Daggerfall
It is a sequel to the CRPG The Elder Scrolls: Arena and the second installment in The Elder Scrolls series. On July 9, 2009, it was made available for download on the Elder Scrolls website.
Gameplay
The key feature of Daggerfall as in all The Elder Scrolls games is the freedom the game offers to players.
Players are free to play the game in any style, from an honorable knight to an evil assassin. Players are also free to stray from the main quest at any time and can choose not to do it at all.
Daggerfall features a spell creation system where, through the Mage's Guild, players can mix a variety of different effects, such as fire damage and levitation, into custom spells.
The game will then automatically generate the mana cost of the spell based on the power of the effects chosen. Daggerfall shipped with several spell effects that did not function correctly, or simply did not function at all, namely the transformations.
Other features include an equipment enchantment system (similar in concept to the spell creation system), the ability to buy houses and ships, vast amounts of clothing and equipment, dynamic political relationships between kingdoms, the ability to become a vampire, werewolf, or wereboar, and the combat system, which utilized mouse movement to determine the direction and effect of weapon swings in melee combat.
The political system is supported by a net of Guilds, orders, and religions, all with unique tasks and quests.
Joining and contributing to these facilities allows the player to raise ranks and achieve higher reputation in the game world. It displays cartoonish nudity (showing breasts but no genitals) both on NPCs (particularly witches, nymphs, temple priestesses) and on the character's paper doll when all equipment is removed.
The game installer includes a password-protected childgard feature that hides blood and corpses (instead showing just the skeleton of the corpse), disables adult topics (though not removing all nudity), and ensures the character portrait is wearing underwear at all times.
Game world
Each dot on the map represents an entire town, city, or dungeon.
Daggerfall, like the other games in the Elder Scrolls series, takes place on the fictional continent of Tamriel. In Daggerfall, the player may travel within the High Rock and Hammerfell provinces of Tamriel.
The journey through these realms is made difficult by a wide range of formidable enemies, the strongest of which are the Daedra.
The player can travel almost anywhere on the map, each area with hundreds of visitable locations.
Daggerfall is the largest Elder Scrolls game to date, featuring a game world estimated as being 161,600 square kilometres (62,394 square miles or 40,400,000 acres) with over 15,000 towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player's character to explore. According to Todd Howard, Elder Scrolls programmer, the game's sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is 0.01% the size of Daggerfall, but it should be noted most of Daggerfall's terrain was randomly generated.
Vvardenfell, the explorable part of Morrowind in the third game has 15.5 square kilometres (6 square miles). The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has approximately 41.4 square kilometres (16 square miles) to explore. In Daggerfall, there are 750,000+ non-player characters (NPCs) for the player to interact with, compared to the count of around 1000 NPCs found in Morrowind and Oblivion. Players have to visit approximately 6-8 areas in order to finish the game, although a total of 47 areas are present.
A limited array of building blocks were used to construct the towns and dungeons, causing some reviewers to complain about the game's monotony. In 2002, Morrowind, the third game in the series, responded to this issue with a smaller, more detailed world with unique-looking cities and NPCs with greater individuality.
Story
Daggerfall is a city in the Breton homeland of High Rock.
The player is sent here at the personal request of the Emperor. Secondly, the player must discover what happened to a letter from the Emperor to a Blades spy in the court of Daggerfall.
The letter reveals that Lysandus' mother, Nulfaga, knows the location of the Mantella, the key to resurrecting the first Numidium (a powerful iron golem). The Emperor wants his spy to force Nulfaga into revealing the location of the Mantella so that the Blades can finish the reconstruction of the Numidium.
Through a series of mishaps and confusions the letter fell into the hands of an orc by the name of Gortworg. In order for the player to give the Mantella to anyone, the player must kill King Lysandus' murderer and put his ghost to rest.
After accomplishing this, the power of the Mantella restores the Underking's power.
Endings
Daggerfall has six different endings:
If the player activates the Mantella himself while in possession of the Totem (the controlling device of the Numidium), the Numidium will slay the player, go out of control, and be destroyed by Imperial forces.
If the player gives the Mantella to the Underking, he absorbs its power, passes into eternal rest, and creates a large "magicka free" area around himself.
If Gortworg is victorious, he uses the Numidium to destroy the Imperial forces and the "Bay Kings," the "rulers" of the several provinces of the Iliac Bay. It is revealed in books in the sequel Morrowind that at the end of Daggerfall, an event known as "The Warp of the West" or "The Miracle of Peace" had occurred, that is, because in order to retrieve the Mantella, the player must enter Aetherius (a spirit realm), a disruption was caused in spacetime, because one of the very Gods of Aetherius (Akatosh) is the dead god of time.
Peterson notes that he's always enjoyed character creation systems, and that, although he doesn't "like playing Gamma World," even now he'll sometimes "roll the dice and see what kind of mutations my character would develop if I actually wanted to play the game." "I know," he says. "Computer role-playing games weren't very interesting while we were working on Daggerfall.
I can remember playing the latest King's Quest, Doom, and Sam and Max Hit the Road while working on it, but I can't say they had any profound impact on the story or design." The game's most profound influences came from whatever analog games and literature Julian LeFay or Ted Peterson happened to be playing or reading at the time, such as Dumas's The Man in the Iron Mask, which influenced "the quest where the player had to find the missing Prince of Sentinel", and Vampire: The Masquerade, which influenced "the idea of vampire tribes throughout the region". Daggerfall's plot was opened up beyond Arena's clichéd and linear "find the eight missing pieces of the "Staff of Chaos" and use it to rescue the Emperor from a dimensional prison", and "that most cliched of all role-playing conventions, slaying the wicked wizard", to a "complex series of adventures leading to multiple resolutions". Daggerfall was released on August 31, 1996, within the game's intended release window. a release again suffering from buggy code. Although Daggerfall's code was, in contrast to Arena's, patchable, the yearning to avoid, in LeFay's words, "all the stupid patches we had for Daggerfall" led to a more cautious release schedule in the future. Ted Peterson left Bethesda following Daggerfall's release, and went to work for a series of companies in Los Angeles and San Francisco: Film Roman, AnyRiver Entertainment, Activision and Savage Entertainment.
On July 9th, 2009, Bethesda made Daggerfall available as a free, legal download on their website, commemorating the 15th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls franchise .
Bugs
A player finds a quest impossible to complete, potentially due to Daggerfall's various bugs, and is unable to help a possessed little girl.
Daggerfall had numerous software bugs in its initial release, to the point that it was theoretically impossible to complete the main story in the original retail version.