Daggerfall question

[Six]

Almost everyone else is mostly right --> Arena - Daggerfall - Morrowind.

Daggerfall was unbelievable at it's release - a massive world ripe for exploration and open to you choice of play style. But for the love of god avoid it today - the Doom-ish psudo-3D is only attractive for the sake of nostalgia and the game is too huge to suffer through it otherwise. I never really had a problem with combat in Morrowind or Daggerfall, it's not as straight forward as some games but it works well within the game world IMHO.

As for combat, don't - I mean DO NOT - use weapons that are not your primary focus. You will miss 90% of the time and start to complain about combat sucking If you want to use more weapons start over and make a custom class or sell a bunch of ebony or glass junk and train em all up.

Besides, combat isn't the focus of TES games.

#6

After checking that link to Moby games...anyone play the other two games?

[Victrix]

Redguard was decent, but marred by technical problems - not bugs per se, but just a pain in the ass to get working, as it came out at that awkward 3dfx transition phase, and I'm not even sure if its 3d accelerated without it.

Battlespire is even worse in that respect, being right on the cusp of win95ness, meaning its a hybrid dos game, and something of a nightmare to get running.

Those issues aside, Redguard was a pretty good adventure game, and Battlespire was an interesting take on one specific piece of Elder Scrolls lore.

I'm looking forward to Bloodmoon a bit, and their next game a lot. I hope they spread their wings a bit and shoot for the impossible again. Morrowind is a really great game, but I still don't like it as much as Ultima 7 in many ways, or Daggerfall in some ways.

[Ragnarok the Red]

I remember just how freaking big a game Daggerfall was with the insane number of cities and NPCs (felt like you were navigating coastal China or India at times the pop density was so huge) and remember reading how the game was supposed to be even BIGGER but they stopped because they ran out of space on the CD-Rom and didn't want to add another disc to the game.

I remember having both Redguard and Battlespire and both of them sucking considerably, even on decent hardware.

[jiji]

I managed to get a lot of enjoyment out of Battlespire, despite its utter badness. It plays more like a System Shock or Ultima Underworld, with its tight environments and level-based design. It was perhaps the buggiest game I've ever enjoyed (maybe even more buggier than Trespasser). I remember giving up after discovering that the boats on a level midway through just...didn't work. I also remember perusing random text files on the CD and finding reports of bugs that hadn't been fixed in the retail version.

I suppose what I enjoyed most about the game was the character development (the RPG kind). I remember being very addicted to that. The level of customizability was comparable to Daggerfall. Also, the writing and dialogue were pretty damned good, and you had a lot of freedom in your interactions with other characters in the game (you could talk to practically any monsters, and there were hardly any cookiecutter NPCs other than them).

After I got my first 3Dfx card (a Voodoo Rush, woohoo!), I was anticipating playing Battlespire with the card, as support for Voodoo was touted in the game's ads. I wasn't too happy when I discovered that it had no such thing. I guess the main problem was that all the characters in the game were sprite-based, so 4MB of VRAM just wouldn't have cut it.

One of the most distinctive things about the game is the way it carried forward the detailed paperdoll equipment screen from Daggerfall...nudity and all. The key difference between the two was that Battlespire's equip screen was high-resolution, and the art was pretty nice, IIRC.

I don't know what happened to the game during development, but it definitely had a lot of wasted potential. I never did try it with the patch...I wonder if the game isn't broken with it installed?

[skelly]

Battlespire sucked. I got to the second level of the dungeon and had to quit... It was too awful, and got very hard. It would have actually been worse if I had created my character without the HP regenerating ability, which seemed essential to wringing any enjoyment at all out of that wretched game.

Character creation was fun, IIRC. That's about the only good thing I can say about it.

As for Daggerfall's combat, while it was stupid-simple, it was still more interesting than Morrowind's. I really dislike Morrowind's "move character to choose your attack" system. I'd rather just move the mouse, ala Daggerfall. Feels better.

Six sez, re: Daggerfall...
But for the love of god avoid it today - the Doom-ish psudo-3D is only attractive for the sake of nostalgia and the game is too huge to suffer through it otherwise.

I would disagree. I played Daggerfall for the first time in 2000, and enjoyed it greatly. The only reason I'd recommend against playing it is that it IS buggy as hell, even with the final patch. If you don't have much tolerance for mucking with things to get around bugs, this is not the game for you.

Btw, the engine's actually a fair deal more advanced than Doom's, and I find the game's visuals and music to be very atmospheric and enjoyable. The snow is especially nice.

[AaronChance]

I was getting Arena confused with Battlespire. Combination of no sleep and too much caffine addled the brain cells.

Morrowind can be set to Daggerfall's more simple attacks. It's what I used in both xbox and pc versions. Chosing the attacks by moving just made that part of combat even more tedious. Ranged fighting was pretty fun though, especially all the magical tricks you could use like levitation, invisiblity, etc.

[GameHED]

Daggerfall was pretty good with control imo. You could either play it as an action game (turn up the difficulty for speed) or as a slow paced rpg. Combat to me wasn't what drew me to the game so much as the huge world and the atmoshpere and freedom. The varied midi music was really great (morrowinds music is no where near as varied and there is just something missing in its music that was in daggerfall) and was another high point. The music would change to reflect the mood for example rather than play from a random list like in morrowind. If the weather or time of day would change, so too would the music. If it was dark, creepy and you were tiptoeing through a dungeoun; or if it was just a bright sunny morning, music suitable for that situation would come on.

As for graphics: no they weren't pseudo 3d at all. The world itself was fully 3D (polygons) but the npcs were sprites. (understandably back in the days when you had limits on processing power) So unlike doom or duke 3d you had proper 3d levels. (uses the same engine as that terminator game, another great game. I remember this because I had so much fun playing it - it had many unique featurs like being able to ride in a jeep and flying vehicle that was surprisingly absent from many fps at the time)

The thing that really tested my patience those annoying jumps into the void. Whenever you had to jump up to a higher level in a dungeoun you could get caught right in between the edges and fall right through the ground! (thankfully there were fixes where you could pop out of the wall at the press of a key)

And also getting lost in a dungeoun may have meant taking hours trying to find your way back out again. Once I devled too deep into a dungeoun and couldn't find my way back out (tried for 3 hours) and had to start again! (the 3d mapping system was cool though, but even that couldn't help sometimes - this is something they should have included in morrowind imo I love seeing a map of something in 3d where you can rotate and zoom and study the structure of the place - it's especially handy when you fall through trapdoors and need to figure out how to get back to where you were)

If morrowind turned out as big as daggerfall I would crap my pants. The game would take years to play. I don't think I could find the patience to play such a big game like DF again today though. Even though it was big there was some repetition in the way certain things looked as if the area may have been randomly generated from existing sets and plugged together without much customisation. (unlike with morrowind where it looks like the areas have been more carefully made)

Still I consider df an awesome achievment for its time because of the sheer size and freedom. You had lots of control of how you wanted to play the game through the classes, items and spells (which you could make yourself and combine different effects) without too much interference or restriction from the main game. Many hours could be spent just role playing your character in the world and living through the shoes of your custom made class, completely ignoring the quest.