Daggerfall is a different game from all the others in the series. When they decided to make Morrowind it was Ken Rolston , Morrowind designer who was against procedural content so they abandoned Daggergall free form roguelike model to go with something closer to Untilma 7. They tried to preserve the political intrigue and some of the free form gameplay through guilds and succeeded to an extent (i would say in terms of political intrigue it was an improvement) but that is essentially a different game.

Hey look, it's every logical fallacy in the book. I didn't have a problem with the content of that guy's posts, I had a problem with the presentation. Also, FYI 'verbose' does not mean 'complex language.' My point was that these views could be made much more concisely. There is a lot pedantry in there, as I said. Too much focus on points that aren't really relevant to the discussion at hand. Hair splitting. Tedium. Take your pick.


Argumentum ad Jersey shore. Find a new trick, this one's a straw man in this context and essentially meaningless.


I don't like Oblivion at all, you just made that up. This has nothing to do with what games I like (I LOVE Daggerfall), it has to do with not being talked down to simply because we don't like X feature of Daggerfall. Disagree with those points? Fine. But stop treating people like children...or expect to be called out on it when you do.


Why do I constantly have to point out how phenomenally stupid it is to equate taste in RPGs and intelligence? There's no correlation. Stop being so pretentious.

Frankly, even though that post may have come off as jerky (and I do apologize for that one, but not this one), I have nothing against the guy. He clearly has great taste in games and is clearly very intelligent. I just hate it when people can't address someone else's opinion without splitting hairs and talking down to them. I overreacted, no doubt about it, but my underlying point still stands.

Okay good, that's what I was looking for.
I do feel a bit silly coming back to read passionate nonsense that I wrote one late drunken night over some old videogame I played 14 years ago.
It's nostalgia more than anything, but I stand by my opinion that Daggerfall and older games in general have a lot more originality and artistic value than what is churned out nowadays.
I really agree with what the guy said about gimmicks being used to sell, while throwing innovation out the window. But why does any of this matter to us. Lol this is the least of my concerns.

Naked chicks dancing in temples along to nice MIDI music and endless scary dungeons will always be one of my top videogame memories.

Dammit, I spend ten minutes writing a big, angry post and you come in here and completely disarm it with a mature, level-headed response.

Oh well, I guess I just get too passionate about these things sometimes. A flaw we probably all have in common.

OT: I found a great anecdote about Julian Lefay. It's post #3 in this thread: http://www.octopusoverlords.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=44513

I read that one too, excellent. I wonder why Julian is not making games anymore... Maybe just got fed up... I would love to see what he would come up with in today's game design environment.

Rational discourse after an angry statement, followed by a reasonable apology? On the interwebz? My god, what have you people done!

X/0

My... God...

Read the thread, glad it ended up OK, etc.

I reckon that I fall firmly in complete favor of the random—err, procedurally generated content. The sequels are good games but difficult to compare with DF. Not because they are worse to me (I like them all the same), but because DF is simply enormous. The size makes it immersive, and I keep coming back to it for that size. Morrowind is what, 15 square miles? Cyrodiil 25? Daggerfall 188,000?



Ahah! So he's the one I can blame.

My only problem with Daggerfall was that it is too big. 188,000 square miles (or whatever it was) of repetitive identical content. I love the game, but beyond the main quest, I never had a reason to leave one of the tiny kingdoms up in the mountains (lol mountains) where nothing I did would ever affect my reputation in anything that mattered. The game is FABULOUS. The game is enriching. I really enjoy it. But the size to me isn't a feature because if you've seen 6 towns and 10 dungeons, you've literally seen them all.

Yeah, though I wonder what it would be like with better procedural content, ie, roads connecting towns, rivers and waterfalls, lakes, hills, etc. DaggerXL supports much longer view distances, and with proper support for mountains, regional elevation, and LOD, the separate areas have a good chance of making the areas more unique and worth exploring on foot.

I must agree.....what the modern games are missing are basically content.

Daggerfall had nearly a 1:1 ratio with real life..(maybe 1:2) which is huge for the gameworld, it make cities realisticaly big and fast travel actaully nessary.

One of the biggest gripes I have with ES game now if that 'the capital' city of a region is just 30 people big. The cities are too small....I can walk between them in a matter of 15 mins or so. The world is rich and detailled, but completely unbelievable space wise....but they try and stop you thinking about it by throwing a drgaon at you or something.


They need to bring in the randomness of daggerfall to add space to the world (what would it be like if the cities 100 of generic NPCs, then quest specific ones stood out). It would make the world feel believable, rather then just crafted. Its not going ot happen though......people dont like empty space inbetween places.


I dont see the daggerfall way ever coming back, daggerfall is all about immersion and sinking into the deep believable world......newer games are all about the action.

Yes, repetition hurts, I can respect that. But like da mage just said, the new worlds rely on your low attention span, basic suspension of disbelief, huge slope gradients, and an abundance of violent distractions to keep you from considering the absurdity of two rivalrous cities being 150 yards apart. All comes down to what we get off on, I guess.

The problem is that with later games this very same thing applies just as well, because that's really all the content they have, either. Oblivion and Skyrim only HAVE a single-digit number of serious settlements to begin wtih, and the dungeons feel alike; all mines generally feel the same, all caverns, etc. Let's also not forget that there's only like 7 different types of Oblivion gate, too.

Coincidentally, Arena's system actually did a decent job there, but that was because it used a block-based system which is INFINITELY easier to do procedural generation for. A modern version that didn't used a rushed procedural generation engine from the mid-90s could work wonders.

At least comparing to Arena, Daggerfall's scale is the same... But yeah, the size issue is significant. I mean, to compare the sizes of some cities in the four true-3D TES games in terms of number of buildings: (colored according to game, bold for major city)
(placed in spoiler tags because it's a long list)

To be honest, 20-28 buildings just doesn't cut it to make it feel "thriving," no matter how shiny the pixels are, or how "awesome" the AI is. Balmora is about the minimum I'd consider a candidate for actually feeling "large." To me, it was a perfect textbook example of how cities SHOULD be constructed in RPGs. The irony is that the city was constructed without the benefit of, say, NPCs even being able to travel in and out of doors, and many of them just permanently standing there 24/7, with text-based dialog.

What I think of Daggerfall in comparison to other TES titles is that it is a far deeper, more complex, more extensive, more believable RPG with a far more ambitious scope of detail and attention the general gameworld in order to present it as a realistic and believable place in comparison to its contemporary TES titles. I attribute it to several main factors: world detail/size/scope, reputation system, factions, choice, and one of the undoubtedly best character creation systems of all time.

Firstly, the game's world is massive and has within it a variety of realistic details. The following two factors, reputation system and factions, are large components of this, but those are to be discussed in their own, respective, following sections. Aside from those, the gameworld just feels like a real place. It's got a holiday system and a seasons system its successors lack, a far more manageable time scale. Every area and situation seems to have its own theme music specifically designed for the purpose and the atmosphere of the game greatly benefits as a result. There are the creepy dungeons (the sounds, inhuman nature, music, and large, labyrinthine structure all contribute to the eeriness present in these dungeons which later games do not match nearly as well), inviting inns, vibrant and bustling scheduled cities, separate factions all vying for their own interests and conflicting with others, varying regions separated into their own entities, and, of course, the political machinations of the Iliac Bay.

Secondly, there is Daggerfall's reputation system. Every faction (joinable and otherwise), social class, and region have their own reputation systems which mingle together to form a complex web in which the player is an ever-changing factor. Help one group out and you're likely to tick someone else off. Gain the respect or revilement your actions deserve and the gameworld will treat you accordingly.

Thirdly, there are Daggerfall's factions. Intertwining with the scope of the gameworld and its reputations, Skyrim's factions offer many positions to an imaginative, role-playing character. There is a clear feeling of well-earned progression through the ranks of any joinable factions, as they require time, reputation, and certain skill competencies, and they award privileges accordingly.

Fourthly, Daggerfall offers choice... actual choice. One can pick and choose one of many individual faction types, every little detail of their character's strengths and weaknesses, their area of residence, if they want to settle anywhere at all, the ability to be a werewolf, a wereboar, a vampire, a militant warrior-priest of Akatosh, a knight of the scarab, a freelance Fighter's Guild mercenary, a Dark Brotherhood assassin, a noble pawn, etc., their faction quests, their general political and religious affiliations, and even, unlike in other TES games, their path within the main quest. Daggerfall doesn't skimp out on choice and this is something Bethesda seems to have forgotten to live up to since.

Fifthly, Daggerfall's character creation system is, hands-down, great. There are just so many combinations that can be derived from the system. One can craft specified details of their own new class, choose advantages and disadvantages which correspondingly affect leveling speed, and control ever detail of their character's presentation to the gameworld. The game even crafts a small, but ignorable and even rewritable (via the game files) if one wishes to make their own, backstory. Attributes can be tinkered with, health progression can be changed in correspondence to ease of leveling, and then there are the questions in which the player gets to choose particular aspects of the character's past which affect the character's stats and starting items.

Daggerfall, as a whole, just screams "awesome open-ended RPG". The world does lack a bit in quality due to a combination of the limitations of the procedural generation tech, lack of funds for the then-small development company, the understaffed nature of the development team, development being rushed and, primarily, the ambitious size and scope of the gameworld, but regardless, the game's concept is gilded and the execution of most of the targeted aspirations are very fun, albeit flawed. I'd love to see a modern successor to Daggerfall. It'll never happen as Bethesda are too preoccupied with further streamlining and simplifying everything while Daggerfall would seem too nerdy and the entire concept of Daggerfall is so very different from what Bethesda has been used to doing for over the past decade, but I think it's about time we saw a modern, better-realized interpretation of Daggerfall's concept. Meanwhile... Skyrim doesn't even have a reputation system, very little choice, little character customization, an unbelievable scope/size (no more underwhelming in this aspect than Morrowind and Oblivion, at least, but all the other things... someone made some streamlining decisions that went way too far with Skyrim), few factions which are incredibly short, tacked on, underwhelming, and pathetic, anyway, and a very poor character creation system. It's a good game, but as a TES RPG, it just fails miserably.

Well Oblivion at least had a sort of reputation system. As soon as you were "criminal scum" all the guards in the whole of Cyrodiil knew it!

DF was just brilliant. And it really took a brilliant designer, LeFay, to create it! Nice to see he has been posting recently, and nice to see DaggerXL progressing well. In these days of WoW and of compasses doing all the brain work for you, a Daggerfall revamp is more than welcome.

Let's be real here, we are mostly speaking from nostalgia as far as glorifying the experience of playing DF.
The reason for this, I think, is that Daggerfall had a few strokes of artistic mastery (namely the music, graphics HEY I LIKE DF'S GRAPHICS BETTER THAN SKYRIM, and concept). We appreciated seeing such an innovative game that comes from a rich source of integrity, that we ignored the game's glaring technical and playability flaws.

Allow me to bring up an uncanny comparison to Daggerfall. The newest game that gives me the same kind of thrill is Saints Row: The Third, and I'd like to suggest it as a modern alternative.
Before you roll your eyes and think "GTA f @ n b o y", try Saints Row and witness the huge, believable city, the explicit and advlt nature of the game, the extreme amount of customization and gritty gameworld and style that just oozes character. That's what I miss from DF, compare with the PG-rated talking manikins in Oblivion, and you'll see what's missing from the later TES games. I enjoy a game that allows me to suspend my disbelief so long because the world is crafted with special attention to aesthetics and doesn't treat me like a 5 year old.

Now ya being desperate about this, to be honest.

May seem that way, but I was just trying to plug a game that I'm immensely enjoying right now.

Thanks anyways, Mr. anime avatar. Whatever floats ya boat if you know what i mean

This reminds me of another gripe about Skyrim: For how much they praised their brilliant new Radiant quest system as an elegant and infinite new method of randomized story-telling-through-questing, it turned out to be nothing more than a handful of "fill in the blank"-type fetch quests. Daggerfall completely outdid it in that respect. Daggerfall's system for generating random quests was bigger, more complex, more varied, and actually *told stories* instead of just doling out simple tasks. Granted, they almost invariably involved dungeon dives, but Skyrim hasn't improved on that.

(side note: I almost said "and Daggerfall's dungeon dives were better anyways". It's true in some ways, but miserably false in others. Skyrim and Daggerfall are on opposite ends of the dungeon-design spectrum: Daggerfall had massively complex dungeons [once I heard them described as having corridors like "mile-long octopi having an orgy") that took hours to complete and were some of the most fulfilling dungeon dives in the most old-school RPG sense of the word. Skyrim, on the other hand, has tiny linear dungeons, but they're beautifully crafted and have the most world-logic to their existence of any of the series, barring Morrowind maybe. There are no huge labyrinths under farmhouses for no reason in Skyrim; its dungeons come very close to making sense in their environment, having the verisimilitude of a history and purpose.)

So why is Bethesda being outdone by their previous work on a decade and a half old-game in such a simple system that seems like it would be SO easy to make more refined and complex with modern technology and resources?
Did they waste all their time developing the system for character creat- oh, nope. They got rid of that entirely.
Writing the MQ or the guilds? I hope to god they didn't spend more than a weekend on that. (Daggerfall outdid Skyrim's MQ writing, too)
Programming dragons? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaNZHfdCF_0

Making a gorgeous world for me to run around in for hundreds of hours, awed by the scenery while picking flowers?
Yeah... must've been that.

daggerfall definately had it's perks and novelties.

interestingly, i never cared for the character customization, the premade classes offered more challenge (i think the most fun i had was with a premade bard). it was a novelty to making mostly overpowered characters (every suggestion for custom classes always involved x3 spellpoints, haha). however, i did like choosing choices for your background story, something i wish they would bring back in some form.

i liked that guilds did feel more like professions, unlike the later titles. however, the best quests were from commoners and nobles, and not from the guilds.

I was going to read the whole thread, but then I saw this comment and realised there is absolutely no point what-so-ever.

You're right, ofc man, everybody else in the world just doesn't get it. How can they be so wrong to like things different than us? The b*stards.

Fine, don't read. I doubt someone with such a shallow egalitarian mindset would empathize. Go watch Jersey Shore LOL...cause its the highest rated show on TV, and how can everyone else in the world be wrong if they like watching it so much?

[censored] man, you're unbearable. Stop being such a [censored], and lay off the logical fallacies.

Ranry, the thread actually turned out better than you'd think.

Woah buddy, that was uncalled for. I actually liked your other post.
But in the spirit of the flame war, go diaf.


p.s.
logic>you