Bethesda Releases Daggerfall For Free 80
On Thursday, Bethesda announced that for the 15th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls series, they were releasing The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall for free. They aren't providing support for the game anymore, but they posted a detailed description of how to get the game running in DOSBox. Fans of the series can now easily relive the experience of getting completely lost in those enormous dungeons. Save often.
Nice nice nice nice... (Score:3, Interesting)
Rest well this night -- (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone set up a torrent! (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone set up a torrent!
Because at 2.5k/sec, I think we're about to break their servers.
Re:Nice nice nice nice... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Source? (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed. Drives me crazy how they don't release the source to these things. On the other hand, I suspect they really don't want to put in the work required to remove all the licensed code they probably used. DaggerXL [wordpress.com] appeared recently. It's a project to recreate the engine and game code from scratch. I'll be keeping an eye on it. A source release would probably help him along though. Getting the dungeons to render isn't too hard for him, but the AI and giant tangle of game logic sounds like a nightmare.
Re:free (Score:4, Interesting)
>>The game was so buggy it isn't worth free
To be honest, it got better.
After 40 patches or so.
Honestly, it's better than either Morrowind or Oblivion. The sheer amount of twinkery you can do with the custom classes and magic item creation is just ridiculous and awesome.
Re:Nice nice nice nice... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish they'd release the source for that. That game is so poorly optimized it still drags on modern hardware. Add a few mods that include NPCs or lots of fancy scripts and -pow- . . . instant slideshow.
Maybe in another 10 years. Sigh.
The only problem is, (Score:3, Interesting)
It's impossible to play and have a hope of finishing unless you're power gaming. None of the main classes actually seem like their made so you could play as them. Unless you already have detailed knowledge of the game, there's not much point in trying to finish it.
That said, there's a feature in the latest patch that allows you to teleport to major areas in dungeons. Don't know how you could play without it. I mean, did anyone ever manage to survive an encounter with an ancient lich or an ancient vampire or a powerful daedra lord?
Then there's also the issue of all the randomly generated dungeons looking like octopuses mating, and that there are way, way too many fetch the foo quests. "Please, I'll help you with your quest to rid Dagerfall of the vengeful spirit, but could you please fetch me my adamantium underpants? I think I left them in a nearby dungeon infested with monsters..."
Re:Nice nice nice nice... (Score:2, Interesting)
You guys need to get up to speed on your DOSBox knowledge.
The more recent versions of DOSBox use a dynarec [wikipedia.org] backend. This is way faster than the old backend and has the added benefit of not requiring you to mess around with cycle numbers for every game.
Re:The only problem is, (Score:4, Interesting)
I completed the game in its time, without any cheating or teleporting. And without even applying cheap character creation strategies like certain race-resistance combinations (I did choose the constraint not to wear leather and chain armour, but those are features and should be obvious by the second time you create a character). So yes, it is difficult, but definitely not impossible.
People nowadays are too spoiled and used to easy games. The thing about ancient liches and vampires was fighting a lot of fights, clearing a lot of dungeons and collecting a lots of items and spells until you were experienced and equipped enough to fight them. And once you could do that, it felt like a truly epic fight. Not like in Oblivion, where enemies are just scaled so you can fight them.
I advise everyone to play this game. In my opinion it is the best CRPG of all time (and I've played most known CRPG's since the times of Might and Magic I and Ultima I).
Re:Source? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've played through all of Morrowind (Before the expansions), and Oblivion when it came out too. Unless you actually played all the way through DF before the other ones, I can see where you wouldn't really understand the differences.
For me, the main difference was the randomly generated towns. They weren't completely random, but they were /different/ every time you started a new game and then stayed the same for that entire play through. Also, you randomly uncovered points of interest through conversations and quests that could be re-visited if you wanted to, but were also tied to your current game. You could also properly buy houses, ships, horses and carts (And they weren't introduced via a patch/mod either, they actually planned for this). There were bookstores which contained literally libraries of interesting books, pamphlets, papers and scrolls. I know they exist in Oblivion too, but it's not the same. In oblivion you go up to a vendor and tell him "Sell!" "Buy!" and get a long list of his inventory. In DF you walked up to the bookshelf and browsed the contents, taking the items you wanted into your inventory.
There's other things like that. The magic/enchant system in DF is way superior to MW/OB's that it's not really comparable. Playing with them in those two is like playing with miniature model trains/planes whereas in DF you were playing with full-sized scale working replicas.
Even the people in the game were random, you couldn't always expect the same npcs to be holding the same positions with the same attitudes every play through. Each game forced you to explore it, and truly felt alive and not some scripted paradise like the other two. I'm not saying it didn't have it's flaws, but I just don't see how a few mods (And I have played with quite a few mods for MW/OB) can re-create or surpass what I really enjoyed about it (Which was no two games being the same).
Re:Source? (Score:2, Interesting)
The AI really is basically non-existent. The trick is he wants to replicate the behaviour of the original game. Getting comparable AI won't be hard but he's going for a game that plays like the original.
There are things he can use, but mostly for stuff like displaying the resources and cells. There are a few of these [dfworkshop.net] with code available.
I'm surprised the easily moddable graphical MUD idea hasn't happened (to my knowledge). One of the biggest downsides of MMOs is the lack of user content. I don't want any game on the scale of an MMO. Well, it can have the physical scale (like Daggerfall), but it would be fun to just have something to crawl dungeons with my bro and a couple friends.