Vapourware Daggerfall Unity isnt Vaporware

[DavidBVal]

I just don't get the appeal. Play an old game, or play a new game, but this "improvement" is disgusting (to me).

 

[Sykar]

You do not get the appeal of making a game easily playable on modern machines and fixing countless bugs while optionally giving you various mods and tweaks to adjust the game to your personal preferences?

 

[DavidBVal]

You do not get the appeal of making a game easily playable on modern machines and fixing countless bugs while optionally giving you various mods and tweaks to adjust the game to your personal preferences?

Daggerfall runs fine on modern machines. Sure, modding games is fine. The stuff being done with Arcanum, Gold Box or ToEE by great developers is legendary. Making a Unity clone of Daggerfall sure could help further modding and make it run better. That's awesome.

Turning beautiful, classic 2D games into what I see in those screenshots is what I don't get.

 

[Azdul]

I just don't get the appeal. Play an old game, or play a new game, but this "improvement" is disgusting (to me).

Early 3D engines does not scale correctly with more powerful hardware. It's the same story with other good games from around that time - like Might & Magic 6 or Duke Nukem 3D.

Besides the engine - original games are great - and were never 'replaced' by new games.

There is nothing nostalgic or worth preserving about low fps, falling through the floor or crashes due to running out of memory below 640 kB.

 

[Lemming42]

Vanilla DF Unity preserves the original graphics as well as can be expected, albeit with vastly increased draw distance, which most people would probably consider a good thing. It's easily the best way to play Daggerfall, since in addition to major QoL improvements it includes bugfixes galore. Language skills actually do something now.

 

[Sibylla]

imagine the hate openmw would get if it was made in unity and you couldnt run it on an old laptop without melting it down

 

[gurugeorge]

Vanilla DF Unity preserves the original graphics as well as can be expected, albeit with vastly increased draw distance, which most people would probably consider a good thing. It's easily the best way to play Daggerfall, since in addition to major QoL improvements it includes bugfixes galore. Language skills actually do something now.

Yeah I had a go with that, it's very nice. I'm too much of a graphics whore to be able to play such a game now, but I agree that the original artistic vision that was designed within the limitations of its time has more aesthetic appeal - again, for the most part, sometimes the upgraded graphics look quite good, like in dungeons and sometimes the countryside. But then you get those 2-d cardboard cutout figures with their weird AI-meld look and it all goes to cock. So on balance it's best to stick with the original graphics.

What they really need to do to complete the visual upgrade is to get a hold of the original art design drawings, if they still exist, and make fresh 3-d models from those. Then it would look all of a piece and have its own aesthetic charm and, ahem, unity.

 

[WilliamLarrySwirl]

Well, i never played Oblivion so i'm just going by hear say lmao.

This is how misinformation is born, like that one poster who said Oblivion doesn't have spellmaking system. It also contradicts with "at high level you only encounter high level enemies", and rats aren't exactly high level enemies.

Back on Daggerfall, I don't think I can say it enough, but I love the character creation on it, and I'm puzzled why no modder has tried to implement it to recent installments. Class advantages/disadvantages, distributing your starting attributes, generated background questions that shapes your stats and starting equipment and editing reputations with few factions. The only things I have found are these two mods.

I only played a few hours of Daggerfall but always planned to go back to it. But your comment reminded me of how great I thought the character creation was. What is the best way/mods to use for a basically first playthrough of Daggerfall today in your opinion.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Turning beautiful, classic 2D games into what I see in those screenshots is what I don't get.

"beautiful"

you guys are so hipster it's painful to read

 

[Funposter]

Daggerfall runs fine on modern machines.

I love playing Daggerfall with the original resolution and rendering but saying that it "runs fine" is just complete horseshit. It feels like absolute crap to play, the framerate is horrifically low and choppy, and it crashes every other hour. If you want to play it in DOSBox be my guest, because I'll be enjoying the improved Unity version which completely supersedes the original.

 

[MWaser]

Admittedly, the only time I played Daggerfall Unity was in its original "feature parity" alpha release, which honestly ended up being buggier on average than the old trashy Daggerfall on DOSbox (which I had also played before), but I imagine it got better since then. The old DOSbox version definitely never did "run fine" either.

imagine the hate openmw would get if it was made in unity and you couldnt run it on an old laptop without melting it down

Performance is definitely a major issue with Daggerfall Unity, but as much as I don't want to defend Unity itself in this (I don't consider it to be a particularly good engine, but it does run mobile games and its baseline requirements are really not that high as a result), the ridiculous performance CPU throttle of Daggerfall Unity is moreso the fault of the devs not bothering with any optimization works (presumably because the people working on it don't know anything about it, if the format of the save files was any indicator of what their technological background was, probably web work). Daggerfall Unity is actually more CPU demanding than OpenMW, which is how you know something really went wrong in the process.

 

[Azdul]

Daggerfall runs fine on modern machines.

I love playing Daggerfall with the original resolution and rendering but saying that it "runs fine" is just complete horseshit. It feels like absolute crap to play, the framerate is horrifically low and choppy, and it crashes every other hour. If you want to play it in DOSBox be my guest, because I'll be enjoying the improved Unity version which completely supersedes the original.

Swimming, climbing, strafing and moving backwards does not work correctly if the number of cycles under Dosbox is too high (>40000). If you set it lower - the framerate does not reach 60 fps and you fall through geometry more often.

With Daggerfall under Dosbox there is no winning - only degrees of losing.

 

[index.php]

https://www.gog.com/en/game/daggerfall_unity_gog_cut

Get your copy of the Daggerfall Unity - GOG Cut​

27 minutes ago

Play a reimagined version of the all-time RPG classic from The Elder Scrolls series. Daggerfall Unity – GOG Cut brings this amazing experience to modern gamers. It has been made possible, thanks to the efforts of the GamerZakh, a gaming content creator with a love for classics.


The GOG Cut of Daggerfall Unity doesn’t require any special actions on your behalf. All you have to do is download the game and simply launch it. Thanks to settings and mods that were selected by GamerZakh you can explore the rich world of Daggerfall with enhanced visuals and gameplay.

 

[agris]

first screenshot:

Spoiler

 

[Lemming42]

This AI-upscaling trend needs to end. It always looks like unimaginable shit, every time, without fail.

 

[MWaser]

pixelphobia is a mental illness

 

[cvv]

Yeah the original characters look WAY better and the original static images like the start screen or the map are fine but playing in the ancient "3D" engine is an absolutely atrocious experience only masochists and people suffering form a severe nostalgia brain damaging syndrome can endure.

I'd rather sacrifice the original chars for the disgusting weird blobs in the Unity version but also the ability to play in an actual engine. If I ever decided to play this game again, which is unlikely. The handcrafted content was p. good but Daggerfall is the reason I absolutely hate procedural generation today and can't stand games like No Man's Sky.

 

[index.php]

Modder drama!
https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?p=61801#p61801

 

[Bester]

I was going to say it's fucking horrible, but then I found out that GOG isn't selling Daggerfall Unity, it's free.

So yeah, modder drama. Who cares where your mod goes, you're the one who made it publicly available. Modder clowns.

 

[MWaser]

Yeah the original characters look WAY better and the original static images like the start screen or the map are fine but playing in the ancient "3D" engine is an absolutely atrocious experience only masochists and people suffering form a severe nostalgia brain damaging syndrome can endure.

I'd rather sacrifice the original chars for the disgusting weird blobs in the Unity version but also the ability to play in an actual engine. If I ever decided to play this game again, which is unlikely. The handcrafted content was p. good but Daggerfall is the reason I absolutely hate procedural generation today and can't stand games like No Man's Sky.

You can play DF Unity with the original graphics, this GOG repack is just a shitty mod compilation.

That being said, I sure hope DF Unity over the years became something actually more or less useable. While it had significant advantages over the original when I played at the stage when its alpha was released (feature parity with the original) it was still kind of buggy, and the optimization of the game was absolutely abysmal (used up more of my CPU than games released in current decade)

 

[DDZ]

I tried playing Daggerfall in Dosbox multiple times, but I ran into the same problem I have with a lot of Dosbox games, I can never get the mouse feel right, always feels off. Sometimes a little, other times a lot.

So I gave this Unity version a go and since I never played the original I can live with the ugly upscaled sprites, this is all I know.

So far I managed to get my ass kicked in the tutorial dungeon 4 times.

 

[Sarkile]

I tried playing Daggerfall in Dosbox multiple times, but I ran into the same problem I have with a lot of Dosbox games, I can never get the mouse feel right, always feels off. Sometimes a little, other times a lot.

So I gave this Unity version a go and since I never played the original I can live with the ugly upscaled sprites, this is all I know.

So far I managed to get my ass kicked in the tutorial dungeon 4 times.

The background that gets you an ebony dagger helps a lot, but that beginner dungeon doesn't pull its punches.

 

[mindx2]

Modder drama!
https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?p=61801#p61801

...respect modders' rights...

Rights? What rights? Only in a modders mind.

 

[spockthewok]

AI upscales must be stopped

Spoiler

 

[Lazing Dirk]

Modder drama!
https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?p=61801#p61801

And yet, on the nexus where the modder uploaded their mod:

Author's instructions

• The original models extracted from ARCH3D.BSA, as well as the contents of BLOCKS.BSA and MAPS.BSA that the json files were generated from, are all the property of Bethesda Softworks and your use of them are governed by the terms and conditions they have imposed.
• Daggerfall Unity and Daggerfall Modelling are both licensed under the MIT License.
• As far as my modifications to the models and json files here are concerned, I am licensing them under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

GOG attributed the author as required. Getting the author's permission to include the mod was a courtesy, not a requirement. If they didn't want people using their shit willy-nilly then that's their mistake. I don't know what licenses the other modders used, but a quick look at that thread indicates at least one of them is changing theirs. I'm not saying that it was necessarily the right thing for GOG to do, but claiming they "don't have permisson" is bollocks, and I hope someone called them out on it.