Daggerfall

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

Daggerfall featured a very large game world (estimated as being roughly the size of Turkey), with over 15,000 towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player's character to explore as he or she pleases; however, the limited array of building blocks which were used to construct the towns and dungeons caused some players 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.

A notable feature in Daggerfall was its spell creation system. Through the Mages Guild, players could mix a variety of different effects, such as fire damage and levitation, into custom spells. The game would automatically generate the mana cost of the spell based on the power of the effects chosen. Interestingly enough, Daggerfall shipped with several spell effects that did not function correctly, or simply did not function at all, namely the transformations.

Other features of interest 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.

Like Arena and many other titles in the series (with the notable exception of Morrowind) 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. Although controversial, the nudity in Daggerfall was never explicit and is generally accepted among players to be immersive rather than offensive. Options to turn off both nudity and blood were available to concerned parents.

Daggerfall, like the other games in the Elder Scrolls series, takes place in the world 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 was notorious for having numerous software bugs in the initial release (hence its unofficial nickname - Buggerfall), to the point that it was theoretically impossible to complete the main story in the original retail version. Even after numerous patches, many issues were still left unsolved. Despite this, the game retains a loyal fan base to this day; in fact, several fans have proposed remaking the game for modern systems.

One particularily infamous 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": if you wanted to enter a town after its gates were closed for a night you had to use a levitation spell to fly over the walls or the climbing ability to climb them. In any case both your horse and your carriage (which you could purchase in the game) stayed with you as if you've just put them in your pocket before climbing/flying and took it out after that.

Many features of current MMORPGs can be traced in spirit back to Daggerfall and its predecessor Arena, which both proved to be effective frameworks for an open-ended and undirected adventuring experience.

The game is out of print, but copies can usually be found on online auction sites.

External links

• The UESP: Daggerfall (http://www.uesp.net/dagger/espdag.shtml)
• Interkarma's Workshop (http://dfworkshop.net/)
• King Svatopluk's Court (http://www.svatopluk.com/daggerfall/)
• The DF Code Project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dfcode/)
• Elder Scrolls GL (http://www.geocities.com/shrew_ii/) (formerly Daggerfall GL)fr:Daggerfall