I'm an old man, played all the TES games as they came out, and still to this day Daggerfall is my favorite computer game of all time, for years I played the OG until Unity, Unity is amazing and being able to mod.. wow. It's an old game reborn.
I haven't been able to try it, but I had been following that one being worked on by Lucius for years. I also love daggerfall the most and am excited to try unity when I can get the time. Halt!
About elevation: the world does have it, in fact, it's the same elevation you see on the world map. Areas in the Wrothgarian Mountains are much higher than on the coast of Daggerfall. However, elevation is even across each square on the world map, and each square is larger than a city, so mountains and hills are way too smooth, impossible to notice from the ground. You can only notice it when there's a stray white pixel on the height map, where you'll see a very steep and high plateau in the middle of nowhere. Unity then amplifies local height noise, creating hills small enough for the player to notice, but those are mostly independent from the world map.
@@chaosordeal294 The heighmap system in the original is entirely functional. The maximum height is just barely difference from the minimum. IIRC the difference is about 50m from the tallest mountain to sea level. Source: I used to do a lot of experimentation and modding on the original DOS version.
Funny thing is, the daggerfall character creation is my favorite in ANY game. it is really great and allows you to create EXACTLY the character you want, no matter what... even if said wcharacter was utterly useless... that'd be for you to figure out afterwards. I really wish there wqere modern games that used this kind of character creator and advantage and disadvantage system and so on.
The radiant quests in Skyrim are exactly like Daggerfall quests, which I find to be a charming parallel. Oblivion's forests are also procedurally generated, just cleaned up by hand. I'd really like to see the return of roleplay options in dialogue that actually have an impact on the responses you get. Choosing which level of formality you want to use in Daggerfall dialogue is a relatively simple but effective way of adding depth, and it honestly works a little better than Morrowind's dialogue system. Oblivion gives you next to no options outside of the Dark Brotherhood questline, and even then they have zero impact on the conversation. Daggerfall is chock full of ambitious mechanics that could be implemented so much better on modern hardware.
Daggerfall was the GOAT back in the days but nobody recognized it. There was so much to discover, it was the first time I really felt "free" in a game. And I will never forget how I got cursed while doing a quest and did not really understand what was going on...and then I suddenly transformed into a werewolf at night and the towns guard hunted me until I figured out weeks later how to get rid of the curse. Also that you could buy a horse, even a wagon, store your loot, join guilds etc etc...it was magical. I never finished it, but tbh that really wasnt my goal either. I made my own adventure, even though it felt generic sometimes, for the time it was groundbreaking and I would go so far to say even though Morrowind was in many aspects the better game, daggerfall was the most innovative title in the series.
Og daggerfall was far from being goat. It was buggy, convoluted, and unfair at times. I remember times when quest become impossible to complete because a room in a dungeon doesn't have a path. Daggerfall unity fixes alot of those issues stopping it from being goat and mods enhanced it. Now it is goat
@@LordVader1094 That's the thing. New players are looking back at the game with modern games to use for comparison. At the time it came out, there simply wasn't much which stacked up to Daggerfall for the experience it offered. In some ways it is still unmatched.
@@mezzb imho one thing that Daggerfall excells at even today is the sense of scale and freedom. I'm 24, so for a while, in my eyes the Elder Scrolls series merely consisted of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. When I discovered Daggerfall I was pleasantly surprised at how much I could explore without being handheld by the game. Granted, it lacks the finer world detail of more recent TES titles, but with Daggerfall I really feel like I'm going on a full blown adventure. Now, with the Unity front-end, this game is perhaps one of the ultimate RPG sandboxes. Daggerfall aged like a fine wine and I'm glad that some people worked hard to give it such a legacy.
I mean, for what its worth, the guys behind Deus Ex didn't want to make a world simulator game with a story tacked on top. Ion Storm just wanted to make an immersive sim first person shooter with a more narrow scope and RPG elements. And they succeeded in that regard if you were to ask me. Its flattering though that Daggerfall was used as a point of reference when trying to figure out their game to begin with, even if it was for the purpose of not following in its footsteps since Deus Ex wasn't trying to be like Daggerfall.
"...huge manuals and the requirements of some basic early computer knowledge." I still remember asking my programmer uncle in 1989 how I should go about it... the MS-DOS manual he dropped was big as a Bible and shook the table. "Read this, cover to cover. Then you'll know the basics on how to USE a computer, after that we can talk about programming."
The irony is that he probably didn't read it all himself. I doubt it Older generations always have a tendency to overestimate their achievemetns in the eyes of the younger generations, mostly because they want the younger generations to do MORE than they did.
even games had large manuals I remember getting Falcon 4.0 , it had a 600 page manual ( i double checked) , no kidding. from all the manual's I kept that was the one
Daggerfall came out when i was in high school. It was the first Elder Scrolls game I played. Parents had just got a new computer at the time and I had the demo from PC World Magazine I think is where it was from. I fell in love with it and it was the game that got me into RPGs. I still remember reading from the manual or players guide a quote that said the level system was based off of using skills and they never understood how a rogues lockpick went up from killing a troll. They tried to hit some type of realism that most games I came across from the genre that I had never seen before. Ever since I had been a fan of TES despite the dumbing down of the series. Hopefully they will return to what they tried with Daggerfall. If not the Elder Scrolls creators that no long work for Bethesda has started a new company Once Lost Games and are making a spiritual successor to Daggerfall called the Wayward Realms. Hopefully they deliver the game they tried to make with Daggerfall.
You bet I'm gonna watch the whole thing when it's out, even though I have already watched all the individual parts. Longform Elder Scrolls content never gets old.
You can watch my final near 4-hour retrospective of Daggerfall here: ruclips.net/video/16YEMiNxNCs/видео.html It includes an updated version of this video as well, correcting any mistakes I made.
Once i got really into (patched) dos daggerfall it became my favourite game ever and unity has made it even skyrocket beyond that, and its great that people are recognizing it now.
It's been a blast watching this 8 part analysis of a game I didn't even know I'd end up loving the same way I did when I started playing TES main titles backwards from Skyrim to Daggerfall and hopefully I'll be able to try Arena and the other spin-off titles. It stands on its own with its "Piece it together" main quest and it really was rewarding to actually find things out yourself and being immersed by the game and the freedom it gives though I still prefer Morrowind with its handmade side quests and world. Looking forward for that 3 hour cut you said in the last part!
I am so fucking glad the unity version exists, it actually allows me to play daggerfall without all the riggemarole of actually playing the original with all it's really aged mechanics. I tried playing daggerfall year after year just out of curiosity but i'd always just give up cause it's so archaic. thanks to this i've actually been playing it for around 10 hours
I loved Daggerfall back when I played it. It took me several attempts to finally get out of the first dungeon it starts you into. I must have put around 50 or 60 hours of gameplay into it. Unfortunately for whatever reason it bugged at one point and I couldn't finish it. It might have been because of that missing dungeon you mentioned. I can't recall.
Between DFU and the Retro Engine for the 16-bit Sonic games, Australia has done the world of retro gaming accessibility and preservation a monumental service.
as an australian, australia has done itself a monumental service in that regard as well. I might only be 14 but unlike others my age, i can still look past dated graphics to see the true beauty of 90's pc games.
I got my first copy of Daggerfall just in time for Christmas 1996, and I got it for free. I was actually buying another game, and asked the vendor about all the second hand copies of this Daggerfall game. I turned out that his assistant had bought them from people who had given up on the game as it was badly, even fatally, bugged. He couldn't get rid of them so he was giving them away as a throw-in to anyone who bought a game from him. As it happens I was in a fortunate position of having internet connection (I was an IT manager at the time and had just installed internet connections at my company) so was able to download a patch from the US (I'm in the UK) which made the game playable. So I copied the patch onto floppy and gave the vendor a copy so he could copy it for his customers. I finished the game that Christmas, have played it many times since, both DOS and Unity, but haven't actually finished it since. The patched version is probably my favourite game of the series, but when I rank them I have to place Daggerfall last because of how badly broken the game was at release; yes as bad as Duhblivion was, at least it was playable and finishable 'out of the box'.
I kind of like that the Beth version miss patches, because it means older versions are accessible and not lost to the public. They should, however, offer a patched version lmao. Not everyone knows it’s the unpatched one.
I can't believe Bethesda was so invested in Starfield they went all the way back to Daggerfall to build their game. It might even come close to Daggerfall's world map!
"oh man I loved that jwlar daggerfall video, maybe I'll look to see what other people think of the unity port, i'll just click the first result on my search without checking to see who made it"
Morrowind was my first elder scrolls and going back to try and play Daggerfall was absolutely impossible for me at first. I couldnt even get it running on windows xp back then when I talked my parents into buying me an original disc off ebay. So happy to see it getting the labor of love it deserves
thanks for this analysis series; it was a great watch! i remember reading something about TES6 planning to have procedural generation, and if we're to believe that reveal trailer is truly set in the iliac bay; who knows, maybe bethesda is interested in revisiting some things that made daggerfall unique to make a truly unique game again. but only time will tell...
Pretty sure Oblivion and Skyrim used procedural generation for their worlds as well. Every open world game uses it these days just not to the extent of Daggerfall
@@MizterMoonshine If I recall correctly, they used procedural generation to _create_ most of the overall geometry during the development process. (Rumor has it a bug in the algorithm's height output is the reason why Oblivion's terrain is so flat and smooth.) However, procedural generation isn't used to dynamically create geometry during the _playing_ process. The world was set in stone by the time it was printed to CDs.
@@djchristian82 It was flat and smooth at the time it was created by the developers. I'm willing to bet that trashing all the terrain, tracking down the bug, and spending a few days or weeks regenerating the heightmaps from scratch probably wasn't in the timetable, so it was left as-is.
Weirdly enough I prefer the cities of Daggerfall in both over the ones they made in the later games. The settlements in the other games all feel far too small and like they are very uninhabited and for some reason underdeveloped for nations centuries old. For me it makes sense to have bigger cities and settlements that are inhabited.
My favourite is Skyrim. Followed by oblivion. Then morrowind. And finally daggerfall. That doesn't mean I hate daggerfall. I love it for it's breadth. I just wasn't transported into a specific place like I was with Skyrim.
you turned me into a Daggerfall enjoyer with your Daggerfall DOS v Unity video (been playing the Unity version ever since). Im still playing my first character (despite the huge hiccups in his stat distribution), I'm a hand to hand assassin type with an obsession to climb things my next character might be a pure mage, because I've heard the magic can get pretty quirky lmao
I just went through the process of installing the daggerfall using the steam version and I love it so far. The only issue I have are dungeons for obvious reasons.
Fantastic! Thank you for talking about some of the Unity Mods. You are likely done with Daggerfall for now. But if you want continue later you can explore DFU specific user mods and how this augmented gameplay in the way required. (A more in depth look) And what else could have been added or adjusted from the mod to make it even better. Hopefully this can create a positive feedback loop with some DFU authors. But take a break. Your work has been excellent!
I watched this guys video saying how great daggerfall was but I forgot the whole unity thing. I wanted to blow my brains out about 2 minutes in. I think I’ll try unity version tomorrow. I can see that is where I messed up.
I want to thank you for making all these videos on daggerfall. You've convinced me to give daggerfall a chance and it has quickly consumed all of my free time. Its one of my favorite video game experiences ive ever had in my 30 years of life and i would have never tried it without you. So, thank you ❤
Things like this that fascinate me about video games.. I can just imagine a currently popular game getting reborn somewhere in the future, and i can't wait :D
When I get a laptop I think this is going to be my first PC game I play on it this game looks so amazing I can't wait to explore one of the largest games ever created and to be honest I would love to see some of the places and provinces I've heard about only in lore or hearsay it looks like a world I want to get lost in!
Morrowind, best game ever i'm downloading this Daggerfall Unity i hope they will remaster these old masterpieces with some updated Unreal engine (Morrowind, Daggerfall, Half life 2, Deus Ex, Xenogears, Enclave, Halo, Starcraft, Doom 1 & 2, Heretic, Hexen, Fallout 1 & 2 , Chrono Trigger , Ocarina of time, Majora's mask and some old Final fantasy, to name a few)
Daggerfall is one of those games that is great when it works, but the DOS version breaks so often it can take the fun out of it. Often switches are inaccessible, you can't find quest items, enemies get stuck in the geometry that you need to kill, enemies stuck in steps will hit you 1000 times in a second and basically instant kill you, its damn near impossible to see anything with some of the weather effects, etc. The bug fixes alone make Unity a better version, since you are guaranteed you can finish it unlike the original. You can still play DOS Doom without problem, all the source mods just make it play like a more modern game, but for Daggerfall the modern port actually makes the base game more playable like intended.
Adjusting the clock speed down because you had a dual pentium processor. Had to do that a lot for “older” games. Oh man, you mention switches. I forgot about having to toggle physical switches on the 8088, 8087, and 8086s for some component configurations to work. (The 8087 was a secondary “math” processor used with the 8088 cpu). Thankfully by the time this game came out that was the past.
Thanks for the video! I remember when I bought Daggerfall. I was a kid. I have the shiny box just here :) And I remember when I bought Morrowind. And, believe me, after the awe of Morrowind graphics, Daggerfall was the vastly superior game. The one that I kept dreaming of.
Not a fan of the high-res assets available for the Unity version (or the now goofy looking AI upscaled sprites), but it's great to see the game getting all the attention it deserves.
I cannot wait to get daggerfall unity set up on my surface book 3, I will just have to not use as many graphics mods, but I can still make it look pretty
I love your videos and as I invest more of my time into Daggerfall, I love learning more about its development and lore. Thank you for these videos!! Can't wait for you to blow up :)
you know what i appreciate you showing the review magazines, they are czech and slovak magazines, legendary times legendary articles legendary games :D you are doing awesome job popularizing DFU! thank you.
Dang it alright I gotta try it. My brain is so broken from Skyrim though. I'm so used to quest markers and voiced dialogue. I tried Morrowind but I didnt make it far, as willing as I was to get over its quirkiness. I have to try it again.
Very nice video. I started playing Daggerfall (Unity) for the first time this week. I never played original Daggerfall. Daggerfall Unity is brutal, and confusing, but I'm enjoying it. Over the last 3 or 4 days, I figure I've played it for about 10 hours. The only other Elder Scrolls game I've played at length is Skyrim (250 hours). Daggerfall Unity feels like a familiar & unfamiliar game. It's a new Elder Scrolls game to me, which I like. The world is MASSIVE. I have no clue what to expect, but in excited to experience whatever.
I remember working at Gamestop (then Electronics Boutique) that the original release date for Daggerfall IIRC was "End of May 95" and that was our running joke about whatever game someone was asking about the release date for.
When i was a kid, my mom sent me to take computer lessons, i used to go to some guy’s house who had a real nice home office, he had 3 computers in there, i remember playing Oregon Trail, GTA 1 & GTA london, as well as elder scrolls, i sure learned how to use those sweet machines
I’m playing for my second time right now without unity. It IS playable, you just have to keep your expectations reasonable and to the date it was released. With those things in mind, it is a ton of fun! But if you compare it to modern convenience… it won’t be.
I love the emulated DOS version, so when DF unity came out.... absolute godsend. mods can effectively turn DF into the game the developers wanted it to be, as well as the game *you* want it to be.
Gavin Claytoon did the world a huge favour, I am eternally greateful I am not even an Elder Scrolls Fan.. and I played the hell out of Daggerfall because it is such an amazing fun game to play for free!
I just wanted to say this video series has been incredible and has convinced me to try playing daggerfall unity which I just finished installing. I was wondering if maybe you'd consider posting a list of mods you'd recommend playing it with? Also, do you have any plans on making a video about redguard in the future?
That’s great news! I hope you enjoy it. I’ll make a video on this in the future, but for the most part I stick to graphics mods, DREAM and Enhanced Sky (both from Nexus) are really good. And yes! I’m looking forward to reviewing Redguard soon (won’t be as long as this series, but still a decent length video :) )
I was born on the day Daggerfall released (probably). This rules. Also, this video series rules. Very glad to have found your channel through deciding to go back and play Daggerfall Unity. It's CONSIDERABLY better than when I played it on DOSBox in 2009 when Bethesda released it for free. Even then, I got sucked into it for quite a while. Kind of amazed I managed to put up with it in retrospect, but Daggerfall Unity really managed to remind me what *really* worked about it while removing (or otherwise lessening) what didn't work. Special mention to the "smaller dungeons" experimental feature in Unity. It makes questing so much better. I'm pretty sure the reason I abandoned the game back then was because I just never found the exit to a dungeon I entered. That character is presumably rotting in an underwater section right now, unaware that The Knights of the Owl (or whatever) have long since expelled him for his many failures.
I remember sending out 7.95 for the patch disk for Mortal Kombat 1 for DOS. I tell my daughter she has no idea how lucky she has it that the internet, medicine, GPS, etc exist.
Super excited for this one! Nice work man :) Keep it up! By the way, is there supposed to be sound at 4:39 and 4:56? It's where you talk about the sound effects / audio bug, but all I can hear is your background music
@@georyx2454 No woriess, I've removed them via RUclips's editor now, so when it updates in a few hours they'll be gone. My bad for missing it before uploading haha
Im from 2000s and I grew up with skyrim ps3 I got a laptop that couldn’t run google docs so I was limited in my game options. I played a lot of older games that worked ok and such I then saw Daggerfall I downloaded from a website and started it Still to this day im obsessed. Never had a game eat away my life so much I recently got an rtx pc And I still choose daggerfall as my main game And this is the original I like Daggerfall unity but I love the charm of the original Maybe there can be a mod that can give the original feel with all fixes I just love retro feeling games and prefer it And its not for nostalgia I feel limitations can bring out the best creativity
When I first started starfield, I thought maybe the random dungeons you found on planets were procedurally generated and Bethesda had returned to their daggerfall roots, but was sadly mistaken 😢
Daggerfall worked almost exactly the same as it does in the DOS box emulator. If you follow Zaric Zhakaron and his playthroughs and story of all the iterations, including the one he played as a kid back in the 90’s, you’ll get a good idea.
If they did an official daggerfall remake and just paid some interns to make some DLC/add stuff to the over world, I'd buy that. Skyrim has gotten 2 rereleases and its their most current main series game.
It's been so long since I've had a PC they're a handful of PC exclusive games I'd love to play again and for the first time to be specific the fate series of games and the 1st 2 elder scrolls
I know where it (this confusion) comes from, but it's not good to let this slide: Contrasting the orchestral version against a *"MIDI"* version because "MIDI sounds bad" is nonsensical. Likely, the "orchestral" soundtrack was produced by putting the music note information onto a MIDI track in a DAW and from that, control a VST plugin that plays an orchestral sounds library. See how silly this is? "MIDI" has exactly zero to do with how things sound as in sonic colors of instruments, it is the digital analog to sheet music in one corner, and in the other, it's a digital serial transfer protocol.
I 100% disagree that the original daggerfall is unpleasant to play. It has aged nicely and the game speaks for itself. Thats why people mod it to be more "eye candy" rather than change assets.
Some people over exagerate when they talk about the bugs in the dos version of the game, even without the fan patches the game isn't that buggy or horrible to play as some people claim. This sucks because there are still people out there who can't run DF Unity in their computers and the original version is the only way they have to experience this awesome game so idiots making the dos version out to be an unplayable broken mess are discouraging these people from ever playing the game.
Daggerfall is great. The Unity port? It's good, but it will be taxing on PCs that are from before 2010, and even more so if one has only the integrated graphics, so it limits a lot of what the Unity port can do, if it can be run at all. ... Eh, don't mind me; I'm only behind because I live under poverty (by wealth class standards).
Yeah people shouldn't be discouraged from trying the dos version because for some people it is the only version. If you install all the patches you get rid of most of the bugs.
Leaving an educational comment here: What you describe as "modded vs midi" music is still midi. Midi is just a file format. How it sounds is decided by what midi font you use. You could have the same sound back in the day with an expensive sound card and the respective midi font (basically kind of a collection of instrument sampled). Midi only tells the device: Play this note, in this pitch, with this duration (and some more info). The device then spits out the music. So the "modded" version as you describe it, is just a better quality midi compared to the standard "adlib" style sound cards most users had in their systems back then.
I look forward to watching this channel grow, the effort you're putting into these videos really shows and those subs are just going to keep ticking up
Idk, I loved and I still do original dos daggerfall version. It's like more authentic, also I think unity version shows the simplicity and missings of a 1996 mapping, wich is not good
Nice video! Got a recommended mod list? You mentioned a few that sounded really interesting (especially the ones that add more quests and stuff in the overworld, and the music improver) but I wonder what you’d consider the best starting mods for someone who has never played Daggerfall Unity before.
Yeah, this is from the original multi part series that was combined to make the full analysis. I privated all of the parts that didnt stand on their own, but left this one and the "Making of" one live as separate parts for those who only care about these sections.
@@KhaziirEverflight No even the non unity port has aged better than most DOS RPGs and even many late 90s crpgs I have a whole bunch of em on steam and gog that I’ve played.
Alright alright, I'll play some more Daggerfall. I'm still on my first playthrough, so wish me luck.. Also I've got Unity, but didn't know you could mod it further, I've got to check those out.
Yeah, you had to have some skills to get some of these games to work. Adjusting your memory allocation in the bios and getting resources allocated for both the game and your sound card were a real challenge. Not all computers had the same cpu and your bios was even more diverse. So the game instructions could only give you guidance, not exact settings.
I'm an old man, played all the TES games as they came out, and still to this day Daggerfall is my favorite computer game of all time, for years I played the OG until Unity, Unity is amazing and being able to mod.. wow. It's an old game reborn.
I haven't been able to try it, but I had been following that one being worked on by Lucius for years. I also love daggerfall the most and am excited to try unity when I can get the time. Halt!
Can’t wait to finish building my dos/win95 pc so I can play this game how it was intended.
Original Version is on Seam now.
Epic
Hello. I am a old man too, or feel like it, at 63. Its great to see another gamer from the time games began.
About elevation: the world does have it, in fact, it's the same elevation you see on the world map. Areas in the Wrothgarian Mountains are much higher than on the coast of Daggerfall. However, elevation is even across each square on the world map, and each square is larger than a city, so mountains and hills are way too smooth, impossible to notice from the ground. You can only notice it when there's a stray white pixel on the height map, where you'll see a very steep and high plateau in the middle of nowhere. Unity then amplifies local height noise, creating hills small enough for the player to notice, but those are mostly independent from the world map.
There was a bug in the original that made the height map not work, so the original "has" it, but it really doesn't.
@@chaosordeal294 The heighmap system in the original is entirely functional. The maximum height is just barely difference from the minimum. IIRC the difference is about 50m from the tallest mountain to sea level. Source: I used to do a lot of experimentation and modding on the original DOS version.
Meaning technically it didn't have elevation outside the world map itself. It was superficial because of hardware and tech limitations.
Funny thing is, the daggerfall character creation is my favorite in ANY game. it is really great and allows you to create EXACTLY the character you want, no matter what... even if said wcharacter was utterly useless... that'd be for you to figure out afterwards. I really wish there wqere modern games that used this kind of character creator and advantage and disadvantage system and so on.
Games nowadays are afraid to allow you to fail.
Unfortunately, they just literally don't make good video games anymore tbh 😞😔
The radiant quests in Skyrim are exactly like Daggerfall quests, which I find to be a charming parallel. Oblivion's forests are also procedurally generated, just cleaned up by hand. I'd really like to see the return of roleplay options in dialogue that actually have an impact on the responses you get. Choosing which level of formality you want to use in Daggerfall dialogue is a relatively simple but effective way of adding depth, and it honestly works a little better than Morrowind's dialogue system. Oblivion gives you next to no options outside of the Dark Brotherhood questline, and even then they have zero impact on the conversation. Daggerfall is chock full of ambitious mechanics that could be implemented so much better on modern hardware.
Man i wished they just build up and improve thier game design instead of removing some of them
I'm pretty sure DaggerFall inspired StarField's features.
Doubt it considering the lackthereof
I think that the man who created the unity version of daggerfall deserves to go to heaven
you know the "extra hell" meme, well interkarma deserves to go to extra heaven.
@@thelemonofgaming6303 lol yess
but not right now, surely
@@Korn1holio Heaven's no, we need him even more now that 1.0 is officially released
Daggerfall was the GOAT back in the days but nobody recognized it. There was so much to discover, it was the first time I really felt "free" in a game. And I will never forget how I got cursed while doing a quest and did not really understand what was going on...and then I suddenly transformed into a werewolf at night and the towns guard hunted me until I figured out weeks later how to get rid of the curse. Also that you could buy a horse, even a wagon, store your loot, join guilds etc etc...it was magical.
I never finished it, but tbh that really wasnt my goal either. I made my own adventure, even though it felt generic sometimes, for the time it was groundbreaking and I would go so far to say even though Morrowind was in many aspects the better game, daggerfall was the most innovative title in the series.
Og daggerfall was far from being goat. It was buggy, convoluted, and unfair at times. I remember times when quest become impossible to complete because a room in a dungeon doesn't have a path.
Daggerfall unity fixes alot of those issues stopping it from being goat and mods enhanced it. Now it is goat
@@newnamesameperson397 Being convoluted and unfair was the standard of the day.
But yes, Unity is objectively superior.
@@LordVader1094 That's the thing. New players are looking back at the game with modern games to use for comparison. At the time it came out, there simply wasn't much which stacked up to Daggerfall for the experience it offered. In some ways it is still unmatched.
@@mezzb imho one thing that Daggerfall excells at even today is the sense of scale and freedom. I'm 24, so for a while, in my eyes the Elder Scrolls series merely consisted of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. When I discovered Daggerfall I was pleasantly surprised at how much I could explore without being handheld by the game. Granted, it lacks the finer world detail of more recent TES titles, but with Daggerfall I really feel like I'm going on a full blown adventure. Now, with the Unity front-end, this game is perhaps one of the ultimate RPG sandboxes. Daggerfall aged like a fine wine and I'm glad that some people worked hard to give it such a legacy.
I mean, for what its worth, the guys behind Deus Ex didn't want to make a world simulator game with a story tacked on top. Ion Storm just wanted to make an immersive sim first person shooter with a more narrow scope and RPG elements. And they succeeded in that regard if you were to ask me.
Its flattering though that Daggerfall was used as a point of reference when trying to figure out their game to begin with, even if it was for the purpose of not following in its footsteps since Deus Ex wasn't trying to be like Daggerfall.
Skyrim guards: "Wait, I know you"
Oblivion guards: "By the nine divines... ASSAULT"
Daggerfall guards: "HOLD HOLD... HOLD ... HOLD"
"...huge manuals and the requirements of some basic early computer knowledge."
I still remember asking my programmer uncle in 1989 how I should go about it... the MS-DOS manual he dropped was big as a Bible and shook the table. "Read this, cover to cover. Then you'll know the basics on how to USE a computer, after that we can talk about programming."
Your Uncle being a cool nerd before cool nerds were a thing
The irony is that he probably didn't read it all himself. I doubt it
Older generations always have a tendency to overestimate their achievemetns in the eyes of the younger generations, mostly because they want the younger generations to do MORE than they did.
e.g i was 5 years old, and i knew the basics of DOS on how to start a game, set it up etc.
If i could do it - you could too.
@@gae_wead_dad_6914 well yeah, he was being a bit hyperbolic. Old folks do that!
even games had large manuals I remember getting Falcon 4.0 , it had a 600 page manual ( i double checked) , no kidding. from all the manual's I kept that was the one
Daggerfall came out when i was in high school. It was the first Elder Scrolls game I played. Parents had just got a new computer at the time and I had the demo from PC World Magazine I think is where it was from. I fell in love with it and it was the game that got me into RPGs. I still remember reading from the manual or players guide a quote that said the level system was based off of using skills and they never understood how a rogues lockpick went up from killing a troll. They tried to hit some type of realism that most games I came across from the genre that I had never seen before. Ever since I had been a fan of TES despite the dumbing down of the series. Hopefully they will return to what they tried with Daggerfall. If not the Elder Scrolls creators that no long work for Bethesda has started a new company Once Lost Games and are making a spiritual successor to Daggerfall called the Wayward Realms. Hopefully they deliver the game they tried to make with Daggerfall.
Bravo on a great series! Thank you for all the time spent on creating it and for the occasional shout out to our spiritual successor!
Thank you for watching them, and thank you for making said successor :)
My only Scrolls is Skyrim. I wish ES 6 was an unofficial remake of Daggerfall. Game looks AMAZING.
I absolutely love the midi soundtrack way more than the modded soundtrack.
Me too, but unlike stuff like "3D monsters for Doom" I can actually agree it is good
You bet I'm gonna watch the whole thing when it's out, even though I have already watched all the individual parts. Longform Elder Scrolls content never gets old.
You can watch my final near 4-hour retrospective of Daggerfall here:
ruclips.net/video/16YEMiNxNCs/видео.html
It includes an updated version of this video as well, correcting any mistakes I made.
Once i got really into (patched) dos daggerfall it became my favourite game ever and unity has made it even skyrocket beyond that, and its great that people are recognizing it now.
It's been a blast watching this 8 part analysis of a game I didn't even know I'd end up loving the same way I did when I started playing TES main titles backwards from Skyrim to Daggerfall and hopefully I'll be able to try Arena and the other spin-off titles. It stands on its own with its "Piece it together" main quest and it really was rewarding to actually find things out yourself and being immersed by the game and the freedom it gives though I still prefer Morrowind with its handmade side quests and world. Looking forward for that 3 hour cut you said in the last part!
I am so fucking glad the unity version exists, it actually allows me to play daggerfall without all the riggemarole of actually playing the original with all it's really aged mechanics. I tried playing daggerfall year after year just out of curiosity but i'd always just give up cause it's so archaic. thanks to this i've actually been playing it for around 10 hours
I started with Daggerfall and loved it. I wish they could update it. Can you imagine Daggerfall with Skyrim graphics and updates.
Skygerfall does exist.... sadly it only covers the main questline of daggerfall
I love that you named a character guybush. Wonderful nod to a classic
Very interesting video like your others. I was not expecting to see my avatar and pictures of my mods in here. Thank you for the surprise! :)
Thank you for all your hard work on the mods! They are greatly appreciated 😊
I loved Daggerfall back when I played it. It took me several attempts to finally get out of the first dungeon it starts you into. I must have put around 50 or 60 hours of gameplay into it. Unfortunately for whatever reason it bugged at one point and I couldn't finish it. It might have been because of that missing dungeon you mentioned. I can't recall.
Thats a damn shame
Between DFU and the Retro Engine for the 16-bit Sonic games, Australia has done the world of retro gaming accessibility and preservation a monumental service.
as an australian, australia has done itself a monumental service in that regard as well. I might only be 14 but unlike others my age, i can still look past dated graphics to see the true beauty of 90's pc games.
I got my first copy of Daggerfall just in time for Christmas 1996, and I got it for free. I was actually buying another game, and asked the vendor about all the second hand copies of this Daggerfall game. I turned out that his assistant had bought them from people who had given up on the game as it was badly, even fatally, bugged. He couldn't get rid of them so he was giving them away as a throw-in to anyone who bought a game from him. As it happens I was in a fortunate position of having internet connection (I was an IT manager at the time and had just installed internet connections at my company) so was able to download a patch from the US (I'm in the UK) which made the game playable. So I copied the patch onto floppy and gave the vendor a copy so he could copy it for his customers.
I finished the game that Christmas, have played it many times since, both DOS and Unity, but haven't actually finished it since. The patched version is probably my favourite game of the series, but when I rank them I have to place Daggerfall last because of how badly broken the game was at release; yes as bad as Duhblivion was, at least it was playable and finishable 'out of the box'.
daggerfall is incredibly playable when the right settings are applied
I kind of like that the Beth version miss patches, because it means older versions are accessible and not lost to the public. They should, however, offer a patched version lmao. Not everyone knows it’s the unpatched one.
I can't believe Bethesda was so invested in Starfield they went all the way back to Daggerfall to build their game. It might even come close to Daggerfall's world map!
Was going to say the same thing: “Is Starfield Bethesda’s new Daggerfall?”
"oh man I loved that jwlar daggerfall video, maybe I'll look to see what other people think of the unity port, i'll just click the first result on my search without checking to see who made it"
love daggerfall, wish someone could give the same kind of love to arena
Morrowind was my first elder scrolls and going back to try and play Daggerfall was absolutely impossible for me at first. I couldnt even get it running on windows xp back then when I talked my parents into buying me an original disc off ebay. So happy to see it getting the labor of love it deserves
thanks for this analysis series; it was a great watch!
i remember reading something about TES6 planning to have procedural generation, and if we're to believe that reveal trailer is truly set in the iliac bay; who knows, maybe bethesda is interested in revisiting some things that made daggerfall unique to make a truly unique game again. but only time will tell...
Pretty sure Oblivion and Skyrim used procedural generation for their worlds as well. Every open world game uses it these days just not to the extent of Daggerfall
@@MizterMoonshine If I recall correctly, they used procedural generation to _create_ most of the overall geometry during the development process. (Rumor has it a bug in the algorithm's height output is the reason why Oblivion's terrain is so flat and smooth.) However, procedural generation isn't used to dynamically create geometry during the _playing_ process. The world was set in stone by the time it was printed to CDs.
@@djchristian82 It was flat and smooth at the time it was created by the developers. I'm willing to bet that trashing all the terrain, tracking down the bug, and spending a few days or weeks regenerating the heightmaps from scratch probably wasn't in the timetable, so it was left as-is.
Weirdly enough I prefer the cities of Daggerfall in both over the ones they made in the later games. The settlements in the other games all feel far too small and like they are very uninhabited and for some reason underdeveloped for nations centuries old. For me it makes sense to have bigger cities and settlements that are inhabited.
The only problem is that they look samey but otherwise you are right.
My favourite is Skyrim. Followed by oblivion. Then morrowind. And finally daggerfall.
That doesn't mean I hate daggerfall. I love it for it's breadth. I just wasn't transported into a specific place like I was with Skyrim.
you turned me into a Daggerfall enjoyer with your Daggerfall DOS v Unity video (been playing the Unity version ever since). Im still playing my first character (despite the huge hiccups in his stat distribution), I'm a hand to hand assassin type with an obsession to climb things
my next character might be a pure mage, because I've heard the magic can get pretty quirky lmao
I just went through the process of installing the daggerfall using the steam version and I love it so far. The only issue I have are dungeons for obvious reasons.
I just installed Unity, I haven't played much, but I'm excited to get into it.
Fantastic! Thank you for talking about some of the Unity Mods. You are likely done with Daggerfall for now. But if you want continue later you can explore DFU specific user mods and how this augmented gameplay in the way required. (A more in depth look) And what else could have been added or adjusted from the mod to make it even better. Hopefully this can create a positive feedback loop with some DFU authors.
But take a break. Your work has been excellent!
Great ideas! And thank you!
I watched this guys video saying how great daggerfall was but I forgot the whole unity thing. I wanted to blow my brains out about 2 minutes in. I think I’ll try unity version tomorrow. I can see that is where I messed up.
If you have no nostalgia for the game or that style of game in general then you won’t really get into it imo. Regardless of the engine it’s on.
Only trough playing previous Elder Scrolls games does the scope of just how far the series has fallen become crystal clear.
I am playing Open Morrowind and is so good I can only imagine what is Daggerfall have to offer.
What is open Morrowind?
I want to thank you for making all these videos on daggerfall. You've convinced me to give daggerfall a chance and it has quickly consumed all of my free time. Its one of my favorite video game experiences ive ever had in my 30 years of life and i would have never tried it without you. So, thank you ❤
Things like this that fascinate me about video games.. I can just imagine a currently popular game getting reborn somewhere in the future, and i can't wait :D
When I get a laptop I think this is going to be my first PC game I play on it this game looks so amazing I can't wait to explore one of the largest games ever created and to be honest I would love to see some of the places and provinces I've heard about only in lore or hearsay it looks like a world I want to get lost in!
Dark and darker
Morrowind, best game ever
i'm downloading this Daggerfall Unity
i hope they will remaster these old masterpieces with some updated Unreal engine (Morrowind, Daggerfall, Half life 2, Deus Ex, Xenogears, Enclave, Halo, Starcraft, Doom 1 & 2, Heretic, Hexen, Fallout 1 & 2 , Chrono Trigger , Ocarina of time, Majora's mask and some old Final fantasy, to name a few)
Truly a masterpiece of a analysis, thank you for your dedication.
Thank you!
Soundblaster Soundtrack Overhaul Mod, you will love the sound of that.
Daggerfall is one of those games that is great when it works, but the DOS version breaks so often it can take the fun out of it. Often switches are inaccessible, you can't find quest items, enemies get stuck in the geometry that you need to kill, enemies stuck in steps will hit you 1000 times in a second and basically instant kill you, its damn near impossible to see anything with some of the weather effects, etc. The bug fixes alone make Unity a better version, since you are guaranteed you can finish it unlike the original. You can still play DOS Doom without problem, all the source mods just make it play like a more modern game, but for Daggerfall the modern port actually makes the base game more playable like intended.
Adjusting the clock speed down because you had a dual pentium processor. Had to do that a lot for “older” games.
Oh man, you mention switches. I forgot about having to toggle physical switches on the 8088, 8087, and 8086s for some component configurations to work. (The 8087 was a secondary “math” processor used with the 8088 cpu). Thankfully by the time this game came out that was the past.
@Alma yes :(
Thanks for the video!
I remember when I bought Daggerfall. I was a kid. I have the shiny box just here :)
And I remember when I bought Morrowind.
And, believe me, after the awe of Morrowind graphics, Daggerfall was the vastly superior game.
The one that I kept dreaming of.
Not a fan of the high-res assets available for the Unity version (or the now goofy looking AI upscaled sprites), but it's great to see the game getting all the attention it deserves.
I cannot wait to get daggerfall unity set up on my surface book 3, I will just have to not use as many graphics mods, but I can still make it look pretty
if someone is interested, there's a mod in skyrim that lets you play Daggerfall but with the skyrim engine
11:30 - 11:47 This is EXACTLY why I love pre 2000s games.
I love your videos and as I invest more of my time into Daggerfall, I love learning more about its development and lore. Thank you for these videos!! Can't wait for you to blow up :)
Thank you! I'm glad you like them :)
you know what i appreciate you showing the review magazines, they are czech and slovak magazines, legendary times legendary articles legendary games :D
you are doing awesome job popularizing DFU! thank you.
Dang it alright I gotta try it. My brain is so broken from Skyrim though. I'm so used to quest markers and voiced dialogue. I tried Morrowind but I didnt make it far, as willing as I was to get over its quirkiness. I have to try it again.
Very nice video. I started playing Daggerfall (Unity) for the first time this week. I never played original Daggerfall. Daggerfall Unity is brutal, and confusing, but I'm enjoying it. Over the last 3 or 4 days, I figure I've played it for about 10 hours. The only other Elder Scrolls game I've played at length is Skyrim (250 hours). Daggerfall Unity feels like a familiar & unfamiliar game. It's a new Elder Scrolls game to me, which I like. The world is MASSIVE. I have no clue what to expect, but in excited to experience whatever.
I caught a glimpse of the player character name "Ezio" in there, that's a good choice 🔥
I remember working at Gamestop (then Electronics Boutique) that the original release date for Daggerfall IIRC was "End of May 95" and that was our running joke about whatever game someone was asking about the release date for.
Daggerfall Unity VR. Now that would be nice.
Highlight of The day right here!!!!
Wow! Thanx a lot! I'm gonna play Daggerfall again, after almost 30 years(as soon as I'll finish replaying Dungeon Master 2😉)!
When i was a kid, my mom sent me to take computer lessons, i used to go to some guy’s house who had a real nice home office, he had 3 computers in there, i remember playing Oregon Trail, GTA 1 & GTA london, as well as elder scrolls, i sure learned how to use those sweet machines
I’m playing for my second time right now without unity. It IS playable, you just have to keep your expectations reasonable and to the date it was released. With those things in mind, it is a ton of fun! But if you compare it to modern convenience… it won’t be.
Let us pray for Arena Unity in the future. I want the whole experience so bad!
I love the emulated DOS version, so when DF unity came out.... absolute godsend. mods can effectively turn DF into the game the developers wanted it to be, as well as the game *you* want it to be.
Gavin Claytoon did the world a huge favour, I am eternally greateful
I am not even an Elder Scrolls Fan.. and I played the hell out of Daggerfall because it is such an amazing fun game to play for free!
I just wanted to say this video series has been incredible and has convinced me to try playing daggerfall unity which I just finished installing. I was wondering if maybe you'd consider posting a list of mods you'd recommend playing it with? Also, do you have any plans on making a video about redguard in the future?
That’s great news! I hope you enjoy it.
I’ll make a video on this in the future, but for the most part I stick to graphics mods, DREAM and Enhanced Sky (both from Nexus) are really good.
And yes! I’m looking forward to reviewing Redguard soon (won’t be as long as this series, but still a decent length video :) )
I was born on the day Daggerfall released (probably). This rules. Also, this video series rules. Very glad to have found your channel through deciding to go back and play Daggerfall Unity. It's CONSIDERABLY better than when I played it on DOSBox in 2009 when Bethesda released it for free. Even then, I got sucked into it for quite a while.
Kind of amazed I managed to put up with it in retrospect, but Daggerfall Unity really managed to remind me what *really* worked about it while removing (or otherwise lessening) what didn't work. Special mention to the "smaller dungeons" experimental feature in Unity. It makes questing so much better.
I'm pretty sure the reason I abandoned the game back then was because I just never found the exit to a dungeon I entered. That character is presumably rotting in an underwater section right now, unaware that The Knights of the Owl (or whatever) have long since expelled him for his many failures.
I found that electronic buzzing to be a corruption of the skeleton's scream audio file.
I remember sending out 7.95 for the patch disk for Mortal Kombat 1 for DOS. I tell my daughter she has no idea how lucky she has it that the internet, medicine, GPS, etc exist.
I'm sure medicine existed when you were a wee baby.
Super excited for this one! Nice work man :) Keep it up!
By the way, is there supposed to be sound at 4:39 and 4:56? It's where you talk about the sound effects / audio bug, but all I can hear is your background music
Good catch, Adobe Premiere didn’t export that audio for some reason
@@Jwlar Huh weird. I thought it was on my end at first lol
@@georyx2454 No woriess, I've removed them via RUclips's editor now, so when it updates in a few hours they'll be gone.
My bad for missing it before uploading haha
@@Jwlar Not a problem man! Honestly the fact that you're doing all these analysis videos more than makes up for it
Im from 2000s and I grew up with skyrim ps3
I got a laptop that couldn’t run google docs so I was limited in my game options. I played a lot of older games that worked ok and such
I then saw Daggerfall
I downloaded from a website and started it
Still to this day im obsessed. Never had a game eat away my life so much
I recently got an rtx pc
And I still choose daggerfall as my main game
And this is the original
I like Daggerfall unity but I love the charm of the original
Maybe there can be a mod that can give the original feel with all fixes
I just love retro feeling games and prefer it
And its not for nostalgia
I feel limitations can bring out the best creativity
Daggerfall taught me how to use a compass
When I first started starfield, I thought maybe the random dungeons you found on planets were procedurally generated and Bethesda had returned to their daggerfall roots, but was sadly mistaken 😢
i remember playing this game when i was in my teenage years i had it on an old mid 90s era computer
Daggerfall worked almost exactly the same as it does in the DOS box emulator. If you follow Zaric Zhakaron and his playthroughs and story of all the iterations, including the one he played as a kid back in the 90’s, you’ll get a good idea.
I'm a big M&M fan, weird that I never stumbled upon this as a kid.
Funny that "wide but shallow" is something people say about Starfield now
If they did an official daggerfall remake and just paid some interns to make some DLC/add stuff to the over world, I'd buy that.
Skyrim has gotten 2 rereleases and its their most current main series game.
It's been so long since I've had a PC they're a handful of PC exclusive games I'd love to play again and for the first time to be specific the fate series of games and the 1st 2 elder scrolls
I know where it (this confusion) comes from, but it's not good to let this slide:
Contrasting the orchestral version against a *"MIDI"* version because "MIDI sounds bad" is nonsensical.
Likely, the "orchestral" soundtrack was produced by putting the music note information onto a MIDI track in a DAW and from that, control a VST plugin that plays an orchestral sounds library.
See how silly this is?
"MIDI" has exactly zero to do with how things sound as in sonic colors of instruments, it is the digital analog to sheet music in one corner, and in the other, it's a digital serial transfer protocol.
I appreciate the sentiment even though I feel this confusion has gone on too long for it to be fixed in the public eye
I 100% disagree that the original daggerfall is unpleasant to play. It has aged nicely and the game speaks for itself. Thats why people mod it to be more "eye candy" rather than change assets.
Bruh never knew about Daggerfall Unity until now. Just downloaded it!
Great video. It would be interesting if you made a video of mod you would recommend. I'd definitely watch it.
Some people over exagerate when they talk about the bugs in the dos version of the game, even without the fan patches the game isn't that buggy or horrible to play as some people claim. This sucks because there are still people out there who can't run DF Unity in their computers and the original version is the only way they have to experience this awesome game so idiots making the dos version out to be an unplayable broken mess are discouraging these people from ever playing the game.
Daggerfall is great. The Unity port? It's good, but it will be taxing on PCs that are from before 2010, and even more so if one has only the integrated graphics, so it limits a lot of what the Unity port can do, if it can be run at all.
...
Eh, don't mind me; I'm only behind because I live under poverty (by wealth class standards).
Yeah people shouldn't be discouraged from trying the dos version because for some people it is the only version. If you install all the patches you get rid of most of the bugs.
Leaving an educational comment here: What you describe as "modded vs midi" music is still midi. Midi is just a file format. How it sounds is decided by what midi font you use. You could have the same sound back in the day with an expensive sound card and the respective midi font (basically kind of a collection of instrument sampled). Midi only tells the device: Play this note, in this pitch, with this duration (and some more info). The device then spits out the music. So the "modded" version as you describe it, is just a better quality midi compared to the standard "adlib" style sound cards most users had in their systems back then.
Definitely may have to get this game
Man, I hope OpenTESArena or similar ports will achieve the same love and make the game even more approachable.
I look forward to watching this channel grow, the effort you're putting into these videos really shows and those subs are just going to keep ticking up
Thank you! :)
2:43 Elder Scrolls in a nutshell.
Idk, I loved and I still do original dos daggerfall version. It's like more authentic, also I think unity version shows the simplicity and missings of a 1996 mapping, wich is not good
Nice video! Got a recommended mod list? You mentioned a few that sounded really interesting (especially the ones that add more quests and stuff in the overworld, and the music improver) but I wonder what you’d consider the best starting mods for someone who has never played Daggerfall Unity before.
Either I have deja vu or I’ve already watched a significant portion of this video in a different one of your videos
Yeah, this is from the original multi part series that was combined to make the full analysis. I privated all of the parts that didnt stand on their own, but left this one and the "Making of" one live as separate parts for those who only care about these sections.
On the whole I think Daggerfall has aged a lot better than most of the DOS CRPGs of that era.
Only, or primariely due to the Unity version/port, tho... without that, and it'D be... less interesting to alot of people.
@@KhaziirEverflight No even the non unity port has aged better than most DOS RPGs and even many late 90s crpgs I have a whole bunch of em on steam and gog that I’ve played.
Alright alright, I'll play some more Daggerfall. I'm still on my first playthrough, so wish me luck..
Also I've got Unity, but didn't know you could mod it further, I've got to check those out.
Yeah, you had to have some skills to get some of these games to work. Adjusting your memory allocation in the bios and getting resources allocated for both the game and your sound card were a real challenge. Not all computers had the same cpu and your bios was even more diverse. So the game instructions could only give you guidance, not exact settings.
Bethesda released a buggy game? You don't say.
i wish every 90s game got this treatment
I still enjoyed playing the DOSbox version when I played it with a guide q few years ago