This is the only TES game where a dungeon can legit generate a dungeon out of its own memory range and crash to DOS prompt if you go too deep in some dungeons, consistently. There's even a vanilla handcrafted dungeon that does it if you go the wrong way and get out of the map. Good times, that, once I lost a Daedric artifact 'cause the quest target spawned out of the map area into the instacrash zone.
Daggerfall was wracked with bugs and problems, crashes, time sensitive quests I couldn't get done in time, and dungeons that literally made me ill from all the twists and turns trying to get to the target destination and back out again. But I loved it and recently played the Skygerfall adaptation of the main quest line. As messed up as it was, it was still terrific
Ah, my highschool years in the mid-late 90s was filled with so many evenings of playing this game. Remember having a 800 MB (not GB) harddrive and could barely squeeze this game on it with fresh win 95 install. Awesome memories.
The first time I ever played this game, I was stationed at Okinawa. My roommate in the barracks had a PC and this was one of the games he had installed. I played this several times but not enough to really be in tune with the game. Game stability and the dungeons were the main detractors for me with this game back in the day. This was the only RPG where before I enter a dungeon, I have to ask myself, "Am I ready for this?" What I did love was the immense area to travel and explore, freedom in character building. I never did get a house in Daggerfall, either. For a FPS RPG game, this was very different from the far later Skyrim where your character skills and stats determine if you can even hit anything. I was swinging my sword like mad in Daggerfall and wondered why I wasn't hitting anything.
The character creation system of Daggerfall is probably the closest a computer game has come to making your RPG character with a seasoned Dungeon Master. You can make some pretty crazy characters and they will still be playable: A martial artist who can't use weapons but can punch his way through crowds of enemies? Check. A darkfriend who takes damage from sunlight and holy places but regenerates in darkness and has increased spell points in the dark? Check. A linguists who can enlist giants and harpies to fight by her side? In Daggerfall Unity you can do that too.
I have no idea how many times I've seen that character creation screen. I've made dozens of characters, only to get bored shortly after leaving privateer's hold and quit. But that character creation screen still excites me to this day
I first played Daggerfall early this year and loved it. Funny thing though, the first character I played a lot was a pure melee, who had special disadvantages meaning she could not use magic. At all. I spent the spare points that gave me on ludicrous hp/level and tohit enhancements so she was a beast but as you can imagine this made dungeon diving Rather Difficult. As to stability, I've played Unity without any of the mods in the GoG cut (played before they came out with it), and it's remarkably stable. Don't think it's crashed on me once. GoG cut is rather unstable though yeah. I read somewhere that disabling the 'better eroded terrain' (or similarly named) mod can help, it certainly did in my case, but didn't eliminate them entirely! Edit: Disabling 'World of Daggerfall' has improved stability further when fast travelling, which has been my only consistent issue. Another edit for those reading this in the future: After disabling these two mods I have not had the game crash on me once and i've played it for like 50 hours since I made this comment. Recommend if you get fast travel crashes. Fun trick I discovered yesterday: if you're in the mages guild and use the journal to try to travel to a quest destination, of course you cannot; but if you then go to the teleporter it will select the destination automatically for you.
Pretty cool video. Daggerfall was always one of those games kinda shrouded in mistery for me so it's cool to actually see the game and learn a bit about it.
Daggerfall is my second favourite TES game right after Morrowind. ANd that was before Unity. I remember getting a quest to travel to Sentinel to report about spies in the kingdom so I raced to there since I almost died when attacked. When I reached the stairs in the palace I was shot in the back and died. That was the moment I truly fell in love with it. Also for those who dislike the massive dungeons I recommend a mod that simplifies the non-main quest dungeons. I havent used it since I love the dungeon crawling in this game even if I also get frustrated sometimes. Another great mod that I do use is the choosing your quests which I think is goes with the Unity version on GOG. Also much of the cheesing that could have been done in the original Daggerfall has been removed by Unity which some dislike but I personally prefer it that way since it lets me do more RP rather than min-maxing. Also one of my favourite youtubers(even if borderline retired) making a video on one of my favourite games is always a treat. I hope everything is okay with you True Review.
I feel the same way, and consider Daggerfall and Morrowind to be the best Elder Scrolls games, by far. Skyrim and Oblivion are fantastic games if you approach them as foundations for modding, but the second and third Elder Scrolls games are masterpieces purely as they are. Daggerfall Unity and Tamriel Rebuilt are just two examples of how profound those games are, that they continue to be played and modded to this day at such a complicated level. As different as they ultimately are, from the engine to the world scale and overall aesthetics, they are the two iterations of the series that I find the most fascinating and replay the most frequently. Currently I'm messing around with a heavily modded Skyrim AE setup after not having played the game in several years, and it is unquestionably gorgeous given the advanced state of the mesh and texture replacers, ENB Series, DnyDOLOD 3, and the abundance of overhauls, expansions, &c and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. But there is nothing like stepping off the boat in Seyda Neen or climbing out of Privateer's Hold and embracing the world from each games respective perspective. I have to actively avoid thinking about it or the dozens of hours and hundreds of mods Skyrim setup I am only just beginning to actually play as of last night will feel empty and boring by comparison, lol.
@@BriteRory I may soon play Skyrim but its a bit of a daunting task as I will have to search for a lot of mods and plan what kind of game I want to play. Also Im currently setting up OpenMW for a play so I wont be doing Oblivion or Skyrim soon. Daggerfall is far easier especially ever since GOG made the Unity version with all them mods I like.
@@Valkbg I hear you, it is overwhelming at first but it really doesn't take very long to become acclimated to. I tend not to pre-plan my mod setups and just go in, continually adding new mods that interest me as I go, but I have been doing it for many years and have a comprehensive understanding of what order things need to be done in, so when I actually begin playing the game and then later find a mod I just have to include, I can do so with minimal patching, making a bashed patch and if necessary rerunning the LOD tools. You could always try following one of the guides that handholds you through; it is fairly simple to determine what is actually necessary and what is optional and it might be a good way to get started? But yea OpenMW is awesome, I have it running on my phone with around 40 mods, including Tamriel Rebuilt and bunch of texture replacers. On my computer I keep a vanilla install, a heavily modded install instance under Mod Organizer 2, and an OpenMW install on an external SSD. That way I can jump around and try different things since not every mod works with every version. If you haven't done any serious modding before, it definitely can feel like a chore and appear daunting, but it really isn't very difficult and just requires a lot of reading, patience and following instructions to the letter. I hope you have a great time with OpenMW though, also you might like to check out Skyrim: Home of the Nords, a Morrowind province mod that portrays Skyrim as it was understood according to the lore within Morrowind's context, it is also compatible with Tamriel Rebuilt and extends the game MASSIVELY.
@@BriteRory How could I forget Home of THe Nords!?! My biggest problem with mods is that when something goes wrong I cant figure out the problem. For example today I installed the 0.48v of OpenMW because the 47v turned magenta on my ass when I tried to run it and the same was true of 48. By chance I learned that it should be in borderless window and that fixed but Im still flabbergasted on why it happened. Thats why I dont use too many mods and I if I can I try to find compilation mods for easier use. My biggest experience with mods is from HoI2 which is far easier to mod than most TES games.
theres a mod for canceling that timer for main quests so u can do them whenever, or so i read, but didnt try myself so i dont know if htat works, i assume it does
Feels good to watch you again. This was a comfy video and you sound like you might've been one of my friends at school, you even have a similar accent lol
This is my first time commenting but I have followed this channel on an old account since (I believe) 2014 or 2015. I genuinely want to say that you’ve been my favorite UA-camr for years as I do rewatch your videos fairly often. From your reviews down to your Deus Ex Lore and Danganronpa Parody. I hope that you get more recognition from your craft as I believe you deserve it and wish you much success. Thank you for the uploads.
Awesome video. Thanks. Daggerfall was my first foray into the Elder Scrolls universe, way back in 1999. I never finished the game, but spent many hundreds of hours in it. I'm heavily into Skyrim now, but never played Morrowind or Oblivion. I plan to start at Arena and go through all the games next year.
didnt expect you to appear in my recommended, i used to watch you years ago when you had the musical transitions on your top 10 videos, i ended up discovering one of my favourite bands because of those lol
To be fair, it would indeed be faster and easier to travel by boat around the south of the continent than overland. That kind of maneuver is actually incredibly common in history.
I'm not sure if they fixed this with the revamp, but I remember setting a mark outside of the dungeon, recalling when over-encumbered, entering your boat since you can enter your boat from anywhere outside, saying "arrrrr" to yourself as you dump your booty on the boat, and then heading back into the dungeon.
this was such a cool game I remember my brother playing when I was a kid. My favorite part was the customer creation and how fluid it felt. Having a text based story idea of your character is something that should be adapted now, at least the story part. I still remember figuring out how to get an ebony dagger from the start and feeling so smart. This and fallout were the coolest games as a child.
Fun video! Everyone who played Arena got Daggerfall and helped it succeed by word of mouth, because the industry still couldn't market itself back then. There was an amazing bug in the spell creation system that let you create a dungeon at any time in the overworld. I remember one and two more fondly than any other games in the series at this point, though I did spend a ton of time in Skyrim and I liked the weird aesthetics and themes of Marrowind. The original Daggerfall, even after a patch, had some amazingly broken bugs in the custom class system, but oddly was way more stable than the remake. Arena was nearly unplayable on release and you actually had to get a free patch disk by mail to fix the initial release of the game (which might be why you're convinced no one left that first dungeon, that's 100% true for people who never got the updated game). The 3D map in Daggerfall was both innovative for its genre and completely unusable to me as a kid and I remember having to learn a whole new kind of sense of direction based on very repetitive architecture to get back out of the dungeons. A lot of the unexplained choices you should be making about play style based character build in Daggerfall comes out of the naive assumption by the devs that you played Arena. The messengers in Daggerfall usually aren't "sneaky" at all and you get a whole description of them meeting and addressing you, so not sure what you meant there. You did just accept back then that you fucked up on the story/task and start over. The dungeons in Daggerfall are definitely procedural or they simply wouldn't be able to store them all. Procedural generation lets you really finely control how things are put together and you can avoid randomness with a fixed seed but you still get that obvious sameness of parts just being stuck together. A tiny handful of unique locations are a little more handcrafted though. Never heard of "console commands" in Daggerfall even having beaten it and I can't imagine the problems you mention of items being in a room with no exit, things have really changed in the new versions... sounds like they even broke the journal from the way you talk about taking notes... love the weird new thing of being able to carry a candle like it's a newer game lol. I remember briefly doing some art for the "Tamriel Rebuilt" project for Marrowind when I was younger. Good memories, good times!
Daggerfall Unity by default presents the game very close to its vanilla form, in fact you can turn in into full vanilla in the config menu. This video used a heavily modded version of the game, more than likely the GOG Cut version wich is riddled with such amount of bugs (due to mod incompatibility) that it crashes more than the original Daggerfall.
It's funny that you should mention Arena... It was actually my introduction to PC gaming and the wonderful world of RPGs to a large extent. That being said, I never finished the story... In fact I don't recall doing anything even related to the main quest... It was mostly just immersing myself into an open world environment that I had never encountered until I played it...which meant running around and just trying to upgrade gear and level up. Jagar Tharn remains an unencountered villain for me to this day. Daggerfall I did play, pretty extensively. That was the first game that introduced to me how intricate games could be... It had a complex and interesting story with all manner of political intrigue and convoluted interests. It was such a great game I remember being somewhat disappointed with Morrowind when it released. I have changed my opinion on Morrowind since though, and I now feel that the story rivals Daggerfall's, if it doesn't beat it outright. But this was a good reminder for me about how much I enjoyed Daggerfall at the time. I had totally forgotten that you could buy a ship and player housing and the knightly orders and such. Some of these things need to come back. I loved working my way up the ranks of a guild or doing those crazy dungeons, which was something Morrowind really lacked.
12:35 I've been playing Daggerfall since its CD-ROM demo release in 1995, and to this day I never knew that until now. Thanks for this great review. I try to convince people in Elder Scrolls Online to play Daggerfall but some can't get past the graphics, even with Daggerfall Unity from GOG. 19:07 Some quests are bugged and the item or NPC isn't there. I have literally spent 1 to 2 weeks on a dungeon quest before, only playing for about a couple hours each day. It's frustrating when I'm in it, but I always felt so much more accomplished after completing a super long drawn out dungeon, as opposed to the quests we have in the later games where they take about 5 minutes to complete.
I actually played Arena, because I was so obsessed with anything Elder Scrolls in like 2012. I didn't quite finish it, but I remember playing as a Mage and collecting a few bits of the staff.
Hey, I *tried* to play Arena! The first dungeon only has like a 20% success rate to get through, and after that you have a giant random-generated world to ... not know what you're supposed to be doing. So there are people who have played it, for like ... 2 hours?
Hilariously, my experience with Daggerfall as a kid was with one of those CDs that had a ton of demos on them. And the demo was unplayably bugged. Collisions were off so you'd fall through the floor, and then drown because you couldn't swim.
Morrowind is largely nonlinear as well. It's only suggested. If you just level up it's all open so they are the same in that regard in so far as non linearity, if not in technically the same way.
18:00 isn’t it that the dungeons outside of the main story were procedurally generated once then placed in the world? I swear every time I enter the same dungeon it’s the same as the save game before
LOL right after the orcs blank face telling you you've got a promotion in the fighters guild, that fake lord of the rings rise to war ad came on, killing orcs in first person with epic music. Perfect timing. I thought it was a part of the video for a second haha.
I recently played Daggerfall, the Unity remake and I actually enjoyed it with the mod that disabled the timers on quests and some quality of life mods. Though I wish there was a mod that fixed the shopkeepers. Keep running into this bug where I'll buy some armor or clothes, but when I try to sell crap I got from a dungeon, even if the value is a fraction of the gold I spent, they'll say they can only give me 500 gold wothout breaking the bank.
My only question is; does Daggerfall have any of the same world building and lore as shown as the newer entries. I love the lore of the Elder Scrolls and even though they have dumbed down a lot of the mechanics, I still enjoy the quests and stories they tell and getting to know all the characters. That's generally my main drive to play the games even like Skyrim
Yes it has a ton of lore. But you wont be watching cut scenes or scripted activity: it is all text in books. You could spend days reading all the books and make a whole personal mission to spend a year collecting and reading them.
@@spayced I mean most of the lore in the games are presented by books lol so I don't really see that as a negative. I actually spend most of my time after I beat the games reading all the books
Guard: Hey no full gallop in town limits. Me: it not full gallop. Guard : it not full gallop. Me: No this, tramples npc. Guard: oh dam bro, now go to jail.
I played arena and rescued the emperor, I fucking love that game. I love being killed after healing, I love raging after that, It makes me feel like I've earned everything I did, not like shitrim "ahnnn eviiiil drahhgon"
Ok, you will say that I'm lying, but I went out of my way in 2018 to beat TES:Arena. I like to play through franchises in their entirety (mostly focusing on the main games) to see their growth and evolution and what changed. I actually enjoyed my time there, even though it was pretty simple game with almost nothing besides the main quest in terms of story. It was nice to role play as a battlemage who was apprentice of Jagar Tharn and colleague of Silmane (dont remeber her first name). I got the oghma infinium and was stack in terms of stats, so much that my absorb magic spell was absorbing 100% of all magic damage, my character was the ultimate counter to Tharn. I killed him twice before decinding to attack his lich stone and destroy him forever and save the emperor (which is crazy that its the same freaking emperor till Oblivion's beginning, Uriel Septim VII !)
Great video, but just a few things: Daggerfall Unity is not a mod, it's a port. Imps can be killed by weapons, but just not weaker material weapons. The landmass is procedurally generated, they did not hand craft a world the size of Great Britain. It was generated in the Bethesda workplace, and everyone plays the same world. This does not mean it wasn't procedurally generated, just that it wasn't generated while you were playing. The same thing applies to dungeons. Loot and quests are the only things generated at runtime from what I remember.
@@jamesbaxter6879 yeah....the Orcs in Daggerfall aren't originally a playable race...they're technically just a type of enemy. Kind of like goblins in Oblivion.
it does a lot more than it has any right to. attack mechanics are clunkier if you don’t enable right-click attack, and some impossible-to-disable changes to the graphics and save system are different from the dosbox version. It should have exclusively fixed bugs and left the rest up to modders.
I played Daggerfall when it first came out, and I loved it... it reminded me a lot of the Ultima games that I was a fan of. It gave you a lot of freedom, and simulated a world that you could explore, even if you didn't want to do any quests. You could just go "looking for adventure." To this day, I consider the Elder Scrolls to be the spiritual successor to the Ultima games.
Bethesda replaced better systems with weaker ones for the same reason most gaming sucks these days: game systems have to be streamlined and dumbed down because noone wants to read a manual anymore. IN MY DAY (when I wasn't walking to school in snow, uphill, both ways) many games came with a big, thick manual... and we loved it. It meant the game had substance. These days, games have to be simplified, cuz there's only so much detail and nuance you can "illustrate" through initial gameplay.
Oh also, they have to restrict choice so that, no matter how silly your choices are, your build is "viable". The signs system is balanced so that the pros and cons are never persecutory. Unlike the real world, where you're fully capable of making bad choice after bad choice, and you WILL reap the consequences. Manbabies nowadays have such fragile egos, that noone likes a game where their bad choices result in failure. "Make me happy all the time, waaah!"
I got several artifacts in Arena. It’s actually got some things I like more than Daggerfall. Not many things, and I vastly prefer Morrowind, but…it’s not that bad.
I don't think I've ever played daggerfall, morrowind is probably as old as I'll get with an elderscrolls game, and not too much of an headache either, to weap my head around the game mechanics.
Someone else's review covered this, but the GOG version is buggy. There's some very stable unity versions of Daggerfall, just be careful which mods you put on there and how they conflict.
Daggerfall's dungeons were procedurally generated in house and then tacked om to the game. That's what it means in this case. There's no procedural generation in game other than the quests and where to go etc
To add to this: they were following a set seed, same with the overall world, exact information is not stored for everything on disc, but they are using a seed to know how things are supposed to be generated. Also, the dungeons were all made up of pre-made pieces, and those are hand crafted, and then the pieces were randomly stitched together, using this seed. And the number of pieces a dungeon can consist of varies a lot. The actual enemy and loot placement is randomly generated when you enter the dungeon though.
Your game is unstable because the GOG cut for Daggerfall Unity has mods that are incompatible with one another. I never had any crash with Daggerfall Unity even with mods as long as I didn't installed mods that were incompatible with each other.
I have Daggerfall waiting for me and I have overall big impression that it is like Morrowind, but it sucks much less. Not that Morrowind is bad, but it has many let's say questionable decisions.
The unity version of Buggerfall is a blast to playthrough, and works really well with a gamepad too. And you can run it smoothly on linux using wine, proton or lutris.
ive played arena and completed it twice and thar statement that people have never gotten out of the first dungeon is stupid, I know plenty of people who have played through arena and clompleted it, its actually a really good game.
Daggerfall is great if you want a horrifying non-euclidean inhuman dungeon crawler designed by a mad AI
"Save a lot, because the game is likely to crash"
So basically, it's Elder Scrolls
This is the only TES game where a dungeon can legit generate a dungeon out of its own memory range and crash to DOS prompt if you go too deep in some dungeons, consistently.
There's even a vanilla handcrafted dungeon that does it if you go the wrong way and get out of the map.
Good times, that, once I lost a Daedric artifact 'cause the quest target spawned out of the map area into the instacrash zone.
@@neoqwerty Ouch
Oblivion didn’t crash like that
And the saves used to corrupt.
@@neoqwerty Really puts the FALL in daggerfall!
buh dum tsk!
Daggerfall was wracked with bugs and problems, crashes, time sensitive quests I couldn't get done in time, and dungeons that literally made me ill from all the twists and turns trying to get to the target destination and back out again. But I loved it and recently played the Skygerfall adaptation of the main quest line. As messed up as it was, it was still terrific
Same with most Bethesda games.
There are mods that disable the time quest feature allowing you to play at your own pace.
You gotta check out Wayward Realms it’s gonna be incredible. Dagger fall in the modern day.
@@stroyerb I've seen it, but I'm not into mmo's anymore.
@@HamguyBacon Ehy, I don't think it is a MMO, it's a single player game 🤔
Ah, my highschool years in the mid-late 90s was filled with so many evenings of playing this game. Remember having a 800 MB (not GB) harddrive and could barely squeeze this game on it with fresh win 95 install. Awesome memories.
Fell in love with this game when I downloaded it earlier this year. The possibilities and grand old adventuring roleplay is fantastic!
6:00 A warrior build and didn't pick the ebony dagger gift.
The first time I ever played this game, I was stationed at Okinawa. My roommate in the barracks had a PC and this was one of the games he had installed. I played this several times but not enough to really be in tune with the game.
Game stability and the dungeons were the main detractors for me with this game back in the day. This was the only RPG where before I enter a dungeon, I have to ask myself, "Am I ready for this?"
What I did love was the immense area to travel and explore, freedom in character building. I never did get a house in Daggerfall, either. For a FPS RPG game, this was very different from the far later Skyrim where your character skills and stats determine if you can even hit anything. I was swinging my sword like mad in Daggerfall and wondered why I wasn't hitting anything.
The character creation system of Daggerfall is probably the closest a computer game has come to making your RPG character with a seasoned Dungeon Master. You can make some pretty crazy characters and they will still be playable: A martial artist who can't use weapons but can punch his way through crowds of enemies? Check. A darkfriend who takes damage from sunlight and holy places but regenerates in darkness and has increased spell points in the dark? Check. A linguists who can enlist giants and harpies to fight by her side? In Daggerfall Unity you can do that too.
I have no idea how many times I've seen that character creation screen. I've made dozens of characters, only to get bored shortly after leaving privateer's hold and quit. But that character creation screen still excites me to this day
I first played Daggerfall early this year and loved it. Funny thing though, the first character I played a lot was a pure melee, who had special disadvantages meaning she could not use magic. At all. I spent the spare points that gave me on ludicrous hp/level and tohit enhancements so she was a beast but as you can imagine this made dungeon diving Rather Difficult.
As to stability, I've played Unity without any of the mods in the GoG cut (played before they came out with it), and it's remarkably stable. Don't think it's crashed on me once. GoG cut is rather unstable though yeah. I read somewhere that disabling the 'better eroded terrain' (or similarly named) mod can help, it certainly did in my case, but didn't eliminate them entirely!
Edit: Disabling 'World of Daggerfall' has improved stability further when fast travelling, which has been my only consistent issue.
Another edit for those reading this in the future: After disabling these two mods I have not had the game crash on me once and i've played it for like 50 hours since I made this comment. Recommend if you get fast travel crashes.
Fun trick I discovered yesterday: if you're in the mages guild and use the journal to try to travel to a quest destination, of course you cannot; but if you then go to the teleporter it will select the destination automatically for you.
Got this video randomly suggested and loved it. Then my heart sank when I saw the frequency of uploads.
This is something I’d like to change. I miss making videos but I’ve only just got the free time to do it. More on the way!
I'm not into the games personally, but I am very much into the way you present these Rant videos. Thank you~
Glad you enjoyed Daggerfall, True! This video has really gotten me excited to play it again! :)
i liked daggerfall dungeon. what I didn't like was random chains and skulls that act as teleporters that you have to take to find the quest item
Pretty cool video. Daggerfall was always one of those games kinda shrouded in mistery for me so it's cool to actually see the game and learn a bit about it.
Daggerfall is my second favourite TES game right after Morrowind. ANd that was before Unity. I remember getting a quest to travel to Sentinel to report about spies in the kingdom so I raced to there since I almost died when attacked. When I reached the stairs in the palace I was shot in the back and died. That was the moment I truly fell in love with it. Also for those who dislike the massive dungeons I recommend a mod that simplifies the non-main quest dungeons. I havent used it since I love the dungeon crawling in this game even if I also get frustrated sometimes. Another great mod that I do use is the choosing your quests which I think is goes with the Unity version on GOG.
Also much of the cheesing that could have been done in the original Daggerfall has been removed by Unity which some dislike but I personally prefer it that way since it lets me do more RP rather than min-maxing.
Also one of my favourite youtubers(even if borderline retired) making a video on one of my favourite games is always a treat. I hope everything is okay with you True Review.
I feel the same way, and consider Daggerfall and Morrowind to be the best Elder Scrolls games, by far. Skyrim and Oblivion are fantastic games if you approach them as foundations for modding, but the second and third Elder Scrolls games are masterpieces purely as they are. Daggerfall Unity and Tamriel Rebuilt are just two examples of how profound those games are, that they continue to be played and modded to this day at such a complicated level. As different as they ultimately are, from the engine to the world scale and overall aesthetics, they are the two iterations of the series that I find the most fascinating and replay the most frequently. Currently I'm messing around with a heavily modded Skyrim AE setup after not having played the game in several years, and it is unquestionably gorgeous given the advanced state of the mesh and texture replacers, ENB Series, DnyDOLOD 3, and the abundance of overhauls, expansions, &c and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. But there is nothing like stepping off the boat in Seyda Neen or climbing out of Privateer's Hold and embracing the world from each games respective perspective. I have to actively avoid thinking about it or the dozens of hours and hundreds of mods Skyrim setup I am only just beginning to actually play as of last night will feel empty and boring by comparison, lol.
@@BriteRory I may soon play Skyrim but its a bit of a daunting task as I will have to search for a lot of mods and plan what kind of game I want to play. Also Im currently setting up OpenMW for a play so I wont be doing Oblivion or Skyrim soon. Daggerfall is far easier especially ever since GOG made the Unity version with all them mods I like.
@@Valkbg I hear you, it is overwhelming at first but it really doesn't take very long to become acclimated to. I tend not to pre-plan my mod setups and just go in, continually adding new mods that interest me as I go, but I have been doing it for many years and have a comprehensive understanding of what order things need to be done in, so when I actually begin playing the game and then later find a mod I just have to include, I can do so with minimal patching, making a bashed patch and if necessary rerunning the LOD tools. You could always try following one of the guides that handholds you through; it is fairly simple to determine what is actually necessary and what is optional and it might be a good way to get started? But yea OpenMW is awesome, I have it running on my phone with around 40 mods, including Tamriel Rebuilt and bunch of texture replacers. On my computer I keep a vanilla install, a heavily modded install instance under Mod Organizer 2, and an OpenMW install on an external SSD. That way I can jump around and try different things since not every mod works with every version. If you haven't done any serious modding before, it definitely can feel like a chore and appear daunting, but it really isn't very difficult and just requires a lot of reading, patience and following instructions to the letter. I hope you have a great time with OpenMW though, also you might like to check out Skyrim: Home of the Nords, a Morrowind province mod that portrays Skyrim as it was understood according to the lore within Morrowind's context, it is also compatible with Tamriel Rebuilt and extends the game MASSIVELY.
@@BriteRory How could I forget Home of THe Nords!?! My biggest problem with mods is that when something goes wrong I cant figure out the problem. For example today I installed the 0.48v of OpenMW because the 47v turned magenta on my ass when I tried to run it and the same was true of 48. By chance I learned that it should be in borderless window and that fixed but Im still flabbergasted on why it happened. Thats why I dont use too many mods and I if I can I try to find compilation mods for easier use. My biggest experience with mods is from HoI2 which is far easier to mod than most TES games.
I need to find a mod to bring back the cheese and try that overpowered high elf build. Even if I wouldnrather not look like one
theres a mod for canceling that timer for main quests so u can do them whenever, or so i read, but didnt try myself so i dont know if htat works, i assume it does
Feels good to watch you again. This was a comfy video and you sound like you might've been one of my friends at school, you even have a similar accent lol
This is my first time commenting but I have followed this channel on an old account since (I believe) 2014 or 2015. I genuinely want to say that you’ve been my favorite UA-camr for years as I do rewatch your videos fairly often. From your reviews down to your Deus Ex Lore and Danganronpa Parody. I hope that you get more recognition from your craft as I believe you deserve it and wish you much success. Thank you for the uploads.
TRUE REVIEW IS BACK! MY CHRISTMAS WISHES ARE FULFILLED!
Awesome video. Thanks.
Daggerfall was my first foray into the Elder Scrolls universe, way back in 1999. I never finished the game, but spent many hundreds of hours in it.
I'm heavily into Skyrim now, but never played Morrowind or Oblivion.
I plan to start at Arena and go through all the games next year.
Nice to hear from you, and about a game I never see people talk about in my Gen
Just found your channel. I love your content. Great job! 👍
didnt expect you to appear in my recommended, i used to watch you years ago when you had the musical transitions on your top 10 videos, i ended up discovering one of my favourite bands because of those lol
Good to see you back man
I am watching this on a community library computer and I sleep on a picnic table by the downtown square park.
Interkarma is a fucking legend. Been following his work for nearly 20 years.
To be fair, it would indeed be faster and easier to travel by boat around the south of the continent than overland. That kind of maneuver is actually incredibly common in history.
I'm not sure if they fixed this with the revamp, but I remember setting a mark outside of the dungeon, recalling when over-encumbered, entering your boat since you can enter your boat from anywhere outside, saying "arrrrr" to yourself as you dump your booty on the boat, and then heading back into the dungeon.
Awesome to see a rebuild 😊
This game was amazing for its time. Absolutely amazing so expansive and a classic.
this was such a cool game I remember my brother playing when I was a kid. My favorite part was the customer creation and how fluid it felt. Having a text based story idea of your character is something that should be adapted now, at least the story part. I still remember figuring out how to get an ebony dagger from the start and feeling so smart. This and fallout were the coolest games as a child.
Fun video! Everyone who played Arena got Daggerfall and helped it succeed by word of mouth, because the industry still couldn't market itself back then. There was an amazing bug in the spell creation system that let you create a dungeon at any time in the overworld. I remember one and two more fondly than any other games in the series at this point, though I did spend a ton of time in Skyrim and I liked the weird aesthetics and themes of Marrowind. The original Daggerfall, even after a patch, had some amazingly broken bugs in the custom class system, but oddly was way more stable than the remake. Arena was nearly unplayable on release and you actually had to get a free patch disk by mail to fix the initial release of the game (which might be why you're convinced no one left that first dungeon, that's 100% true for people who never got the updated game). The 3D map in Daggerfall was both innovative for its genre and completely unusable to me as a kid and I remember having to learn a whole new kind of sense of direction based on very repetitive architecture to get back out of the dungeons. A lot of the unexplained choices you should be making about play style based character build in Daggerfall comes out of the naive assumption by the devs that you played Arena. The messengers in Daggerfall usually aren't "sneaky" at all and you get a whole description of them meeting and addressing you, so not sure what you meant there. You did just accept back then that you fucked up on the story/task and start over. The dungeons in Daggerfall are definitely procedural or they simply wouldn't be able to store them all. Procedural generation lets you really finely control how things are put together and you can avoid randomness with a fixed seed but you still get that obvious sameness of parts just being stuck together. A tiny handful of unique locations are a little more handcrafted though. Never heard of "console commands" in Daggerfall even having beaten it and I can't imagine the problems you mention of items being in a room with no exit, things have really changed in the new versions... sounds like they even broke the journal from the way you talk about taking notes... love the weird new thing of being able to carry a candle like it's a newer game lol. I remember briefly doing some art for the "Tamriel Rebuilt" project for Marrowind when I was younger. Good memories, good times!
I actually like the old graphics bruh, unity makes it all look plastic. It would be nice to have the modern conveniences with that.
Unity has options to use old school rendering mode
Daggerfall Unity by default presents the game very close to its vanilla form, in fact you can turn in into full vanilla in the config menu. This video used a heavily modded version of the game, more than likely the GOG Cut version wich is riddled with such amount of bugs (due to mod incompatibility) that it crashes more than the original Daggerfall.
It's funny that you should mention Arena... It was actually my introduction to PC gaming and the wonderful world of RPGs to a large extent. That being said, I never finished the story... In fact I don't recall doing anything even related to the main quest... It was mostly just immersing myself into an open world environment that I had never encountered until I played it...which meant running around and just trying to upgrade gear and level up. Jagar Tharn remains an unencountered villain for me to this day.
Daggerfall I did play, pretty extensively. That was the first game that introduced to me how intricate games could be... It had a complex and interesting story with all manner of political intrigue and convoluted interests. It was such a great game I remember being somewhat disappointed with Morrowind when it released. I have changed my opinion on Morrowind since though, and I now feel that the story rivals Daggerfall's, if it doesn't beat it outright.
But this was a good reminder for me about how much I enjoyed Daggerfall at the time. I had totally forgotten that you could buy a ship and player housing and the knightly orders and such. Some of these things need to come back. I loved working my way up the ranks of a guild or doing those crazy dungeons, which was something Morrowind really lacked.
12:35 I've been playing Daggerfall since its CD-ROM demo release in 1995, and to this day I never knew that until now. Thanks for this great review. I try to convince people in Elder Scrolls Online to play Daggerfall but some can't get past the graphics, even with Daggerfall Unity from GOG.
19:07 Some quests are bugged and the item or NPC isn't there. I have literally spent 1 to 2 weeks on a dungeon quest before, only playing for about a couple hours each day. It's frustrating when I'm in it, but I always felt so much more accomplished after completing a super long drawn out dungeon, as opposed to the quests we have in the later games where they take about 5 minutes to complete.
The true best way to buy a house is to take out a loan in a place you are never going to return to. And uh
Not pay it back.
18:10 non mainquest dungeons are procedural but based on certain set blocks to a degree.
I actually played Arena, because I was so obsessed with anything Elder Scrolls in like 2012. I didn't quite finish it, but I remember playing as a Mage and collecting a few bits of the staff.
Hey, I *tried* to play Arena!
The first dungeon only has like a 20% success rate to get through, and after that you have a giant random-generated world to ... not know what you're supposed to be doing.
So there are people who have played it, for like ... 2 hours?
yea boi another true review vid havent watched one of these in ages
I've missed your rants.
Hilariously, my experience with Daggerfall as a kid was with one of those CDs that had a ton of demos on them. And the demo was unplayably bugged. Collisions were off so you'd fall through the floor, and then drown because you couldn't swim.
I beat Arena years before Daggerfall. It was the whole reason I wanted to get Daggerfall at the time so badly.
Morrowind is largely nonlinear as well. It's only suggested. If you just level up it's all open so they are the same in that regard in so far as non linearity, if not in technically the same way.
my first version of daggerfall crashed 20 years ago any time i fired an arrow and when i went into water.... Im in a new era with what i can do now
18:00 isn’t it that the dungeons outside of the main story were procedurally generated once then placed in the world? I swear every time I enter the same dungeon it’s the same as the save game before
I played the whole game-Elderscrolls 1. It began my love and fanboy of video games.
Why didn't you recommend any mods? For instance, I know there's a mod that makes dungeons smaller.
very well made video
I'm sure the last 20 minutes of this video were very good, but after you mentioned the Unity game being free on gog I had to go do stuff.
LOL right after the orcs blank face telling you you've got a promotion in the fighters guild, that fake lord of the rings rise to war ad came on, killing orcs in first person with epic music. Perfect timing. I thought it was a part of the video for a second haha.
Out of curiosity what thing is the clip at 16:45 is from
Very fun video. You are 💯 right on the criticisms.
I have finished Arena more times than I can remember. Most often with the Healer class.
Where's our Daggerfall remake Bethesda
I recently played Daggerfall, the Unity remake and I actually enjoyed it with the mod that disabled the timers on quests and some quality of life mods.
Though I wish there was a mod that fixed the shopkeepers. Keep running into this bug where I'll buy some armor or clothes, but when I try to sell crap I got from a dungeon, even if the value is a fraction of the gold I spent, they'll say they can only give me 500 gold wothout breaking the bank.
My only question is; does Daggerfall have any of the same world building and lore as shown as the newer entries. I love the lore of the Elder Scrolls and even though they have dumbed down a lot of the mechanics, I still enjoy the quests and stories they tell and getting to know all the characters. That's generally my main drive to play the games even like Skyrim
Yes it has a ton of lore. But you wont be watching cut scenes or scripted activity: it is all text in books. You could spend days reading all the books and make a whole personal mission to spend a year collecting and reading them.
@@spayced I mean most of the lore in the games are presented by books lol so I don't really see that as a negative. I actually spend most of my time after I beat the games reading all the books
No horse armor? I'm out.
Guard: Hey no full gallop in town limits. Me: it not full gallop. Guard : it not full gallop. Me: No this, tramples npc. Guard: oh dam bro, now go to jail.
Arena is the only game that actually gave me jumpscares
I liked Morrowind’s spell crafting system the best, it was so unique.
I played arena and rescued the emperor, I fucking love that game. I love being killed after healing, I love raging after that, It makes me feel like I've earned everything I did, not like shitrim "ahnnn eviiiil drahhgon"
The ultimate test of Daggerfall players is whether they played the game long enough to learn the truth of that "dirty dog" letter.
Climbing. Why can't we have nice things Tod.
Ok, you will say that I'm lying, but I went out of my way in 2018 to beat TES:Arena. I like to play through franchises in their entirety (mostly focusing on the main games) to see their growth and evolution and what changed.
I actually enjoyed my time there, even though it was pretty simple game with almost nothing besides the main quest in terms of story.
It was nice to role play as a battlemage who was apprentice of Jagar Tharn and colleague of Silmane (dont remeber her first name).
I got the oghma infinium and was stack in terms of stats, so much that my absorb magic spell was absorbing 100% of all magic damage, my character was the ultimate counter to Tharn. I killed him twice before decinding to attack his lich stone and destroy him forever and save the emperor (which is crazy that its the same freaking emperor till Oblivion's beginning, Uriel Septim VII !)
Great video, but just a few things: Daggerfall Unity is not a mod, it's a port. Imps can be killed by weapons, but just not weaker material weapons. The landmass is procedurally generated, they did not hand craft a world the size of Great Britain. It was generated in the Bethesda workplace, and everyone plays the same world. This does not mean it wasn't procedurally generated, just that it wasn't generated while you were playing. The same thing applies to dungeons. Loot and quests are the only things generated at runtime from what I remember.
First time I played this game a shop owner framed me for stealing? Then I got sent to prison? Confused.
Best game tho, 12/10.
True Review + Elder Scrolls = YYYYEEEAAAHHHH
played this to death back in the day, today tho I would suggest playing the skyrim mod Skygerfall instead
I like how your viewers are either people with 10k hours in the game or who do not play games at all
2:30 - I thought you said "Advanced Jizz" and I had to stop what I was doing and go back to your video to see wtf you were talking about lol
You gotta check out Wayward Realms it’s gonna be incredible. Dagger fall style game in the modern day. Made by a lot of the same team/devs also.
16:45 movie source?
Hope you make a video on morrowind one day
It's entirely possible, since I replayed it immediately after I finished this game.
I played the original when it first came out. got lost, got bored and moved on...
ah, yes. warp in the west and dragon breaks, bethesda's unwillingness to commit to a cannon ending for any of their earlier games shines thru.
Canon*
Omg. I had so many hours into this game. It was hardcore lol.
Daddy Azura. Nice.
daggerfall good
Same brains who made Daggerfall (and had nothing to do with Bethesda afterwards) are now working on a new game called Wayward Realms, look it up
I was SO taken aback when I saw Orcs in the Bestiary. Talk about yikes...lol
I'm sorry, what?
@@jamesbaxter6879 yeah....the Orcs in Daggerfall aren't originally a playable race...they're technically just a type of enemy. Kind of like goblins in Oblivion.
daggerfall is my favorite elder scrolls game. unparalleled story, mixed feelings on daggerfall unity though
Why mixed?
it does a lot more than it has any right to. attack mechanics are clunkier if you don’t enable right-click attack, and some impossible-to-disable changes to the graphics and save system are different from the dosbox version. It should have exclusively fixed bugs and left the rest up to modders.
@@sharkyjeff unironically i think the HD textures and updated lighting system are uglier to look at and negatively impact the vibe of the game
I loved Daggerfall until I got to the final dungeon. That mantella dungeon was so unbelievably confusing.
Play with Smaller Dungeons setting. Main quest dungeons are not affected by this though.
I have played and beaten Arena but have never played Daggerfall
Daggerfall? More like Blaggerfall. I just made that up and I don't know what it means. Thanks for the video.
I played Daggerfall when it first came out, and I loved it... it reminded me a lot of the Ultima games that I was a fan of. It gave you a lot of freedom, and simulated a world that you could explore, even if you didn't want to do any quests. You could just go "looking for adventure." To this day, I consider the Elder Scrolls to be the spiritual successor to the Ultima games.
Bethesda replaced better systems with weaker ones for the same reason most gaming sucks these days: game systems have to be streamlined and dumbed down because noone wants to read a manual anymore. IN MY DAY (when I wasn't walking to school in snow, uphill, both ways) many games came with a big, thick manual... and we loved it. It meant the game had substance. These days, games have to be simplified, cuz there's only so much detail and nuance you can "illustrate" through initial gameplay.
Oh also, they have to restrict choice so that, no matter how silly your choices are, your build is "viable". The signs system is balanced so that the pros and cons are never persecutory. Unlike the real world, where you're fully capable of making bad choice after bad choice, and you WILL reap the consequences. Manbabies nowadays have such fragile egos, that noone likes a game where their bad choices result in failure. "Make me happy all the time, waaah!"
most of the world doesn’t have hands?
I got several artifacts in Arena. It’s actually got some things I like more than Daggerfall. Not many things, and I vastly prefer Morrowind, but…it’s not that bad.
I don't think I've ever played daggerfall, morrowind is probably as old as I'll get with an elderscrolls game, and not too much of an headache either, to weap my head around the game mechanics.
I played Arena when I was nine years old.
Someone else's review covered this, but the GOG version is buggy. There's some very stable unity versions of Daggerfall, just be careful which mods you put on there and how they conflict.
Daggerfall's dungeons were procedurally generated in house and then tacked om to the game. That's what it means in this case. There's no procedural generation in game other than the quests and where to go etc
To add to this: they were following a set seed, same with the overall world, exact information is not stored for everything on disc, but they are using a seed to know how things are supposed to be generated.
Also, the dungeons were all made up of pre-made pieces, and those are hand crafted, and then the pieces were randomly stitched together, using this seed. And the number of pieces a dungeon can consist of varies a lot. The actual enemy and loot placement is randomly generated when you enter the dungeon though.
19:58 he said it, he said the word
I played Arena and completed it in 1994.
Jwlar played Arena he even has video proof!
I got as far as the first room in Arena and "noooope"
Your game is unstable because the GOG cut for Daggerfall Unity has mods that are incompatible with one another. I never had any crash with Daggerfall Unity even with mods as long as I didn't installed mods that were incompatible with each other.
I have Daggerfall waiting for me and I have overall big impression that it is like Morrowind, but it sucks much less. Not that Morrowind is bad, but it has many let's say questionable decisions.
The unity version of Buggerfall is a blast to playthrough, and works really well with a gamepad too. And you can run it smoothly on linux using wine, proton or lutris.
ive played arena and completed it twice and thar statement that people have never gotten out of the first dungeon is stupid, I know plenty of people who have played through arena and clompleted it, its actually a really good game.