Daggerfall's plot has no right to being as good as it is

[TheHouseAlwaysWins]

I mean, I wasn't expecting much out of the plot going into it since it was a Tolkien dungeon crawler and the core concept of the plot is simple, but I was proving wrong. The plot in Daggerfall is actually pretty interesting because it plops you into this huge world with not much direction beyond notes in your inventory, and you're left to explore and do quests for the various Kingdoms and powers throughout the Bay that give you a sense of what they've been through and their motivations as political powers. It actually reminds me of the way Fallout games are usually set up rather than a typical Bethesda title, it also does shades of grey better than Fallout: New Vegas, I think, personally. It is not a perfect, amazing plot as the quests surrounding Medora are annoying, and the bugs, and I think Mannimarco could have been more fleshed out, but it turned out to be way more interesting that I was expecting.

 

[0wing]

Well, Daggerfall had similar treatment to New Vegas and had even less time (less than a year), which means black sea of bugs, lots of loose ties and unfinished content. (the game doesn't even have a realized heightmap, even though it's in the game files) It's a commercial tech demo.

 

[TheHouseAlwaysWins]

Well, Daggerfall had similar treatment to New Vegas and had even less time (less than a year), which means black sea of bugs, lots of loose ties and unfinished content. (the game doesn't even have a realized heightmap, even though it's in the game files) It's a commercial tech demo.

There is height in Daggerfall. It's just that height in Daggerfall means how bumpy the terrain is. The terrain in the Wrothgarian Mountains or Ephesus is a lot more bumpy than in the regular kingdoms like Glenpoint, Tulune, or Daggerfall

 

[Ratty Sr.]

Well, Daggerfall had similar treatment to New Vegas and had even less time (less than a year), which means black sea of bugs, lots of loose ties and unfinished content. (the game doesn't even have a realized heightmap, even though it's in the game files) It's a commercial tech demo.

I thought the game was in development for three years. At least that's what I remember reading in reviews when the game came out in 1996. Even with such a respectable dev time, many of the creators' ambitions were never realized.

But yes, Daggerfall was tremendously well-written, with a deeply engrossing main story that was also very non-linear, much more so than any subsequent Elder Scrolls game.

 

[0wing]

I thought the game was in development for three years. At least that's what I remember reading in reviews when the game came out in 1996. Even with such a respectable dev time, many of the creators' ambitions were never realized.

Assumptions tend to be wrong. Not to mention that Arena was released in 1994, and Deluxe Edition by the very end of '94, Daggerfall development didn't start before that. By the time of 1995 bethesda developed a new engine, tested it with a new groundbreaking FPS using The Terminator license (which looked like a Fallout 3 demake, lol) and decided that Daggerfall should compete with Id Software's games (I ain't joking in this one), and so have everything and be everything. By the time Daggerfall was pushed to release (Aug 1996), developers ran out of time to fill the RNG gaps with content, to properly design locations by hand where it needs to and so on and so on.

There is height in Daggerfall. It's just that height in Daggerfall means how bumpy the terrain is. The terrain in the Wrothgarian Mountains or Ephesus is a lot more bumpy than in the regular kingdoms like Glenpoint, Tulune, or Daggerfall

But this so called bumby terrain supposed to represent mountains. And don't you notice something? Daggerfall's landmass is basically flat besides random bumpy polygons. Even Arena had some roads and trees and other more complex scene to generate. Even randomly generated spaces need content to build from.

 

[Lanfear]

I'm yet to receive any explanation for why the totem of Tiber Septim was a baby.