Vapourware Daggerfall Unity isnt Vaporware

[rusty_shackleford]

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.

modders don't understand how licensing works at all
that's my one main takeaway from interacting with them for years. They can't grasp this simple concept. They all seem to think licensing is something you can just revoke at a moment's notice anything they get their feelings hurt, or can ignore when it benefits them.

 

[DDZ]

 

[Valdetiosi]

See, I guess people don't like jaggy sprites, but these upscaling details on character portraits makes them look weird and ugly?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

damn oblivion looking good

 

[Lemming42]

All Daggerfall graphical "upgrades" are doomed to look weird no matter what. There was someone a while ago who tried, with demonstrable skill, to redraw the character sprites by hand. The results looked good when viewed in isolation but terrible in-game. Everything in the game world is abstracted (large empty rooms, nobody moving bar a couple of rarely-seen animated characters, etc) to the point where pixellated graphics end up looking a lot more natural.

 

[Jarmaro]

I'm actually liking those updates to the Daggerfall, it used to look too dated for me to check it out, but now with the pack of mods from GOG it actually looks playable. Funny, just the other day I saw Daggerfall recreation on Skyrim's engine and it looked interesting. I guess I'll try the moded original instead.

 

[agris]

jarmaro you have my sympathies. With no known cure for bad taste, I’m afraid your condition is terminal

 

[Jarmaro]

Okay, I played it for an hour and I'm getting a bit frustrated, unsure if it's because of my skill or botched character creation, but both magical imps and skeletons appear to be downright immortal. I tried to go for a battlemage, but both of my skills don't kill anything and regenerating to full health takes waiting over 20 hours. Should I attack skeletons in some specific way to kill them? Or just a full character reroll.
As for the game itself, it looks suprisngly good once you play it. It actually plays and looks better than Morrowind.

 

[Lemming42]

Magic gets insanely powerful later on in Daggerfall but, unless you're very set on being a mage, for a first playthrough it might be easier to just go with a melee build with Long Blade or Short Blade as your primary combat skill, accompanied by either Dodging or Block, depending on what equipment you want to use. You could also try hand-to-hand which gets absurdly strong by the endgame but has a few drawbacks (no guilds have it as a required skill, there are no trainers, and you need to focus on three attributes - STR, AGI and SPD - to get the most out of it).

If you're still around level one or two, though, the skeletons are likely to rip you to shreds no matter what build you have. Best bet for Privateer's Hold is to just run for it, honestly, straight to the exit without stopping. With DF Unity's enhanced movement, it's not too hard to dodge the skeleton near the lift and leap up onto it before he can get to you. Stop to kill a few rats or bats if you really want to get some combat training in.

 

[MWaser]

Magic gets insanely powerful later on in Daggerfall but, unless you're very set on being a mage, for a first playthrough it might be easier to just go with a melee build with Long Blade or Short Blade as your primary combat skill, accompanied by either Dodging or Block, depending on what equipment you want to use. You could also try hand-to-hand which gets absurdly strong by the endgame but has a few drawbacks (no guilds have it as a required skill, there are no trainers, and you need to focus on three attributes - STR, AGI and SPD - to get the most out of it).

If you're still around level one or two, though, the skeletons are likely to rip you to shreds no matter what build you have. Best bet for Privateer's Hold is to just run for it, honestly, straight to the exit without stopping. With DF Unity's enhanced movement, it's not too hard to dodge the skeleton near the lift and leap up onto it before he can get to you. Stop to kill a few rats or bats if you really want to get some combat training in.

Daggerfall ... Block

Are we playing the same game?

Also yeah if you want to stand a chance in daggerfall early game, you need high speed as the biggest necessity, since the attack speed difference between 70 speed and 50 speed (let alone under 50) is insanely large.

 

[Lemming42]

^ You're right, what the hell am I talking about re: block. I've just been playing Morrowind for the past couple weeks which has addled my brain.

 

[Jarmaro]

Yep, it was the botched character creation, after arriving at the town and trying out the mage guild I realized how dumb my skill distribution is so I restarted and did it by hand. The difference is staggering, the dungeon is a breeze, the skeleton was dead after the first attempt. Now it's pure pleasure.

 

[Jarmaro]

How hard can one quest be? The game told me in tutorial that I just need to ask and the opportunity will arise. So when a scared inkeeper asked me to save his daughter I obviously accepted. It's just one dungeon.
...it's been around an hour and I feel broken. I've always had bad space awarness in games, my achilles heel. Just a few hours with Daggerfall and I question anything I've ever read about TES series on Codex. I've played every single one except Arena now. Is this that classic game design that people want? Endless, soulless, computer generated dungeons full of scaled to level enemies? Standing and swinging sword at the skeleton endlessly? This is just brutal. I genuinely might not finish this dungeon, not even sure if this is the right one, because it's full of bats and undead while the inkeeper talked about orcs. Jesus, this is too much.

Spoiler

 

[index.php]

 

[Lemming42]

How hard can one quest be? The game told me in tutorial that I just need to ask and the opportunity will arise. So when a scared inkeeper asked me to save his daughter I obviously accepted. It's just one dungeon.
...it's been around an hour and I feel broken. I've always had bad space awarness in games, my achilles heel. Just a few hours with Daggerfall and I question anything I've ever read about TES series on Codex. I've played every single one except Arena now. Is this that classic game design that people want? Endless, soulless, computer generated dungeons full of scaled to level enemies? Standing and swinging sword at the skeleton endlessly? This is just brutal. I genuinely might not finish this dungeon, not even sure if this is the right one, because it's full of bats and undead while the inkeeper talked about orcs. Jesus, this is too much.

Spoiler

Enemies tend to spawn based on your level, as long as the dungeon's name lines up with what's in your quest log then you're in the right place.

You may want to play with DF Unity's Smaller Dungeons feature, which makes random sidequest dungeons significantly less sprawling, though getting absolutely destroyed by every single dungeon is a big part of the Daggerfall experience.

Arena's worth a try if you've never played it before, btw, there was some discussion in another thread not long ago about how it's actually a cut above Daggerfall in a few ways.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Another one.

The code for his mod is literally MIT licensed.
https://github.com/magicono43/DFU-M.../blob/main/Scripts/RestWarningIfUnwellMain.cs

Unofficial Block Location and Model fixes

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.

Modders don't understand licensing.

 

[index.php]

How hard can one quest be? The game told me in tutorial that I just need to ask and the opportunity will arise. So when a scared inkeeper asked me to save his daughter I obviously accepted. It's just one dungeon.
...it's been around an hour and I feel broken. I've always had bad space awarness in games, my achilles heel. Just a few hours with Daggerfall and I question anything I've ever read about TES series on Codex. I've played every single one except Arena now. Is this that classic game design that people want? Endless, soulless, computer generated dungeons full of scaled to level enemies? Standing and swinging sword at the skeleton endlessly? This is just brutal. I genuinely might not finish this dungeon, not even sure if this is the right one, because it's full of bats and undead while the inkeeper talked about orcs. Jesus, this is too much.

Spoiler

You can make the dungeons smaller: https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?t=1689

 

[Jarmaro]

I vastly understimated the dungeon. I turned out to be THREE times as big as I explored so far. Now that I've finally found the door forward...they don't work. No information, nothing. Nothing happens when I try to enter. Not sure what I'm supposed to do, but I'm sure as hell not continuing to explore, fighting another army of bats and skeletons is too much. Any ideas?

Spoiler

 

[rusty_shackleford]

 

[Jarmaro]

What do you mean by this

 

[rusty_shackleford]

What do you mean by this

I mean your screenshots look like someone decided to use a sharpening shader and turned it to max
if you like it, keep playing, I won't judge. Just thought it looked funny.

 

[V_K]

How hard can one quest be? The game told me in tutorial that I just need to ask and the opportunity will arise. So when a scared inkeeper asked me to save his daughter I obviously accepted. It's just one dungeon.
...it's been around an hour and I feel broken. I've always had bad space awarness in games, my achilles heel. Just a few hours with Daggerfall and I question anything I've ever read about TES series on Codex. I've played every single one except Arena now. Is this that classic game design that people want? Endless, soulless, computer generated dungeons full of scaled to level enemies? Standing and swinging sword at the skeleton endlessly? This is just brutal. I genuinely might not finish this dungeon, not even sure if this is the right one, because it's full of bats and undead while the inkeeper talked about orcs. Jesus, this is too much.

Spoiler

DF is basically the game that says: "Oh, you're one of those people who think automapping makes dungeon crawling too easy? Well, think again".

 

[Sacibengala]

Another one.

The code for his mod is literally MIT licensed.
https://github.com/magicono43/DFU-M.../blob/main/Scripts/RestWarningIfUnwellMain.cs

Unofficial Block Location and Model fixes

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.

Modders don't understand licensing.

To be honest. This looks real bad for the modders in question, at the end. Because it seems that they don't want the gog users to use their mod. GOG is far away from perfect, it's getting worse by the day, actually, but in this case it's just stupid from the modders part to bitch about this.

 

[ADL]

I don't remember modders being like this twenty years ago and I certainly don't remember people putting shit behind paywalls but they should all fuck off. Modding is performed as a public good to further enhance a game for the sake of improving the game for yourself and others. Once it's made available, it should be available to fork and further modify for others and allowed to repack for people who don't want to spend an entire day or two downloading and configuring modlists.

As long as you're being credited, I don't see the problem and I'd certainly never throw an autistic fit over a company like GOG hosting a repack of a game including my mod and distributing it for free. That's insane.

 

[markec]

Okay, I played it for an hour and I'm getting a bit frustrated, unsure if it's because of my skill or botched character creation, but both magical imps and skeletons appear to be downright immortal. I tried to go for a battlemage, but both of my skills don't kill anything and regenerating to full health takes waiting over 20 hours. Should I attack skeletons in some specific way to kill them? Or just a full character reroll.
As for the game itself, it looks suprisngly good once you play it. It actually plays and looks better than Morrowind.

Here is a hint for a new player, travel to the city of Daggerfall but plan the trip in such way for you to arrive in middle of the night.