I have just started playing Daggerfall and I am still in Privateer's Hold, I am getting used to fighting and moving around, but the tutorial is really vague and not very helpful, so I am left wondering a few things about the controls.

1. Is there a way to look down or up? Sometimes things get difficult always looking forward.
2. How do you pick things up and search dead bodies? Can you even search dead bodies?
3. How do you block? Or is that handled automatically like MW?
4. Anything else the tutorial didn't explain that I should know?

I would very much advise you to turn on looking with mouse (basically, where you point your mouse, there you look). Press ESC go into Controls-> Mouse and turn it on. It makes everything easier, at least in my opinion.

You search and activate by default with Space. You CAN search dead bodies.

As far as I know, blocking is done automatically.

Save often. Enjoy the game.

Thanks! How exactly do I turn on the mouse looking? I foumd the thing that says mouse, but I don't know what to do after that. Any help?

EDIT: Nevermind, didn't see the cursor checkbox.

EDIT2: I changed the setting to View but nothing happens now (I can't look around, the mouse does nothing), what do I do?

You need to edit your Z.cgf file.

change controls betaplyr.dat to controls viewplyr.dat

This will make the controls nice, like morrowind and oblivion.

Ok thanks. I will try that.

If sometimes you can't do anything with your mouse, press Ctrl+F10 and that will bind the mouse to the screen.

It's unfortunate, but keep in mind the original game came with an extensive manual, and back then, people HAD to read the manual to learn the controls. Actually, if I remember correctly, "tutorials" weren't normal back then. Daggerfall was one of the earliest games I remember having a tutorial at all.

(but as your other questions have been answered, I need go no further)

This is what Bethesda should have spent just one hour doing so they got lots of great PR on top of the PR of giving Daggerfall away free:

First: Edited the Z.cfg file for view mode before zipping the files

Second: Put a readme in the zip explain the VIEW key controls

Third: Got permission and included a web FAQ in with the zip (or better yet a pdf manual!)

Fourth: Taken a leaf out of GOG.com and preconfigured the code with DOSBox so the executable installed DOSBox, installed the game and then put a simple shortcut on the desktop to double click to start the game Many GOG customers don't even know the game they bought and are playing is running in DOSBox, because all they do is double click the shortcut and the game starts up!

If they had done any of the above they would have benefited enormously in PR - and would have given Daggerfall a little more respect too. It doesn't take as much money as companies think, to do small things that eventually become higher sales figures!

And on top of all the above, months or even years of men/women hours would not have to be spent on threads like this, explaining how to use DOSbox orput the game into VIEW mode, etc.!!!

Be happy it was released at all.. most of us were almost completely sure it would never be offered as a free download.

They don't wanna deal with teh lawyer aspect of all that. Nobody ever wants to do the legal part. It's a bit like when Raven released code for some old games but didn't provide a license that actually let you do anything with the code. They only corrected that this year.

I don't understand the point of needing a separate dat file. I just configured the controls in the game and it works great. The only thing that really differs is how to switch to view-based mode and how reconfiguring the attack button just breaks things.

Daggerfall doesn't seem to have blocking. It has dodging, which is a skill check when you get hit in combat.

Also, instead of zipping and uploading the cd, Bethesda should have zipped the installed and pached game folder that is modified to run without cd, plus all the convenient configurations mentioned above made.

*GEEZ!* It only took 10+ years to convince them to release it at all. Most of us thought it would never happen. They didn't have to do it. WTF?

It's more rewarding to fiddle with it.

Speaking of that, I noticed the movement in game is glitchy if your cycles are too high in DOSbox. So are some of the sounds. With cycles limited to 35000 this isn't a problem. I wonder what the upper limit is, primarily because lowering it affects load times.

Thinking of it... yeah, you are right.


Upper limit depends on your CPU. When cycles become too high for your CPU to handle, gliches begin.

The thing about the default control scheme for Daggerfall is that it's very cumbersome. Now, keeping things in perspective, most complicated games of that era had cumbersome control schemes so there is no strike against Daggerfall or Bethesda.

Now an interesting feature that Daggerfall offered was the mouse free-look view. This was still "catching on" for many games in 1996; doubly so for RPGs. Daggerfall's default scheme is similar to most other 3D (or pseudo-3D) games of the same era, like the Eye of the Beholder series. With a little reconfiguring, you can setup Daggerfall's controls to work about 95% like Morrowind.

However, in keeping with the nostalgia, I've just opted to relearn the old default control scheme, crazy cross-fingered buttons and all.

The tutorial "quest" is actually broken (something I've always suspected), since it's supposed to continue for a few days after the first dungeon. Download http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Files, as it fixes a LOT of buggy quests in the game, including the tutorial.

You obviously won't be able to see the full tutorial unless you start over, but it's definitely worth getting anyway.

The rest of the tutorial didn't really do much for me. It really just explained what stores, inns and guilds do.

The upper limit is around 60,000 cycles. Also, when setting constant cycles a value over around 35,000 will cause video sequences to stuttering naticeably (though they already stutter before then, just not much). Higher than 60,000 and swimming/climbing starts to be affected. Use 'cycles auto limit 60000' to avoid both problems while still having decent load times.

Ahh, 60,000. Just tested that. Runs like a dream. I knew the command to use but it looks like neither me nor the guys in the DOSbox forums figured out the optimal number. How long did it take you?

By Mephala, why would you like to edit the Z.cfg the way it was explained here? The mousework works flawless the way it is (at least on my Macbook). The only thing I had to do was changing to mouse-view (no Z.cfg edit, at all).

Just a couple of hours. There's a convenient pool south of Daggerfall castle which helped for testing.