The Elder Scrolls: Chapter II - Daggerfall

aka: Daggerfall: Die Schriften der Weisen, Daggerfall: The Elder Scrolls - Chapter 2
Moby ID: 778
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Daggerfall is a sequel to The Elder Scrolls: Arena; it is set in the same medieval fantasy world Tamriel - more specifically, in the homeland of the Breton race, known as High Rock, and the province Hammerfell, home of the Redguards. The game's title is derived from the name of High Rock's capital city.

The main protagonist travels to Daggerfall at the request of the emperor Uriel Septim. His mission involves freeing the ghost of the late King Lysandus. Apparently, a letter concerning the king and sent by the emperor to the court in Daggerfall contains information about a dangerous ancient power. It is now up to the hero to retrieve the letter, reveal the dark secret that has been preserved in the king's family, and eventually discover the key to the resurrection of an iron golem who wields immense power.

Like its predecessor, Daggerfall is an open-ended role-playing game, in which the main quest is but a small fraction of the various missions and assignments the player is able to undertake. The game is notable for breaking records concerning the size of its world (though much of it has been generated randomly). Interaction with hundreds of thousands of non-playable characters is possible. The player is free to join one of the many political and social organizations of Tamriel, as well as pursue a personal quest for power. The player is able to buy houses, ships, and horses, as well as become a werewolf, a vampire, or a wereboar.

Combat in Daggerfall is action-based: the player uses the mouse to determine the direction and the power of sword swings and shots from a ranged weapon. Character growth is handled somewhat similarly to that of Quest for Glory games: the more the player performs an action, the better the protagonist becomes at it. For example, swinging the sword will eventually increase the player character's attack power and skill with that weapon, etc. This extends to non-combat activities such as jumping, bartering, speaking foreign languages, etc. Leveling up occurs when several main and secondary skills have been raised sufficiently. During character generation the player is given the option to create and name his or her custom classes by combining attributes and skills.

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Critics

Average score: 81% (based on 26 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 110 ratings with 8 reviews)

A massive, ambitious masterpiece that just missed 'perfect'.

The Good
Daggerfall is a massive, open game; anyone who has played it will tell you that. The land you can explore is twice the size of the UK, the dungeons are as of yet unrivaled in size in any other game, and the towns are pleasantly life-sized.

The premise of the game is that you can make your own adventure. In this, it succeeds; Daggerfall is the epitome of non-linear. This is obvious from the character generation, where you have the option to make your own class-- the class-making system is an amazingly fun part of the game which includes the options to add special advantages and disadvantages such as phobias, resistances, and specialties.

The non-linearity isn't just in the character generation process, however; it lasts throughout the game. There are a number of guilds to join-- assortments of temples and knightly orders that vary from country to country add to the normal selection of Thieves, Warriors, and Mages (and Assassins!) guilds-- each of which offer their own 'quests'. These quests are the building blocks of the game. They vary greatly, although about 45% are dungeon-hack quests.

The world around you feels alive, to a certain extent. The NPCs feel far from lifelike-- more on that in the downsides section-- but the intricacies and details of the world of Tamriel that the game is set in are a great help to the level of immersion. There are simulated weather effects, very rare for when the game was made, including snow and rain. When winter comes, the buildings, ground and trees are covered with snow.

The music is very good for the time, especially if you set up your sound the right way. Sound effects are decent; not impressive technicly speaking, but they work really well in-game. Monsters each have their own distinct sound, and when you hear something new in a dungeon, like a mummy's low, mourning cry or the horrific scream of a Lich, you're likely to be scared out of your wits. And if you are an arachaphobic, like me...

Shudder.

As for the game mechanics, they are generally excellent. The game does not use the typical 'experience points equals a level' system; instead, the skills you use are the ones that increase. This system is so much better then the normal one, it's really hard to explain. The spell system is interesting; you can buy default spells, or make new ones in the Mages Guild. This is not nearly as refined as in Morrowind, but it is still fun and interesting.

I could go on for a long time about how you can collect ingredients to make potions, enchant your own items, collect various pieces of the different armor the game offers, get a horse and/or cart, buy your own house, buy your own ship, etc, but that would make this review far too long. Instead, I'll move on the 'main quest'.

The main quest sneaks up on the player in the form of an innocent letter regarding the topics of the quest the Emperor sent you to this part of Tamriel for, which are explained to you in the introductory movie. From here, the quest branches into many directions. It's always more complex then you think, and in the end when you've figured it all out and solved both halves of the main quest, you'll have made your way through a spellbinding story of deception, intrigue, and betrayal. And the game doesn't end there-- you are welcome to continue exploring. Your adventure goes on for as long as you want.

The Bad
Bugs! That is the main downside you'll hear about Daggerfall. Bugs. The game is pretty buggy even with the latest 2.13 patch, and even when you've learned to avoid things that bug the game. It is bearable, however.

Another bad thing is the NPCs. NPCs you see wandering around towns are not just cookie-cutter-NPCs-- they are generated on the spot, and they change when you enter the town again! The other NPCs you will meet that are important to quests or plots are static, but feel unlifelike. They are represented by a single pixilated picture that is occasionally animated, and they don't fight. Things that fight, you can't interact with. This is a big failure of the game and, in my opinion, its primary shortcoming.

Other issues include how many quests are hell to solve, because you have to hack through a dungeon that, as you'll swear up and down when you finally get out, spanned all of Tamriel underground. The game isn't balanced; it's painfully easy to use various exploits, and powergamers will soon tire of how pathetically easy everything becomes after 10th level.

There are so many little issues that pester the game. A totally bugged logbook is one of them; you can record about 5 things people said in conversations before it resets itself. Another is the Automap; it's a great idea, having a 3d Automap you can view from different angles and navigate easily, but it just doesn't work like it should, and it's barely any help in the nightmarishly maze-like dungeons you will oft encounter.

The Bottom Line
Daggerfall remains one of the best RPGs of all time. I personally think that only Morrowind, the very recent sequel, is a superior game (and of course it is, given the time difference! Here's to hoping TES 4 will be better then Daggerfall and Morrowind both). It is truly a masterpiece, a classic; it should live on forever in the memories of gamers. It is flawed, of course, and perhaps had the developers not been so extremely ambitious in planning it, it would have turned out a much better, more solid game. But its massiveness is what makes it so captivating, what sets it apart from all the rest. If you like RPGs, this is a must-have game.

DOS · by ShadowShrike (277) · 2004

A complete world in a box, and the freedom to do what you want.

The Good
This game is big. Really, really big. Perhaps a little too big...

There appears to be infinite possibilities in this game. The only problem is that there is just not enough time to explore more than a fraction of what goes on here. A complete world is mapped before you, and you can go anywhere. A dozen countries each with a culture of their own, hundreds of towns and villages and spralling cities. Dungeons, tombs, crypts and castles litter the countryside. So many, you are spolied for choice.

The game's character system is easily the best around. There is a huge scope for character creation. including the inclusion of negative and positive character aspects which allows for the closest thing to real role-playing you'll find in a game. Any character you can imagine can be created. The skills-based system is wonderful. For the first time a game dares to break the level-based mold, and it does it so well. Practice a skill and you will get better at it. Want to be better runner? Run everywhere you go. Practice your climbing on nearby buildings, and jump around alot - you're skills will increase. Brilliant.

There are some wonderful touches. Buy yourself a cart, park it outside a dungeon. Everytime your inventory is full in your sweep through the dungeon, take it back to the entrance and dump it in the cart. When your cart is full, take it back to town and sell the contents for a fortune. Enough to buy a house, perhaps? Go ahead. Buy a house. You can if you want to. You could also buy a ship to sail around the lands.

I would like to comment on the creative and compelling storyline, but I didn't actually see it much. There is a deeper purpose to the game, but with so many side-quests and exploring to do, it's very easy to forget that this game actually has a purpose.

The Bad
It is bugged. Badly, badly bugged. But, there are always patches...

The worst parts of this game are the dungeons. They're horrible. I was always told that any dungeons should have a purpose - why is it here? who built it?. In this game, all the dungeons are obviously built by a complete psycho intent on ruining your day, and spoiling a damn fine game. The corridors appear endless, a myriad of twists and turns leading nowhere. And don't say "Ah... a labyrinth." Are you trying to tell me that every single dungeon is a labyrinth? Every single one? I don't think so! Additionally, all the dungeons look the same. There are whole sections which are just dropped in, duplicated across mnay seperate dungeons.

The game is perhaps a little too large, with little cohesion. It is very easy to lose the main plot of the story and find yourself on a personal quest for fame and fortune. Not a bad thing in its own right, but it doesn't take long before you realise that the main game has gone, and you are in a situation with no apparent ending. A bit like real life, I guess.

There's something which amuses me. With a horse and cart it is still possible to climb walls, hence you can be ride along city walls and rooftops with your cart behind you. Let's call it a 'feature', shall we?

This game is magnificent in so many ways, but I just got bored and frustated with it too quickly.

The Bottom Line
As a game, this is magnificent. A huge, rolling adventure allied to the best RPG system available. It's just a little too serious to be fun.

DOS · by Steve Hall (329) · 2000

Is that a pixel in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?

The Good
The good reviews I've read of it. Glowing reviews, even. Now for the bad.

The Bad
Error 117. I wondered: is it because it is WinME-hostile? I wouldn't be surprised. I logged onto the Net, searched for "daggerfall error 117" and was rewarded with this hint: "Just keep reinstalling it until it works".

You shake your head in disbelief. This must be a sick joke. Oh, well, in for a penny, in for a pound. You reinstall. Error 117. Reinstall again. Wow, it works! Go figure.

A huge, open game, say the glowing reviews. Uh? You find yourself in a dark dungeon of little twisty passages (or are they twisty little passages, or ...?). Confronted with your first enemy, a giant rat, you frantically right-click your mouse while waving it about. That is supposed to get your sword cutting, thrusting or slashing. Yeah, like, once in a blue moon. So the rat gets ten bites at you while you barely manage one swing or thrust. RIP. Reload. Start again. Same story. Is that sword stone-deaf? It appears to be. The thing is known to be literally crawling in bugs, so you download the latest patch, and start afresh. Same sorry story. Sick of it, you look for a cheat, a trainer, whatnot. Got it! Just add "cheatmode 1" to the z.cfg file and Ctrl-F4 gets you into god mode. Nice. So you start again. Giant rat. Try to wield sword. Sword still deaf to your frantic mouse clicking and waving. But never mind, you're invulnerable now and after minutes of waving that mouse about like a fool, you eventually kill that rat, and off you are, on your quest to finding the exit to that miserable claustrophobic hell hole. More boring encounters, more stupid mouse waving at your stone-deaf weapons. Oh... a pox on it all, and you keep hitting "+" until, thanks to cheat mode, all your skills are maxed out to 100%. Is it my imagination? I thought my weapon, then, became more responsive to my mouse-waving.

I spent hours looking for an exit. Sick of it, I downloaded a walkthrough. Equipped with this new knowledge, I knew that, next to that throne (big name for a squarish joke of an armchair), there was a lever I just had to pull, and the platform of the throne (sic) goes up and there you are, almost. So you pull the lever and the platform goes up... leaving you down. Oh... you've got to climb onto it. Pull the lever again, bring the platform back down. Now... how do you get onto the wretched platform? Walking onto it won't work. So you try running and jumping. Missed. Looks like "jump" is only good for an Olympic five-inch jump. Back up, try again. Fail. Back up to try once more. Uh? Can't move? How about turning left? Stuck. Right? Stuck. Try as you may, you are stuck. Was that a feature, or another bug? Thank God for the "escape" key! Hit escape, exit, start again. Eventually, you make it out of this dismal dungeon, to find yourself in a deserted countryside with snow falling. Where to go? I picked west and soon met... what seemed to be someone in the distance, in heavy winter clothes. Makes sense, doesn't it? So I walked up to him (her? it? it did look like a giant mushroom...) only to see a pixellated mess, quite as bad as in the very earliest version of Ultima Underworld. Nothing recognizable. And nothing new there: the "lever" near the "throne" was also completely unrecognizable. You had to look for it, knowing it was there, knowing it was a lever. But back to our mysterious person, or mushroom, who knows? When I walked around it to take a look from different angles it was the same pixellated mess. So I walked up real close, and... I walked through it! Never mind, keep on trudging west, o, intrepid adventurer! Mayhap thou shalt chance upon something of interest. Oh, I just heard a flappity-flap-flap... ah, that's a giant bat all right. They were such pests in the dungeon, but here, you almost feel relieved at having found something recognizable. Dispatch it in two blows of your sword (without god mode and all my skills maxed out to 100% I dread to think how long this THRILLING encounter would have taken, and how many hit points it would have cost me). What now? Continue west, why not? I must have trekked west for two days of game time (judging from the light). It was no skin off my nose, really, since I just ran on and on and on, not even bothering to dodge trees, bushes, rocks: no need, you just whiz through them! Eventually I found a hostile centaur. How thrilling. Slay him! Keep on west... on and on and on... vast expanses of snow now with only mountains in the distance, covered in forests. Wow! A grizzly bear! Slash, thrust, dead. Keep on going.... I must have trudged on for days, and those mountains in the distance did not get one inch closer. If your idea of gaming is to hold your left forefinger on "P" (for "run") and your right forefinger on the up arrow (for "forward")... it's not mine, so I reloaded, and this time waited for dawn. Oh no, you can't rest "there are enemies nearby". Uh? Where? So you have to go around in circles, looking for enemies. Oh, there he is, looks like an archer. Slish, slash, all gone, enemy. Ah, it was a bard. Now for a bit of shut-eye... CRASH! By then I had wasted so much time on this game that an hour more, or two, was nothing. Reload... (sigh). This time I went around in ever widening circles. Still nothing, nowhere. Time to have a peek at the walkthrough:

"In one to three weeks after you surface from Privateer's Hold, you receive a letter--provided you are in town."

Provided I am in town? Where is town? I have been combing that wilderness for days, east, west, north, south, and no town has ever appeared. When in such dire straights, do what every computer user does, when hopelessly cornered: read the manual. And there, there you find the Magic Key (tm): "W". Just press "W" (for world map, presumably). Wow! I wish the makers of Fallout had thought of that. In Fallout, when you leave a town you find yourself automatically in world-map mode. How dumb. Having to leaf through the manual for some Magic Key (tm) would have added sooooo much to the gameplay of Fallout, wouldn't it?

Seriously now. Navigating the world map, I soon spotted Daggerfall town and I had myself whizzed there. And there and then, I discovered the true purpose of my adventure. The citizens of Daggerfall are seriously missing in the pixel department, all the more of a pity because about half of them are buxom wenches, many with a libido-boggling cleavage. But, each being allowed just five or six pixels per ... er... eye, the scenery leaves quite a lot to be desired, as it were. So the purpose of the game is clear: an Evil Wizard (tm) has stolen most of the pixels of the Realm. Your mission, should you accept it, is to slay him and return the missing pixels to Emperor Uriel Octopus (Octopus? perhaps I am one ahead--er... afoot). This brilliant flash of intuition exhausted me. I needed a nap. Clicked on the campfire icon. Was informed that sleeping inside or near a town was illegal. Oh, yes, fair enough, the rule dates back from good old SSI Pool of Radiance. Fair enough. But what's this? Three knights setting upon me, swords drawn? Come on, gentlemen, I'll go quietly. But no way, they won't listen to reason or humble pleading. Oh well, being in god mode, what do I care? Slish slash, slish slash, there they go. A fourth one turns up? Slish slash, poor fellow. Still... reload and be a good boy, find an inn to rest. Knowing, from the walkthrough, that I would have to sit around twiddling my thumbs for quite a while, I booked in for 10 days, at a cost of 30 gold pieces. Still, I felt that, given that eyesore of a pixel-challenged innkeeper, HE should have paid me 300 gold to stay in his flea-pit. Then I lost interest.

Now what sort of a game is that? The graphics are so hideously pixellated that you hardly ever know what you are looking at. And Daggerfall came out four years, four years, yes, after Ultima Underworld. I thought I was back in the days of Leisure Suit Larry and Zack MacKraken. This is ridiculous. Fighting is a preposterous, frenzied waving about of your mouse, right-clicking away like a madman in the faint hope that that will move your weapon an inch, two with a bit of luck. Moving backwards is like wading through a pool of treacle. Jumping is like having balls on chains weighing you down. What gameplay is salvageable from this sorry mess? The "open" play? Play what? At being a highwayman robbing heavily pixellated travellers? A ladies' darling wooing hideously pixellated tavern wenches? An errand boy roaming yuckily pixellated dungeons in search of unrecognizably pixellated artifacts for some pot-bellied pixellated merchants? How thrilling.

Oh, solving the quest? Well, then, spare me those stupid encounters with stupid beasties, fought with stupid weapons that refuse to move when you mouse them about, spare me those hideously pixellated graphics, and let's have an old text adventure instead. How about "Colossal Cave", uh?

The Bottom Line
I have seen Arcatera described as an "insult to gamers' intelligence". Daggerfall qualifies, too.

DOS · by Jacques Guy (52) · 2004

[ View all 8 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Do these (DOSBox-ed) as a free bonus count as a Windows release? Cavalary (11445) Dec 25, 2015
Daggerfall Soundtrack Remake Pieces of 8-bit Dec 3, 2015
It's FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Foxhack (32102) Jul 18, 2009

Trivia

CompUSA release

In order to get Daggerfall carried in CompUSA stores, a special edition of the game was requested. The CompUSA version has 16 extra quests added to the game. A patch was later released that added these extra quests to the standard version of the game.

Freeware release

The game was offered as freeware on July 9, 2009 in celebration of fifteen years of Elder Scrolls.

Graphics

Daggerfall's creature art is an interesting mix of hand-drawn work and rendered material. All of the creatures, in fact, originally had 6 frames to every animation, but this had to be chopped down considerably to compress the size of the game which was already monstrously large for the time it was released.

The only remaining trace of these original detailed animations is in a "bestiary" video describing several of the creatures of Daggerfall.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #8 Top Vaporware Title in Computer Game History
    • May 1997 (Issue #154) – Role-Playing Game of the Year

Information also contributed by PolloDiablo.

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Related Sites +

  • Daggerfall at Wikipedia
    Information about The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall at Wikipedia
  • Doug's Daggerfall Page
    A Fansite dedicated to Daggerfall.
  • TES: The Essential Site
    A site for Daggerfall, featuring one of the largest surviving conclaves of fans.
  • The Tamriel Compendium
    The Tamriel Compendium has lots of info about Daggerfall (and a few files), including a bestiary with creature sounds.
  • The UESP
    The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages is one of the oldest sites about the Elder Scrolls series. It has huge amounts of information about Daggerfall.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 778
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Omniscia.

Windows Apps added by Plok. Windows added by Rik Hideto.

Additional contributors: Brian Hirt, ShadowShrike, Alaka, formercontrib, Yearman, Patrick Bregger.

Game added January 23, 2000. Last modified March 18, 2024.