Im pretty sure they are free to download on the internet now. I got into TES with Oblivion. Oblivion and Skyrim are fantastic, but I have heard that the earlier games are much much larger and more epic. With nostalgic graphics and more imagination and deeper immersion.

Is this true? How are they viewed?

Play thems for yourself - check out the downloads at the UESP.

They're definitely much larger, if less detailed due to that size. "More epic" is a matter of opinion, but I'd say so. "Nostalgic" graphics are only really nostalgic if you were playing games in the mid 1990s, but they aren't too bad. Daggerfall's certainly very imaginative, Arena quite a bit less so (probably on par with Oblivion in that regard). The immersion is quite good, but there are a few things (bugs mostly, but also the limitations of the time's technology) that can pull you out of it.

All in all, I'd wholeheartedly recommend Daggerfall, and say at least give Arena a try.

Daggerfell is indeed sweet, if not a bit hard at first. By far one my favorites so far, despite being dated, its a great game and a good introduction to politics 101

I still can't figure out Daggerfall or Arena - I get lost too easily without the distant LOD of the mountains and landscape and stuff.

I just wish I knew about this game back when I was playing Doom, Xwing, Heretic, Hexen, Wing Commander, etc on my 486 DX4/100. It seems like both games would have been perfect for me tech-wise during that era. Not sure if I would have had the patience for it, as I didn't play many RPG's back then except console JRPGs like Final Fantasy 4 and 6...But I did used to play Dungeon Hack which was basically a randomized dungeon crawl type game.

df was the worst game in pc history,period!

i dont understand y its still being discussed! seriously!

We can live with your lack of understanding.

daggerfall's not bad. downloaded and played it for the first time recently. i'm enjoying not being told EXACTLY where to go and what to do for the most part. except the dungeons. i'm currently on a quest to kill a giant in the Cabals of Eronyr or something. i've been through every inch and not seen a single giant. a marker in that situation would be helpful. i've been in there for 3 real life days now.

One thing that can be hard to get used to in Daggerfall is failure. You can be too slow doing a quest, and the target creature goes away, or the person you're escorting gets bored and leaves you. It doesn't matter much, just go get another quest to do. The main-line quests may need to be completed, but those usually don't have short time limits, or unreachable goals.

Quests for unique artifacts (outside the main quest) are repeatable. If you fail to get it the first time, it will come up again.

The thing I found most frustrating was getting back out of dungeons with characters who had insufficient spell points to cast Recall, and hadn't yet found an item with that enchantment. (And there is a way around that, if you get desperate)

Daggerfall has an epic scale, but it lacks detail. It uses a series of 10 dungeons that are randomly assigned whenever you enter one, and a series of 8 generic quests specific only to a given guild, that are randomly assigned when you ask to do another guild task. This gives it a "cookie cutter" feeling over time--knowing that if you don't like the current quest you've been tasked with, for instance, you can reload and you'll get one of the other seven.

There's still a reasonable amount of lore, a lot of great fights, and a solid, overarching story. It's not my favorite ES title by any means, but you could do a lot, lot worse than playing Daggerfall.

As Scrow2 said. Give each a shot and decide for yourself. Good luck should you decide to play these classics. Brace yourself for a steep learning curve and figuring out a lot on your own. These games will not gently guide you along. The side quests involving random dungeons can be very overwhelming at first. You will be searching vast areas and a lot of exploring is required to find your quest objective sometimes. I recommend visiting http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page and checking out every article about the mechanics and key features of each game. This will go a long way in helping you better understand everything going on in the game which it will not show you. Decide what kind of character you would like to play and create a custom class. A class you create yourself will be much more effective versus the preset classes. Though I did perfectly fine in Arena as a preset warrior. I would not recommend it for Daggerfall at all as it has much deeper character customization with custom classes and you should use it to your advantage unless your looking for more of a challenge. Most importantly especially with Daggerfall. Back up your saves! At the very least if you cannot be bothered with creating a back up folder for your saves. Keep one save slot as a long retreat save in case a quest bugs out or you mess up a main quest. I learned the hard way and I lost a few characters when I first started playing because of random bugs fixsave(a utility for Daggerfall which usually repairs errors in your game) could not repair. Now I have a back up folder with a lot of saves just in case the worse happens. I would rather give up a few levels or a nice item versus having to completely start my game over any day.

I'd like to give Daggerfall a try one of these days. I tried out Arena a year or two ago but I just couldn't get into it, probably because I couldn't even make it out of prison.

Best advice about exploring dungeons. Just perform a left or right hand search. Follow one side of the wall inside a dungeon and keep following it at every corner. At your discretion you can leave the wall so you can explore the unexplored portions of the dungeon. This helps immensely!

Sometimes monsters slip through cracks between textures and fall into the Void. Try to exit the dungeon and (if there's still not too late to finish the quest) enter it again. Chances are you'll meet your Giant this time.

I just downloaded it last week. I have yet to make it out either. The frame rate per second is actually seconds per frame rate. Is that the norm for that game?

The dungeons aren't randomly assigned when you enter it. People mistake procedurally generated to mean it's all random. The game WAS procedurally generated, then everything was set in place. Meaning, a dungeon location will always have the same map. Every time. Without fail. Quest item locations were poorly implemented, but the maps for everything are already set.

your PC is not up to the task of running the DOS emulator most likely. DOS emulation takes a lot of juice from a rig to run smoothly. I am fairly certain this is why we havent seen Battlespire for free yet, that was one of the most demanding DOS games made, released shortly before DOS went away in favor of our more modern Windows.

of course, there may be some other reason, but the framerate thing comes up quite a bit and often relates to someone trying this stuff on a 3 or 4 year old PC.

Check your Dosbox configuration and set the cycles to 32000. That's a nice round number that's worked very well for me (higher numbers give me terrain and movement bugs, and lower slows the game down)

I would enter a dungeon, and find one of ten dungeons when I entered. If I instead quit, reloaded, and entered, there was a good chance I would find a different one of those ten interiors in that dungeon. The dungeon did not have the same map. I was surprised by this, and so tested it repeatedly at the time.

Really? I have always encountered the same map at a given dungeon, and not just with the MQ dungeons. That's part of my treasure hunting roll, as I was able to roll out some pretty big loot hauls early in the game by going to a specific dungeon.

I'll have to go with paladin181 on this. In the 10+ years I've been playing this I've never seen a dungeon change, either on a reload or in a different game.

As for "10 interiors".....I've read somewhere (possibly UESP) that there are ~40 interiors (i. e. dungeon modules). Don't kow about that but it took me about 10 minutes to list 22 of them off the top of my head, none associated with the MQ.

It's a myth that Daggerfall's dungeons are procedurally generated at runtime. Every location in Daggerfall is statically defined by a fixed map layout (stored in maps.bsa) that is identical in every copy of Daggerfall. Saving and reloading (or entering and exiting) will never result in a different dungeon layout. Trust me, I've spent a lot of time on this over the last decade or so. Not just as a player but right down to the bits and bytes under the hood.

In total there are 187 dungeon blocks (including border blocks and quest blocks), although many of these are just variations of the same overall shape. These 187 dungeon blocks are assembled into a total of 3455 dungeons of different configurations across all regions. Again, many of these look almost identical so it's easy to think there are fewer dungeon layouts overall.

If you'd like to look into this in more detail, my http://youtu.be/6dajgZH9wLc program lets you explore every 3D model, interior block, exterior block, city, and dungeon in the game. These layouts are the same in my program as they are in the game because every location is laid out precisely and totally in the maps.bsa database.

I'll take your words for it. It's been a long time since I played and reviewed the title, and I could be misremembering. Although it isn't a "myth," which would presume reading somebody else's account, but my own recollection which, at worst, is at fault.

I could swear, though, that I recall the shock of having to start a dungeon again after a crash, and finding a totally different layout. Hmm...

Any 3 or 4 year old PC should have no problem running Daggerfall in DOSbox. It runs fine on my Pentium-III laptop from 2002 with 256 MB of RAM and a 16 MB video card. That thing can just barely run Morrowind (doesn't meet min specs), and it can play Daggerfall just fine, although with longer load times.

Configuration is a big thing with DOSbox, as paladin181 said right after your post. For reference, my cycles setting in the config file is "cycles=max limit 60000". The optimal setting seems to vary for different people, but most seem to report sticking it somewhere between 30000 and 60000 plays best. Having it too high does seem to cause movement physics issues for most people.


Interkarma is correct. The layouts of areas never change. Most of the big dungeons in Daggerfall province have become very familiar to long-time players as a result. Yeten's Web still makes me want to tear my hair out.