The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
Developer(s)	Bethesda Softworks
Publisher(s)	Bethesda Softworks
Engine	XnGine
Platform(s)	MS-DOS
Release	August 31, 1996 1996
Genre(s)	First-person RPG
Mode(s)	Single player

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is a first-person freeform computer role-playing game (CRPG) for MS-DOS, developed by Bethesda Softworks and released in 1996. It is a sequel to the popular CRPG The Elder Scrolls: Arena.

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 anytime and can choose not to do it at all.

Daggerfall features a spell creation system where, through the Mages' 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 of sword 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. According to one's reputation, NPCs in Daggerfall will react differently (for example, over time nobles will be more well-mannered with the Player character if he's a high-rank Knight or Royal Guard).

Daggerfall featured nudity prominently, both on NPCs (particularly witches and temple priestesses) and on your character's portrait when you removed all of your equipment. Options to turn off both nudity and blood are available.

Game world

File:Daggerfall1.png

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

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

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.

Daggerfall is the largest Elder Scrolls game to date, featuring a game world estimated as being 161,600 square Kilometres (63,125 square miles) — roughly twice the size of Great Britain — 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 the province of Morrowind in the third game has 6 square miles. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has approximately 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. It should be pointed out that 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 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. He wants the player to do two things. First, the player must free the ghost of the late King Lysandus from his earthly shackles. Secondly, the player must retrieve 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. 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. Gortworg, not knowing what the Mantella is, 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' 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. 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, defeat the orcs, and to unite all the provinces of Tamriel under the Empire once again.
• If one of the Bay Kings wins (any of them), they use the first Numidium to defeat all the other kings just before the Underking destroys it and himself.
• If the King of Worms receives the Mantella, he uses it to make himself a god.

Continuity

Since Daggerfall had six very different endings, the writers of the Elder Scrolls series had to be creative when writing the sequel. 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, due to the fact that in order to retrieve the Mantella, the player must enter Aetherius (a spirit realm), a disruption was caused in spacetime, due to the fact that one of the very Gods of Aetherius (Akatosh) is the dead god of time. Therefore, all of the endings of Daggerfall occurred simultaneously: the PC is slain by the Numidium, either the Kingdom Betony, Sentinel or Wayrest is victorious, the "Bay Kings" and the Imperial forces are defeated by the Orcs, who then create their own kingdom of Orsinium, all of Tamriel is united under the Empire once again, the King of Worms becomes a god and another incarnation becomes the leader of the Order of the Black Worm, and the Underking is reunited with his heart.

However, in Oblivion, treasure hunters claim to be hunting for treasure on behalf of Orsinium and Gortworg.

Development

See also: Development history of The Elder Scrolls series

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. Daggerfall saw the replacement of Arena's experience-point based system with one that rewarded the player for actually role-playing their character, and revolved around skills. Alongside skill-set tweaking, Daggerfall came equipped with an improved character generation engine, which included not only Arena's basic class choices, but also a class creation system. The system, which was designed primarily by Peterson, with influences from GURPS, allowed players to create their own classes, assigning their own skills. 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. "I'm weird." 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 twice the size of Great Britain, filled with 15,000 towns and a population of 750,000.

Daggerfall saw little influence from other video games of the time. "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.

Bugs

File:Daggerfall3.png

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. Even after numerous patches, including a special patch that adds extra items released by CompUSA, many issues were still left unsolved.

One bug caused players running up stairs to fall through the terrain into a featureless black space which irate gamers nicknamed "the Void". Some players later used the Void to their advantage by using it as a shortcut to other areas within the game. Another infamous topic was that of "the horse and the carriage": a player wanting to enter a town after its gates were closed for a night had to use a levitation spell to fly over the walls or the climbing ability to climb them. In any case the player's horse and carriage (which could be purchased in the game) stayed with the player as if they had been in the player's pocket. Additionally, there was a bug in which, once the player had reached the top of the wall, if the player jumped while running towards any of the battlement-style parapets on top of the relevant wall, it was possible to perform a ridiculous leap which hurled the player hundreds of feet through the air, invariably killing them upon landing unless they were very well trained in jumping (such as a master acrobat character), or were skilled or lucky enough to land upon a roof, or unless the player knew any spells to slow aerial descents. This jumping bug would occur when the player jumped towards other slanted surfaces, such as roofs. Additional bugs made some skills pointless: Picking locks is the primary skill of a thief in Daggerfall. Only after picking many locks is it possible to break some of the advanced locks in cities. A simple open-lock charm learnt in any magicians' guild will open any lock in the game, so lockpicking by hand becomes obsolete. It was possible to learn this cheap charm with a freshly rolled character, pick the lock of a bookstore at night, steal all the books, sell all those books to the owner in the morning and repeat the procedure thus making vast amounts of money - this could be spent on real estate and ships.

External links

• The Elder Scrolls (Official site)
• Daggerfall Synopsis (Official site)
• The UESP: Daggerfall
• King Svatopluk's Court
• The DF Code Project
• The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall at MobyGames