The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
Developer(s)	Bethesda Softworks
Publisher(s)	Bethesda Softworks
Director(s)	Julian Lefay
Designer(s)	Julian Lefay Bruce Nesmith Ted Peterson
Programmer(s)	Hal Bouma Julian Lefay
Composer(s)	Eric Heberling
Series	The Elder Scrolls
Engine	XnGine
Platforms	MS-DOS
Release date(s)
Genre(s)	Action role-playing
Mode(s)	Single-player

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is a fantasy open world action role-playing video game developed and published by Bethesda Softworks and released in 1996 for MS-DOS. It is a sequel to The Elder Scrolls: Arena and the second installment in The Elder Scrolls series. It is the first game in the series to be rated M. On July 9, 2009, Bethesda made Daggerfall available as a free, legal download on their website, commemorating the 15th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls franchise.

Gameplay

A first-person screenshot from Daggerfall, demonstrating the user interface and graphical capabilities of the game.

In Daggerfall, as in all The Elder Scrolls games, players are not required to follow questlines or fill specific character types.

Daggerfall features a spell-creation system where, through the Mages Guild, players can create custom spells with several different effects. The game will then automatically generate the magicka cost of the spell based on the power of the effects chosen.

Other features include an equipment enchantment system (similar in concept to the spell creation system); the ability to buy houses and ships; a variety of clothing and equipment; dynamic political relationships between kingdoms; the ability to become a vampire, werewolf, or wereboar; and the combat system, which uses 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 organizations allow the player to raise ranks and gain a reputation in the game world, which affects how NPCs and other factions view the player.

Daggerfall has genre-typical gore elements and some sexual topics. It displays cartoonish nudity including male and female genital areas 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 sexual topics (though not removing all nudity), and ensures the character portrait is wearing underwear at all times.

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. A wide range of formidable enemies, the strongest of which are the demonic Daedra, make the journey through these realms difficult.

Bethesda claims that the scale of the game is the size of Great Britain: around 229,848 square kilometers (88,745 square miles), though the actual size of the map is 161,600 km² (62,394 mi²). The game world features over 15,000 towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player's character to explore. According to Todd Howard, game director and executive producer for Bethesda, the game's sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, is 0.01% the size of Daggerfall, but some aspects of Daggerfall's terrain were randomly generated, like the wilderness and some building interiors. The explorable part of Morrowind, Vvardenfell, is 24 km² (9.3 mi²). By comparison,The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is approximately 56.97 km² (22 mi²), and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is 37.1 km² (14.3 mi²), with a quarter of this terrain as unplayable, as it is stuck behind invisible borders.

In Daggerfall, there are 750,000+ non-player characters (NPCs) for the player to interact with, compared to the count of around 1,000 NPCs found in Morrowind and Oblivion. However, the geography and the characters in these later games are much more detailed.

An automap was implemented to help players navigate through the lengthy tombs and ancient underground fortresses. 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 build 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 containing unique-looking cities and NPCs with greater individuality.

Plot

Daggerfall is a city and kingdom in the Breton homeland of High Rock. The player is sent here at the personal request of the Emperor. He wants the player to do two things. First, the player must free the ghost of the late King Lysandus from his earthly shackles. Second, 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's 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. Not knowing what the Mantella is, Gortworg consults Mannimarco, the King of Worms (the leader of the Necromancers). During this time the Underking, who originally destroyed the first Numidium because of its misuse by Tiber Septim, is recuperating deep within a tomb of High Rock after expending so much energy destroying it the first time. In order for the player to give the Mantella to anyone, the player must kill King Lysandus's murderer and put his ghost to rest. After accomplishing this, the player must steal the totem of Tiber Septim from King Gothryd of Daggerfall, and free the Mantella from its prison in Aetherius. Following this the player has six choices of how to deal with the Mantella.

Daggerfall has six 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. Although this was listed as a possible ending on the Elder Scrolls official website during the 10th anniversary of the series, there doesn't appear to be any possible way to achieve this ending because the player cannot retrieve the Mantella without giving the totem to one of the major powers first. This ending is possibly just a rumor which even staff of Bethesda that did not work on the development of Daggerfall were led to believe was true. It is possible to achieve this ending through hacking of game files. However, the end result is unfinished and nearly unplayable due to bugs.
• 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. The Underking arrives shortly thereafter to destroy the first Numidium once and for all, losing his own life in the process. Gortworg then succeeds in creating Orsinium, a kingdom of Orcs.
• If the Blades are victorious, they succeed in recreating the first Numidium and use it to defeat the Bay Kings and the Orcs as well as unite all the provinces of Tamriel under the empire once again.
• If any of the Bay Kings win, that king will use the first Numidium to defeat all the other kings just before the Underking destroys him and itself.
• If Mannimarco receives the Mantella, he uses it to make himself a god.

Development

The player can travel almost anywhere on the map, each area with hundreds of visitable locations.

Each dot on the map represents an entire town, city, or dungeon.

Design goals

Work on The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall began immediately after Arena's release in March 1994. The new project saw Ted Peterson assigned the role of lead game designer. Originally titled Mournhold and set in Morrowind, the game was eventually relocated to the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell, in Tamriel's northwest.

With Daggerfall, Arena's experience-point based system was replaced with one that rewarded the player for actually role-playing their character. Daggerfall came equipped with an improved character generation engine, one that included not only Arena's basic class choices, but also a GURPS-influenced class creation system, offering players the chance to create their own classes, and assign their own skills.

Daggerfall was initially developed with an updated 2.5D raycast engine, like Doom's, but it was eventually dropped in favor of XnGine, one of the first truly 3D engines. Daggerfall realized a gameworld the size of Great Britain, filled with 15,000 towns and a population of 750,000.

Influences

Daggerfall, in Peterson's opinion, was little-influenced by contemporary video games, as they simply "weren't very interesting." "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." Daggerfall'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."

Release

Daggerfall was released on August 31, 1996, within the game's intended release window. Like that of Arena, Daggerfall's release suffered from buggy code. It was patchable code, however, a fact that nonetheless left consumers disgruntled. The yearning to avoid what were, 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.

Community-support

After the end of official support by Bethesda, some mod makers have devoted time to repairing some of the remaining bugs in the latest official release of Daggerfall with so called Community patches. The DFQFIX quest-fix pack and HackFall being the most recent attempts at this.

DaggerfallSetup is a community made Daggerfall installer for modern Windows versions. The aim of this project is to install and easily run a fully patched Daggerfall on a modern Windows operating system under usage of the DOSBox emulator. This game installer setup contains many official and unofficial patches and also fan translations for several languages, for instance to French, Russian, Spanish, and German.

Engine remakes

There are also fan-made game engine rewrite projects for Daggerfall, which aim for native compatibility with modern operating systems and hardware (as opposed to being run in DOS, or through DOSBox). The XL Engine was started in June 2009 named DaggerXL and merged in 2011 with another engine rewrite project to the XL Engine. The final goal of the XL Engine is the support of many classical 3D game engines. Additional goals - for Daggerfall specifically - include the implementation of features that were initially promised for the game, but were not included (or only partially coded in) at the time of its release in 1996. As of August 2012, DaggerXL supports character creation, the rendering of all provinces and dungeons, user-definable display resolution (including smoothed terrain and Bloom), and basic gameplay. While additional gameplay features and bug-fixes are currently being implemented for DaggerXL, a significant amount of the project's development since 2011 has involved the refactoring of the XL Engine itself as a result of the merger.

Daggerfall Unity is another open source recreation of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall using the Unity3D game engine with active development as of November 2015.

Modding

Although Daggerfall did not come with official modding tools like later The Elder Scrolls releases, enthusiasts for the game developed tools on their own to access the game's content soon after its release. As a result, a number of additional quests, graphical enhancements, and gameplay features were developed by third parties. Notable works include AndyFall and DaedraFall.

Reception

In 1996, Computer Gaming World ranked it as the eighth top vaporware title in computer game history (due 1994, delivered 1996), stating "Featuritis and creeping technology held up this potential jewel for far too long."

External links

• Official Daggerfall site
• UESP Daggerfall Wiki
• Daggerfall on The Elder Scrolls Wiki
• The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall at DMOZ
• The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall at IMDb