserve the hype lavished on it by its nostalgic fans, despite being groundbreaking for its time.

Deuce, I think you're one of our most monocled members, but I'm going to have to tear you apart for this sentence, because it's pure crap. As you probably already know I dislike the whole "groundbreaking for its time" rationalization. Depending on how you look at it it's either a tautology or an oxymoron, but in either case it's a meaningless statement. If it's groundbreaking then it's groundbreaking. That time has passed or that someone else has copied the groundbreaking part doesn't retroactively make it non-groundbreaking so we have to specify that it was only so "for its time". Which brings us to the whole nostalgia crap; YOU JUST SAID THAT IT IS GROUNDBREAKING! You have JUST justified it being lavished with praise. The whole paragraph reads like IGN; let's dismiss the groundbreaking part by claiming that it was so "only for its time" and that the fans are only hyping it for nostalgia and totally not for being groundbreaking, even though we just admitted that it was. WTF Deuce!

In contrast, in Daggerfall you play an Imperial agent, sent to investigate the murder of a Breton king and find out what happened to a secret message sent by the Emperor to a trusted member of the nobility.

This is another great thing about Daggerfall's plot, so subtle that everyone overlooks it: the real reason the Emperor sends you to the Illiac Bay is to recover the letters. Finding out what happened to Lysandus is only an excuse to mask how important the letters are, and there are hints sprinkled throughout that the Emperor doesn't actually care about Lysandus. The ambiguity and subtlety that permeates EVERYTHING in the story is one of the reasons I consider it to be one of the best made for a CRPG.

even with the Increased Magery advantage, spellcasters still run out of magicka often and have to fall back to melee weapons to defeat their enemies.

Two words: Spell Absorption.

I feel you didn't spend enough time detailing the amazing complexity of the character system, but then again one could easily write a book about it, so I don't blame you. There are a TON of things that you can do. You don't need the 3x magic bonus if you play a non-spellcaster, and unlike Arena it's a perfectly viable class here. The critical weaknesses are huge disadvantages that you can then balance with bonuses elsewhere (and of course you can negate some with the right race choice). There's Spell Absorption, which is a HUGE benefit to spellcasters and also the easiest way to get yourself killed if you're not careful. The background questions you can answer will also affect starting gear and can get you some very nifty items. The only character creation that beats this one is Battlespire's and that one is probably the most interesting and complex one I have ever seen in a CRPG.

You can forget about being a diplomat or a pure rogue, as it will be prohibitively difficult to win the game using only stealth, diplomacy, or lockpicking skills.

Diplomacy/stealth is actually a very possible and fun way to play. The Language skills will simply make the associated enemies sit around and not attack you on sight. Considering the range of enemy races that they cover, you can pretty much have almost half of the enemies in the game become completely non-hostile. Stealth can take care of the rest. There are almost no fights that you HAVE to win in the game - the only plot-critical one is finding and killing Lysandus's murderer, but there's an alternative non-fighting route to achieve the same goal in that dungeon.

For example, when I had around 20 skill points invested into my lockpick skill, I was very rarely able to unlock doors, as opposed to the 20% chance I thought I would have. However, once this same skill was brought up to the mid-40s, I was able to easily unlock the vast majority of locked doors I encountered.

Each door has different lockpick difficulty. IIRC city doors are the easiest and it's possible to grind your skill on them, though I never bothered that much (other than to rob stores blind, which is always fun)

Guild quests are randomly generated, and thus can be exploited so you get an easy one via save scumming. At first I tried to play the game straight, taking whatever quest was given to me without trying to game the system.

Dude... DUDE! Just turn down the quest. See the next one. Turn it down too if you don't like it. This isn't gaming the system, it's playing DF the way it's supposed to be played. You were trying to play it the way every other RPG in existence has conditioned us to play, and this is NOT how you play DF.

But artifacts do not last very long and will disappear after limited uses

Like all other items artifacts can be repaired. Enchanting one of your items with the repair ability means you can cycle artifacts, using one while the other sits in the inventory and auto-repairs. Besides some don't use up their charges unless you activate them, and are super good even without the specials (IIRC Ebony Mail)

One thing that Morrowind did better, however, was making the quests unique instead of randomly generated, therefore enabling guild politics and regional concerns to come to the fore and have greater narrative weight.

DF guild quests are unique. Just because they are repeatable and the specific names change doesn't mean the quest is entirely random. And as such a LOT of guild quests interact with other guilds, the covens, the provincial laws, and some even allow you to betray the guild itself, opening up additional quests. The system is FAR more complex and better accomplished than Morrowind's, and the guild reputation interplay is spectacular.

In Arena, leveling up was much more difficult but still sought after as you could notice your power increasing compared to that of the enemy. In Daggerfall, you could make a graph where the advantages to leveling peak at around level 20 and then decrease steadily due to level-scaling of the enemies and diminishing returns on further level gains. Again, this is bad design.

This is pure bullshit. Arena had the worst level scaling in the entire series, even worse than Oblivion. The stats of all enemies scaled EXACTLY to your level. Daggerfall ONLY scales the "class" enemies, the humanoids that have the playable classes. Those do scale with your level but NOTHING else does. A rat will always be the same rat with the same stats. Same for the ancient vampire. You can encounter rats at level 1 or at level 20. You can encounter ancient liches at level 2 (this HAS happened to me, and others have reported similar experiences in the various Daggerfall threads) or level 20. They will always have the same stats. The only reason you notice the power curve in Arena is because spellcasting is so utterly and irredeemably broken that by the time your Battlemage has a good defensive custom spell and a good offensive custom spell you can one-shot everything no matter their stats. That's not good design BTW.

The criticisms I’ve expressed do not mean that this is a bad game, and I would rather describe it as a brilliant gem with numerous imperfections.

My biggest gripe with the review is that it doesn't reflect this conclusion at all. You talked about many of the most brilliant things in the game without really explaining why they're brilliant (character system, faction system, quests, Spellmaker, Item Maker, Vampirism and Lycanthropy, the Witch Covens, and so on) but a lot of the imperfections you focus on are either plain wrong due to misunderstanding how some systems work (level scaling, factions and reputations) or are insanely nitpicky (bugs). Yes of course it's buggy. It's a fucking Bethesda game. If you think Arena or Morrowind are less buggy, you've been playing them with a decade's worth of unofficial patches and didn't use those for Daggerfall, which isn't exactly fair. And you chose to harp on the Void bug of all things. I've had it happen less than a dozen times over TWENTY YEARS of replaying this game. You didn't even mention save game corruptions though, which can and still do happen, just as frequently, and are MUCH more serious because a simple Recall won't get you out of it. Oh BTW there're some console commands to bypass the Void bug, so it's really not serious enough to warrant a whole paragraph.

Despite my own picking it's a good read. A lot of my problems with the review stem from you trying to play it like every other CRPG, the way we have been badly conditioned to play: complete all quests, if you pick one quest then you MUST complete it! No abandoning allowed! No turning down! No failure! This isn't Daggerfall. Daggerfall is great and unique because it's much more organic. Sometimes failing a quest is better, depending on what you're actually trying to achieve. This isn't a completionist's game, not one you play "just to see the end". Oblivion is a "sandbox" because you can ignore the MQ and go pick flowers. Daggerfall is truly an open game because you can ignore (or better yet, fail) the MQ and go become head of a guild, turn into a Vampire (with all the disadvantages), join a Witch Coven and find out from them how to get cured, become so hated in one province that you have to permanently move your base of operations elsewhere, betray your quest giver because it increases your standing with the Law, betray your guild to open up additional quest chains, or because it helps another guild you're trying to join instead... the possibilities are endless, and they are entirely supported by in-game mechanics. THIS is why Daggerfall is great. No other TES has even attempted this.

 

[Azalin]

No review of Daggerfall is truly complete without mentioning the massive amount of pixelated boobs that this game provides. And no, I’m not talking about fools. I’m talking tits, jugs, gazongas, hooters, knockers, fun bags, bazoombas, cha-chas, num-nums, cantaloupes, flapdoodles, mounds, torpedoes, rack, neeners, soombas, mammaries and milk bombs. They are simply everywhere, although they do change from location to location. If you're a religious type, the finest examples can be found in temples dedicated to Kynareth, goddess of air, and Dibella, goddess of love (and there are also barechested men in Dibella’s temples for all the female gamers out there). The sophisticated aficionado can also find a varied assortment of bare sweater puppies in personal chambers inside castles, at some mage guilds, on monsters in dungeons and among the daedra princesses. Unfortunately, we would have to wait until The Witcher to get in-game collectible cards, but there’s always CTRL-F5 in DOSBox. I used to think that some of those Oblivion mods went a bit over the top, but after playing Daggerfall, it's tempting to view them as a return to form.

That's an impressive number of synonyms there son

Also for devoting an entire paragraph of the review to boobs

 

[worldsmith]

Preference for size over sound design is really the core of the problem when it comes to Daggerfall. The game is both impressive for its size and scope, and suffers badly for it.

Lots of games would do well to "suffer" so "badly" (i.e., have a size and scope more like Daggerfall's).

Purchasing a house

Should have just bought a ship and stowed your stuff there. (That's what I did. Don't recall if I ever bothered buying a house. That would seem too much like "settling down" anyways.)

Or you could just do what most people in the real world do and get a loan from a bank to buy a house (or ship) instead of complaining about how you can't afford one until later. (Loans have to be paid back within one year, though if you fail to pay it back on time it's apparently just a regional reputation hit. If you screw up and fall short of cash at the end of the year, you could always do a short-sale on your house and hope that along with what cash you have is enough to pay off the loan. Then you could immediately take another loan so you can buy a house again, and try to make your next year a bit more productive.)

towards the last portions of the game

What is this "last portions" you speak of? The game never ends.

Once I started realizing that the dungeon side quests I was sneaking through were populated with archliches and liches instead of the zombies and skeletons I had grown used to engaging, I knew it was time to have my rogue-like swordsman to finish his business in Daggerfall and retire.

What? No. This is when it starts getting fun! Because you're tempted to collect high-powered souls to make high-powered gear, so you cast soul-trap on every ancient liche and vampire you come across... and then eventually you mess up, casting soul-trap when you have no soul gems on you, but you don't realize that, and you just keep fighting and fighting as your health vanishes, wondering when the hell this damn thing is going to die, until you finally realize your mistake and freak out, fearing that you have just created an unkillable ancient liche by permanently trapping his soul in his decrepit body. Run away! Run away! (Fun times. I would really like to see a lot more side-effects/consequences like that when playing with magic in RPGs.)

I found sellable equipment that had no special properties, but due to some overflow bug showed up as worth more than 65,000 coins.

I never ran into that one. Sounds like a good down payment on that house you were talking about though.

Once you are stuck in this void, there is no getting out unless you are a spellcaster who prepped for this eventuality with a Mark spell, meaning that once again this game prefers its magic-users over other class archetypes.

Hmm, my memories perhaps aren't reliable, but I thought I did manage to get back from the void by "slipping through a crack" - the same way you get into the void in the first place. (E.g., levitate on top of a dungeon section with a seam in it, wait for levitate to wear off, and then work that seam until you fall through - right back into the dungeon.)

Using a bug to prove the game prefers magic-users though... that's some "special" logic there.

I've had it happen less than a dozen times over TWENTY YEARS of replaying this game.

I've had it happen much more often than that... but mostly because I've entered the void on purpose many times.

It's real easy to get into the void if you know what you're doing. And that's because certain types of actions in certain types of areas are just way more likely (in some cases essentially guaranteed) to have that result.

Anyways, I just basically LARP'ed my way through it - the void was obviously a magical dimension of darkness accessible via cracks between worlds.

 

[Excidium II]

I like all the exposed skin in Daggerfall. Before puritanism and modesty took over CRPGs.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

I like all the exposed skin in Daggerfall. Before puritanism and modesty took over CRPGs.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

Discounting purposefully edgy shit of course.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Or like the nudity in Diablo? Or the various nude statues, art and monsters in other games?

The nudity in Daggerfall was purposely edgy shit. So was the in game sex novel. All videogame nudity is just edgy shit.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Or like the nudity in Diablo? Or the various nude statues, art and monsters in other games?

The nudity in Daggerfall was purposely edgy shit. So was the in game sex novel. All videogame nudity is just edgy shit.

homo

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

kajhit have barbed penises - daggerfall taught me that

 

[laclongquan]

People keep trying to get me play Daggerfall and Arena. Pixxellated graphics keep turning me off though~

 

[MicoSelva]

I would call Daggerfall 'experimental' rather than 'groundbreaking'. It was a new kind of approach to make a living, digital world, very ambitious and bold. While it ultimately failed, it was a good test for what works and what does not, and influenced countless following games, making it one of the most important RPGs ever made (but not one of the best).

Anyway, thanks for the review, Deuce Traveler .

 

[paintinggrey]

I like all the exposed skin in Daggerfall. Before puritanism and modesty took over CRPGs.

"Hello ladies, look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me."

 

[Black_Willow]

I like how Sceptic and other bethestards get bottombothered.

 

[Gregz]

The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall ranked #35 in the RPG Codex’s Top 72 RPGs listing, being beaten out by such RPGs as Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and Gothic, while Daggerfall was considered better than Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. And that feels about right. Daggerfall is a good enough game that it should be something any fan of RPGs takes the time to experience and admire, but for those new to the genre there are better entry points to recommend.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that until rather recently, the Codex preferred Daggerfall to Morrowind in polls and such?

 

[Sceptic]

I would call Daggerfall 'experimental' rather than 'groundbreaking'.

I don't see why the two have to be exclusive. And I'd call it "one of the best despite flaws", the same way Arcanum is. It does some things better than any other CRPG (the main story and the political complexity, the faction system, character creation), it has some great mechanics that ultimately don't work as well as they should because of severe flaws (character advancement and the bizarre way leveling works, one of the most extensive dungeoneering experiences marred by the copy/pasta design, the quest system which is great but does require you to radically change the way you look at quests and factions) and then there's the experimental stuff that ultimately doesn't really work (the huge world that you can explore in real-time but that has absolutely nothing, the insane number of NPCs that have absolutely nothing to say). As far as I'm concerned the game still falls north of great, not just because of the experimental stuff, but also because of the stuff that does work.

Anyway Deuce Traveler I think I came across harsher than I intended in my previous post (aside from the IGN accusation, which you totally deserve ). I really like your review, but there's not much I can say about the parts of it that I agree with, so naturally my post ends up being about the points where I disagree. Great job all in all

You really should play Battlespire BTW, even if you don't want to review it. It's missing a lot of the more experimental aspects of DF, but this means you might actually enjoy it more, as it's a straight dungeon crawler with a completely hand-crafted and immensely good dungeon. I'd even recommend Redguard, which is not a CRPG but is not bad at all as far as action/adventure games go, the biggest problem with it is getting it to run in DOSBox.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Yes, "groundbreaking for its time" implies it can be made non-groundbreaking in the future if some other game breaks the ground even harder. We know the intended meaning was "technically impressive for 1996 but that alone doesn't make it as good as the fans say", though.