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The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall |
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Studio: |
Bethesda
Softworks |
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Designer(s): |
Julian
Lefay; Bruce Nesmith; Ted Peterson |
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Part of series: |
The
Elder Scrolls |
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Release: |
September 20, 1996 |
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Main credits: |
Programmers: Hal Bouma, Julian Lefay Artists: Mark
K. Jones, Hoang Nguyen, Louise Sandoval Music: Eric
Heberling |
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Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough, parts 1-20 (19 hours
46 mins.) |
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Most of my readers already know that I strongly dislike
throwing around controversial «hot takes» for the sheer sake of starting a
fight or making myself look different from mindless sheep herds. It’s a hell
more of an achievement to try and open up new insightful passages inside the
boring truth than forcefully turn it into an exciting lie — or something like
that. But every now and then, there happens to be a «hot take» which does
actually come straight from the heart, and that’s probably the most fun for
an honest reviewer: try and make a convincing case for what might seem like a
hopeless situation to the majority. So, without further ado — I think that The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, a
much-admired cult classic and, according to many, the true beginning of the epic majesty that is The Elder Scrolls, is actually inferior to The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the first game in the series. While
unquestionably presenting many important steps forward in the evolution of
the Elder Scrolls universe, I come
to view Daggerfall — in retrospect — as a monumental failure,
more of a lesson on how not to do
an open-world RPG than anything else. The reasons why some of Daggerfall’s aspects remain unique
(and thus, somewhat fascinating to certain types of players) are simple: they
were bad aspects, soon to be
jettisoned even by the Bethesda people themselves. I would not dare to go as
far as call the entire game bad — it does have a life of its own — but I
cannot share the enthusiasm of its veteran fans, and I certainly cannot lie
that I had a lot of fun playing it (well, I did have some, but it is unlikely I shall ever return to the game after
beating it of my own desire). First things first, though: my first experience with Daggerfall was utterly dreadful.
Having just completed Arena (about
twenty years late to the party), I was excited to see how far Bethesda could
push the same formula just two years later. It took a bit of a struggle to
get the old DOS version to work, but that kind of a struggle was nothing new
to me after a decade of playing my old favorites on Windows XP. The major
problem, however, was not that the game croaked and groaned as I was testing
its limits; the major problem was that I couldn’t really get anywhere. It took what seemed like years even to get out of
the initial dungeon — at the cost of being humiliated by enemy after enemy.
It took another year to bring my character to the nearest village — where
nobody wanted to talk to me or give me a job because I did not have any
reputation with them. Finally, after an eternity spent mucking around, I got
my first fetch quest, which required visiting a faraway dungeon represented
by a 3D map that I could not properly interpret. And in that dungeon... I got
lost. I ended up roaming an endless series of similar-looking corridors,
battling tough-as-nails enemies and perhaps
even finding the object I was looking for, except that I could not get out.
It looked like that one single dungeon was more huge and intricate than all
of Arena’s main dungeons put
together — and that was just a minor fetch quest. Once I realized that, my
enthusiasm died, and I buried it by deleting the game from my hard drive, weeping
over all the wasted time, and moving on. Fast forward another ten years or so, and one sunny day a
piece of interesting news reached me: apparently, there was a fan-funded
project of remaking Daggerfall
completely in the Unity engine,
claiming to have preserved the graphic style, quest system, and overall
atmosphere of the original game but fully reprogramming it so that it could
run smoothly on modern computers. I was skeptical at first, but decided to
check out the details — and the one that managed to seduce me was the fact
that the new version of the game had a «Smaller Dungeons» tweak, where you
could modify the parameters so that the procedurally generated dungeons would
shrink in size (from, say, 16 or so story levels to about 3–4). This most
gracious offer on the part of the modders convinced me to give the game
another try — and although it was still tough, this time around I at least
managed to beat its main quest, which, I guess, does give me the right to
produce a general assessment of Daggerfall’s
strengths and weaknesses. After all, the difference between the original Daggerfall and Daggerfall Unity is not so much in style or substance as it is in
who plays them and when — experiencing this game back in 1996 was a
completely different feeling from trying to submit to its charms in the post-Skyrim age. Personally, I do not
regret not belonging to the former group, as this gives me a less
nostalgically biased perspective on things. I will eagerly admit, though, that my personal feelings
for Daggerfall are the feelings of
an adventure game lover, not a diehard RPG veteran — and it was precisely
that latter category to whom the Daggerfall
team was pandering. The team in question was led by two of the original
creators of Arena, Ted Peterson
and Julian Le Fay, with newcomer Bruce Nesmith completing the designer trio
in the place of Arena’s Vijay
Lakshman, whose own contributions to Daggerfall
seem to have been marginal (he would quit Bethesda at the end of 1994).
Overall, Peterson and Le Fay are responsible for the lion’s share of creative
decisions on the nature and structure of Daggerfall
— which, by all accounts, they wanted to emerge as the most monumental,
open-ended, and entertaining RPG that one might even imagine in the
mid-Nineties. By any kind of objective measure, their enthusiasm on the
issue paid off well. After a couple of false starts (the original version of
the game was provisionally titled Mournhold
and was set to take place in the province of Morrowind — a decision to be
later honored in the third installment of The Elder Scrolls, of course), the
game hit store shelves in the fall of 1996 and quickly became both a
commercial hit, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and a critical
darling, winning a boatload of awards and triggering rave reviews in almost
every magazine that mattered. Not even the staggeringly massive amounts of
bugs (many of them game-breaking) could turn the tide — with a universe of
such a magnitude, programming lapses were viewed as inevitable and excusable.
The game could tax the player’s PC to the max, could take ages to boot, could
place you in an unwinnable situation every step of the way, could commit tons
of technical crimes for which any modern product would be review-bombed into
oblivion (remember Cyberpunk 2077?),
and yet, cursing and swearing under their breath for having to re-roll their
character for the tenth time in a row, players would still embrace it —
because back in 1996, it offered them something they had never been properly
offered before. In this review, I shall try to lay out, as clearly as
possible, what exactly it was that we were offered in 1996; whether it was
really worth it back in 1996; and whether it still remains worth it almost 30 years later. The evaluation will, of
course, have to be comparative — by its very nature, Daggerfall remains wedged between The Elder Scrolls Arena (on the qualities of which it seeks to
expand but whose virtues and flaws it continues to share to a large degree)
and The Elder Scrolls Morrowind,
which represents a major point of departure from the ideology of its two
predecessors, be it for better or worse, but which also happens to inherit
some crucial features of Daggerfall.
Therefore, I ask forgiveness beforehand for the many references that will be
made to both of these games throughout the review — I do assume, though, that
most people who had the pleasure of immersing themselves in the world of Daggerfall are to at least some degree acquainted with Morrowind as well; and if they are
not acquainted with Arena — well,
this review shall do its Machiavellian best to convince them to give the
first game in the series an honest try. |
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Content evaluation |
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Plotline
The
designers themselves went on record saying that they were more inspired by
historical fiction when making Daggerfall
than by other RPG games, and it shows: for all the supernatural paraphernalia,
the game plays out much more like a classic historical-adventure novel, by
the likes of Alexandre Dumas or Maurice Druon (or George R. R. Martin, to use
a more recent analogy) than The Twelve
Labors Of Hercules, which was more of a model for Arena. Daggerfall
prays at the altar of realism, and its Tamriel is now much less of a generic
fantasy idyll threatened by a supervillain and much more of a complex,
intertangled web of political and financial interests, whose many rulers are
all on non-stop power trips and eat, drink, and shit Machiavellian intrigue
for breakfast, dinner, and supper. The game does not even have a supervillain: instead, pretty
much all of its characters show various shades of grey, and your final
actions will depend exclusively on whose particular lust for power you find
the least harmful and most morally acceptable of all (or the reverse, if you
prefer to «evil-play» your character). Not
being a major expert on the history of CRPGs prior to the Elder Scrolls, I am in no position to
say exactly how innovative was that one decision to make the universe more
«realistic» and less «classical» — but at the very least, it was
unquestionably the first CRPG of such a massive
scope to achieve that goal; and it is not just the later titles in the
series, but pretty much every ambitious RPG in the «realistic medieval
fantasy» genre, from BioWare’s Dragon
Age to CD Projekt Red’s The
Witcher, that owes its dues to Daggerfall
— at least, from a formally chronological point of view. Importantly,
the «realism» is not merely restricted to the main backbone of the storyline.
The main purpose of Daggerfall, in
the mind of its creators, was to succeed in the area in which, it was felt, Arena had largely failed: build a
large, detailed world in which the players could simply live their lives without being strictly bound to one particular
linear course of activities. In pure theory, Arena was structured that way, too, but technical (and probably
strategic) limitations made it so that the divide between the Main Quest —
mapping out thrillingly hand-crafted, unique dungeons packed with challenging
packs of tough enemies — and everything else (mainly running boring generic
side quests for boring generic NPCs in boring generic procedurally generated
dungeons) made the idea of living your other secret life in Tamriel into
quite a boring chore. And what good is building up an alternate secret life
for yourself if it’s even more boring than your real one? As
the designers realized that the most, if not only, appealing part of Arena was its main storyline, they
made a strong and conscious effort to bring more balance to Daggerfall, so that, essentially, you
could just lose yourself in the game without even remembering that it had a Main Quest in the first place.
The central trick employed here was related to the system of leveling up. Arena used a very simple mechanic
where you leveled up as you gained more XP, and you gained more XP from
killing monsters, and the places where you could get the most monsters to
kill were, of course, the huge dungeons of the Main Quest. So you could
easily and efficiently beat the game just by visiting and revisiting the
major hand-crafted dungeons, gradually collecting the necessary pieces of the
puzzle, and almost completely ignoring the rest of your surroundings, except
to return to a big city from time to time to sell your loot, stock up on
gear, potions, and new spells, and then safely proceed to the next dungeon. In Daggerfall, however, leveling up
became a much more tricky affair: to become more powerful on the whole, you
had to train your major and minor skills (more on that whole system later),
and many of the subplots in the Main Quest would not even become available
until you reached a certain level by grinding up — and the obvious way to
grind was to embark on series of side quests that you could get from various
guilds, temples, orders, factions, and random commoners in the streets. This
way, the game subtly, but firmly pressed you to actually live out a «working
life» in Hammerfell, and since all the side activities — upon first sight, at
least — were more varied and less predictable than in Arena, you could indeed get caught up in them so much that you’d
forget all about the Main Quest entirely. Not
that the Main Quest itself offered any flaming incentive to be remembered.
While the game starts out quite similarly to Arena — your main character finds himself/herself inside a
starting dungeon, where you need to find some equipment and make your way
through a bunch of enemies before getting yourself thrown out into the wide
open world — the preamble is, in fact, seriously different: you are merely sent out on what looks like a
couple of minor routine errands (understand what troubles the restless spirit
of a recently deceased ruler and investigate the fate of an Imperial letter
that never reached its intended addressee). Over time, the first plot
gradually expands into a torrid tale of personal conflicts and betrayals,
while the second one turns into a search for an all-powerful artefact with
the potential of changing the course of history — but the burn is slow, and
the technical and creative limitations on making it truly exciting are too
strong. In
theory, things could have been great. Over the course of the game, «The
Agent» (you) finds him/herself coursing between the main seats of power in
the High Rock and Hammerfell provinces of the Empire of Tamriel — Daggerfall
itself, ruled by the Breton King Gothryd (son of the murdered Lysandus);
Wayrest, ruled by King Eadwyre and his wife, the ruthless and depraved Queen
Barenziah; and the somewhat Africanesque Sentinel, ruled by the equally
treacherous, but a little less whacky Queen Akorithi. In between these
colorful characters and all sorts of additional rogue-like barbarian or
undead rulers (Orcs, Undead, etc.) whose friendship you need to obtain to
pass the Main Quest, the game’s main plot holds plenty of Game Of Thrones-like potential.
Unfortunately, most of that potential remains unrealized — or, at best,
potentially realizable inside the mind of you,
the seasoned roleplaying expert. The
problem is that even the different sub-scenarios of the Main Quest, when you
actually get around to them, mainly follow the same mechanics as the side
quests. After you reach a certain level, you receive a letter that summons
you to one of the courts. There, you receive an errand — usually a fetch
quest — to accomplish which you have to perform a lengthy dungeon crawl,
fighting off enemies and occasionally solving platform-style puzzles to get
from one place to another. The only two differences from the even more
generic side quests is that you get more unique quest-opening and
quest-closing blocks of text from the immovable mouths of your employers, and
that the castles, palaces, and dungeons you explore during the Main Quest are
designed manually rather than procedurally, which at least ensures a bit of aesthetic and atmospheric
specificity for each of them (but not too much). This is not enough to raise
an eyebrow. By
the end of the game the situation was worse for me than in the middle of a
classic Chinese novel: too many characters with too many complex agendas and
way too little by way of distinct personality to make them stand out from one
another. It does not help matters that the NPCs in Daggerfall are basically cardboard models which never move or
properly react to your actions (more on that in the Atmosphere section below), or that your own character is
basically a mute whose interaction is reduced to fighting, or that the chunky
dialog tossed out by all those political figures is poorly readable and
stylistically dry (not a single character in the game has any traces of verbal individuality,
with maybe the sole exception of Mad Nulfaga, the babbling dervish-like
mother of Lysandus). Admittedly, Arena
suffered from the same problem, but Arena
did not even try to go for the same level of «sophisticated political
realism» as is implied by Daggerfall’s
main quest — its encounters with powerful figures were nothing but formal
set-ups for the hunt for the next McGuffin. You do not expect a striking
personality from «Queen Blubamka of Hammerfell», but you do expect one from the legendary Queen Barenziah of Morrowind
(she does have a three-volume biography as a bestseller in so many book
stores around Tamriel), and the game does nothing to justify those
expectations. Perhaps hiring voice actors (at least for the main NPCs) might
have helped. All
of this leads to the sad fact that when I am presented with the unexpected
and innovative final twist — being able to choose for myself the final
destination of the game’s super-gizmo-thingie, the Mantella — I find myself
not caring in the slightest who gets it: Wayrest, Sentinel, Daggerfall, the
Empire, the Orcs, the Necromancers, or the Undead. Usually, I find myself
choosing the Empire, simply because Emperor Uriel Septim VII (a) was the only
character in the game kind enough to show his face and address me with actual speech in the introduction and
(b) seems to be the most preferable version for those who do not want to
choose, crushing all the rebellious factions and restoring a unified balance
in the same way across all territories of the Empire. (Not that I’m an
imperialist at heart — unless I’m playing Civilization, where you literally have no choice — but all those
other guys are so annoyingly boring, I feel like they all deserve to be
ground into submission). If,
then, even the wheels and cogs of the Main Quest feel bland and mechanistic,
the game’s superficially impressive array of side quests predictably suffers
the same fate. Once we scrutinize all those hundreds of possibilities and
weed out the generic fetch quests that differ only through their variables (who needs what to be retrieved from where
in exchange for a gift of what else),
we are left with, at best, slightly over a dozen or so mini-stories with
their own twists (e.g. «Former Student», where you can team up with a rogue
Mage to perform some shenanigans, or «Lord K’avar», a multi-part where you
have to track down a particularly squiggly noble and deliver him to the court
of Sentinel), which feature slightly more engaging dialog than the rest but
usually still boil down to yet
another round of dungeon-crawling and monster-fighting. Very rarely, you get to perform a moral choice (as in, kill
somebody or let them go), but their consequences rarely matter to anything
but your conscience, and since I, personally, do not feel any close rapport
with any of these characters, my conscience couldn’t care less if I simply
decided to murder every man and woman in sight (although it does work hell on your Reputation, so
I wouldn’t recommend it — The Elder
Scrolls are not Grand Theft Auto,
and the penalties for overkilling are quite extreme). In
short, the attempt to make Daggerfall
into a sprawling, dazzling network of shocking political intrigue, thrilling
tales of betrayal and salvation, and diverse characters oozing charisma
and/or repulsion, was noble, but never went far beyond the basic framework —
much as it happens in tabletop RPGs, of course, but I am not exactly sure that Peterson and LeFay’s goals included
imitating the dynamics of a tabletop RPG. Back in 1996, few people knew such
kind of sprawl could exist within the confines of a CRPG, so the novel effect
alone was sufficient for quite a few fans to develop a childhood crush on
Queen Aubk-i (or King Gothryd, for that matter). In retrospect, though, it is
hard for me to imagine any new fan — even those playing the shiny modernized
Unity version of the game — developing a genuine fondness for the intricacies
of Daggerfall’s main plot or
«manually designed» side missions. Perhaps it was simply a general lack of
experience in the field: while adventure games, with years and years of
trial-and-error behind them, had already managed to work out ways of making
their characters memorable and their plots involving, western RPGs were only
beginning to slightly tip the balance from their purely mechanistic aspect to
story-related attractions. (Given the giant, if not quite revolutionary, leap
in quality from Daggerfall to Morrowind six years later, I do say
this with relative confidence). Whatever
be the real reason, as a «story-driven game» I find Daggerfall to be more of a failure than Arena, whose straightforward epicness feels more balanced and
adequate than Daggerfall’s
half-assed lesson in «magical realism». Let us see now how it fares as an
«action-packed game» instead. |
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Action
The
latter part is arguably the one
major departure from the mechanics of Arena,
and the tightest link between Daggerfall
and its successors, starting from Morrowind.
In Arena, your task was to nurse
your character by harvesting progressively larger and larger amounts of XP,
which could be harvested in one way only — killing bandits and monsters.
Leveling up was gruelling and grindy, but easy. In fact, you could level up
simply by following the Main Quest: having entered one of the principal
(hand-crafted) dungeons, all you had to do was meticulously explore it and
wipe out all the inhabitants, which almost certainly netted you enough XP to
move on to the next level, which was sufficient to mop up the next principal
dungeon, rinse and repeat. All the game demanded of you was kill, kill, kill,
and with each dungeon respawning its monsters in between your leaving and
coming back, nothing was easier. Daggerfall worked differently. In addition to the
simple basic Attribute system, which still operated more or less the same way
as in Arena (Strength,
Intelligence, etc., increasing as you level up), the game also introduced a
much more detailed set of Skills — 35 abilities that could be trained on a
level from 1 to 100 and included military talents (Archery, Long Blade, Critical
Strike, etc.), magic proficiencies, physical virtues and personality quirks
(there were even such Skills as Orcish,
Nymphish, Impish, Dragonish, etc., which supposedly increased your
knowledge of the respective hostile race’s language and culture so that the
monsters would not be hostile upon encounter — a pretty useless set of
skills, since by the time you’d master it to a decent level, you were
probably already such a strong warrior that there was absolutely no need for
you to «pacify» a hostile creature anyway, well, unless you were actually
trying to play a pacifist in Daggerfall). With
this system, leveling up was no longer tied to the general harvesting of XP
(in fact, Daggerfall does not even
have XP as a viable parameter), but
only to performing various actions that would raise your Major and Minor
Skills — and you would have to do quite a
lot of those to become eligible for leveling up. At the same time, you had to level up in order to be able to
proceed with the Main Quest: certain parts of it would only trigger upon
reaching a certain level. Esentially, this meant that staying away from side
quests was now a no-no: every once in a while, you could simply not progress
in the game without beefing up your numbers, and the only way to beef them up
was to take on a bunch of jobs. Which, in turn, means that quite a bit of
time will be spent simply looking for work — although this is made easy if,
early in the game, you join a number of Guilds and Fractions, whose Masters
are always happy to send you on another dungeon crawl. I
mean, some of the minor quests
might be free of dungeon crawling — for instance, simple delivery quests
("I need you to take this gadget
to somebody else in town over the next 7 days", etc.). These present
simple and efficient ways of making a little bit of money, although every
once in a while there will be an annoying catch: you might not be entirely
sure of your destination, e.g., you are told to deliver this-and-that to
«Bamboozle Mansion» in Daggerfall, and Daggerfall has about 5,000 houses each
of which could be «Bamboozle Mansion». To find the proper house, you have to
question people on the street — and this is where one of the worst elements
of the game comes into play: Reputation. Your
reputation at the start of the game is very low, it takes months of playing to significantly
raise it, it’s very easy to lose it, and unless it’s pretty high up there,
most of the townspeople will treat you with hostility and refuse to answer
your questions. To make matters worse, you are given the choice to address
your collocutors in three different voice tones — Polite, Normal, and Blunt —
and it is always difficult, if not impossible, to tell which NPCs prefer to
be addressed in which way (typically, you would think that it depends on class
distinctions, from the aristocracy to the common folk, but I am still not
sure it really works that way all
the time). Every once in a while I happened to notice that it actually takes
me more game-playing time to get a proper set of directions to someone’s home
than to thoroughly explore and map out an entire dungeon. (Morrowind would generally preserve
this system, but alleviate things for the player by taking away the stupid
Tone distinctions and giving you the opportunity to bribe most of the unhelpful
NPCs into quickly changing their disposition). This
is just one — though very telling — example of how the quest of making the
game more sophisticated and realistic can result in unwarranted grievances
for the player. Most of the other «realistic» elements introduced in town
areas are nowhere near as harmful, but, in retrospect, aren’t exactly all
that great to write home about. You now have a much bigger variety of types
of stores (weaponry, armor, alchemy, jewelry, outfits, books, etc.), which
makes it a somewhat larger hassle to sell your loot but compensates for it
with differentiated atmosphere. You have banks where you can store your money
(useful because carrying around bags of money actually adds to your weight
problem) and you can buy horses (very
useful for travel purposes), carts (very
useful for storing extra loot purposes), houses (completely useless), and
even ships (never really tried, too expensive, but I suppose it makes
long-distance traveling a little cheaper in the end). These are fun things to
do at first, but they get pretty boring and repetitive a couple hours into
the game. The
main field of activity, just like in Arena,
remains dungeon-crawling. On lower levels, it is significantly more
challenging than in Arena — for
instance, already in the opening dungeon you are bound to run into several
types of enemies, such as Imps and Skeletal Warriors, that are tremendously above your level, and are
probably not even supposed to be fought at this time, unless you have a nifty
starting bonus or cheat. (For comparison, the opening dungeon in Arena only had Rats and Goblins —
relatively easy enemies for a beginning player). The enemies themselves seem
to move and hit somewhat faster than they used to, and healing stuff is not
as easy to come by as it was before — many healers, for instance, will not do
business with you until you increase your rank in their respective
guild/faction. (In Arena, it was
somehow not a problem for me to pack a solid supply of healing potions before
diving into the next big dungeon; in Daggerfall,
I find myself in need of risky rest and recuperation nearly all the time spent in said dungeon). This,
however, is not a big complaint. The designers thought that fighting in Arena’s dungeons was too easy, so
they went ahead and threw more of a challenge at us with Daggerfall. That’s understandable (at least if you manage to
forget that actual combat still consists of the same old mechanic of
frantically thrashing around the mouse as your character swings his sword /
axe / mace at the enemy, praying for a high roll to come along). What is NOT
understandable or forgivable, in my opinion, is the utterly and utmostly
HIDEOUS design of the actual dungeons — the single major decision that, at
times, threatens to suck all the fun out of the game, turning it into an
undeservedly tedious chore; the single reason why I, a pretty patient person
when it comes to video games, ended up jumping ship with the original,
non-Unity Daggerfall. In Arena, there were two types of
dungeons. For the Main Quest, the designers prepared a set of sprawling,
(usually) multi-level, hand-designed maps which were fun to explore because
almost each one had its own atmosphere (medieval castles, fantasy towers,
abandoned mines, foggy gardens, volcano pits, etc.) and its specific types of
enemies. By contrast, the side assignments usually had generic, procedurally
generated dungeons, relatively small in size and usually consisting of the
same three or four-level rectagonal areas with randomly spawning enemies — boring,
but quick to complete and, most importantly, completely and utterly optional
(as I said earlier, it was perfectly easy to just level up and beat the game
staying exclusively on the Main Quest without wasting your time on anything
else). The dungeons themselves were isometric and easy to navigate with a
gradually self-filling map, the only problem being an occasional movement
issue where you could get stuck in a tunnel or waterway if a monster happened
to hover above your head. Secret doors in the walls, barely visible to the
naked eye, could be identified by being automatically marked on the map; and
if you got too hopelessly lost or did not want to backtrack through a lengthy
maze, the game offered a nifty Passwall spell with which you could temporarily
remove any stone block in your path and make all sorts of shortcuts. It was a
good experience. Forward
on to Daggerfall, though, and in
their attempt to make things more visually stimulating and technically challenging at the same time, Peterson and LeFay
commit a gaming crime if there ever was one. First, there is the ridiculous
decision to make every single dungeon huge as heck. Even when you are sent
out on an easy-peasy starting mission — say, find and bring back some
long-lost potion recipe — the location you have to explore for this will
literally spread out kilometers in
all three directions; at a certain point, you begin to wonder whether all the
good people of Hammerfell ever had any other purpose in their lives than to
dig, dig, dig endless tunnels joining empty rooms and hallways all through
their land, so that they could be populated with monsters and bandits later
on. Naturally, all of this dungeon-sprawl will be procedurally generated,
meaning that most dungeons will consist of pretty much the same types of
building blocks, crammed together into the same types of mega-building
blocks. In a perverse way, eventually
this will begin to help you with orientation, because after a while you shall
get used to instantly recognizing the type of dungeon you find yourself in,
including all of its secret doors and levers. But it will take plenty of
time, toil, and tears to become an expert in Daggerfall Dungeon Engineering —
an expertise that, unlike one’s progression in the ways of, say, Minecraft, is purely a goal in itself
and won’t do much for your overall skill level. As
I said before, the Unity re-write of the game potentially solves that problem
if you set a special filter that reduces the average dungeon size for all the
procedurally generated maps. Unfortunately, while this at least gives me a
chance to beat the game properly, it does not make the dungeon-crawling
experience any more fun. After a while, the exact same building blocks get
boring — and another big flaw of Daggerfall
is that, this time around, pretty much the same building blocks constitute both the randomly generated maps
and the hand-crafted dungeons of the Main Quest, with but a few
embellishments every now and then in the latter case. Worse, the accompanying
self-filling 3D map, while I imagine the designers must have been very proud
of it back in 1996, is awfully disorienting — it keeps twisting and twirling,
expanding and shrinking, it confuses me about my own location on it, and
overall, I believe, is a nightmare for any player who happens to be, er, uh,
stereometrically challenged (like myself, I’m ashamed to say). In Arena, secret doors leading to extra
parts of the dungeon that you could not discern normally were marked with a
plain old red dot on the map, like any other door. In Daggerfall, they are represented as minor doorsill indentations
on the 3D map that you can only discern while holding it under a certain
angle — this is the single factor that could increase the time I spent in a
single dungeon from, say, ten minutes to frickin’ thirty, most of them frantically spent alternating between normal
game mode and scrutinizing every nook and cranny on the goddamn twirling 3D
map. There are few things of which I hold worse memories in my gaming
experience than those maps. As
for the creatures that populate those dungeons, well, on one hand, Daggerfall does a good job balancing
them in relative accordance with your level — although the game still
features a sharper and harsher learning curve than Arena, because even when you are at your weakest, any random
dungeon will still throw on an occasional Orc or Centaur or Skeleton at you,
prompting you to run for your life, cheat with the console, or prepare for a
long and difficult encounter with plenty of save-scumming. As you toughen up,
most of these enemies quickly become nuisances rather than threats (the game
does not make weaker enemies scale up to your level), generally just making
you wonder about what on Earth are they actually doing here, and how is it
exactly that a bunch of rogue Archers and Battlemages is able to share common
space with Imps, Ghosts, and Ancient Vampires in the exact same underground.
(Not peacefully, mind you: the
game’s AI is trained to make all these guys recognize each other as threats,
which often works to your advantage as you can lure two particularly tough
enemies next to each other and then just stand and watch them hack each other
to pieces). The
bottomline is that, while I did enjoy quite a bit of dungeon-crawling in Arena, my reaction to the same activity
in Daggerfall was fifty percent
hatred (first half of the game — while leveling up and getting familiarized
with the building blocks) and fifty percent boredom (second half of the game,
with all the blocks figured out and most of the monsters becoming automatic
fodder for my blades and spells). It is not until the very last quests in the
game that the designers’ fantasy slowly starts climbing out of its permanent
state of slumber and they begin to come up with slightly more inventive
puzzles and settings for those dungeons — particularly the very last quest,
‘Journey To Aetherius’, where your hero has to navigate the surrealist, Space Odyssey-like sacred geometry of
the Mantellan Crux to get to the ultimate prize. Here is where you get to be
more creative than before, figuring out novel ways of getting to your
destination while staying under constant fire barrage of the toughest Daedric
enemies in the game. Why the designers could not come up with comparable
challenges throughout the earlier parts of the Main Quest is beyond me —
probably too busy setting up the World-At-Large to get properly invested in
all those minor details like, uh, you know, actually making the gameplay
process interesting for a change. As
in the previous game, to alleviate the boredom you are welcome to experiment
with a large variety of ways to best your cartoonish enemies. Daggerfall features a similar arsenal
of weapons, randomly empowered with various special effects, and an even
larger arsenal of spells, including your own spell generator where, like in Arena, you can concoct super-powerful
magic blasts that are vastly superior to ready-made stuff. Unfortunately, to
do that you have to get in the good graces of the Mages’ Guild, not to
mention earn boatloads of money — and by the time you are ready, you will
probably already be so powerful that even the simple ready-made spells will
already make mincemeat of all but the most powerful of your enemies (like
Ancient Vampires, etc.), so in the end I found myself using the game’s spellmaker
even less frequently than I did in Arena
(and, of course, it is only available to Mages’ classes). Overall,
I would say that it is far more difficult to survive in Daggerfall than in Arena.
Enemies, even relatively weak ones, generally hit harder for larger chunks of
damage; casting spells, particularly offensive ones, costs a ton of mana;
healing and mana-regenerating potions are harder to get and more expensive;
and random dungeon loot appears slightly less frequently than it did before.
The only saving grace is that there seems to be a higher chance of falling
upon useful magical artifacts (e.g. Expensive
Shirt of Lightning Bolt, that sort of thing) which I found to be far more
practical than regular spells — they usually have a large number of charges
that you can throw at enemies without wasting any of your own precious mana.
With a steady supply of such artifacts, combat becomes significantly easier;
so much easier, in fact, that this is a clear sign of imbalanced game design
(I would personally make the artifacts less powerful while at the same time
being a little more gracious with the player’s health and mana bars, but
that’s just me). Yet the difficulty would be tolerable if it were
properly compensated with fun and excitement; as it is, in the action
department Daggerfall suffers in
exactly the same ways as it does concerning its plot and general setting —
the make everything as big as possible
ideology sets out to overwhelm, and then, once the overwhelming is done with,
leaves you in the middle of a grueling and exhausting experience. Even if you
discount all the bugs and crashes (which would eventually be overcome with
lots of patching and are no longer a threat at all with the
console-controlled Unity version), it is still
a grueling and exhausting experience that, in my personal opinion, does not
significantly improve on the humbler scale of Arena in quality. The only way I could forgive this disaster
would be for it to offer extra «immersion» — but here, too, I see trouble
ahead... |
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|
Atmosphere
Let
us start from the very beginning. Once you have generated your character (in
total silence, as opposed to the haunting musical background of Arena), you are taken to your first
cinematic — a memorable FMV sequence featuring little-known theater actor
John Gilbert as Emperor Uriel Septim VII. It is suitably impressive, sinister
and gloomy, seemingly setting up the stage for a world of secret underground
meetings, conspiracies, treacheries, and, hopefully, medieval torture. Alas,
it is the ONLY cinematic sequence; the
only other cutscenes shall be some miserably short animated sequences that
highlight 3–4 particularly important events, usually at the very end of the
game. Hardcore RPG fans might shrug and note that cutscenes are for pussies
and that they did nothing but cheapen, trivialize, and ruin the RPG
experience. That may be so. But in Arena,
the simple cutscenes with voiceovers that followed you throughout the game —
dream visions of Ria Silmane and Jagar Tharn — were tremendously effective.
Not only did they inject a «human» element into the game, but the contrast
between the demonic, threatening appearance of Tharn and the angelic,
hope-giving reflection of Ria truly reinforced your belief in that you were really engaged in an epic battle
between Good and Evil. Daggerfall
pushes things one step further by pretty much rejecting this contrast —
«good» and «evil» are not just blurred in the game, they are practically
non-existent — and as sophisticated as that approach is, it doesn’t do any
good as far as one’s gut reactions are concerned. After
the opening cinematic, you awaken to find yourself, once again, inside a
dungeon, armless and underleveled, fighting for your life and freedom. In
this situation, Arena welcomed you
with a creepy, claustrophobic environment of low stone ceilings, iron grates
and chains, total darkness outside of a very narrow field of vision, and an
occasional monster emerging out of that darkness — one that you could spot
from far away only by its sounds (squealing rats and grunting goblins). It
was tense, unnerving, and pretty scary at times. It wasn’t too difficult to
beat the opening dungeon once you’d gotten the hang of it, but even on
subsequent playthroughs I still kept feeling like I was really fighting for my life in one of the toughest, creepiest
environments ever created by the sick minds of human (humanoid) beings. By
contrast, the opening dungeon — and, for that matter, most of the other
dungeons — in Daggerfall never
gives me any kind of comparable feeling. The rooms and corridors are far more
spacious, never feeling as if the ceiling is just one step away from caving
in on your head. There is almost always ample light, produced by constantly
burning torches, which also means that, unless a particular enemy is waiting
in ambush right around the corner, you can see most of the threats from many
meters away, not needing to be on your guard 100% of the time. The sounds
produced by the enemies are usually not as spooky as in Arena (more on that below), and the relatively loud, martial
dungeon music is more about a general sense of hostility and aggression than
about suspense and hidden threat, like the spooky tracks of Arena. Overall, there is much more of
a purely pragmatic than aesthetic feel about these dungeons — they are here
to present a challenge to be beaten, not so much to generate an emotional
overload on your senses. This
does not mean that Daggerfall’s
dungeons are entirely free of heart-bursting events. Each time you meet a new
type of enemy, like the Skeletal Warrior with his horrendous scream, or the
Giant Scorpion with his massive and disgusting bulk, or the Wraiths swooping
upon you out of nowhere on the night streets of the haunted city of
Daggerfall (not really a dungeon, though), you might die a little inside,
yearning for the relative safety and coziness of one of the game’s
innumerable taverns much in the same way as you got that urge with Arena. But pretty soon you find
yourself running out of those fresh impressions, and this is where one of Daggerfall’s biggest flaws steps in: monotonousness. The exact same types
of caverns, corridors, halls, and shrines that you meet in your opening
dungeon are going to pursue you for the entirety of the game. With the sole
exception of the last challenges of the Main Quest, everything consists of the same building blocks. At least in Arena, you had different settings —
«true» dungeons of the grate-and-chain variety, medieval castle interiors,
sterile glass towers, etc. etc.; Daggerfall
has approximately 2–3 different types of patterns (stone walls, brick walls,
earthen walls) that are not very different from each other in aesthetics, as
if all that unimaginably expensive digging work had been commissioned from
the exact same architect all through the realm. And considering that the game
forces you to do all those generic
side quests while patiently waiting to level up so you can advance the Main
one, there’s no getting away from that monotonousness. So
much for the interiors (where you are going to spend at least 85-90% of
actual playing time); what about the outdoors, then? Well, the outdoor space
works more or less the same way as in Arena,
perhaps with a little more diversity of the natural habitats (forests,
mountains, swamps, deserts, etc.) and a few gracious touches to make certain
towns and cities less of a carbon copy of each other — Sentinel, for
instance, has a distinctly more «North African» vibe to it than Daggerfall or
Wayrest. That said, every single shop in every single city looks absolutely
the same, as does every single tavern, Guild,
Temple, or even royal castle. As much as I try to think of something, it is hard for me to come
up with even a single example of atmospheric build-up in this mighty big
world that Daggerfall does better
than Arena. Maybe the fact that there
are farm animals scattered around and they make occasional animal noises when
you brush past them? The
«mechanical» rather than «humanistic» nature of the game even seeps through
in minor details of the character’s interaction with random NPCs. In Arena, each person you encountered
was happy to give you some personal information (generic, but reasonably
well-written), then provide you with some local rumors and — potentially —
job offers, if not much else. In Daggerfall,
characters do not give out anything but their name, and rumors / job offers
are only possible to come by if you are lucky enough to please them, which
does not really happen until you’ve worked on your Personality for what might
be ages and ages of gameplay. This would be remedied by the time of Morrowind, which would reinstate the
overall «chattiness» of Arena and
seriously alleviate the issue of hostile disposition (more people would be
relatively friendly to you at the outset, and the non-friendly ones could
always be buttered up with bribes); but in Daggerfall, stopping random Joes and Janes on the street is
almost never fun (and can, in fact, turn into a veritable nightmare if you
are in desperate need for some directions). Honestly, I don’t mind that all
the citizens of Tamriel have somehow turned from cheerful and helpful bonhommes into haughty arrogant
assholes in between the events of the two games; I do mind that they have turned into procedurally generated haughty
arrogant assholes, though. Arguably
the best chance the game had at seriously
raising the immersion level was in the designers’ bold and near-genius
decision to open up paths where your character could succumb to lycanthropy
or vampirism — becoming a werewolf or a blood-hungry undead creature while
still being able to carry on with the usual quests, for as long as the player
wanted (there are ways of removing the curses, though they are complicated
and sometimes dependent on random factors). It is pretty spooky, for the first time at least, to open up your
character screen and see the results of the transformation — though with the
game always played in first person perspective, you don’t get to admire your
new personality all that much (apart from some growling sounds).
Unfortunately, other than your being hunted down much more frequently by the
town guards or specially hired bounty hunters, the change brings on very
little difference. You become stronger, you have to kill innocent people to
survive in the wilderness, but the people themselves rarely show any
passionate reaction to your appearance change (other than hiding and staying
off the streets if you decide to go on a bloodthirsty rampage). Very soon,
you just get used to your new nature and start to view it from a purely
pragmatic angle of gains-and-losses. It
goes without saying that, when taken completely
out of context, Daggerfall can
still come across as quite a striking game in terms of potentially impressive
world-building (as can nearly everything). But while most players do prefer
it over Arena, they seem to usually
do so because of its relative hugeness (so many more things to do!) or
because of all the changes in gaming mechanics that bring it closer to the
standards of 21st century Elder Scrolls;
assessments like «Arena is so much more
dull» or «Arena is so lifeless in
comparison» almost never seem to crop up in any comparative discussions,
and for a good reason. With Daggerfall,
designers ended trading in a solid chunk of Tamriel’s living soul for extra
size, sophistication, and complexity, and to me, that is never a good thing. |
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|
Technical features |
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|
By any objective account, the two years that separate 1994’s Arena from 1996’s Daggerfall should have resulted in
some serious improvement on the visual front — and the abovementioned
opening FMV cinematics, with the «Emperor»’s grim face staring at you out of
the gloom as torches flicker around, was a promising enough start... except
that it did not lead anywhere. FMV was a well-established standard by 1996,
but Daggerfall was not about
luring the player in with realistic cutscenes, nor was it about stunning the
player with beautiful, otherworldly landscapes or character portraits.
Instead, it focused on one thing only when it came to graphics: improving and
refining its 3D capacities so that the players, even much more so than in Arena, would be able to realistically
transport themselves into Tamriel. To do that, Bethesda designed its own
brand new game engine, XnGine, first tested on the 1995 1st person shooter Terminator: Future Shock, but only
reaching full capacity with the release of Daggerfall. Said engine kept the studio going all the way through
the late 1990s, with the Battlespire
and Redguard Elder Scrolls spin-offs all based on it, but would be retired for
Morrowind. Unquestionably, XnGine was a big technical improvement over the
graphic properties of Arena. It
gave you almost full control over the camera, which you could pan around in
almost any direction — this made it possible, for instance, to install
trapdoors or vents in the ceiling which you could only see from a certain
angle (hardly ever accessible in Arena)
and then levitate upwards if you needed to. You could zoom in on any object
or character with far more precision and detail than before, and you had a
much improved field of view in the wide open spaces around you. The world
felt a little less claustrophobic and stilted than it did before, helping the
designers with their quest to make the player truly get lost in a realistic
alternate universe that stretched out as far as the eye could see in any
given direction. However, even those improvements had their unpredictable
drawbacks. Perhaps the most bizarre of the graphic decisions was to make all
the NPCs in the game into fullblown 3D shapes... by actually making them bi-dimensional. Namely, you can try to
walk around any character you meet and he/she will respectively turn around
and follow you, in the process of which you realize that they have height and
width, but no depth — basically a
set of cardboard cutouts that are either chained and locked to their original
position or randomly move around. Paradoxically, NPCs in Arena end up looking more realistic: while you never get a chance
to turn them around or take a proper glance from the sides, they’re alright
as long as it’s just the front — meanwhile, Daggerfall characters always
look like cardboard dolls, even after you kill them (then they just look like
dead cardboard dolls, huddled on
the floor). This is also a major reason why it is hard for me to perceive any
of the game’s enemies as genuinely creepy — as long as you’re fairly sure
that Ancient Vampire is made out of cardboard, who even gives a damn if the
guy is able to bring you down in two quick sweeps of his claws? He’s still a
bit of a joke. The environmental graphics occasionally improve on Arena — particularly in the portrayal
of procedurally generated landscapes — and occasionally don’t, as it happens
with the dungeons: as I already mentioned above, I find the drawing style of Daggerfall’s dungeons fairly bland
and pragmatic. Occasional randomized details thrown in here and there —
torches, tapestries, skull candles, mutilated bodies sticking out of
suspended cages, etc. etc. — add a little bit of atmosphere but can be just
as confusing as they are embellishing, particularly when you want to click on
something hoping that it would be a pile of loot, and it turns out to be just
a bunch of unclickable pixels. It’s OK, but I think that the designers, by
this time, were so amazed at the power of procedural generation from building
blocks that they were just too happy to let the machine take over and craft
all of that huge universe for them while they just sat around twiddling their
thumbs — minimalizing human input and ultimately making the world of Daggerfall look and feel more flat
and boring than that of its predecessor (something that modern day AI art
proponents should seriously keep in mind). One thing Daggerfall
did really well compared to Arena,
though, was the lighting and its shift across the day-night cycle; there are
four or five different settings from early morning to late night, coupled
with additional effects like rain, snow, and fog, and all of them are handled
much better than before — so much so that it can be a bit of a poetic
experience to cast Levitate on yourself at dusk and fly over the hills,
forests, and towns to watch the scenery (admittedly, I mostly used to do that
in the reworked Unity version, but I’m pretty sure the original impact on the
player back in 1996 was comparable). But for all the gorgeousness of the scenery at particular times
of day (which would be completely overshadowed by the same effects in Morrowind, anyway), it cannot fully
erase the rather painful memory of the strangeness and, fairly often,
relative inappropriateness of Daggerfall’s
NPC sprites. It is not merely the cardboard cutout factor: most of the enemy
sprites encountered around the dungeons just aren’t particularly distinctive
/ impressive on their own. Humanoid enemies tend to look the same — Burglars,
Assassins, and Battlemages all wear similar capes and are basically clones of
each other. Vampires, even Ancient ones, look suspiciously similar to the
same humanoid Battlemages as well — looking far less drastic than their
counterparts in Arena, with their
sinister monastic black cloacks and toothy grins. Liches, the most dangerous
enemies of them all, are basically made to look like slightly more
sophisticated modifications of regular Skeletal Warriors, instead of their
distinctive screechy red-haired ancestors in Arena. Spiders have mutated from the nasty dirt-brown colors of Arena to a more squid-like shape of
grayish and green, looking more like some puzzled alien plushy than a genuine
menace. Again, I feel as if it was only diversity for diversity’s sake that
interested the designers: while there are significantly more different types
of enemies than there used to be, hardly any one of them — maybe with the
exception of Giant Scorpions, ugh — truly fits the definition of proper
«Nightmare Fodder». Actual diversity in the portrayal of friendly NPCs is
commendable (though way below the future standard of Morrowind), but there are very few unique portraits — apart from
maybe a tiny bunch of Kings and Queens, most of the named characters are
represented by the same sprites that you also encounter on various side
assignments, which hardly helps the player to memorize the principal dramatis personae of the game, already
not very memorable because of the generic and similar nature of their
respective dialogs. Perhaps the inclusion of at least a handful of cutscenes
at key moments in the game might have helped, but the designers did not want
to waste their money on that — at
best, all they could do was provide a few full-screen portraits of the game’s
Daedric (divine) characters after you earn enough gold to secure an audience
with one of them, and a few ultra-short, barely comprehensible animations for
several major events close to the end of the game. These are all nicely done,
but for a game that can stretch out to hours and hours and hours of gameplay,
it’s like 3–4 crystals of salt in a mammoth pot of boiling broth — pretty
much nothing to write home about. All in all, Daggerfall’s visuals end up feeling uninspired and perfunctory in
between the crude freshness of Arena
and the psychedelic inspiration of Morrowind. |
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|
You
might remember how, in my previous review of Arena, I was gushing all over the limited MIDI musical tracks and
sound effects of the game — astonishingly impressive for all of their
relative simplicity — so one might guess that at least in the audio
department, Daggerfall would be
able to expand on those achievements. Unfortunately... yes, you guessed
right: it does not. In fact, it takes a step back. For
sure, Eric Heberling was retained as chief composer for the game, and this
fact by itself was a guarantee that the musical soundtrack would not suck.
But either they cut his salary or his working hours or something, because for
about 50%, the soundtrack is recycled
— yes, that’s right, the same lovely, entrancing ditties of Arena have simply been carried over
into Daggerfall, occasionally in
inferior arrangements. By itself, this would not have been a significant
crime, unless we introduce severe penalties for laziness. But the problem is
that they are mixed in with new
music, and this new music is largely different.
By no means is it bad, but the newly written compositions usually have a much
more dynamic, sometimes even martial or aggressive quality to them. Sometimes
you enter a city and the music that plays feels fit to accompany a military
parade, even if there is none in sight. Sometimes you enter a dungeon and the
music gives you the atmosphere of troops marching out to war, even if the
actual enemies are skulking solitarily or in very small groups, spread widely
all over the place. It’s not a tragedy, but it does not always feel right, if you know what I mean. To
use an analogy with a much more modern era, this jarring musical shift is
somewhat similar to the one I experienced when playing The Witcher 2 after the first part of the trilogy: the music
there made a serious point of switching from the overall more pastoral,
meditative, atmospheric tracks of the original to a generally more loud,
bombastic, aggressive style, sometimes bordering on symphonic metal — which
was not necessarily to my liking, but at least it did fit the shift in the
game’s overall atmosphere, as The
Witcher 2 focused far more on martial affairs and devastating battles
than its predecessor. Returning to Daggerfall,
I suppose that this emphasis on more dynamic, rhythmic, «pumping» music
should be reflecting the Elder Scrolls’ attempted transition to «Fantasy Realpolitik», as the world around you
is now less of an «amazing new universe you have to take in with all your
senses» and more of a «dangerous place where you have to build up alliances
to survive». But I am not sure that this shift adds to, rather than detracts
from, the uniqueness of Tamriel — and all those tracks carried over from Arena only serve to remind me of the
idealistic qualities of the first game. That
said, sound-wise my biggest gripe with Daggerfall
is not the music (which may not be quite as magical as in Arena, but is never openly bad), but
the game’s sound effects. In Arena’s
world of dungeon-crawling, those were absolutely essential: drenched in total
darkness, the dungeons typically betrayed the nearby presence of the enemies
only through the sounds they made, so it was essential to listen in all the
time if you did not want to get ambushed. In Daggerfall, with much better lighting of the dungeons, you far
more typically are able to see your enemy from far away, or catch a glimpse
of him through the little slit opening of the dungeon doors, so the sounds
they make more often have a purely aesthetic function — and, as a rule, they
are either boring or just stupid. For
instance, in Arena the nasty brown
spiders would issue a venomous hiss as they scurried along; in Daggerfall, the ridiculous-looking
plushy octopus-like beasties are instead distinguished by... purring (why??). Arena’s Ghosts would emit sinister wails, mixing deadly menace
with resigned melancholy; in Daggerfall,
they just raise a gust of wind and put out an utterly generic roar. Skeletal
Warriors, instead of rattling their bones, emit a blood-curdling banshee roar
that does scare the pants off you when you first hear it, but later on mainly
makes you wonder about what sort of vocal cords these guys have to make those
sounds — and the only difference between their
roar and that of the Liches is that the latter have it more low-pitched
(boring). Vampires sound like wimps next to their Arena counterparts. Orcs growl and grumble okay (their effects
seem to be just taken directly from Arena),
but for some reason, the supposedly imposing Daedra — the demonic beings that
replace the previous game’s Fire Demons and suchlike — just growl and grumble
in much the same way. Overall,
much less work has been put into
making your enemies imposing through audio than there was in Arena — and even though, as a rule,
they are tougher and present significantly more challenge (particularly when
you are still underleveled and underequipped), they fail to generate as much
terrified respect as their predecessors. Interestingly, for Morrowind the entire «identify your
enemy through its typical sound» mechanic would be completely removed, as
enemies would only emit specific battle grunts while fighting you, never
before that — I wonder if that had anything to do with the overall
disappointment at the use of pre-combat sound effects in Daggerfall, or merely with the technical aspects of redesigning
the basic principles of the Morrowind
universe as such? Finally,
there are the audio tracks attached to cinematics, but as the cinematics
themselves are scarcer than hens’ teeth, these deserve only a passing mention
at best. The FMV actor playing «Uriel Septim VII» is passable; the brief
voiceovers that accompany the game’s minimalistic cutscenes are not, as they
are usually drenched in heavy reverb and are barely even comprehensible
(without any subtitles, of course). At least Ria Silmane and Jagar Tharn in Arena had their own vocal
personalities; in Daggerfall,
nobody has any vocal personality except for the Emperor, who appears at the
start of the game for exactly one minute and then never even returns. And
this was 1996, for Christ’s sake — how on Earth did these guys not think of
allocating even a tiny portion of the budget to hire some voice actors? Voice
acting would be the only possible
way to bring all those non-procedurally generated characters like Mad
Nulfaga, Queen Akorithi, the King Of Worms, etc., to life, and with the
fairly small amount of lines allocated to each of them it wouldn’t have cost
them all that much. Even the economical approach of Morrowind, where important characters would only have a few lines
of their entire output voiced, would go a pretty long way toward making them
feel more alive — but Daggerfall
remains as hardcore as they come in this respect, and I am not even sure I
can bring myself to «respect», much less actually enjoy it. |
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|
Interface
Oddly
enough, the differences between Arena
and Daggerfall seem to be at their
lowest when it comes to basic interaction and general game mechanics — and
most of them have to do with said mechanics becoming more complex and sophisticated
in just about every respect. Thus, at the start of the game, you get the same
choice as in Arena — forcibly
select one of the many character classes or be assigned a particular class
based on your answers to a lengthy morality test — but now, in addition to
that, you are asked to fill in a few points of your Biography, which set up
additional attributes and bonuses that may or may not turn out to be very
useful at the start of the game. (Spoiler: always choose «ebony dagger» as your gift from the Emperor, this
will make your life much easier in
the opening dungeon where some enemies can only be harmed with high quality
weapons — otherwise, you’ll have to be constantly on the run). Then, when
rolling your character, in addition to your main Attributes, you get an extra
screen where you can allocate bonus points to your Primary, Major, and Minor
Skills — the ones you shall have to try and excel in so as to level up
properly throughout the game. Same principle, but with more layers. I
must state right away that I mainly played the remade Unity version, which
(in its base form) introduces some reasonable modifications to the original;
for instance, the classic version of the game has a large control panel
clogging about 1/3 of the screen (just as in Arena), while the Unity remake completely eliminates it, giving
the player a much bigger field of view at the expense of having to rely on
various keyboard shortcuts (totally fine by me). Overall, though, I think
that the default Unity version, without additional mods or anything, mostly
respects the original interface and all of its features, be they helpful or
dreadful, exactly the way that a classy product should do. The
added complexity does take some getting used to after the relative simplicity
of Arena. For instance, your
clothing and appearance style now shares the same screen with your inventory,
which, in turn, is divided into the inventory that you carry directly upon
you (adding up to your maximum carried weight) and the much larger amounts of
inventory you can lug around in your wagon (provided you buy one early in the
game as soon as you can afford it, which is always recommendable). The
controls used to swap between your carried and transported items are not very
intuitive, as is the option to equip or unequip a certain weapon or piece of
clothing, and it took me quite a while to train all that juggling to a more
or less mechanistic state. There is also an option now to sort through your
inventory, dividing it into subcategories ("Weapons & Armor", "Magic
Items", "Clothing", "Ingredients") that are not
entirely convenient since they occasionally overlap (e.g. "Weapons"
and "Clothing" can include "Magic Items"), but it does
make life a little easier when dealing with merchants. One
thing that I do actively dislike is the new dialog screen. Instead of the
little window of Arena, initiating
conversation with any random NPC now triggers an entire screen that is very
poorly and confusingly organized. The generic dialog options are arranged in
the upper left corner in such a way that swapping between general topics and
specific questions about people or locations becomes non-intuitive, and the
duplication of your questions (upper part of screen) in the general dialog
window is disorienting. It does speed up the dialog process, making it a
little quicker to select topics than before, but the problem is that the
dialogs themselves are largely uninteresting — you get a real boatload of
potential topics to discuss, but 99% of them produce utterly generic and uninformative
answers anyway, so basically it’s a whole lot of fuss for nothing. (The best
aspects of this new dialog window would be preserved in Morrowind, which overall does a much better job with its conversation system than either of its
two predecessors). That
said, all of this is really just nitpicking; on the whole, you really mainly
play Daggerfall in the same way
you played Arena, just with a
bunch of added options that, for a while, shall make life more confusing and
disorienting for a beginning player. A good example of this is the new
structure of the Guilds and Temples: in Arena,
you had a single Guildmaster providing all of the location’s limited
services, while in Daggerfall,
Guilds are populated by a variety of specialized NPCs, randomly scattered
around the rooms with their own perks — some give you quests, some sell you
spells, potions, and weapons, some train you, some offer teleportation
services or even (very expensive) communication with the Daedra, making life
more complicated and variegated; this principle would later be adopted
full-scale into Morrowind as well.
(Too bad I had fairly little interest in most of those services — by the time
my character would be fully leveled up and have enough gold to afford all of
them, I was already at the end of the Main Quest). All
in all, the playing interface of Daggerfall
certainly makes that of Arena look
like an early demo version in comparison, giving you, the wannabe champion of
Tamriel, a seemingly unlimited variety of action. You can build your
character up to the highest ranks of all the numerous Guilds and Factions,
earn boatloads of cash and deposit them into banks with steady interest
growth, think up the most appalling spells, befriend (or piss off) all the
Daedra in the universe, purchase more property than the entire British Royal
Family combined, and build up an arsenal of magic weapons and armor that
shall defy the imagination of J. K. Rowling, with your Casual Pants Of Ice
Bolt and Short Shirt Of Fire Storm annihilating dungeon enemies by the dozen.
Too bad all this variety still feels boring and lifeless — although, of
course, much depends on the strength of your imagination and the pull of your
roleplaying instinct. |
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|
Verdict: Arguably the ultimate showcase of what happens when one
lets Unbridled Ambition be dominated by All-Powerful Algorithm.
The obvious problem is
— but who really needs an infinite
game, or, at least, an infinite game of that kind? At least strategy games,
be it simple chess or Civilization,
are endlessly replayable because they keep challenging you with new,
sometimes totally unpredictable combinations of factors. Next to these, all
the variety of Daggerfall offers
fairly little by way of true intellectual challenge, unless you take fate
into your own hands and begin setting up special challenges for yourself
(e.g. finding the proper McGuffin inside a huge dungeon without killing any
of its creatures, or defeating all of them bare-handed, or refusing to use up
Magicka etc. etc.). All in all, Daggerfall
is still very much of a «plot-oriented» game, and in any such game the
transferral of plot construction to machine algorithm is not even something
that a serious studio in the 2020s would entrust to any kind of advanced AI,
let alone in the 1990s to a simple generative procedure. The principal
difference between Arena and Daggerfall is in focus: Arena was essentially a
manually-designed game with a large additional — and, frankly speaking,
totally optional — procedurally generated component; it is easy to guess that
most players, like myself, were attracted to the manually-designed Main Quest
and quickly got bored with all the robotic, repetitive side missions. The
designers were not satisfied with this because it made Arena way too Doom-like,
so with Daggerfall they forced you to actually live out a
full, wholesome life in their sprawling universe, promising more variety and
much more freedom of choice as compensation. For many people, this was quite
an exciting deal back in 1996, and these people kept the legend of Daggerfall — the Epic To End All Epics
— going strong for decades, even going all the way to remake the game in a
modern engine for new generations of gamers (by contrast, the Open-Source Arena project, striving to do the
same thing for Daggerfall’s big daddy,
has not managed to properly get off the ground in almost ten years as of now —
clearly, the enthusiasm is just not on the same level here). Yet despite all the
excitement, which could not even be quashed by the extremely unstable state
in which the original game was released (earning it the ignominious nickname
of Buggerfall among the cynical
strata of the gamer population), it took but a couple of years for even the
masterminds behind Bethesda to realize that the ideology behind Daggerfall was pretty much a dead
end. In some ways, the revolutionary gap between Daggerfall and its spiritual, but not «constructional» successor,
Morrowind, reminds me of the
transition from parser-based to point-and-click-style adventure games in the
early 1990s — just as the parser-based ones were starting to reach a certain
level of acceptability, the industry killed them off to alleviate the
concerns of frustrated players in favor of a more comfortable approach. Likewise,
the «let-the-RPG-build-itself-for-you» approach, with procedurally generated
universes and quests, arguably reached its apex with Daggerfall — and then immediately crashed and burned, as there
was seemingly nowhere left to go with it. Instead, Morrowind relied on a heavily expanded work team of
flesh-and-bone humans to let you enjoy a very, very large and diverse world
with a very, very large set of individually-tinged quests — very, very, very large... but not infinite, the
way Daggerfall had been. The difference, however, from the
situation with parser-based games is that the former were actually
salvageable: solid team efforts with a bit of a linguistic component behind
them could have come up with ways
of easing verbal communication between the gamer and the game — it was a purely
managerial decision based on crude issues of cost efficiency. Whether, on the
other hand, the «self-building» style of Daggerfall
could really have been pushed further in the late Nineties — for that matter,
whether it can really be pushed further even today, even with the help of all the advanced AI developments —
remains a big question. Can procedural generation go as far as to have your
newest RPG design an infinite series of individual, non-repeating game quests
for you? Can it keep on self-designing, mapping, decorating an infinite
series of diverse towns and villages with ever-shifting parameters and
building blocks? More importantly, can it do all these things smoothly, without bugging down,
hallucinating, and crashing? Possibly in some distant future — but it is
quite telling that, as far as I can tell, there are virtually no signs of any
such tendency at present, with game designers preferring to stick to the
tried and true rather than placing the keys in the hands of some brand new «ChatRPG»
engine. As it happens, Daggerfall even today remains the unsurpassed
apex of the self-building plot-based game approach, with all of its dubious
virtues and obvious flaws. If you have never tried it and this review has not
convinced you to give it a go so far, I can take on the responsibility of temporarily
taking back all the criticisms and recommending that you do download the (totally free) Unity version and give it a spin
for a couple of hours, just to see what all the hoopla was about — do not
bother beating the Main Quest to the very end unless you happen to fall under
the enchantment. It is truly one of the noblest, and most thought-provoking,
failures in the history of gaming, and I sincerely wish I could feel for it
so much more than I do. Fortunately, the best of what Daggerfall had to offer — namely, the completely restructured
framework of Tamriel, the guilds and factions, the book lore, the skill
system, etc. — passed on into Morrowind,
so you could say that Bethesda threw out the baby, but at least it kept the
bathing water: a surprisingly sweet deal for most of us. |
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