With all the excitement attached to both Skyrim and the Elder Scrolls Online I thought I would post a review of the game that introduced me to the world of Tamriel.
Daggerfall was released in 1996 by Bethesda as a follow-up to their 1994 game Arena. Instead of attempting to continue in the entire continent, the game takes place in the Iliac Bay, the coastal regions of High Rock and Hammerfell. This makes the game slightly more focused than Arena with more emphasis on the politics and powers controlling the region.
Plot Summary
The City Of Daggerfall is under a curse, haunted by the spirit of the late King Lysandus and his army of ghosts. No one can walk the city by night for fear of the curse. The kingdoms are warring and betraying each other in their bids for power while the savage orcs and sinister necromancers prepare forces of their own.
Eager to keep his hold on the Iliac Bay, Emperor Uriel Septim VII secretly sends a champion on a course for Daggerfall to investigate why King Lysandus' haunts his former kingdom. However, as the ship nears Daggerfall a supernatural storm leaves the hero shipwrecked and stranded in a coastal cave. With only basic equipment and beginner's luck you must escape and fulfill your role as the Emperor's champion...
Gameplay
Daggerfall is an early first-person RPG which uses a rather basic 3D engine similar to Doom or Duke Nukem. The controls more-or-less default to the type used in Arena which are awkward and clumsy. However unlike Arena you can customise almost every function. Players of the later Elder Scrolls games will find they are able to achieve a layout similar to Morrowind or Oblivion.
So with your newly configured controls you can escape the first dungeon and set out in the world. As with later Elder Scrolls titles, this is open ended. You can pick up quests in towns or guildhalls, which often result in you delving into a dungeon and completing an objective inside. When you first start, there will be no dungeons on the map apart from crypts. You find dungeons by taking quests, looting maps during your adventures or sometimes you get a location as a quest reward.
There are literally thousands of locations in the game, from tiny hamlets and way shrines to huge walled cities. Sadly there is a lot of repetition and random content. The guild quests are totally random and generic. On the other hand you can take work forever, unlike later games where rising in the ranks basically means you stop getting quests.
An important part of the game is of course the dungeons. In Daggerfall they are big. Really big. Many players complain about this as you frequently cannot find the quest location and you may never find your way back to the surface again. It can be frustrating but it also makes the dungeon a truly daunting environment. Unlike the later games when a dungeon meant two or three caves linked together, Daggerfall has dungeons akin to your old D&D maps. There are still websites that offer help with Daggerfall and they give a few hints on dungeon crawling for this very reason.
The combat system is very much like a tabletop RPG would be. Your stats and skills give you a semi-random chance to hit something. The enemy has an automatic dodge roll. The same system was later used in Morrowind and is often disliked by people who play Oblivion or Skyrim. Personally I prefer this system for the RPG experience. I will go more into this when I review Morrowind.
One thing to note is the game is sadly very glitchy. Depending on which version you have it can be very hard to complete the main storyline due to crashes and corrupted saves. There are plenty of bug fixes on the internet though.
Graphics and SFX
Sadly this is probably the reason why many people will never play Daggerfall. The basic 3D engine uses fairly repetitive textures and flat bitmap sprites for enemies, NPCs and scenery. Even back in 1996 the graphics were fairly low resolution. The game has always been sold on depth and vastness rather than it's graphics.
The in game sounds are okay if not a little generic. Many of them will be familiar as they seem to be from a public domain source and are used in many games. Some of the creatures sound rather creepy though, such as the snarling vampire and screaming skeleton (which gets annoying quickly).
One rather interesting fact is that Daggerfall actually contained nudity (okay so it was blurry 16-bit nudity) and was originally going to have some adult content. None of the other Elder Scrolls games have attempted this so blatantly.
Conclusion
Old and clunky but still very playable. Daggerfall has an air of hidden politics and a genuine sense of vastness to it. The game can be genuinely challenging and you are not lead by the hand at all.
With the bugs, glitches and low res graphics (even for it's day) I'll give it a 8/10.
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