Julian LeFey, or whatever he calls himself these days, burned out and dropped out of making games way back in the Battlespire days. I admit to a bit of geeking out over the news of some of the Daggerfall team getting back together because I was in my formative gaming years when Daggerfall was released and, although it was as buggy as hell, I saw tremendous potential for computer games to simulate an open world and allow players all sorts of play-styles… and it didn’t try so hard to allow a player to be the master of every guild and every ability.
Unfortunately, Bethesda winnowed the open world and player character options down with each Elder Scrolls iteration with a goal of making the game more focused, and simultaneously allowing the player to become a master of every skill and guild – only the path to mastery in the early and mid game varies, but the characters all end up the same.
I know it’s way too early to see if LeFey and gang can make something that more closely resembles an RPG of old, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
I still have nightmares about wandering the randomly generated 3d dungeons, trying to find a feather that was in all likely hood outside of the actual level geometry.
The labyrinthine dungeons really grew tiresome, but there was something I liked about the relative emptiness (compared to later ES games). It felt closer to traversing a real land, rather than a theme park. Fast-travel was possible, so the player could skip the doldrums of hoofing it, step by step. And the cookie-cutter encounters could be dinged, too. There’s plenty in Daggerfall to criticize, but at the time, it felt like a huge step forward in CRPGs. It was really the promise of what could be done when a game company goes whole-hog for the open world experience.
At the time, there was plenty of complaints about what Daggerfall did, from the technical glitches of falling through mathematical seams in the dungeons into the void to vast cookie-cutter landscape to repetitive fetch quests for guilds – but it was breaking all kinds of new ground. I was always disappointed that no company really picked up that mantle of player freedom and computerized Dungeon Master effect for the sake of a more distilled, theme-park experience.
I played the hell out of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim – but they never felt much like a living world, though Morrowind’s story was excellent. Morrowind is romanticized as hell, and had some great things, but it felt too small. The major city in the game had, what, thirty people? It was little more than an apartment complex. All the ES games have their problems and can be nit-picked to death, but they’re still great fun. Arena and Daggerfall really opened the doors of what translating a table-top RPG to the computer screen could be like. It was just a promise never really pursued.
I intentionally didn’t mention how legendarily buggy it was, trying to focus on the game itself really not holding up today.
Daggerfall was incredibly ambitious and even impressive for its time. It was one of the first open-world games, years before GTA3 had the critical insight that you need to seed the gamespace with lots of systems to give people something to do in that open world.
I never did, got close once back in the day, tried to focus only on the main quest, and I did for a while. Regardless, for its time it was a marvel, warts and all.
Daggerfall remains one of my most treasured gaming memories. From the box, which promised oh so much, to the game itself, which delivered, um, something less than the box promised, to the wonky random dungeons with no exits, to sitting in an inn room blasting fireballs at the wall to skill up…classic stuff.
I do think the somewhat empty world did add to the experience in an odd way. Wandering across the gameworld was often kind of eerie and suspenseful precisely because there wasn’t much there. I do much prefer Skyrim-style “chock full o’nuts” worlds these days, though, but I wouldn’t mind having some parts of modern game worlds replicate that feeling.
Yeah, aside from the bugs, the randomly generated dungeons were horrible. I loathed to get a quest to find some object or person, only to have them in some dungeon where it could take hours, if not days to wander through. Fortunately they had a spell that would help you get out once you were lost in these things.
However, I am always happy to see more open-world games where you can build a character the way you want.
I was lucky with my playthough. I had my first home internet setup as the game was released and patches came in just as I needed them.
This game had a crazy amount of ways you to play your character. I ended up as a vampire who only fed on animals and could travel only at night and wander near empty towns. By the end of the game, I crafted a set of armor that shielded the power of the sun for a few hours. It was cool being able to wander crowded streets in daylight again.
I adopted a rotating save system to protect against data loss and I still use that system today where games allow.
Battlespire was a much more focused experience. I remember it getting lousy reviews and it was even more buggy than Daggerfall but I had a lot of fun with it.
Yeah I never ending up finishing Battlespire either. It was just too buggy and unstable. My tolerance for buggy games was much higher in those days I guess because I still ending up with a positive impression.
I bought and played a bit of Redguard but if I remember right, it was more of an action/adventure game. I didn’t like it much then and dropped it after getting stuck on a puzzle. But after playing a bunch of the newer crop of action/adventure games, maybe it was a bit ahead of its time and I wasn’t hip enough to get it.
I couldn’t figure out How to Elder Scroll at all until much later - Daggerfall was this immense potentiality hidden behind the inscrutability of the gameplay. I maybe tried a few dungeons and died in all them, wandered around aimlessly, and finally drifted away from the game to do other things.
I loved the powergaming aspects, where you could build custom classes taking negligible negative traits to afford powerful positive ones. Like your class couldn’t use crappy iron armor, barely useful at the beginning of the game, in exchange for overpowered traits like constantly regenerating health or getting triple mana from each point of intelligence. Munchkin paradise.
You could name your custom class too. I was a ButtFucker.
