I'm an old man, played all the TES games as they came out, and still to this day Daggerfall is my favorite computer game of all time, for years I played the OG until Unity, Unity is amazing and being able to mod.. wow. It's an old game reborn.
I haven't been able to try it, but I had been following that one being worked on by Lucius for years. I also love daggerfall the most and am excited to try unity when I can get the time. Halt!
The radiant quests in Skyrim are exactly like Daggerfall quests, which I find to be a charming parallel. Oblivion's forests are also procedurally generated, just cleaned up by hand. I'd really like to see the return of roleplay options in dialogue that actually have an impact on the responses you get. Choosing which level of formality you want to use in Daggerfall dialogue is a relatively simple but effective way of adding depth, and it honestly works a little better than Morrowind's dialogue system. Oblivion gives you next to no options outside of the Dark Brotherhood questline, and even then they have zero impact on the conversation. Daggerfall is chock full of ambitious mechanics that could be implemented so much better on modern hardware.
About elevation: the world does have it, in fact, it's the same elevation you see on the world map. Areas in the Wrothgarian Mountains are much higher than on the coast of Daggerfall. However, elevation is even across each square on the world map, and each square is larger than a city, so mountains and hills are way too smooth, impossible to notice from the ground. You can only notice it when there's a stray white pixel on the height map, where you'll see a very steep and high plateau in the middle of nowhere. Unity then amplifies local height noise, creating hills small enough for the player to notice, but those are mostly independent from the world map.
@@chaosordeal294 The heighmap system in the original is entirely functional. The maximum height is just barely difference from the minimum. IIRC the difference is about 50m from the tallest mountain to sea level. Source: I used to do a lot of experimentation and modding on the original DOS version.
Funny thing is, the daggerfall character creation is my favorite in ANY game. it is really great and allows you to create EXACTLY the character you want, no matter what... even if said wcharacter was utterly useless... that'd be for you to figure out afterwards. I really wish there wqere modern games that used this kind of character creator and advantage and disadvantage system and so on.
I mean, for what its worth, the guys behind Deus Ex didn't want to make a world simulator game with a story tacked on top. Ion Storm just wanted to make an immersive sim first person shooter with a more narrow scope and RPG elements. And they succeeded in that regard if you were to ask me. Its flattering though that Daggerfall was used as a point of reference when trying to figure out their game to begin with, even if it was for the purpose of not following in its footsteps since Deus Ex wasn't trying to be like Daggerfall.
You bet I'm gonna watch the whole thing when it's out, even though I have already watched all the individual parts. Longform Elder Scrolls content never gets old.
It's been a blast watching this 8 part analysis of a game I didn't even know I'd end up loving the same way I did when I started playing TES main titles backwards from Skyrim to Daggerfall and hopefully I'll be able to try Arena and the other spin-off titles. It stands on its own with its "Piece it together" main quest and it really was rewarding to actually find things out yourself and being immersed by the game and the freedom it gives though I still prefer Morrowind with its handmade side quests and world. Looking forward for that 3 hour cut you said in the last part!
Once i got really into (patched) dos daggerfall it became my favourite game ever and unity has made it even skyrocket beyond that, and its great that people are recognizing it now.
I loved Daggerfall back when I played it. It took me several attempts to finally get out of the first dungeon it starts you into. I must have put around 50 or 60 hours of gameplay into it. Unfortunately for whatever reason it bugged at one point and I couldn't finish it. It might have been because of that missing dungeon you mentioned. I can't recall.
I got my first copy of Daggerfall just in time for Christmas 1996, and I got it for free. I was actually buying another game, and asked the vendor about all the second hand copies of this Daggerfall game. I turned out that his assistant had bought them from people who had given up on the game as it was badly, even fatally, bugged. He couldn't get rid of them so he was giving them away as a throw-in to anyone who bought a game from him. As it happens I was in a fortunate position of having internet connection (I was an IT manager at the time and had just installed internet connections at my company) so was able to download a patch from the US (I'm in the UK) which made the game playable. So I copied the patch onto floppy and gave the vendor a copy so he could copy it for his customers. I finished the game that Christmas, have played it many times since, both DOS and Unity, but haven't actually finished it since. The patched version is probably my favourite game of the series, but when I rank them I have to place Daggerfall last because of how badly broken the game was at release; yes as bad as Duhblivion was, at least it was playable and finishable 'out of the box'.
Between DFU and the Retro Engine for the 16-bit Sonic games, Australia has done the world of retro gaming accessibility and preservation a monumental service.
as an australian, australia has done itself a monumental service in that regard as well. I might only be 14 but unlike others my age, i can still look past dated graphics to see the true beauty of 90's pc games.
"oh man I loved that jwlar daggerfall video, maybe I'll look to see what other people think of the unity port, i'll just click the first result on my search without checking to see who made it"
thanks for this analysis series; it was a great watch! i remember reading something about TES6 planning to have procedural generation, and if we're to believe that reveal trailer is truly set in the iliac bay; who knows, maybe bethesda is interested in revisiting some things that made daggerfall unique to make a truly unique game again. but only time will tell...
Pretty sure Oblivion and Skyrim used procedural generation for their worlds as well. Every open world game uses it these days just not to the extent of Daggerfall
@@MizterMoonshine If I recall correctly, they used procedural generation to _create_ most of the overall geometry during the development process. (Rumor has it a bug in the algorithm's height output is the reason why Oblivion's terrain is so flat and smooth.) However, procedural generation isn't used to dynamically create geometry during the _playing_ process. The world was set in stone by the time it was printed to CDs.
@@djchristian82 It was flat and smooth at the time it was created by the developers. I'm willing to bet that trashing all the terrain, tracking down the bug, and spending a few days or weeks regenerating the heightmaps from scratch probably wasn't in the timetable, so it was left as-is.
Morrowind was my first elder scrolls and going back to try and play Daggerfall was absolutely impossible for me at first. I couldnt even get it running on windows xp back then when I talked my parents into buying me an original disc off ebay. So happy to see it getting the labor of love it deserves
I love your videos and as I invest more of my time into Daggerfall, I love learning more about its development and lore. Thank you for these videos!! Can't wait for you to blow up :)
Things like this that fascinate me about video games.. I can just imagine a currently popular game getting reborn somewhere in the future, and i can't wait :D
you know what i appreciate you showing the review magazines, they are czech and slovak magazines, legendary times legendary articles legendary games :D you are doing awesome job popularizing DFU! thank you.
I just wanted to say this video series has been incredible and has convinced me to try playing daggerfall unity which I just finished installing. I was wondering if maybe you'd consider posting a list of mods you'd recommend playing it with? Also, do you have any plans on making a video about redguard in the future?
That’s great news! I hope you enjoy it. I’ll make a video on this in the future, but for the most part I stick to graphics mods, DREAM and Enhanced Sky (both from Nexus) are really good. And yes! I’m looking forward to reviewing Redguard soon (won’t be as long as this series, but still a decent length video :) )
I just went through the process of installing the daggerfall using the steam version and I love it so far. The only issue I have are dungeons for obvious reasons.
Super excited for this one! Nice work man :) Keep it up! By the way, is there supposed to be sound at 4:39 and 4:56? It's where you talk about the sound effects / audio bug, but all I can hear is your background music
@@georyx2454 No woriess, I've removed them via UA-cam's editor now, so when it updates in a few hours they'll be gone. My bad for missing it before uploading haha
I remember working at Gamestop (then Electronics Boutique) that the original release date for Daggerfall IIRC was "End of May 95" and that was our running joke about whatever game someone was asking about the release date for.
When i was a kid, my mom sent me to take computer lessons, i used to go to some guy’s house who had a real nice home office, he had 3 computers in there, i remember playing Oregon Trail, GTA 1 & GTA london, as well as elder scrolls, i sure learned how to use those sweet machines
I can't believe Bethesda was so invested in Starfield they went all the way back to Daggerfall to build their game. It might even come close to Daggerfall's world map!
Daggerfall is one of those games that is great when it works, but the DOS version breaks so often it can take the fun out of it. Often switches are inaccessible, you can't find quest items, enemies get stuck in the geometry that you need to kill, enemies stuck in steps will hit you 1000 times in a second and basically instant kill you, its damn near impossible to see anything with some of the weather effects, etc. The bug fixes alone make Unity a better version, since you are guaranteed you can finish it unlike the original. You can still play DOS Doom without problem, all the source mods just make it play like a more modern game, but for Daggerfall the modern port actually makes the base game more playable like intended.
Adjusting the clock speed down because you had a dual pentium processor. Had to do that a lot for “older” games. Oh man, you mention switches. I forgot about having to toggle physical switches on the 8088, 8087, and 8086s for some component configurations to work. (The 8087 was a secondary “math” processor used with the 8088 cpu). Thankfully by the time this game came out that was the past.
Dang it alright I gotta try it. My brain is so broken from Skyrim though. I'm so used to quest markers and voiced dialogue. I tried Morrowind but I didnt make it far, as willing as I was to get over its quirkiness. I have to try it again.
When I first started starfield, I thought maybe the random dungeons you found on planets were procedurally generated and Bethesda had returned to their daggerfall roots, but was sadly mistaken 😢
Daggerfall is great. The Unity port? It's good, but it will be taxing on PCs that are from before 2010, and even more so if one has only the integrated graphics, so it limits a lot of what the Unity port can do, if it can be run at all. ... Eh, don't mind me; I'm only behind because I live under poverty (by wealth class standards).
Yeah people shouldn't be discouraged from trying the dos version because for some people it is the only version. If you install all the patches you get rid of most of the bugs.
I was born on the day Daggerfall released (probably). This rules. Also, this video series rules. Very glad to have found your channel through deciding to go back and play Daggerfall Unity. It's CONSIDERABLY better than when I played it on DOSBox in 2009 when Bethesda released it for free. Even then, I got sucked into it for quite a while. Kind of amazed I managed to put up with it in retrospect, but Daggerfall Unity really managed to remind me what *really* worked about it while removing (or otherwise lessening) what didn't work. Special mention to the "smaller dungeons" experimental feature in Unity. It makes questing so much better. I'm pretty sure the reason I abandoned the game back then was because I just never found the exit to a dungeon I entered. That character is presumably rotting in an underwater section right now, unaware that The Knights of the Owl (or whatever) have long since expelled him for his many failures.
I love the emulated DOS version, so when DF unity came out.... absolute godsend. mods can effectively turn DF into the game the developers wanted it to be, as well as the game *you* want it to be.
If they did an official daggerfall remake and just paid some interns to make some DLC/add stuff to the over world, I'd buy that. Skyrim has gotten 2 rereleases and its their most current main series game.
Idk, I loved and I still do original dos daggerfall version. It's like more authentic, also I think unity version shows the simplicity and missings of a 1996 mapping, wich is not good
Great video! I got to chat and interact with Interkarma in the XL-Engine forums and I remember his first posts about his Unity Engine project for Daggerfall, it's incredible to see how far it's come and how it's really made the game shine after getting rid of the chaff.
Daggerfall worked almost exactly the same as it does in the DOS box emulator. If you follow Zaric Zhakaron and his playthroughs and story of all the iterations, including the one he played as a kid back in the 90’s, you’ll get a good idea.
I remember sending out 7.95 for the patch disk for Mortal Kombat 1 for DOS. I tell my daughter she has no idea how lucky she has it that the internet, medicine, GPS, etc exist.
Yeah, this is from the original multi part series that was combined to make the full analysis. I privated all of the parts that didnt stand on their own, but left this one and the "Making of" one live as separate parts for those who only care about these sections.
Really over the years ive been looking for a game so masive as Daggerfall and freedom and sadly i´ve haven´t found anything like it. Don´t know if you know any similar games (indie, or not) that give that much freedom on a masive world.
I 100% disagree that the original daggerfall is unpleasant to play. It has aged nicely and the game speaks for itself. Thats why people mod it to be more "eye candy" rather than change assets.
Some people over exagerate when they talk about the bugs in the dos version of the game, even without the fan patches the game isn't that buggy or horrible to play as some people claim. This sucks because there are still people out there who can't run DF Unity in their computers and the original version is the only way they have to experience this awesome game so idiots making the dos version out to be an unplayable broken mess are discouraging these people from ever playing the game.
Played this game from the time it came out to about 2008 when my old rig finally died and my new computer couldn't play it. I don't know how many hours I put into it, but it's definitely a lot, I'd go days at a time, for years. Tried playing it with an emulator, and it just didn't work for me. It was always a buggy mess of a game, but in the emulator it was near unplayable. Then Daggerfall Unity came along. Thankfully I'm not the nostalgic type, or I'd probably play it straight into an early grave. All the good, plus better, with almost none of the bad.
What mod is being used to create the Orc camp in the overworld at 10:33? This video series has got me into DFU, and I'd really like to flesh out the game with some mods, but can't find that one.
It’s a work in progress mod by Cliffworms, you can find him on Twitter. He has also made other mods for DFU, it isn’t public yet but it will be soon. For similar results, ‘Warm Ashes’ helps to add some life to the world, as well as ‘wilderness NPCs’, which adds friendly and enemy NPCs everywhere.
I believe these are added by the World of Daggerfall Project mod. Which is a huge and ongoing undertaking of having fans build new world content for the game.
I prefer the original for "nosalgia" reasons (i say this as a 19 year old) the old feel is just so cool! I use a CRT modded version of DosBox so it looks like the real deal from the late 90s.
I was a big fan of Daggerfall back in the DOS age, but even with the Unity version, I still can't get back in the game today. When I swing my weapon 100 times on any enemies, 99 time my strikes will miss or got parried. I just can't stand this very low hit success rate making each battle long and moral dampening (I have tailored my character stats to have excellent hit rate). Is there any mod for the Unity version to address this abysmal hit success rate problem?
"When a souls-type game was just called a game." LMAO. Played Daggerfall a lot. It would crash every some 3+ hours with a ten percent change to corrupt your safefile too. Thankfully the game's good enough to just restart a run but I always quit out and started a script that copied the savefiles to another folder just in case.
I mean its fairly pretty if you squint. And the abstract graphics makes it feel like a murky representation of another world. Which might make you feel weirdly immersed in it.
been trying to play unity but had to give it up as i just cant understand the combat,everything kills me in like 3 hits and i can never tell if im hitting anything or not
you probably heard already but some of original daggerfall developers are currently working on a wayward realms, a possible true successor to daggerfall
I don't know if it's because I beat Arena just prior to starting my Daggerfall playthrough, but I didn't actually find it all that bad. Sure, it's annoying that enemies can one-hit-kill you, or that merchants pay you 1\3 of the expected sum, and of course there's stuff like the game not telling you that you've failed a quest, or enchanted items breaking beyond repair, but honestly, once you get used to the game, it's a lot of fun and not all that janky. Ironically, trying to play DF Unity, I always get screwed over in new ways, mods or not, the skeletons in DF Unity are particularly awful. No idea how they balanced the port, but the skeletons in the original game were your best friend by comparison. 😒
I feel like the art is too amateur to have such high res sprites, they kinda end up looking like a 13 year old who tried creating original characters by looking at 80s-90s fantasy novel covers and trying to imitate them. They were definitely made with pixelated sprites in mind. I'd love to play with all the modern amenities, mods, and high resolution - so long as the textures and sprities dont look like OpenGL texture smoothing has been blasted over the artwork. What the game needs is high quality sprites, not just high res sprites. But if there isn't a lot of artists that feel like re-imagining Daggerfall's characters and NPCs.. I could definitely do the work, it's really just NPC world sprites that look goofy. Think I'll start messing around with mock ups and see if I can come up with anything that looks great but also blends with current mods most people are using for textures and whatnot.
It was a very broken game. There was a main quest line breaker where Barenziah doesn't even appear and you can't progress. Falling through the floor (alot) and despawning quest items. Add all of that to silly large procedually created dungeons! I love the game, I always have, always will but unity has saved it. Great video!
I played it when it was released. It had a lot of great features, but don't forget that in addition to falling through the floor, getting stuck in doors was a major problem.
The fan patches and DF Setup have saved it, unity has improved it. If you install all the fan patches after the latest patch the game isn't broken at all and the bugs are rare.
The drawback of df unity is that it actually requires about as much as oblivion does to run efficiently which to me for a fancy reskin of a fckng 1996 game is absolutely ludicrous. No reason it should have those requirements. I legit can't run it on a 2016 desktop pc
Nope. I was a mad Daggerfall fanatic when it first came out but we have Skygerfall now, replicating more of daggefall in skygerfall would be good but Daggerfall dosen't offer anything that's not in Skyrim or Skygerfall
Bro... in the mid 1990s having a pc was NOT niche. It was fairly mainstream in the late 80's ffs! I hate it when people that clearly weren't a part of a time try to speak on it and are just blatantly wrong.
I have full respect for the original version, but I think you have to be some kind of masochist to not play unity daggerfall 😂 As soon as I moved to unity I could actually beat the first tutorial bat enemy
Tbh I think Unity Daggerfall looks like an abomination. The sprites have that very ugly upscaled pixel art look, and the graphics, overall feel and music have completely lost their retro charm, feeling pretty soulless now. Full disclosure I only briefly played Daggerfall years after release in dosbox, an even though it is super rough and clunky by modern standards, I'd rather play an old game and enjoy it's old charm for what it was than go for a strange soulless frankenstein.
I'm an old man, played all the TES games as they came out, and still to this day Daggerfall is my favorite computer game of all time, for years I played the OG until Unity, Unity is amazing and being able to mod.. wow. It's an old game reborn.
I haven't been able to try it, but I had been following that one being worked on by Lucius for years. I also love daggerfall the most and am excited to try unity when I can get the time. Halt!
Can’t wait to finish building my dos/win95 pc so I can play this game how it was intended.
Original Version is on Seam now.
Epic
Hello. I am a old man too, or feel like it, at 63. Its great to see another gamer from the time games began.
The radiant quests in Skyrim are exactly like Daggerfall quests, which I find to be a charming parallel. Oblivion's forests are also procedurally generated, just cleaned up by hand. I'd really like to see the return of roleplay options in dialogue that actually have an impact on the responses you get. Choosing which level of formality you want to use in Daggerfall dialogue is a relatively simple but effective way of adding depth, and it honestly works a little better than Morrowind's dialogue system. Oblivion gives you next to no options outside of the Dark Brotherhood questline, and even then they have zero impact on the conversation. Daggerfall is chock full of ambitious mechanics that could be implemented so much better on modern hardware.
Man i wished they just build up and improve thier game design instead of removing some of them
I'm pretty sure DaggerFall inspired StarField's features.
Doubt it considering the lackthereof
I think that the man who created the unity version of daggerfall deserves to go to heaven
you know the "extra hell" meme, well interkarma deserves to go to extra heaven.
@@thelemonofgaming6303 lol yess
but not right now, surely
@@Korn1holio Heaven's no, we need him even more now that 1.0 is officially released
About elevation: the world does have it, in fact, it's the same elevation you see on the world map. Areas in the Wrothgarian Mountains are much higher than on the coast of Daggerfall. However, elevation is even across each square on the world map, and each square is larger than a city, so mountains and hills are way too smooth, impossible to notice from the ground. You can only notice it when there's a stray white pixel on the height map, where you'll see a very steep and high plateau in the middle of nowhere. Unity then amplifies local height noise, creating hills small enough for the player to notice, but those are mostly independent from the world map.
There was a bug in the original that made the height map not work, so the original "has" it, but it really doesn't.
@@chaosordeal294 The heighmap system in the original is entirely functional. The maximum height is just barely difference from the minimum. IIRC the difference is about 50m from the tallest mountain to sea level. Source: I used to do a lot of experimentation and modding on the original DOS version.
Meaning technically it didn't have elevation outside the world map itself. It was superficial because of hardware and tech limitations.
Funny thing is, the daggerfall character creation is my favorite in ANY game. it is really great and allows you to create EXACTLY the character you want, no matter what... even if said wcharacter was utterly useless... that'd be for you to figure out afterwards. I really wish there wqere modern games that used this kind of character creator and advantage and disadvantage system and so on.
Games nowadays are afraid to allow you to fail.
Unfortunately, they just literally don't make good video games anymore tbh 😞😔
I mean, for what its worth, the guys behind Deus Ex didn't want to make a world simulator game with a story tacked on top. Ion Storm just wanted to make an immersive sim first person shooter with a more narrow scope and RPG elements. And they succeeded in that regard if you were to ask me.
Its flattering though that Daggerfall was used as a point of reference when trying to figure out their game to begin with, even if it was for the purpose of not following in its footsteps since Deus Ex wasn't trying to be like Daggerfall.
Bravo on a great series! Thank you for all the time spent on creating it and for the occasional shout out to our spiritual successor!
Thank you for watching them, and thank you for making said successor :)
You bet I'm gonna watch the whole thing when it's out, even though I have already watched all the individual parts. Longform Elder Scrolls content never gets old.
Skyrim guards: "Wait, I know you"
Oblivion guards: "By the nine divines... ASSAULT"
Daggerfall guards: "HOLD HOLD... HOLD ... HOLD"
It's been a blast watching this 8 part analysis of a game I didn't even know I'd end up loving the same way I did when I started playing TES main titles backwards from Skyrim to Daggerfall and hopefully I'll be able to try Arena and the other spin-off titles. It stands on its own with its "Piece it together" main quest and it really was rewarding to actually find things out yourself and being immersed by the game and the freedom it gives though I still prefer Morrowind with its handmade side quests and world. Looking forward for that 3 hour cut you said in the last part!
Once i got really into (patched) dos daggerfall it became my favourite game ever and unity has made it even skyrocket beyond that, and its great that people are recognizing it now.
Very interesting video like your others. I was not expecting to see my avatar and pictures of my mods in here. Thank you for the surprise! :)
Thank you for all your hard work on the mods! They are greatly appreciated 😊
My only Scrolls is Skyrim. I wish ES 6 was an unofficial remake of Daggerfall. Game looks AMAZING.
I love that you named a character guybush. Wonderful nod to a classic
I loved Daggerfall back when I played it. It took me several attempts to finally get out of the first dungeon it starts you into. I must have put around 50 or 60 hours of gameplay into it. Unfortunately for whatever reason it bugged at one point and I couldn't finish it. It might have been because of that missing dungeon you mentioned. I can't recall.
Thats a damn shame
I got my first copy of Daggerfall just in time for Christmas 1996, and I got it for free. I was actually buying another game, and asked the vendor about all the second hand copies of this Daggerfall game. I turned out that his assistant had bought them from people who had given up on the game as it was badly, even fatally, bugged. He couldn't get rid of them so he was giving them away as a throw-in to anyone who bought a game from him. As it happens I was in a fortunate position of having internet connection (I was an IT manager at the time and had just installed internet connections at my company) so was able to download a patch from the US (I'm in the UK) which made the game playable. So I copied the patch onto floppy and gave the vendor a copy so he could copy it for his customers.
I finished the game that Christmas, have played it many times since, both DOS and Unity, but haven't actually finished it since. The patched version is probably my favourite game of the series, but when I rank them I have to place Daggerfall last because of how badly broken the game was at release; yes as bad as Duhblivion was, at least it was playable and finishable 'out of the box'.
Between DFU and the Retro Engine for the 16-bit Sonic games, Australia has done the world of retro gaming accessibility and preservation a monumental service.
as an australian, australia has done itself a monumental service in that regard as well. I might only be 14 but unlike others my age, i can still look past dated graphics to see the true beauty of 90's pc games.
"oh man I loved that jwlar daggerfall video, maybe I'll look to see what other people think of the unity port, i'll just click the first result on my search without checking to see who made it"
thanks for this analysis series; it was a great watch!
i remember reading something about TES6 planning to have procedural generation, and if we're to believe that reveal trailer is truly set in the iliac bay; who knows, maybe bethesda is interested in revisiting some things that made daggerfall unique to make a truly unique game again. but only time will tell...
Pretty sure Oblivion and Skyrim used procedural generation for their worlds as well. Every open world game uses it these days just not to the extent of Daggerfall
@@MizterMoonshine If I recall correctly, they used procedural generation to _create_ most of the overall geometry during the development process. (Rumor has it a bug in the algorithm's height output is the reason why Oblivion's terrain is so flat and smooth.) However, procedural generation isn't used to dynamically create geometry during the _playing_ process. The world was set in stone by the time it was printed to CDs.
@@djchristian82 It was flat and smooth at the time it was created by the developers. I'm willing to bet that trashing all the terrain, tracking down the bug, and spending a few days or weeks regenerating the heightmaps from scratch probably wasn't in the timetable, so it was left as-is.
Morrowind was my first elder scrolls and going back to try and play Daggerfall was absolutely impossible for me at first. I couldnt even get it running on windows xp back then when I talked my parents into buying me an original disc off ebay. So happy to see it getting the labor of love it deserves
I love your videos and as I invest more of my time into Daggerfall, I love learning more about its development and lore. Thank you for these videos!! Can't wait for you to blow up :)
Thank you! I'm glad you like them :)
Things like this that fascinate me about video games.. I can just imagine a currently popular game getting reborn somewhere in the future, and i can't wait :D
Truly a masterpiece of a analysis, thank you for your dedication.
Thank you!
Only trough playing previous Elder Scrolls games does the scope of just how far the series has fallen become crystal clear.
I am playing Open Morrowind and is so good I can only imagine what is Daggerfall have to offer.
What is open Morrowind?
you know what i appreciate you showing the review magazines, they are czech and slovak magazines, legendary times legendary articles legendary games :D
you are doing awesome job popularizing DFU! thank you.
I just wanted to say this video series has been incredible and has convinced me to try playing daggerfall unity which I just finished installing. I was wondering if maybe you'd consider posting a list of mods you'd recommend playing it with? Also, do you have any plans on making a video about redguard in the future?
That’s great news! I hope you enjoy it.
I’ll make a video on this in the future, but for the most part I stick to graphics mods, DREAM and Enhanced Sky (both from Nexus) are really good.
And yes! I’m looking forward to reviewing Redguard soon (won’t be as long as this series, but still a decent length video :) )
Daggerfall Unity VR. Now that would be nice.
I caught a glimpse of the player character name "Ezio" in there, that's a good choice 🔥
I just went through the process of installing the daggerfall using the steam version and I love it so far. The only issue I have are dungeons for obvious reasons.
Super excited for this one! Nice work man :) Keep it up!
By the way, is there supposed to be sound at 4:39 and 4:56? It's where you talk about the sound effects / audio bug, but all I can hear is your background music
Good catch, Adobe Premiere didn’t export that audio for some reason
@@Jwlar Huh weird. I thought it was on my end at first lol
@@georyx2454 No woriess, I've removed them via UA-cam's editor now, so when it updates in a few hours they'll be gone.
My bad for missing it before uploading haha
@@Jwlar Not a problem man! Honestly the fact that you're doing all these analysis videos more than makes up for it
love daggerfall, wish someone could give the same kind of love to arena
I remember working at Gamestop (then Electronics Boutique) that the original release date for Daggerfall IIRC was "End of May 95" and that was our running joke about whatever game someone was asking about the release date for.
When i was a kid, my mom sent me to take computer lessons, i used to go to some guy’s house who had a real nice home office, he had 3 computers in there, i remember playing Oregon Trail, GTA 1 & GTA london, as well as elder scrolls, i sure learned how to use those sweet machines
Highlight of The day right here!!!!
I can't believe Bethesda was so invested in Starfield they went all the way back to Daggerfall to build their game. It might even come close to Daggerfall's world map!
Was going to say the same thing: “Is Starfield Bethesda’s new Daggerfall?”
Wow! Thanx a lot! I'm gonna play Daggerfall again, after almost 30 years(as soon as I'll finish replaying Dungeon Master 2😉)!
Daggerfall is one of those games that is great when it works, but the DOS version breaks so often it can take the fun out of it. Often switches are inaccessible, you can't find quest items, enemies get stuck in the geometry that you need to kill, enemies stuck in steps will hit you 1000 times in a second and basically instant kill you, its damn near impossible to see anything with some of the weather effects, etc. The bug fixes alone make Unity a better version, since you are guaranteed you can finish it unlike the original. You can still play DOS Doom without problem, all the source mods just make it play like a more modern game, but for Daggerfall the modern port actually makes the base game more playable like intended.
Adjusting the clock speed down because you had a dual pentium processor. Had to do that a lot for “older” games.
Oh man, you mention switches. I forgot about having to toggle physical switches on the 8088, 8087, and 8086s for some component configurations to work. (The 8087 was a secondary “math” processor used with the 8088 cpu). Thankfully by the time this game came out that was the past.
@Alma yes :(
Dang it alright I gotta try it. My brain is so broken from Skyrim though. I'm so used to quest markers and voiced dialogue. I tried Morrowind but I didnt make it far, as willing as I was to get over its quirkiness. I have to try it again.
When I first started starfield, I thought maybe the random dungeons you found on planets were procedurally generated and Bethesda had returned to their daggerfall roots, but was sadly mistaken 😢
Daggerfall is great. The Unity port? It's good, but it will be taxing on PCs that are from before 2010, and even more so if one has only the integrated graphics, so it limits a lot of what the Unity port can do, if it can be run at all.
...
Eh, don't mind me; I'm only behind because I live under poverty (by wealth class standards).
Yeah people shouldn't be discouraged from trying the dos version because for some people it is the only version. If you install all the patches you get rid of most of the bugs.
I found that electronic buzzing to be a corruption of the skeleton's scream audio file.
I was born on the day Daggerfall released (probably). This rules. Also, this video series rules. Very glad to have found your channel through deciding to go back and play Daggerfall Unity. It's CONSIDERABLY better than when I played it on DOSBox in 2009 when Bethesda released it for free. Even then, I got sucked into it for quite a while.
Kind of amazed I managed to put up with it in retrospect, but Daggerfall Unity really managed to remind me what *really* worked about it while removing (or otherwise lessening) what didn't work. Special mention to the "smaller dungeons" experimental feature in Unity. It makes questing so much better.
I'm pretty sure the reason I abandoned the game back then was because I just never found the exit to a dungeon I entered. That character is presumably rotting in an underwater section right now, unaware that The Knights of the Owl (or whatever) have long since expelled him for his many failures.
I love the emulated DOS version, so when DF unity came out.... absolute godsend. mods can effectively turn DF into the game the developers wanted it to be, as well as the game *you* want it to be.
i remember playing this game when i was in my teenage years i had it on an old mid 90s era computer
If they did an official daggerfall remake and just paid some interns to make some DLC/add stuff to the over world, I'd buy that.
Skyrim has gotten 2 rereleases and its their most current main series game.
Idk, I loved and I still do original dos daggerfall version. It's like more authentic, also I think unity version shows the simplicity and missings of a 1996 mapping, wich is not good
This is amazing!
I wonder if you can still fly around shooting area-effect fireballs that blast crowds of enemies at once. :D
Great video! I got to chat and interact with Interkarma in the XL-Engine forums and I remember his first posts about his Unity Engine project for Daggerfall, it's incredible to see how far it's come and how it's really made the game shine after getting rid of the chaff.
Daggerfall worked almost exactly the same as it does in the DOS box emulator. If you follow Zaric Zhakaron and his playthroughs and story of all the iterations, including the one he played as a kid back in the 90’s, you’ll get a good idea.
Let us pray for Arena Unity in the future. I want the whole experience so bad!
I'm a big M&M fan, weird that I never stumbled upon this as a kid.
Never clicked so fast !!
Thanks :)
I remember sending out 7.95 for the patch disk for Mortal Kombat 1 for DOS. I tell my daughter she has no idea how lucky she has it that the internet, medicine, GPS, etc exist.
I'm sure medicine existed when you were a wee baby.
Can you do a quick documentary of what happened to Daggerfall XL? I used to check it ever now and then in 2014 but it kinda just died.
Either I have deja vu or I’ve already watched a significant portion of this video in a different one of your videos
Yeah, this is from the original multi part series that was combined to make the full analysis. I privated all of the parts that didnt stand on their own, but left this one and the "Making of" one live as separate parts for those who only care about these sections.
this serious is great
Really over the years ive been looking for a game so masive as Daggerfall and freedom and sadly i´ve haven´t found anything like it. Don´t know if you know any similar games (indie, or not) that give that much freedom on a masive world.
Nice Monkey Island team in one of the early clips lol
I 100% disagree that the original daggerfall is unpleasant to play. It has aged nicely and the game speaks for itself. Thats why people mod it to be more "eye candy" rather than change assets.
Some people over exagerate when they talk about the bugs in the dos version of the game, even without the fan patches the game isn't that buggy or horrible to play as some people claim. This sucks because there are still people out there who can't run DF Unity in their computers and the original version is the only way they have to experience this awesome game so idiots making the dos version out to be an unplayable broken mess are discouraging these people from ever playing the game.
Love your channel
Check out our Wilderness Overhaul mod :)
Finally the vast nature of Daggerfall looks like real nature, not like homogenously placed billboards :D
Man, I hope OpenTESArena or similar ports will achieve the same love and make the game even more approachable.
maybe in future we can enjoy daggerrim
three in a month??? by jove
I prefer Daggerfall DOS. It just feel so much more authentic. The controls are easy to fix.
Played this game from the time it came out to about 2008 when my old rig finally died and my new computer couldn't play it. I don't know how many hours I put into it, but it's definitely a lot, I'd go days at a time, for years.
Tried playing it with an emulator, and it just didn't work for me. It was always a buggy mess of a game, but in the emulator it was near unplayable.
Then Daggerfall Unity came along. Thankfully I'm not the nostalgic type, or I'd probably play it straight into an early grave. All the good, plus better, with almost none of the bad.
When I first played Daggerfall in 96/97 I didn't know how to fight and I kept dying to the first rat.
Bethesda released a buggy game? You don't say.
What mod is being used to create the Orc camp in the overworld at 10:33? This video series has got me into DFU, and I'd really like to flesh out the game with some mods, but can't find that one.
It’s a work in progress mod by Cliffworms, you can find him on Twitter. He has also made other mods for DFU, it isn’t public yet but it will be soon.
For similar results, ‘Warm Ashes’ helps to add some life to the world, as well as ‘wilderness NPCs’, which adds friendly and enemy NPCs everywhere.
I believe these are added by the World of Daggerfall Project mod. Which is a huge and ongoing undertaking of having fans build new world content for the game.
I prefer the original for "nosalgia" reasons (i say this as a 19 year old) the old feel is just so cool! I use a CRT modded version of DosBox so it looks like the real deal from the late 90s.
@@perkeleejonne9702 To the contrary most people are playing the Unity remake.
Where de fook do i download this
github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity/releases
I was a big fan of Daggerfall back in the DOS age, but even with the Unity version, I still can't get back in the game today. When I swing my weapon 100 times on any enemies, 99 time my strikes will miss or got parried. I just can't stand this very low hit success rate making each battle long and moral dampening (I have tailored my character stats to have excellent hit rate).
Is there any mod for the Unity version to address this abysmal hit success rate problem?
"When a souls-type game was just called a game." LMAO. Played Daggerfall a lot. It would crash every some 3+ hours with a ten percent change to corrupt your safefile too.
Thankfully the game's good enough to just restart a run but I always quit out and started a script that copied the savefiles to another folder just in case.
I mean its fairly pretty if you squint. And the abstract graphics makes it feel like a murky representation of another world. Which might make you feel weirdly immersed in it.
i wish every 90s game got this treatment
Dos vs Unity vs Skygerfall
been trying to play unity but had to give it up as i just cant understand the combat,everything kills me in like 3 hits and i can never tell if im hitting anything or not
It uses the same hit chance style combat of Morrowind. It is certainlty an aquired taste.
elder scrolls 6 needs to be an rpg again, but we all know what we're gonna get....
you probably heard already but some of original daggerfall developers are currently working on a wayward realms, a possible true successor to daggerfall
Was that opening sound effect taken from rayman or something, sounds familiar
It's from Spyro
@@Jwlar ohhh yeah that's the one haha
Yeee
I don't know if it's because I beat Arena just prior to starting my Daggerfall playthrough, but I didn't actually find it all that bad. Sure, it's annoying that enemies can one-hit-kill you, or that merchants pay you 1\3 of the expected sum, and of course there's stuff like the game not telling you that you've failed a quest, or enchanted items breaking beyond repair, but honestly, once you get used to the game, it's a lot of fun and not all that janky. Ironically, trying to play DF Unity, I always get screwed over in new ways, mods or not, the skeletons in DF Unity are particularly awful. No idea how they balanced the port, but the skeletons in the original game were your best friend by comparison. 😒
I feel like the art is too amateur to have such high res sprites, they kinda end up looking like a 13 year old who tried creating original characters by looking at 80s-90s fantasy novel covers and trying to imitate them. They were definitely made with pixelated sprites in mind. I'd love to play with all the modern amenities, mods, and high resolution - so long as the textures and sprities dont look like OpenGL texture smoothing has been blasted over the artwork. What the game needs is high quality sprites, not just high res sprites. But if there isn't a lot of artists that feel like re-imagining Daggerfall's characters and NPCs.. I could definitely do the work, it's really just NPC world sprites that look goofy. Think I'll start messing around with mock ups and see if I can come up with anything that looks great but also blends with current mods most people are using for textures and whatnot.
It was a very broken game. There was a main quest line breaker where Barenziah doesn't even appear and you can't progress. Falling through the floor (alot) and despawning quest items. Add all of that to silly large procedually created dungeons! I love the game, I always have, always will but unity has saved it. Great video!
I played it when it was released. It had a lot of great features, but don't forget that in addition to falling through the floor, getting stuck in doors was a major problem.
The fan patches and DF Setup have saved it, unity has improved it. If you install all the fan patches after the latest patch the game isn't broken at all and the bugs are rare.
wtf is a zed x spectrum? i had a zee x spectrum it was E Zee the use not E zed to use
"modern sensibilities"
God, just to hear this it reminds me of what kind of times we're living in and it makes me cringe
Gave it a try wanted to like it. feels empty. nothing to really do. nothing lands on hitting the enemy.
The drawback of df unity is that it actually requires about as much as oblivion does to run efficiently which to me for a fancy reskin of a fckng 1996 game is absolutely ludicrous. No reason it should have those requirements. I legit can't run it on a 2016 desktop pc
Gavin? Gaviiiin.
I hope one day daggerfall becomes like morrowind or oblivion after unity has been perfected
Did we need a 2 minute history of personal computing lmfao video essays man
I liked the midi music more
Nope. I was a mad Daggerfall fanatic when it first came out but we have Skygerfall now, replicating more of daggefall in skygerfall would be good but Daggerfall dosen't offer anything that's not in Skyrim or Skygerfall
Bro... in the mid 1990s having a pc was NOT niche. It was fairly mainstream in the late 80's ffs! I hate it when people that clearly weren't a part of a time try to speak on it and are just blatantly wrong.
The reason to play the original MS-DOS version and not DFU: the original has several translations into my language, DFU has none.
I have full respect for the original version, but I think you have to be some kind of masochist to not play unity daggerfall 😂
As soon as I moved to unity I could actually beat the first tutorial bat enemy
Unity is an absolute masterpiece. I cant say enough positive things about it.
Tbh I think Unity Daggerfall looks like an abomination. The sprites have that very ugly upscaled pixel art look, and the graphics, overall feel and music have completely lost their retro charm, feeling pretty soulless now. Full disclosure I only briefly played Daggerfall years after release in dosbox, an even though it is super rough and clunky by modern standards, I'd rather play an old game and enjoy it's old charm for what it was than go for a strange soulless frankenstein.