I would not be surprised at all. Immersion is about everything, including peoples reactions.



It's more than scaled a little. But i think you already answered yourself when you said "i assumed it was scaled a little". Being immersive is when you don't have to assume anything except you are playing a game. It should feel natural and Daggerfall cities (at least because of their scale) felt like cities and not representations of it.



Don't know how you got that idea but most old TES players enjoyed the new setting and it's variety. That's something that was greatly improved from Daggerfall. They had a good excuse for wanting to have more unique content and less procedural looking stuff but Morrowind ended up being very blocky anyway and dungeons very repetitive.

You can't have a huge game with plenty of landscape and want everything to be unique. That's something that is not possible to do. Either you limit the game to playable areas and make it non-continuous like in Fallout, Deusix and Bloodlines (which breaks immersion a little) or you use procedural techniques which was they were trying in Oblivion but were not ambitious enough.

Your comparison is strange.

Books have technical limitations that games don't. For instance, you probably wouldn't complain that the printed word can only describe someone's physical features but can't really give you an exact picture of what he looks like; in fact, most folks enjoy filling in details with their imaginations. I.e., we readily accept this technological limitation. It would tedious to have a book say, "His nose was one point five inches long and turned up at the end at a twenty degree angle. Each of his identical nostrils described an ellipse that was point eight four centimeters at its widest" etc. ad nauseam. But that's equivalent to the vast useless empty areas in DF that are thought by some to be immersive. You could just as easily relax and accept the limitation the MW/OB game designers had of having to compress the terrain to keep the game from being tedious. It's the same thing. If you don't want to get around that but can accept lactating talking geckos, that's merely your choice, but I would call it an awfully strange and selective one.

"It's more than scaled a little. But i think you already answered yourself when you said "i assumed it was scaled a little". Being immersive is when you don't have to assume anything except you are playing a game. It should feel natural and Daggerfall cities (at least because of their scale) felt like cities and not representations of it. "

you missed the main point of that particular paragraph, vvardenfell wouldn't have large cities anyways due to the blight & ashstorms. though yes, the scale was different than daggerfall's, which could be accounted to the fact the game was redesigned with the xbox in mind...

the morrowind concept map linked http://www.imperial-library.info/maps/concept_morrowind.jpg makes me die a little inside when i think of what could've been (incidently the sentiment with playing daggerfall).

But why do you think that sacrificing scale and immersion is necessary? One of the motivations for Daggerfall design was to make the most immersive game they could at the time. Besides Daggerfall had fast travel to solve this problem. If you are talking about walking inside towns and the complexity of dungeons then i agree that something would have to be done but not by sacrificing what could simply be tweaked to work better.

Morrowind provided transportation services and yet people complained just the same for walking too much. This seems to imply that the tedious of traveling has nothing to do with scale. Bloodlines can have tedious traveling moments with load screens, specially when you move from one area to another and those are very restricted areas.



That map is an example of a very believable world map. It features roads, rivers and varied climates and is lore accurate. What I wished to see for Morrowind and Oblivion, instead of a sandbox was a travel map system similar to Realms of Arkania where we plot our path in the map to travel. It should take lore accurate time to travel between places and random encounters would depend on many variables like the place, the weather, the season, of it's day or night or if we are using a road or crossing through forest. This would make exploration a lot more interesting. If the player wanted to walk between those places instead of using the map then why not.

they really should make an updated version of Arena true to current lore. this would allow the devs to show off a bit of each providence, various cultures. it could be like how the zelda series basically retells the same story slightly different each time...

Daggerfall fans expected Morrowind to be what Daggerfall should have been if it was finished. Even during Morrowind development, some devs said that Morrowind will be that. What a disappointment to discover that in fact, it was so far from the Daggerfall spirit when it came out. Morrowind was already oriented to seduce a larger public than the traditional RPG gamer, although not much as Oblivion is. Bloodmoon didn't change that. What did it bring from Daggerfall? Werewolfs, snow weather, Spriggans, bears and that's nearly all. So no, Bloodmoon did not make Morrowind more Daggerfall-like at all. Morrowind simplified too many things, first by grouping characters class into simplistic categories, Mages, Thieves and Warriors. All the game was made around that. Even the three great houses were class-oriented, Telvanni for the Mage, Redoran for the Warrior and Hlaalu for the Thief. Moreover, the main quest was absolutely Manichean and did not offer choices, the RPG element that was a little developed in the 1996-game Daggerfall, and was nearly entirely abandoned in the 2002-game Morrowind. The Daggerfall main quest was absolutely wonderful in comparison. The only element that I liked in the Morrowind one is that you never know the true story behind what happened with Dagoth Ur and the Nerevarine in the past, which is the same as in our Earth history especially for old history, some country giving a version of it which is different from the version of the neighbour.

Many others things were dropped in Morrowind, some realistic ones, like the character having to wait for some days before his weapon is repaired. In Morrowind, not only an armorer can repair your weapons in one nanosecond, but you can carry loads of hammers to repair yourself your weapons and armors in nanoseconds too. Completely unbelievable, and this little thing is a part of the ton of things that made Morrowind far less immersive than Daggerfall, where it should have been a lot more.

However we could debate endlessly about which game is superior to the other, and it has already been discussed endlessly by hundred of others players. For me it's the first time though.

If you actually want to bring the realism in scale into question, it's worth noting that the scale of the world compeltely changes every game, and that, while the area in DF being the size of Great Britain IS big, given the size of the continent of Tamriel, the size of the countries in DF you visit should amount to, what, something roughly as large as Europe, no?

In regards to DF's town sizes, it's not so much that they're not *actually* big, but not big enough to really support all the people you see there. There's very little in the way of industry and commerce and you have to wonder what everyone does. Not ALL of those people on the streets can be travellers, but there are way more than there can be housing for. Are they all vagrants or something?

Also, something to consider, but realism might equal immersion in some sense, but realism doesn't always equal fun. Though really, the only cripplingly unfun thing I found with daggerfall -- and the only factor that genuinely makes me not like the game -- are the dungeons. They're too big, they take too long, and they're too similar. I like dungeon crawls in large dungeons, sure. I love Wizardry and Etrian Odyssey and whatever. But those had puzzles. DF's dungeons were fairly mindless dungeon hacks that were impossible to navigate and took too long to do. I guess it requires a certain hardcoe gamer mindset to be able to put up with doing potentially dozens of multi-hour long dungeons. I just don't have time for that, though. I can put up with repeating similar quests for the same reason that I can repeat the static quests in Morrowind across several playthroughs. I can put up with the lack of meaningful exploration (Mostly. I have some quotes about Shigeru Miyamoto I could bring up. And I don't mean exploration in the sense of scouring a dungeon completely for all hidden doors and items and whatever. I mean exploring and finding something really unexpected or exciting or surprising. You can generally tell what a dungeon's layout type will be, roughly, very early on). I just don't have the patience for something that demanding, I guess. I play games to have fun. Not to have the freedom to fail missions.

And doesn't the fact that everyone basically fast travels everywhere in DF sort of make the huge wilderness irrelevant? How can you extoll the values of some gameplay feature if you never actually do anything with it?

Also, why hasn't anyone considered that maybe profitability didn't really have anything to do with the changes Morrowind had? Maybe the devs decided not to do the randomly generated thing because, well, actually designing areas is a lot more fun than letting a generator do it for you?

"Morrowind simplified too many things, first by grouping characters class into simplistic categories, Mages, Thieves and Warriors."

Every game in the series has done this, to the point where it is, quite simply, a staple of Elder Scrolls character creation. And I also think it's sort of a major fault that the series has never addressed. For instance, I don't want to be a mage, a thief, OR a warrior. I want to be a carpenter/lumberjack.

"Don't forget most game reviewers typically don't have weeks or months to play a game so even worse they get swayed by purdy graphics."

Most reviewers don't have weeks or months to play a game so they have to finish a game as quickly as possible and probably won't enjoy it, regardless of quality.

"The Daggerfall main quest was absolutely wonderful in comparison. "

Gameplay-wise, yes, but the writing was rather lacking, and it had an unfortunate tendency to break. But this is where all that faction stuff comes into play, and immensely so.

You also have to consider that the notion of the main quest in Morrowind is fairly different from in Daggerfall. Daggerfall had a single, rather branchy, questline. Morrowind had a lot of questlines. Doing MW's main quest gets you a new title and alters some world conditions, but it's a freeform game. What if you DON'T care about being the nerevarine, but want to just become a master thief or hijack house telvanni?

You don't really win the game by doing the nerevarine quests. The game doesn't end. There's still stuff to do. Just like any other guild.

Technically in DF, the guild quests were to gear you up for the main quest. You could spend the entire game ignoring the main quest very easily, sure, but the guilds were to get you resources so that you'd be strong enough to actually win, and the non-guild quests were to get you in good favor with the royalty in various regions so that you could actually GET the main quests. In a sense, DF was still built around it's main questline.

Morrowind wasn't.

Daggerfall dungeons have puzzles but they are optional and relatively simple. In most cases you can gain access to an hidden treasure room or other hidden part of the dungeon by pulling a set of levers, activate an elevator platform, find a secret passage underwater or find the right combination to walk by teleporting walls. There are no word riddles and i'm happy with that.



They made it that way to be more fun. That's one of the reasons people loved Daggerfall so much. You don't have to pick any template quest unless you want to and you are not forced into a linear path or do them in any order. If you fail one there's an hit in your reputation but you can recover from it. It's not something drastic like in Oblivion, for example, where you fail one guild quest and you can't progress in the guild anymore. Some quests should be like this but in Morrowind it works the same way as in Daggerfall. You can fail quests in many places and still be able to progress in the guild. They didn't use template quests but they used lots of optional quests which amounts to the same result. It would be fun to have those small job quests to be randomized a little. Morrowind was a big a improvement over Daggerfall in terms of guilds, i admit it, but i disagree with your statement that freedom to fail is not fun.



Why do we need a gameplay reason to justify immersion? People play games with a first person camera in a 3d world only because it's more immersive. Daggerfall wilderness is actually useful for quick random encounters and if the wilderness was much more detailed instead of being just four different areas (desert, temperate, tropical, mountain) of infinite terrain. Still it was fun to walk in some random direction and see what would pop up but not like Oblivion where at every road turn we find a dungeon. Removing artificial barriers is already important enough. It was great to enter a city at night by climbing the walls or rob an house by climbing the house to the second level.



That's not what they say. Making Morrowind wilderness consumed an absurd amount of time and the use of a terrain generator allowed them to achieve the same results. In Oblivion they let the generator do most of the stuff and then tweaked the important places by hand. The technology to generate realistic forests wasn't available at the time of Daggerfall so it looks artificial and repetitive.



You also get to know the world and lore by doing some template quests in Daggerfall. Morrowind expanded on this. Evolve the game and expand on it. That's the proper way to make a new ES episode.

I used to think the same thing when I first started playing Daggerfall "the dungeons are impossible to navigate and boring" yes they can be I have to be in the mood for exploring them.
The key to navigating the dungeons is learning how to use the map to look for hidden doors, Trapdoors etc that you would find hard to see... using torches on walls or skulls or hanging chains to be able to open some of them. Explore a large area around the entrance first because 90% of quest items are usually found somewhere near the entrance, but not always on the same level.

I personally love the atmosphere in daggerfall's dungeons, with the music and the 'feeling of being in danger' especially early in the game, and getting attacked silently from behind or paralysed by spiders, no other game has the same dungeon atmosphere for me. But then again Nobody can make you like them either.

...

"Daggerfall dungeons have puzzles but they are optional and relatively simple."

True, but I'm more interested in the more complex, interactive sort of puzzles, I guess. Item-usage based ones. As in, building rope bridges out of vines. Not the really bizarre item-based puzzles you see in a lot of point and click adventures. I tend to prefer Myst because it doesn't HAVE those and if nobody's going to do them right, well, don't do them at all (Hi. Gabriel Knight 3's moustache puzzle. And that thing in the Longest Journey with the rubber duck tube).

"There are no word riddles and i'm happy with that."

True.

"It's not something drastic like in Oblivion, for example, where you fail one guild quest and you can't progress in the guild anymore."

You could fail guild quests in Oblivion? How the !@#%..? Weren't most of them just "GIVE ME X" and it was pretty much impossible not to?

Well, except for that mage guild quest with the book of lightning, where you could screw over the guild leader, but the actual progression of events after that point didn't make any sense because they were checking some sort of arbitrary "quest state" variables and not whether or not you actually had the stupid book.

"but i disagree with your statement that freedom to fail is not fun."

Well, let me rephrase that. The freedom to fail is fun in the sense that it takes stress off the player. You failed the quest, or it's too hard, or whatever? No big deal. In DF it's that you can put in a lot of time investment into a quest and still fail. I don't mind time limits, but given the size and inavigability of the dungeons, some of the time limits seem a bit unfair, whereas some of the quests that are like "Go to some house and kill a tiger" have relatively long time limits. The hugity and convolutedness of the dungeons and odd placement of the quest items made it seem a bit unfair, too. It's like, yeah, in a roguelike, you can die and lose your character permanently, but if you die it's usually your fault, whereas if you fail a quest in Daggerfall, it feels like it's the game's fault a lot of the time. It's true you can prepare for a lot, but guessing a dungeon's enemy difficulty is a lot harder, and as I said, it's not necessarily easy to predict where the quest item will end up and it's rather needle in a haystack and just wandering in the dark instead of really having to think through your explorations.

I think Arena's dungeons were sort of better in this regard. They were smaller, but it's more that they way they were organized, you basically always had to go down to the lowest level, grab what you need, and escape, and it's more of a matter of conserving your health and items and magic, because resting to restore health isn't anywhere as easy in Arena as it is in DF, and as a whole I think Arena's a bit harder.

TAking the roguelike thing further, Arena also had a lot more unidentified items.

"It would be fun to have those small job quests to be randomized a little."

As I said earlier, I'd get rid of small quests as jobs, and replace them with something else. Like, instead of getting a random "Go kill some assassin" quest, you could, perhaps, just kill assassins that you encounter in the wilderness or in cities -- randomly placed enemies, like with MCA or something -- or monsters than wander into town and get bounties for turning in their writs or some other proof you killed them. Actually, I'm going to go bug someone to make this mod.

"Why do we need a gameplay reason to justify immersion?"

Okay, I went a bit overboard there. It's really more that I don't see how DF's wilderness WAS immersive. With Arena's wilderness areas, they gave the impression there was stuff in the world outside of the cities. Also, Morrowind had a big smoking volcano in the background which was awesome, although DF had some rather pretty background bitmaps (PCXs?). I disgress [sic]. DF's wilderness wasn't a gameplay area the same way Arena's was. Arena's was a bunch of houses and encounters and graveyards and basically a big playground, that still looked fairly cool and wildernessy. It was immersion integrated with gameplay. DF's size was immersive, I guess, but did the wilderness really serve it well? I think a really, really huge problem with DF's fast travel was the fact that you could never hit an encounter with it. Wouldn't it be cool if, when fast travelling, it dropped you out in an area with a special encounter? Orif you're staying at inns, occaisionally something happensthere? You could probably have these templated like the quests. If anyone ever played the earlier Arkania games, or Breath of Fire 4 for the PSX for that matter, both did stuff like this.

"The technology to generate realistic forests wasn't available at the time of Daggerfall so it looks artificial and repetitive."

They still looked better in Arena, though. It's not so much tree position, but like, forest bounding. Or landscape bounding in general, I guess. I mean, technically, in a strict sense, Arena didn't have a wilderness, but just large suburban and rural areas outside of cities, so I'm also going to play the oldschool card and say that yes, I am a bit annoyed that DF never did anything interesting with that, and say that exploring Morrowind's wilderness always felt way closer to Arena's wilderness to me and if I had to play THAT oldschool card, Morrowind as a whole felt a lot closer to Arena -- and brought back things like asking NPCs about their backgrounds and things like bizarre little static NPCs (remember how Arena had hokers that you couldn't do anything with, but they'd still say stuff like "NOT TONIGHT, SUNSHINE" instead of just sitting nakedly and creepily in their bedroom, and happily chatting with you about... politics?)

"You also get to know the world and lore by doing some template quests in Daggerfall."

By template quests do you mean the random ones, or some of the unrelated quests that make up the main quest?

Also, I guess there are actually two main-quest lines, sort of. what I meant is that they're all geared around the same story, more or less.

"That's not what they say. Making Morrowind wilderness consumed an absurd amount of time and the use of a terrain generator allowed them to achieve the same results."

Sure, but is that the Morrowind devteam saying that, or the oblivion devteam? Because the general consensus the players have is that the end result really wasn't the same at all, and some of the bizarre little eastereggs in MW make me think they were enjoying themselves.

The reason to use speedtree and generate land was announced in Oblivion. Speedtree let's a modeler add as much hand made content as he wants to customize any particular spot. And there is a great variety of vegetation packs available to buy. Oblivion devs only brought a few and didn't include swamp or tropical forest packs. Oblivion invisible limits could have been done with infinite terrain easily instead of those invisible walls.

It seems to me that most of your problems with Daggerfall are with the poor quality of the generators they used for the wilderness and the dungeons. Arena generated towns and wilderness is admittedly superior to Daggerfall while this game has better gameplay. The only problem with Arena wilderness is that it isn't continuous, that is, we can't walk from a city to another. I had lots of fun with Daggerfall dungeons. I remember climbing several levels of air pits to reach unexplored areas or exploring huge underwater areas swimming through tunels and stair ways. It felt like a real 3d dungeon. The problem is not exactly the size but the lack of a more organized structure (like Arena layered dungeons) and the repetition of the models use to make those dungeons. I bet they could do a lot better with the technology they have today.

I wouldn't want a copy of Daggerfall. There are many things they have done very well in Morrowind and also in Oblivion and that should not be ignored.

there really isn't that much of a chance to fail a quest in daggerfall outside of letting the quest timeout. there were a few quests that you could fail by not following specific directions though, they were few and far between.

morrowind did expand well on this, as it introduced more ways to complete (and fail) quests in general. but cause the quests are predetermined, they loose their novelty after you found every way you can complete (or fail) the quest. some of the funnier ways to fail in morrowind is if your escort decides to fight an alit barehanded and dies, or you speak during a vow of silence.

Wait what? :blink:

No wonder I haven't been able to reach the next town, despite having walked for almost 4 hours. :facepalm:

Wow. This is a great thread.

Daggerfall 4 Lyfe.

Wasn't there a Daggerfall Remake project going on?

EDIT: Found a http://www.dfworkshop.net/ for the Daggerfall Remake project's homepage, but, the link is dead. I assume the project died out, eh? Shame.

There is another place they reside now, but I don't have the link saved and it's still basically dead in the water.

Ahh, figures. Shame about that. I saw a screenshot of it and it looked pretty neat.

Bethesda has said they will come out with the legal hammer if a remake is even considered. However, http://dungeonhack.uesp.net/ is still about, though it has ofcourse changed to being in the same vein as Daggerfall.

Bah, five years ago Bethesda probably would have helped with the remake!

The Dungeon Viewer looks nice.

Unless they receive permission from gamesas, they'll just be working on a game called Dragonfell. Is all of Beth's lore copyrighted anyway? They could try to create a game with the feel of daggerfall in an entirely different province.

I'd warrant that yes, Bethesda's lore for The Elder Scrolls is copyrighted material, as it is a part of the games, which are copyrighted in themselves. It'd be like taking the model of the Imperial City from Oblivion, and using it in a game.

Okay, my two cents. Or rather... well, whatever.

I started my Elder Scrolls playing with Daggerfall. It was the best in the series then, and is still the best in the series currently. My second favorite is Oblivion, followed by Arena, and lastly is Morrowind. I can't stand Morrowind, personally.

Why did I like Daggerfall? I don't really know exactly.
Perhaps it's the endless quests. Sure, there's only a small amount of quests to do in total, and they're randomly picked from the huge pool of quests, but there was no need to actually do a quest in a dungeon at the time. I could have grabbed one from a merchant who wanted me to get gold from people, or I could have done a little investigating. Also, I could explore towns. Sure, the towns were 'randomly' generated, but I still had fun leaping from rooftop to rooftop evading the guards. I still have fun with Daggerfall today. I do know that the dungeons are repetative, but they were huge. I can get lost in them, easily! But of course, there was always a way out of a mess I could have gotten myself into. The game is fun, plain and simple. I still enjoy it today, with it's graphics engine, and the way it does things.

Now, you may ask why I like Oblivion. I'll tell you, it's not for the quests or storyline. It's for the exploration factor. It's the only game that I've played that if I can see it, I can visit it. The way to get there might be different, but I can at least visit this place. I might be able to explore every square inch of the game, but that doesn't mean that another character can enter a dungeon that I haven't been inside before and explore it (even when it's pretty small, but I do sometimes find surprises, like the first Ayelid ruin you see in Oblivion after finishing the sewers). Or I can just climb the mountain that I saw when I first started playing, then look back on the imperial city. That's my experiences in Oblivion. Sheer exploration.
Not to mention mods on PC can make it feel like a PC game and not a console game.

Now, if I look to Arena. The main thing that puts me off Arena right now is the controls. I'm used to WASD, not the arrow keys like I was when I was younger. I can't get used to the arrows after playing WASD for so long. It's just hard. However, Arena has it's merits.
The random quest system is there, as well as endless opportunities to find stuff to explore in. If I remember right, the terrain is procedurally generated as you move around. You can find small towns outside of towns, and visit them, or find a dungeon and explore it, and it'd be randomly made when you visit them. That's a huge place for exploration right there. But of course this had it's downfalls. Back in 1994, this would have been a great achievement in gameplay. In fact, it was. Endless stuff to do, to be exact. It's a great game, and every fan of the series should take a look.

Finally, I'll visit Morrowind. It's main problem is it was designed as a console game, and it plays like a console game. It's also a drab, lifeless environment. I'm sure I'll get flak for saying Morrowind is horrible, but in fact, it just is (in my opinion). The dungeons were TINY. I couldn't explore them, I'd find the other end in 5 minutes. This is far from a dungeon in daggerfall, where I'd be in it for a longer time. This is also far from Oblivion, where there'd be more things to find in the dungeon than just getting in and getting out. Mods for me couldn't redeem Morrowind for me, it just felt boring and lifeless. I prefer exploring the woods than exploring a barren wasteland blighted by disease. Sorry, fans of Morrowind and it's expansions. It's just not a game for me.

You used to frequent the forums :'[



It is indeed still going on, though since the old forum crashed and burned our new one is somewhat slow. But drop by none the less, http://dungeonhack.uesp.net/forums/

I know, and I kind of miss them, but I have so much on my plate right now I can barely manage the forums I do frequent.

Once I get some time on my hands I'll be buckling down on programming, so hopefully in a year's time or so you guys will have some extra help

It'd be great if the DID remake Daggerfall.
But clearly, they won't.
For one, it's probably foolish as they'd never catch the same ambience as the original and would disappoint the faithful.
For two, every chapter in the series is a new one, a new adventure, an addition to the lore. They keep the story moving forward, re-visiting an old chapter is not in keeping with this trend.

Personally i'd be happy if they keep about 4 or 5 years between each Chapter but supplement us with Adventure titles like Redguard.