I would fix all bugs
Then add crossbows and spears.
WYSIWYG
Movable light sources.
Usable containers.
Language skills making it possible to speak with creatures.
Daedra would have move personality and interaction, like in BS.
Maybe slightly upgraded graphics.
Improved roleplaying options. I'd make some quests have dialogue and choices quite like in Bioware games.



edit: usable bandages and all that stuff that ain't working how it was supposed to.

"Halt","Halt","Halt","Halt",. Yeah. I would prolly make that a bit more varied.

yeah lol that got anoying after a while
halt halt halt halthalthalt

Make the player's hands represent their current clothing.

Oh, and another fix I forgot to add on my list-- it'd be nice if the loot on a corpse made some sense based on profession and logical equipment. I'm pretty tired of slaying a mage and finding three sets of plate armor, with mismatched pieces like multiple left pauldrons, and illogical weapons. How many left pauldrons does one guy need to wear, anyhow? :rolleyes: The game should generally confine the equipment on an enemy to what would make sense to carry. For example, high-rank orcs (say, Warlords) can have a better chance than average to have orcish armor, and Daedra Lords daedric? How about zombies and undead having mostly broken or badly worn equipment that has to be repaired before use?

I would add editable house interiors.

More faces, more hair, more clothes, more different looks for armor, more different building styles, more quests, more NPC graphics (esp. the ones who walk around)

Having just started to play DF, I think the only things I'd like changed are:

-Any and all of the annoying bugs in the game(inventory glitches)
-Fix the broken skills(pickpocket, lockpicking[open spell glitch makes this somewhat useless], all the languages) and other broken parts of the game
-SMALLER DUNGEONS!!!!
-Balance certain leveling issues, I hate fighting an army of rats and bats in a dungeon and then suddenly get attacked by a Dragonling when I sleep outside.
-Get rid of the horse neighing
-Some restore health potions would be nice, I can't find a damn one anywhere, unless I have one and its called something else

That's what I think needs to be fixed. Anything else is just a bonus. Ironically, for a game that is criticized for being really buggy and unstable, I haven't had a single crash on my Vista laptop with DOSBox after playing for 20+ hours. The main annoyance in the game is all the little...and major glitches. I haven't hit to many of them, but there is a enough to make the game very "twitchy".

But I still love the game, and old Dos graphics are t3h bomb. Daggerfall had alot of things right about it, the character generation sequence was the best in the series IMO. And starting out in privateers hold was a bit more fun then having to run through a long and boring dungeon while watching other people fight(*cough*Oblivion*cough*). Advantage/Disadvantage was a great idea and I'm upset they didnt keep that in MW or OB, if I were to mod THOSE games, I'd put daggerfall's Charagen phase in them.

HERETIC!

Oh damn, dude. What is that? I'd heard of DaggerfallXL...



You trippin'? The labyrinthine dungeons are one of the best parts of Daggerfall.

For me:
*Adding random tiny villages and dungeons (cannot be found via map) in the wilderness.
*For that matter, a visible Main Roads to any cities.
*Toggle script to cancel vampirism and lycanthropy effect so I can fight them without becoming them.
*Replace Dialogue NPC Box Picture with something to my favor (or more likable).
*Add in NPC not found ingame.
*Remove the retarded script that automatically have the Fighter Guilds involve with http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:The_Lost_Child quest.

This is the test of high-quality textures for DaggerXL project.



As for me, I hate these huge twisted dungeons. They are really boring.



I'm not quite sure I've understood you - I'm currently working on the high-resolution portraits for NPCs for DXL...

Talking about improving dungeons i noticed most improvements that people want are already in Oblivion dungeons, with mods that fix level scaling and random treasure. Size is not too big - the equivalent to Privateers Hold for most Oblivion dungeons. It's easier to navigate within without being lost. There are traps and secret passages. Dungeon exterior matches it's interior. Correct textures and architecture styles. Illumination is very good.

Still i had more fun with Daggerfall dungeons and Oblivion ones felt very boring and without much purpose. It's hard to explain but i will try.

The ambient music is excellent. One of the things that make dungeons feel so cool. Not an orchestra but sounds of doors and moans used as instruments for a creepy music.

Daggerfall dungeons don't just have traps, elevators and doors activated by switches and levers, teleporting doors, climbing pits, secret passages and other stuff for exposition and to make good screenshots. Traps in Oblivion dungeons are don't pose any danger or force the player to think too hard or find an alternative route. In Daggerfall these things can be a puzzle but there always alternative routes if the player can't climb or swim well or levitate. Daggerfall supports better using skills to solve problems inside dungeons. In Oblivion you only need a good sword and plenty of health potions and go through the obvious and only path. Boring.

This is an evil of both Daggerfall and Oblivion dungeons. A dungeon is just an obstacle in the way to complete a quest, which is either (in most cases) collect an item or kill someone. Replace the dungeon by a brick wall which takes a certain amount of effort and health to pass and you have the only reason for a dungeon to exist. Kind of boring and this should be improve by trying to generate some sort of background and history for a dungeon and have this background be used for quests.

Design is what unbalances the score towards Daggerfall. This has nothing to do with dungeon architecture which is better in Oblivion by far, but what makes the player move and interact inside the dungeon. Being lost is fun and contributes to immersion if not excessive, which admittedly happens more than necessary in Daggerfall. Sometimes you find a monster that is hard to impossible to beat and you have to flee, but that won't stop you from finishing a quest. It only creates a sense of imminent danger. You can abandon a dungeon quest because there's always more chances for adventure. There's always a secret room or a blocked passage without an obvious access path which makes it hard to explore a dungeon in a boring way and breaks the player routine. There's always one or two big treasure piles which makes going into a dungeon worth it.

Finally the big thematic rooms that appear inside Daggerfall dungeons, specially in the big dungeons. These rooms remind me of prison cells, underground forbidden temples, battle pits, caves connected to rivers used by smugglers, treasure vaults connected by elevator mechanisms. These big blocks often have a secret treasure room and are very fun to explore and sometimes with interesting navigation puzzles.

Both Daggerfall and Oblivion dungeons can still improve a lot by taking examples from other games. Diablo had special rooms in it's generated labyrinths, sometimes with special characters and a story that would trigger a quest. Once i found a Nord walking inside an Oblivion dungeon. I thought great, this is a random encounter inside a dungeon. Maybe this guy is another explorer and he has a story to tell. Great disappointment. The guy would mumble abut boring gossip as if he was a common town person and would ignore me completely.

Just some ideas on how to improve Daggerfall dungeons both statically and dynamically in the way the player interacts inside them.

More boobs, butts and bulging codpieces so that it could be entered into Guinness for "least tasteful game release".

No! The dungeons are too big!
So... I would probably add more small medium-sized dungeons.

Absolutely agree!!! These endless tunnels are just boring! Yes, tiny dungeons of Morrowind and "linear" dungeons of Oblivion are not so atmospheric (however sometimes they are atmospheric) but spending weeks of real time on wandering in the maze of Daggerfall dungeons sometimes made me hate this game. That,s why while in guilds, I avoided dungeon-crawling missions.

Somewhat agree. I think there should be a better mix of dungeon sizes. Some should be relatively small, like Privateer's Hold, a few medium ones, and some should be huge labyrinths. As it stands, dungeons only come in sample size (cemeteries) and gigantic, with nothing in between. I'd also like to see better theming in dungeons, where some of them have a specific look-- cave system, temple, prison, crypt, mine, what have you-- and everything in the dungeon matches that idea, instead of being just a random toss of rooms and sections.

It would be nice if graveyards were used as quest locations. Perhaps for low level quests, or for non-combat type guilds like the Thieves' Guild.

Lucius said that there will be a chance to mod the dungeons making them individually looking, but is a very distant future. And there is still a question about people who will make these dungeons unique...

This probably isn't modable, but if i could i would make it so that if you explored a dungeon that it remembers that u explored it so that when you back into it at a later point in time it doesn't reset the level. I know that's part of the game engine itself probably, but w/e. I've had this happen playing the game. I needed to get a levitation potion to get to a part of a dungeon and when i came back the dungeon reset. I was like wtf is this [censored], and i only went to a town that was literally an hour away from the dungeon. I could have practically walked there w/o fast travel. And that's saying something in daggerfall. And the mother [censored] reset. Spent 2 hour exploring and now i have to do it all over again....my biggest gripe with that game

For those interested in moding Daggerfall dungeons when the opportunity appears there are a few simple tricks that can improve dungeons a lot and remove the boredoom of the endless more of the same blocks. Here's a few hints written as an howto list.

Eliminate those long ramps corridors with a very step inclination. Its not only architecturally unrealistic but it confuses players unnecessarily. Intuitively lower levels should be more interesting dangerous and feature reach, so one of the objectives of the player should be find a way to go to the lower less accessible areas.

In some blocks there's too many small rooms with nothing inside. It makes the player spend too much open doors just to look at an empty room. Instead make rooms connected to each other having more than one exit and several divisions. Occasionally add a secret door to an hidden room, an invisible wall, a illusion wall, a floor trap, a switch activatable door and other interesting stuff (good memories from Dungeon Master and all its tricks). Fill rooms with furniture and items that is suggestive of their use and the damaged caused by adventurers and looters. For instance a wizard room or lab may be found in a lower dungeon but not the castle kitchen and that lab would either have a wizard working in it or be guarded by some imps or an atronach or show severe signs of looting and disorder.

Architecture should make it easier to navigate and also be consistent. Dungeons that have an exterior castle should be linked to a castle interior (think of a capital city of any Kingdom and it's castle) and not directly to a dungeon interior. Those tinny cave entrances don't make sense for dungeons, only for mines or natural caves. Fix texture sets so they are consistent in the entire dungeon. Use a slightly different texture set for the lower levels and important rooms and make these important rooms stand out (these are the rooms that where quest stuff may be randomly placed). The most important paths can be made with double side corridors and have more junk, blood spread around so the player knows these are the beaten paths but also the more dangerous ones. Alternatively add enough air pits, secret passages and alternative roots for the sneaker and the mage to go around.

Like someone already said it doesn't make sense for dungeons to generate instantly. About dungeon population i would go for a fixed population per dungeon type and being leveled in a transparent and immersive way, that is a castle dungeon that is supposed to be filled with ghosts in the dungeons and harpies in the castle rooms should not suddenly be filled with Daedra unless it's some sort of special or random encounter inside a ruined castle which would be cool.

Loot should also be consistent with the dungeon type and container where it appears. No more finding gold in rats and stuff like that. Also every dungeon have at most two important rooms per block where a quest item may be randomly assigned when a quest is generated. These rooms should have richer loot if not the quest item or person to find.

When creating replacement blocks for Daggerfall dungeons don't do it without a purpose but think of a theme or a background story for the kind of dungeon you are making. Perhaps the owner of the castle was also a priest for a forbidden and expanded part of the dungeon to be an underground temple. One of the local Knight guilds discovered this temple and destroyed it and all its idols but the priest managed to escape by a secret passage behind the main altar that leads through natural caves to the wilderness.

Finally always remember to make your replacement blocks role-playing friendly. A dungeon will be explored by many different characters with different skill sets. Some will be good at sneaking and climbing or using archery to cripple enemies from a distance or from high inaccessible places. Not everyone will be good in magic or be good in direct physical confrontation. For a role-player it's good to be able to dungeon crawl use his character favored skills and playing style. Personally I think this is more important than realism, but realism is not to be dismissed.

i never had rats leave gold before? also i agree with those steep walkable stair/wall sections, i never figured out what it is supposed to be.

The long and steep stairs exist because of the way Daggerfall arranges dungeons as a grid of dungeon blocks. Each dungeon block is twice as tall as it is long and always has 2 exits (one above the other) on each one of it's four sides. So when a dungeon is arranged as a grid of blocks there is always some faces leading to the void that have to be closed and that's why those long and step corridors are used.

An example will make this clear. Imagine that B is a dungeon block , E is the dungeon block with the dungeon entrance and F is a dungeon block with just a long corridor that is used to close the exits of another dungeon block so you don't walk into the void. This is the layout of Privateers Hold.

_F_
FEF
_F_

When moding Daggerfall dungeons the easiest way would be to provide replacement geometry for the filler blocks (the Fs) and the interior blocks B and E. Or better yet split each block into an upper and lower section. I don't know how much of the Daggerfall dungeon format is understood by but i believe it combines pieces (some are quite huge) of dungeon parts to form a block, and then it combines blocks in a grid to form a dungeon. It's a very simplistic method but if well used it can provide good results.

It's also very convenient for template quests. When we need a random dungeon for a quest we only need one single instruction in the quest code to reserve a random dungeon in the same kingdom and link it to the quest. Then add another instruction to reserve a random item and link it to the quest as a quest item. Finally a third instruction to place the quest item anywhere in one of the marked special locations inside the dungeon. You can get the same quest from different quest givers as many times as you wish and you always get a different dungeon and a different item. Try do this with the Morrowind or the Oblivion scripting language. Not saying it is impossible but it should be a real challenge to code the same functionality.

Fix/Rebalance the spells.

Damage Health should cost less so Destruction is more worth using.
Shield should absorb more damage for its cost.
Dispel Undead/Daedra/Humanoid should be save or die, and on a successful save the critter takes damage based on your level.
Paralysis and Silence should cost considerably less given that there exist magic items that are quite easy to stumble upon in a normal playthrough which have identical effects and are free to cast.
Regeneration should cost more, since right now it's possible to regenerate half a health bar a turn or more with the spellmaker.
Make Polymorph a "Lycanthropy" spell that can turn you into a bear, spider, or zombie temporarily.

On the combat:

Give hand-to-hand an additional to-hit bonus to make it a viable alternative to using daedric weapons that have +12 to hit.
Rework the material-based weapon damage bonuses. A daedric dagger deals 13-18 (~16 average) and a daedric claymore deals 14-30 (22 average), which is silly.
Axes should do more damage.
Blunt weapons should have added knockback.
Katanas/Dai-katanas should degrade much faster than longswords/claymores.
Swinging speed should be affected by the weapon's weight.
Poisoned weapons should return, with appreciable effects like DOT, slower movement, or paralysis. These poisons can be crafted via the potion maker, but the PC must succeed a check based on any combination of his INT, AGI, Medical, and Backstabbing skill to apply the poison properly.

Just brainstorming aloud here.

Nearly all these things have been discussed in the DaggerXL Forums, these are all very excellent ideas, (dungeon size is a matter of opinion, but some medium dungeons would be nice I suppose) and are not entirely impossible.

You see, DaggerXL is a brand new engine that reads Daggerfall's original data. It was designed to be extremely tweakable and moddable, nearly everything I read in this thread is completely plausible as DaggerXL continues to make progress. For now we are just working on gameplay features so people can play the game as soon as possible, with some new fancy features as well. I have no doubt that within this year there will already be a community of modders working on different projects, we have two right now, Textures & Music.

Here is a sample of what our Texture Project has done.
http://i619.photobucket.com/albums/tt272/PatchyPegleg/DXL_B8_4b6af19b.png
This is an incredibly small view into the window the DaggerXL can open for us all.