So I just started playing Daggerfall for the first time a couple days ago. I'm a huge fan of RPGs with randomly generated content (eg roguelikes), and I am glad I found this game because it really feels like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis (Daggerfall in space) in a fantasy setting.

My first question is: what, exactly, is randomly generated in Daggerfall? IE: Dungeons, Towns, Monster Spawns, Loot, Houses, NPCs, Quests?

Secondly: Are things generated randomly when a new game is started, or has everything been pre-randomized when the game was originally coded? If everything is randomly generated when a new game is created, is it possible to have a completely different world?

Finally: If everything is random, does that mean there are no leveled lists? So am I just as likely to run into a dungeon of rats as I am to find a dungeon full of Daedra? What about loot? Is it leveled, or completley random as well?

To be honest very few things are procedurally generated during the game, but they used a worksation at the time to pre-generate all dungeons and towns. Some were later tweaked by hand.



Side quests are generated during the game. Daggerfall quest engine is capable of linking dungeons dynamically to quests. Npc can be created with a random face and class and placed anywhere on a vacant house or a dungeon. Items can also be generated and marked as quest items or belonging to a certain npc. Dialog lines can be given to npcs dynamically.

The good thing about this is that all these things are garbage collected, that is free from memory, once the quest ends which is very awesome.



Loot is leveled and random. Merchants inventory is leveled and also random. It's the same with dungeon occupation. Leveled things depend on many factors. You can get some really back luck and enter a dungeon full a ancient vampires and daedra with a low level, but this rarely happens and only in side quests which are repeatable. Dungeon monsters are usually leveled around the players level and depend on the dungeon type and region of the map. Giants can be easily found in the Wrothgarian Mountains and Giant Scorpions on the desert areas. It's possible to find the occasional over-powered enemy like an ancient lych and you may also find a weak rat or bat if you are high level.

You can also find the occasional odd place like in the game you mentioned. These places are catalogued in this site:

http://www.jceason.dircon.co.uk/dagger/dfgprov.htm

It's amazing this site is still up, after all this time.

The wildlife areas (the area between towns, dungeons and other places), street-walking town NPCs, non-main quests and the loot are all randomly generated.

The towns are dungeons were generated during the game development, but then saved so they always look the same for everyone. And the monster spawn locations in the dungeons are always the same too.

The dungeons have leveled lists (excluding the main quest dungeons I belive), so your level matters for the monsters, but not that much. The loot is also leveled and depends on the level. When you have a higher level you will get more gold and more powerful weapons/armors. There's a chance to get powerful stuff in the beginning too, but it's extremely small.

It's true, besides dat main quest everydin' be monotonous and da damn same ova' and ova' again

still got luv' fo the game tho, my fav :talk:

Oblivion always bothered me in that all of the dungeons were built using large "pieces" linked together. So in every cave, for example, you would find the exact same sections as every other cave:

Twisty Tunnel A
Twisty Tunnel B
Small Chasm
Cavern Room A
Cavern Room B

Rinse and repeat in a different order for every cave in the world. I've always thought that it worked better when dungeons were completely randomized with smaller "pieces" for diversity.

So, since dungeons have been generated randomly in Daggerfall, does that mean that there are no duplicate dungeons in the world? I have read that each dungeon still uses a few static pieces for quest locations.

I entered my first dungeon last night and loved the layout. I really like how 3D they are and have a lot of crazy passageways that go in all directions. I even found a couple doors on the side of chasm walls that were completely unaccessible without levitation (was that intentional, or random?). I created a swashbuckler character with very high climb, run and jump and am having a blast scaling walls and jumping over chasms.

I honestly don't know why so many people hate the dungeons in Daggerfall. Maybe I just played a really fun one, and all the rest are crap, but I think DF's dungeons are the best I've seen in any RPG, much less in an Elder Scrolls game. I actually like getting lost in them - it actually feels like I'm really spelunking a real cave.

The dungeons are built of "blocks", with any dungeon having about 3, with as much as 5 or 6 and as little as just 1. The blocks are HUGE, though, so if you enter a block you have done a lot before, then you have a pretty big area that will feel familiar. That said, the blocks are big, twisted, and crazy, so just because you've been to that block before doesn't mean you're going to know the route by heart. It takes quite a while before the same block gets old--besides, the monsters and loot always change. Learning a block only makes it easier to navigate, which can be a good thing.

Some blocks are very recognizable; for instance, the whole of Privateer's Hold shows up sometimes, Others, such as those with very large central chambers are easier to learn. But there are quite a few blocks that consist of nothing but maze, and I'm convinced you can't learn those. Ever.

There is a very good reason that nobody has ever tried/succeeded to map out even a single dungeon block in its entirety. Well, save the PH, of course, but that one's dinky.

You probably could replicate the vastness of Daggerfall's dungeons in Oblivion and Morrowind, but the problem would be the sheer amount of memory that dungeon would use up because each piece of the dungeon holds so much more data to it.

I find it simply dazzling that a game that can fit entirely on the half gig hard drive and still have wiggle room, can have so much more content than any game today requiring twice the hard disk space of Vista. The reason is all because our higher graphics are far more data consuming than little play mechanics like weather, bartering, ships, random quest generating, and 3d auto maps. Least, that's what I think. Can't find any other explanation for it.

yes, less polygons, small resolution, limited color pallette all make the game smaller. but i also find it strange that people consider the game monotonous because of the random generation. my character is over level 20 but i still find new things in dungeons that i've never seen before. i think i have also never seen gargoyles yet. oblivion was much more boring to me though i only got to level 13 or so, it was super monotonous and there was nothing interesting or fun to see or do.

i've played noctis a little bit and i agree with your observation. i wish there were more games like it . unfortunately it won't start up anymore. i tried deleting and re-installing it but it just crashes to desktop. strangely if i run it from inside the zip file it works but i get asked if i want to update the archive anytime something wants to save

The other thing I really love about Daggerfall is the random quests. From what I've noticed, it seems like the quests follow a template (like fetch me x from person y and bring it to building z). Even though they follow the same pattern, it just makes it so much more interesting when you just never know exactly "what" your target is going to be.

This is how Dwarf Fortress does adventure mode quests as well (only Daggerfall does it better).

Also, it surprised me because some of the random quests actually go deeper than they first appear. For example, I love that after you finish a fetch quest, you get a letter from the enemy trying to convince you to take a better deal. So, suddenly you've become caught up in a much larger story than you initially thought. Games, even today, rarely get this complicated with "scripted" quests, much less with randomized quests.

I also really like the character history. One question though, how randomized is the history? It seems to me that the names for characters in the history log is randomized.

This is a little unrelated to randomization, but I also LOVE the custom character creation system. I have never seen this level of flexibility for character creation in an RPG before - even TES 3 is more strict. It is just insane that the game gives you a blank slate to mold the attributes however you want. Also, one pet-peeve of Elder Scrolls games has always been how there is no advantage to not wearing a shield. But in Daggerfall, I set my character up with disadvantages so he can't wear any shields, but then gave him extra advantages in sword combat. I can finally have a swashbuckler!

Daggerfall scripting language is a weird thing but it can do almost anything. My guess is that that quest is a commoners or merchants quest because it's more developed than the usual fetch quests. Those quests may have random events disturbing the normal progress or choose the ending randomly.

The quest source in readable text is available in this site:
http://andux.svatopluk.com/



You meen biography? That depends on how you answer questions in character creation, your class choice and other character choices.

IIRC, Daggerfall quests are chosen between 300-350 templates, whose features (npcs, monsters, loot, etc.) are always randomized. And as you said there's far more variety than what generally people make it out to be: very few quests have got no branches/variations/random events - the typical example of this flexibility being either the infamous Lord K'avar quest (which can be worked out in 5-6 different ways) or the Mages Guild quest in which you get to kill a renegade mage (which, for some unknown reason, in my game is always - and I mean every time I get the quest - called Baltham Greyman): if you agree to spare his life he'll contact you later triggering a new quest, which can present itself into three-four different variations.