The character generation is pretty epic.

The seasonal shifts and weather systems. Why those are left out of games now-a-days I don't know.

Climbable walls/barriers. Levitation.

Usable clothing is neat as it is, but if they would have had enough time to been able to implement it in the way they wanted, where putting your hood up would have hid your identity when going into a town that is warring with your province - or making it so guards wouldn't instantly recognize you if you are a criminal, the more expensive clothing giving the upper-class people a good impression of you while the peasants might dislike you a little more and visa-versa, the khajit suit improving your stealth ability, cloaks protecting your from negative effects of cold weather, etc would have been phenomenal.

I liked the Daedric summoning system too. Requiring lots of gold, specific days of the year, and sometimes even specific weather effects. You had to plan ahead for them. Not to mention you either had to be a high ranking member of the mages guild or temple, or randomly come across a very elusive witches coven in the wild...it really makes the recent verion of TES "summonings" seem shallow.

The holidays in general were pretty cool, depending on the day, shops had discounts and temples had free healing and whatnot.

The way certain guild quests may conflict with other guild's that you may be a member of, forcing you to choose and deal with the consequences.
Also the way you really had to work your way up a guild's hierarchy, you couldn't just run a (very) few quests and find yourself at the top. It's almost impossible to be the head of multiple guilds. I liked that.

The vastness of the game-world itself. A single city could seem nearly as big as 1/4 of the entire game-world of Oblivion.

The way the game made you feel like just another person in Tamriel, the world doesn't revolve around you.

The way lycanthropy and vampirism were handled.

Another touch I like is the biography your character gets (F5)

And some bizarre aspects that I find funny:

You can pickpocket animals, i.e. bats, not sure where their pouches are :rofl:

How you can levitate while still on horseback.


If they implemented the wars between the kingdoms as planned (from what I've read at some places), i.e. with sieges, working catapults, that would have been awesome.

Something that definately needs to be implemented in ESV that was in Daggerfall: Timed music. Music for nighttime, daytime, raining, snowing, temples, taverns, shops, etc.

Because sneaking under the light of the moon in creepy woods with loud trumpets singing on your butt pretty much kills the scaryness factor of the said woods.



I found a shopping list of an Orc.
Peasants have the tendancy to carry bat guano in their pockets as well. Lots of peasants.

Definitely agreed. In the Ashlands at night (Morrowind), an imported daggerfall night mp3 track was playing which fitted perfectly, until it then changed to an upbeat track, completely ruining the tense atmosphere

As much as I love Morrowind and it's great soundtrack, it would have definitely been better if there was music for specific weather, places and time, and I hope the next TES game will return to Daggerfall's place/time/weather/season music system, works a lot better, and is certainly one of Daggerfall's strengths.

Also, I felt the dungeons had more interactive aspects in Daggerfall. Teleporting through brick walls, discovering hidden doors, activating wall lights and floating skulls, even touching a hanging chain that will cast levitation on you, and also trap doors where you could plummet to your death. The dungeons just felt more immersive this way. While some of the other games including Oblivion had an assortment of traps, they just didn't seem as fleshed out as they could have been, or as much as Daggerfall's were.

On that note I shall gripe about the battle music. HATE it. It doesn't seem to fit the game to me. It also acts like a "spider sense" and lets you know something is going to attack you. While the later soundtracks are good, the battle music interpreting it ruins it for me.

After just downloading the game today, I must say that the incredible amount of detail in this game is impressive. The first dungeon was great......and from what I'm reading I'm not even close to getting started yet. My first character is a Breton Knight. The first thing I want to do is find a Knightly Order to join.

After spending some time with this game I truly believe that Bethesda needs to take currently available technology and use the format for this game as a shell to make the 5th Elder Scrolls game. I played Morrowind and Oblivion prior to this and neither game comes close to matching the amount of detail that this game offers. It is insanely indepth. But I'll save that discussion for another time as I don't want to hijack this thread.

Very impressed with this game.

I agree. I love the writing. Even the frequent typos can be endearing ("Do you wish to risk you life and very soul by summoning [daedra x] into this world?")

Also while on the writing, I think the various character background bios are a superb touch and worth noting here. The fact that Daggerfall has no voice acting (apart from the narration clips) allowed the devs to run totally free with lots of interesting writing, and the lengthy scrips give the game a lot of flair. In this day and age, people seem to have forgotten that we construct a lot of nice voice acting in our own heads while we read.


EDIT

Yeah, I might have mentioned the size of the world, but I just felt that didn't fall under the category of "little" touches. MW and Ob may have very beautiful scenery, but I do hate the way that the size is 100% illusion with them, whereas it's 100% scale in Daggerfall.

First, let me join this conversation by saying Morrowind and Oblivion (the latter especially!) needed dozens of mods added to get them anywhere near Daggerfall. In Morrowind the ILPGN mods that added/changed the conversations made the game a little more 'Dagger'ish'. In Oblivion it was mods like MMM that gave creatures some intelligence and got rid of the levelling ridiculous, for example. In fact it was interesting how many Morrowind mods were actually about trying to bring Daggerfall gameplay options to it, as were the Oblivion mods with both Daggerfall and Morrowind style mods. What I would say, in defence of Morrowind, is that it is way way closer to Daggerfall, than Oblivion is to even Morrowind! Why Bethesda have not been brought up big time for insisting on 6-12 voice actors to voice 100's of NPC's in both Oblivion and Fallout 3, when every other company (Bioware, for example) uses dozens and dozens is totally beyond me! Maybe the weakness of us gamers to accept these things is why we don't get Daggerfall's any more?! I mean PC sales of Morrowind and Oblivion weren't quantifiably smaller than Daggerfall, were they?!

Secondly, regarding Daggerfall, I am surprised no one has pointed out the one thing Daggerfall brought to the market hat hasn't really been done since, Actually talking about it on page one of the manual - and that's the fact that you could fail, you could make mistakes, you could upset and even kill the 'wrong' people, and you could carry on the game! In every other game, if you don't follow the 'game rules' you have no other choice than to re-load. But as the manual says, you may miss out on something if you constantly reload to fix 'errors'. It suggests only when your totally flummoxed or dead should you re-load! This way of playing has not been replicated again, with the exception of on game I can think of - that other classic Planescape Torment!

By utilizing a game system that allowed you to make mistakes and carry on, Bethesda made a game that rally immersed you in it, because it became so 'real'!

Even the last 'big' RPG Dragon Age is a collection of linear quests, with the only 'openness' being you get to choose the order of the quests... Between that game and Mass Effect, along with the way Oblivion turned out, I am quite concerned about the future of roleplaying, so thank god for DOSBox and games like Daggerfall!!!!

This is a very important point you brought up, not sure why I didn't think of that before, as I discussed this with a friend a few months back. It's really good that you can fail many quests as that means you don't have to (or feel) like continuously reloading your game if you don't succeed. And this more like real life too.

I love the feeling of playing a thief in Daggerfall, the combination of climbing, stealth, critical strike, backstabbing, lockpicking, bashing doors was a great fusion.

And it's very satisfying too, for example you are in a dungeon, and can't open a door, no worries - just smash it open

While the open door spell (i.e. making your own open spell with the spell maker) is a lot better for accessing buildings than locking picks , I do like the sound when you successfully enter a building, that *click* sound is taffer goodness :woot:

While you can't reach all locations like levitation can, climbing is so useful, especially if you are unable to recast the spell.

Little touches? There are many.

Light sourcing on Fire Daedras-- the fact that they carry their own bright glow that moves with them, from the flames. The first time I ever saw one coming around a corner in a dark dungeon, I got chills. The dim, flickering glow that got brighter and brighter as it came around the corner, with the terryifying roar, and you knew something wicked this way comes.

Paintings. I love how when you find/steal a painting, you can use it to look at the actual art, and that there are hundreds of different paintings to see, each with its own picture and title and artist. That sort of detail, though not very useful in game terms, is pretty impressive. I still want to make a thief/art collector character one of these days.

Sound effects in town-- horses neigh, cows and pigs, cats meowing and dogs barking. I sometimes use the guards on horseback sprites from Andyfall, because even though they look screwy indoors, seeing other people on horseback in the streets just looks right, somehow. Atmospheric.

A minor gripe, now, about two or three details that they had in Arena and cut from Daggerfall. Getting drunk was possible in Arena-- go to any tavern and drink youself sick-- but not Daggerfall, where you get a 'you are not hungry' tag after one drink or bit of food. Also, the automatic haggling in Daggerfall loses something compared to the fun back-and-forth in Arena, where when I was in a good mood I'd offer to overpay hugely for something (Why not? It's not as though there was a lot to buy in Arena once you had gobs of money.), like five hundred a night for a room at an inn. Fun touch to pretend to be a rich philanthropist.

Buying houses and ships are a detail I love, even if the house isn't useful for a whole lot except storage. But like I said, once you've got money rolling in, what else can you spend it on in the game? It's fun to have a 'home' to come back to, and RP getting to know the town you live in. Favorite pubs and shops, and whatnot, or making sure you get to your temple every week for services if you're religious.

A missing detail that they almost finished putting in that I love-- the songs. Ever look through the text file for the game? There are lyrics for some sort of bardic song generator, possibly for taverns, where it looks as though it would string random lines that rhymed together to make songs on the fly. One of those fantastic little ideas that sadly never got finished.

Oh most definitely! Something I truly miss as the the sound track changes as it rain to sun to day to evening!

The sounds are what I find most memorable - the music, of course, and the other background noises.

Exactly!!!

Morrowind was the first Elder Scrolls game I played, then Oblivion and now I'm just finishing the main quest on Daggerfall and I gotta say that Daggerfall is by FAR the best out of the three!!!

Since Daggerfall all the Elder Scrolls games have waned in "depth" and "immersion", it really pathetic. Oblivion wasn't open at all!

And I love the fact that you mention in Daggerfall that you can fail or screw up the game (you could kinda do this in Morrowind) but Oblivion was just... Oblivion svcked!



Yes! Yes! In the next Elder Scrolls I'd like to have quests that you receive from eating entheogens like Peyote or Ayahuasca, except Elder Scrolls versions like Hist sap or something.

On a related note, I saw this the other day: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:SPELLS.STD_indices
Scrolling down, you'll see that the drugs in Daggerfall-- the same ones that occasionally pop up as quest items if you're smuggling for the thieves guild or something-- are all supposed to have spell effects. Sursum, for example, seems to drain INT but increase STR when used. Indulcet is supposed to boost Luck at the expense of Stamina. I've recently been, er, trying these drugs IC (Only in the name of science, I swear!) whenever I get a quest involving them, but so far I've yet to see any actual effects. Granted, I've only managed to experiment twice so far. Has anyone else ever become an addict in Daggerfall? If the drugs do what the spell list here says they should, it'd be another rather interesting, if somewhat ethically sketchy touch that I hadn't noticed before.

Is it wrong for me to say the most endearing factor of this game is the ability to climb an Underground Tower!, jump off, and shoot an Orc [i]in the ass[i] while playing as a catgirl female khajiit wearing only a hooded cloak?

I've yet to recreate anything like that in Morrowind or Oblivion...

A good soundtrack, a solid combat system, and a huge world, truly worthy of being called a world.
The fact it had no voice acting (I'm more of a reader than a listener), and the little text windows that describe the area (eg. shops,) were great, and I loved that there were holidays.

The nights were great, specially when you hear the wolves howling, and some of the quests were fun, though got boring after a while (was it the WW/Vamp cure quest, where you are chased down in the night? That quest was awesome).

Though it has it's faults (quite a few actually), I really love this game, can't wait for future versions of DaggerXL.

I'll bump this thread.

Any DF remake out there will have to strive hard to recreate the atmosphere of the game. It's that single thing - the atmosphere - which makes it so timeless and superb.

It might have dated effects and graphics, but it's the one and only game which scared me the creeps in dungeons the first time I entered them, and still scares me! Yesterday, I was glancing at an underwater corner in a dungeon when a skeletal warrior came and gave me the creeps, I actually shivered a bit and recoiled from my chair .

Not to mention all the other effects, which range from the lighting to the excellent soundtrack, particularly the night time soundtrack; when I used to play the Betony demo, like seven years ago, I didn't even need to enter a dungeon to be afraid. It was as if the whole game conveyed an overpowering and mysteriously attractive sense of darkness and fear, at least for the mind of an 11 year old kid.

I agree on this point. Even in the heart of a dense, crowded city, you feel strangely alone and vulnerable. Inside a tavern, the 2D patrons don't all look particularly welcoming, and after the occasional midnight zombie break-in bearing a message from the King of Worms, you find it even harder to find peace in the taverns and elsewhere.

The thing about the Daggerfall world is that it's so expansive, and there's so many powerful guild and nobility factions out there, conspiring, far more powerful than you, manipulating forces beyond your control, you really feel small and unimportant in such a vast world. I want to return to this in TES V. It wasn't so bad in Morrowind where you were initially loathed by pretty much every Dunmer (and I love how they managed to push an excuse to hate non native-born Dunmer as well), but in Oblivion pretty much every NPC was disproportionately friendly to you. In Daggerfall, I want to feel weak and insignificant again, at the bottom of a chain of social Darwinism which I must climb and adapt to to survive, or otherwise be lost forever.

Love:
*Being chased by assassins, for various reasons. Morrowind also had assassins, but they were quite easily solved, and not there due to your actions/lycanthopy/vampirism.
*Character creation - It only takes about 30 minutes of the months spent playing the game, but it is one of the greatest things about Daggerfall. A ton of freedom.
*That it's not kiddied-down. Daggerfall has a lot of tension, political intrigue, and generally dark themes. And isn't afraid to show it.
*Carts. Very important, since the dungeons were very long and could have a ton of loot. Havn't seen a remake of these for sequels.
*Descriptions that show near dungeons & 'holiday events' that pop up.
*Vengeaaaance!
*The music.
*The atmosphere.

Adding your own notes to the local area map is pretty neat, especialy if you run past something that seems interesting, but you're in a hurry so you can't look at iy at that time

The music is wonderful

Carts, mounts and ships

A trillion different items

-different ways to wear clothing and capes
-the court system
-the options of the fast-travel system
-carts
-ships
-wereboars
-combat(dragging and swinging)
-various joinable factions
-the bank system
-money weighing something(relates to bank system)
-books that I can't find in other Elder Scrolls games
-Mannimarco
-large variety of skills
-character creation
-written story of my character's past
-large variety of songs
-holidays
-skills being important
-wood elves not being a bunch of jokes
-mounted combat
-actual summoning of Daedric Princes
-the atmosphere

Those are my reasons for why it is special(in what ways it is different from and better than other Elder Scrolls games). There are many more amazing things about Daggerfall, but it shares those things with other Elder Scrolls games.

"YEEEEAAAAARGHH!"

gives me a damn heart attack.

But c'mon guys. We gotta admit, Morrowind and Oblivion are epic. Sure they aren't AS good as this one, but that doesn't make them bad. I played Morrowind as my first Elder Scrolls game, so I am very biased on that game, but Oblivion is different. I was excited about the new physics and other things, and because it was a sequel to the world's second greatest RPG. I was not disappointed. I was immersed in the game for a long time, but looking back, it is missing a lot, yet it has so much more. The music on my Daggerfall copy is nowhere to be found, so I am used to Morrowind's loud trumpets playing while sneaking in a dark house, and same with Oblivion. I am still getting used to Daggerfall, it's complex and VERY deep. I am a little biased on this, but I think we should ease up on bashing the new sequels. Normally, the third sequel to a game series is never as good as the others, same with later things like fourth sequels. Bethesda has done very well on keeping a good theme and all over 'good gaming' on it's many sequels, and ya know? Things NEVER stay the same when they are recreated 4 times.

I agree that Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion are all great. Oblivion is still my favorite of the series, but Daggerfall definitely has some unique stuff.