what was wrong with the king of worms in oblivion? the player had the upper hand with the black soul gem. made sense that some things are just hype, even the king of worms.

Nobody who went to Scourg Barrow would call the KoW "just hype." Seriously, they dialed him down but good. They could've said he was on the wane and risking all for a big return to power. I don't recall that they did that, but I could be wrong.

<--------- not just a pretty face, nstuff.

[bowing deeply]

just how powerful should the king of worms be? his spell coup de grace was the worm thrall, which if the player didn't have the colossal black soul gem, would've ended the fight before it began. considering the gamble of the colossal black soul gem, it made sense that the king of worms expended a lot through the casting of an ineffective worm thrall. considering the colossal black soul gem was something the king of worms couldn't have predicted, the circumstances played out adequetely. the necromancer moon is now forever a part of the sky left from the dragon break.

what evidence is there of the king of worms true power? the book of his biography reeks of sensationalism.



i always saw the king of worms as diabolical rather than powerful. scourg barrow supports that with its convoluted tunnels and a fake throne room.

The guy makes servants of the most powerful undead in the game (monsters so powerful they can waste the highest level PCs in a few seconds), and doesn't even seem that bothered if you kill them because he can just raise them later. That kinda implies that he's damn powerful.

Regardless, in OB the KoW faces you in single combat. That's just silly. You should have had to face him and 6 or 7 liches/vampire ancients/whatever at once. Even if he's supposed to be 'more diabolical than powerful', he'd be even more likely to be guarded by powerful minions do do the dirty work (ie, killing you) than doing it himself by his lonesome.

Besides, since when did necromancy move from raising the dead to enthralling the living?

the king of worms thought that the worm thrall was fool proof. he was wrong, and got killed. many villians have famously died that way. why give the king of worms so much credit?

i suppose enthralling is a more 'evil' magic to use against the living. raising the dead only gets you so far, enthralling and trapping souls is a change of pace.

Indeed, I can only really assume that the "Mannimarco" faced in Oblivion was not the real thing, but a puppet created in his own likeness; not even a full aspect. And yeah, he most certainly was powerful, if he had ancient liches and vampires at his disposal. Clearly even THEN he'd be beyond the scope of, say, Mankar Camoran. But instead, what do you see in Oblivion? A mere conjurer that occasionally summons skeletons, and he's set to be your level +7. Wow. Again, I feel some major quests, such as the endquests for guilds, should be fixed in level. Plus, he should've had some unique spell effects.

sad part for me was to watch him get thrown all over the place by my summoned elemental. i was just standing there filling him with arrows while he concentrated on it.

wasnt even much of a fight. i had expected like the brawl of the century with hulk hogan and me in the ring against king of Worms deluxe +12 evil wizard half-god, but all i saw was a slinky, elf running and summoning weak skeletons against my elemental totally ignoring my arrows in his back.

Touche my friend.


Very good point.

To understand KoW's power you have to understand just how challenging Daggerfall is, and that a room with 6 of 7 ancient liches and vampire ancients is just about the most terrifying thing imaginable. Pile on top of that that Morgiah's Wedding is generally the first main quest available to the PC, at around level 3 or 4, and I think you've got a concentrated effort on the part of the devs to set up the KoW as being incredibly powerful. Plus he's the only major character in the game with goals beyond mere political power--he seems to be the sort that's moved beyond the concerns of the physical world, which again implies a hell of a lot of power. AND he has the power to make everyone in the game world like you if you do what he wants. That can't come easy.

Here's a simple, entirely lore correct experiment that PROVES he was meant to be incredibly powerful in Daggerfall. Take the most powerful weapon in Oblivion and swing it at the "King of Worms" about 100 times and see what happens. Then take the most powerful weapon in Daggerfall and swing it at the KoW about 100 times and see what happens. I rest my case.

The game crashed on me. :wacko:

because he is so [censored] powerful.

But KoW is not as terrifying as the young boy in green with a sword at the entrance of Castle Wayrest, who emits a strange kind of moan if you try to talk to him.

that's the truth.

I love that kid. Just one of Daggerfall's multiple random oddities.

Curiously enough, I was just exploring the non-dungeon areas of Castle Sentinel for the first time ever the other day. Through the door opposite where Prince Lhotun is sitting there's what appears to be a male prosttute who makes the exact same moan when clicked. Now that's terrifying.

Haha awesome find, I never knew about that one!

there's a number of npcs that make that noise. pretty funny.

sad part for me was to watch him get thrown all over the place by my summoned elemental. i was just standing there filling him with arrows while he concentrated on it.

Exhibit A showing that Oblivion's AI could've used some work. They could've made it more difficult without making it so numbing (like when I'm an assassin and I have to fight a will-o-the-wisp).

the king of worms thought that the worm thrall was fool proof. he was wrong, and got killed. many villians have famously died that way. why give the king of worms so much credit?

Dude was totally ancient yet totally with it, so it's unreasonable to think he'd not be on to things like that when someone short-lived like Hannibal Traven knew it.

I wish I could play it. If only. Because that is very much like life, divvied up into two parts, the battle and the beauty. Most of life for most people i the battle, the struggle inherent in the human psyche to survive, to keep fighting until you're down for the count. That fact that a game makes no concessions, comes at you with the battle until you win or die, that is truly an uplifting, enthralling thing. I wish I could play it for more than like three hours a season.

I would have to say that Daggerfall is most certainly not even close to being overrated. Many people will say this today, when the standards for video games are much higher now than they were when Daggerfall was released. I remember playing Daggerfall for the first time when it was released and was completely floored by how amazing I thought it was. I remember the bugs, but I also remember not caring the least bit because I was so blown away by how much I loved this game.

As far as bugs are concerned, it would be impossible to release a game like Daggerfall without bugs, especially at that point in time. I do agree that there were some serious bugs that should of been fixed before it was released, but this happens regularly even today. But like I said, the bugs were never enough for me to not like this game. Out of all the video games I've played in my life, I've put the most time into Daggerfall by a landslide. Even today it still remains my favorite game of all time.

Daggerfall had the best character creation I've ever seen in an RPG. The class specific traits and the ability to create really unique custom classes are amazing features that weren't seen to that point and to my knowledge we haven't seen since. The background generation was unique and had an excellent 'RPG' feel to it. I often spent hours simply creating characters with the custom class editor because it was so much fun. The only downside was the options for changing your character's appearance were very limited, but it was something we had to live with due to the technical limitations of the time.

Opening your fast travel map for the first time was an experience that left you completely overwhelmed with number of different places you could go to. It was something that really sold the game at first, but after you've played it for a long time the novelty does wear off and you do begin to realize that there really isn't any point in visiting 99% of most towns unless a random quest sends you there.

The Dungeons, on the other hand, were too big. It got to the point in my adventures where I always made sure I had some way of casting a recall spell before I entered a dungeon, because the dungeons were so massive and the map was often hard to read. The simple fact that they were big was not really the problem, though. The problem was finding quest items in dungeons. It was very difficult and at times impossible, depending on the item you needed to find. In the end, my biggest beef with Daggerfall are the item finding dungeon crawls.

I was never really impressed with the variety of weapons and armor in the game. But in the end, spell casting was really the meat and bones of Daggerfall. Spell making was a ton of fun and really made spell casting characters much more fun to play than a simple Warrior. This was both a good and bad thing.. while spell casters were often extremely fun to play, those who couldn't cast spells often had a very difficult and frustrating time in the game. I often created characters who were forbidden to use magic just to create a challenging experience.

My favorite part of the game was the lore focused around the royal families and the main quest. I believe this game's storyline really hit the nail on the head when it came to how royalty of that period behaved themselves ,and the main story--when you weren't exploring miles of dungeon tunnels--was very fun and engrossing.

I could go on and on about the good and bad traits of this game, but that basically sums up how I feel about Daggerfall. I believe that most people who call it underrated or a bad game have those feelings stemmed from impatience and unwillingness to look past the fact that is an old game with clunky controls and bugs that quite frankly were impossible for the developers to avoid. Did Bethesda bite off more than they could chew? Probably, but they did a heck of a job regardless.

Yes, Daggerfall is a lot like life:

There's a tutorial, but it mysteriously vanishes about 3 steps before you're ready to be left on your own. A lot of times you have no idea what to do next in the main quest, and sometimes you won't even realize a quest you're on IS part of the main quest until the quest is finished. That's okay, though, because if you spend all your time focused on the main quest you miss a lot of really wonderful diversions. A lot of times even the simplest mission will leave you alone, over encumbered, and low on magic at the bottom of a terrifying dungeon, and the only way out is to drop some of your baggage and start putting one foot in front of the other.

The world is full of people, but you'll find you can only have really meaningful interactions with a handful of them. Even then, a lot of the people you deal with turn out to be two-dimensional. Banks are all the same. There are five weapon stores for every bookstore, even though most agree that the number of hostile monsters in the world decreases if you just learn to talk to them. Nothing works the way it's supposed to, but it's a lot of fun anyway. There're no dragons, but that's never stopped anyone from looking.

In the end you might be rewarded with a lot of money or even world-wide fame, but generally the world hasn't changed much from when you started.

Also there's nudity. And...it crashes a lot? Plus if you buy the CompUSA version you get some additional quests, but you can just download them from UESP anyway so there's really no point.

Fixed

I think DF has just got a bad reputation for crashing. I've never found it to be anywhere near as unstable as people make it out to be. Yes, you can fall into the void and through roofs in towns, but crashes? I can't remember the last time the game actually crashed with Dosbox and the latest patch, but it has crashed a couple of times on my win98 computor. I think its crash reputation and "buggiest game ever" name has been carried over from its DOS days, when games were far more stable than they are now and hardly got patched at all. Its no more unstable than a lot of the latest windows games IMO.

Indeed. On my old computer, Daggerfall rarely crashes. Yesterday, I played Arena for 3 hours and it crashed about 8 times. Arena should get that reputation.

Yes, Daggerfall isn't as bad with crashing as it's made out to be. I just like to make fun of it because I love it so much. Recent games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 crash as much if not more. The all time champion for a buggy, unfinished game, as far as I'm concerned, is the very recently released Empire: Total War. It makes out of the box Daggerfall look like a finely tuned finished product by comparison.

Maybe it's because of how not-often I play it, but it almost never crashes for me. Guess I'm just lucky.

Indeed. On my old computer, Daggerfall rarely crashes. Yesterday, I played Arena for 3 hours and it crashed about 8 times. Arena should get that reputation.

The only way Arena crashes for me is when I try punching foes. I don't think it's otherwise crashed 8 times for me since 1994, even in DOSBox. I agree that DF doesn't crash much. In order of crashing, I'd say Oblivion > Morrowind > Daggerfall > Arena. Hmm, not sure what it means that it coincides with the order the games were released...maybe nothing. Oblivion crashes for me like half the time I'm exiting it, but I don't count that as a major show-stopping crash.

In order of icky bugs/exploits programmers should've fixed but didn't, I'd say Daggerfall >>> Morrowind > Oblivion > Arena.

In order of games that include the awesome Passwall spell, it's Arena >>>>>>>>>> all the rest.