I just started playing daggerfall. was doing ok until I met an imp and he just murdered me quick.


controls are CLUNKY.....I tried remapping it helped some. combat seems insanelly clunky.
I made a mage class, using stuff that would have made a good custom mage class in morrowind. I run out of magicka really really fast. it svcks. way worse than in morrowind or OB.

my thief class finally made some progress but fights are deadly as Fffing a shark. swinging the sword is a HUGE pain in the ass.

I am like a drug addict when it comes to Morrowind and OB. literally did every quest in them, talked to every person.

is it just me or is this game harder to get into? how could you possible use magic alone in the first dungeon and survive?

I don't mind games that are hard. I just finished witcher 2. I find this harder than that due to control issues and mechanics. and W2 was way harder than W1.

To not have terrible magika levels and not get your [censored] handed to you, make a custom class.

Cross posting isn't cool.

That said, I answered some stuff in the other thread. I probably should also mention the key to fighting often involves moving out of the way fast enough to avoid attacks. Your dodge skill takes forever to get to the point where you have any real chance of not taking a bunch of damage from an attack.

I mentioned getting the ebony dagger in the other thread. The other option is just to stay away from the two imps in the first dungeon. There's no need to fight them for story reasons and all the dungeons respawn as soon as you leave/re-enter, so clearing them is really just a personal achievement thing. My current character just runs for the hills when a lich appears.

sorry, I thought I changed my comment enough....after putting it in another thread, I realized I wanted to ask it as it's own topic.



I finally got out of the dungeon by running past the the toughest creature.


1) clunky controls
2) terrible interface


really wanted to play this the week before skyrim.....i am sure I would have been wowed in the 90s, but I just cant deal with this game. oh well. retro is obviously not my thing. too bad, it was free!

What's wrong with the controls? The only weird part is the gesture-based combat. Everything else plays like a normal FPS, except that the movement physics are glitchy.

As for the interface, there are two things that annoy me:

1. No quicksave/quickload keys. WTF? Doom had those in 1993, even though they had annoying prompts attached.
2. You can only see 4 slots at a time on any inventory screen. I know this is an artifact of most DOS games using 320x200 resolution, but it's maddening.

Everything else works out well enough once you learn the shortcut keys. There are quite a few of these and some of them appear to be undocumented. For example, F9 shows you debug info, with the most useful part being your coordinates in the world.

I'm not really getting what you mean about the controls and the interface, after you adjust it to view-based mouse controls and full view it's essentially the same set up as any of the other elderscrolls games.

Are ya sure ya just not randomly clicking the "Swing Weapon" button and actually holding the "Swing Weapon" button and moving ya mouse left and right?

Speed and agility affect your swing and movement - also if your swinging a dagger, it is faster than say a battle axe....

That's what I thought too, but then realized that it is harder to go back to a previous game, as I am used to the newer interface of Oblivion.

I feel the same thing when I tried going back to Morrowind, as Oblivion was my first TES game. Combat is much harder there as well, because of control issues...

Some of you folks get spoiled and too used to the newer graphics, and the expectation of having WASD at your disposal all the time.

Sure, the gesture-based combat does take a little getting used to, but it's alright. As for the imps in Privateer's Hold... Either avoid them, or get used to saving before them. A few things to take into consideration:

• Daggerfall has a spell-timing glitch: you can literally cast in milliseconds... And so can monsters. This means they'll dump their entire store of magicka on you as soon as they get into range. This can oten be fatal.
  
• You COULD make a character with the "absorbs spells" ability. While very expensive, (the only pre-made character that has it is the Sorcerer, which balances it with the "inability to regen magicka" trait) it makes dealing with enemy spellcasters a lot easier.

As mentioned before, new players to the game should ALWAYS opt to start with the ebony dagger; it is a vastly better weapon than you'll be able to get for quite a ways into the game: it'll affect every monster you ever meet, is fast, inexpensive to repair, and does quite good damage.

Only stray away from taking the ebony dagger once you're experienced at the game and ready for a real challenge. (those of you used to "Easy-mode" Oblivion or even Morrowind will find Daggerfall very, very hard; this was before Todd Howard's "let the player always win" philosophy came on board) I myself tend to just take the money or a book, as I usually play "pure mages," and forbid myself from equipping any weapons or attacking. Yes, it's quite possible, but no, it's not easy in the slightest.

As for the interface in general, it isn't the best... But then again, I feel that it's honestly, at worse, on a par with the PC interface for Oblivion. (and Skyrim, apparently)

http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/2904/dfcontrols.png

Use this control scheme, OP. This is the closest I managed to get it to Morrowind and Oblivion. Also, turn on fullscreen in the options for a minimally intrusive interface - this includes your health, fatigue and magicka bars, a compass, and any buffs/debuffs you have on you. Of course, the hotkeys you use to access the inventory/travel/journal/character/spellbook screen are completely up to you; the ones in the image are mostly personal preference.

As for the starter dungeon, some protips:

- The spells the imp casts against you are mostly poison based (theoretically he should have a ranged fireball-type spell, but he waits until melee range to fire it off for whatever reason), so if you picked 'You have the most trouble resisting poisons' in the 12 background questions during character creation, you may have a harder time.
- If you didn't start with one, the human enemies will likely drop a steel weapon for you to use against the rest of the imps in the dungeon (there's 3 total).
- The skeleton has a difficult armor class to deal with - I've found that only warrior types with blunt weapon as a primary can really stand toe-to-toe with him at this stage of the game.
- If you picked the ebony dagger, disregard the last tip. You can probably defeat him that way, too.
- Don't be afraid to use offensive magic if that thief backs you into a corner. Shock does some pretty decent damage and will sometimes one-shot him if he doesn't save against it.
- Moving 'stealthily' (holding whatever key you have bound to 'sneak' mode) will sometimes leave a monster in an idle state, allowing you to avoid confrontation or even move in for a backstab attempt (3x damage)
- You can backstab with a bow. Yeah, it's nuts.
- If (when) you escape the hold, go immediately south. After a few minutes of walking you'll come across the perfect "starter town", Gothway Garden. It's got a Fighter's Guild, Mage's Guild, Temple, and several general stores to dump your loot or buy clothing/weapons/horses.

I absolute love the gesture-based combat. I enjoy it much more than today's click and swing no brainer style. It DOES feel clunky with a new character because you will be SLOW. Once you get your agility up you'll be swinging that sword faster than a blink of an eye. And then it gets REAL fun.

Mages are tough to start with for sure. If you want to go pure mage it's usually best to just run out of the dungeon and avoid combat as much as possible. And then get to a mages guild and train, train, train! I can't tell you how many hours my mages spent holed up in a tavern room casting spells all night to boost my skills. They're squishy to start with, but if you take baby steps and build your mage up, you'll be a walking death machine.

Actually, isn't it speed, not agility, that determines swing rate? Agility would be for your to-hit and also added to your AC.

As for pure mages, I took an even further challenge: no weapons. No armor. Only use circinate spells. I MIGHT decide to add on "no grinding at all" and "no crafted items," but that doesn't really add any further challenge, it just makes it more tedious. I often later resort to items with +skill on 'em, but in such cases it DOES feel cheap when I hit the "all spells now cost 5 magicka" part.

Or maybe I might remove spell absorption from my character. I usually go with a class with a very slow progression, because I felt it too fast otherwise.

You are correct--speed determines your swing speed. It's been too many years!

http://www.elderscrolls.com/daggerfall/ - Daggerfall is free! Also, Uesp has some setup stuff.

Oh I have it, I just played it to death so it's been awhile since I've fired it up.

Another thread reminded me of another stipulation of my "pure mage" archetype: I'd minimize my STR and END, putting both into the lowest range I could. (10-19, for a -4 modifier) This added yet more challenge to the game, all right.

You're talking to some guys who actually have original copies of Daggerfall... Even though I don't quite know where mine is ATM.

My apartment is too small to lose it. :ermm:

No domicile is too small to lose things in! Though I've never lived in a cardboard box, I've managed to lose things within a box that I knew were in there, and managed to search repeatedly without finding. :bonk:

Still have the box in my closet. Man, I miss those old PC game boxes..