Bugs

When Daggerfall was released, it was so full of bugs that it was often called "Buggerfall." Most of them have been eliminated by a long, long series of patches (which other game do you know that has a patch version 2.13?), and it is quite playable now. Here is a list of bugs I still encountered. Originally, I played it on a Duron under Windows 98, later I moved the game to a Pentium 120 running DR-DOS. Some bugs may have been related to Windows and the too fast computer, others remained.

• Regularily, the game freezes, leaving me no option but a cold restart. This is not something that happens every now and then, I'm always prepared for it. Solution: Save often, never have anything important running in the background.
  NOTE: When I moved the game to the Pentium, the problem, at first, did not ocur any more. Now it's back, though less frequent, and usually when a movement key is pressed. It is less likely to happen when I use the mouse for movement.
• After the first level up, my character (a rogue) lost her class. Her inability to wear plate remained, her inability to equip tower shields vanished, and the class field became empty. Solution: Accept it, or fix it with a savegame editor.
• Some quests cannot be fulfilled properly, at least not if you do something the designers did not anticipate. It happened to me on one of the harpy quests: to fulfill it, you have to kill five harpies in a certain dungeon. When you have done it, you get a success message. This particular quest took me to a dungeon with five entrances, which, as I found out later, led to exactly the same spot. I thought it would be an easy way to enter the five doors one by one and just kill the first harpy, which is never far off. Wrong. I did not get the message, even when I later killed five of them without leaving the dungeon in between, and the quest remained unsolved. There are three possible solutions I can think of:
  1. Don't leave the dungeon when on such a quest. Basically, it is never a good idea. When you leave the dungeon, it is reset, with stronger monsters if you have levelled up, and you lose your automap.
  2. Save your game every time before you take a quest, and don't overwrite this slot until the quest is solved. If it can't be solved, reload. You won't like this if you found a real cool item.
  3. Just live with it. It's not a big problem if you botch a quest now and then, it just adds to the realism of the game. A fulfilled quest usually gains you 5 reputation points with the questgiver, while failing costs you only two.
  Another thing happened when I got the "mummy finger" quest. In this quest, you are supposed to take an item to another person. I found her, but when I clicked on her nothing happened. Later I read that this quest is actually supposed to end up in a dungeon crawl. I chose method two in this case.
• Getting a "clear house of monsters" quest from a merchant, the monsters are regularily not in the indicated house, but outside in town. Does not make much of a difference, except that it's hard to tell when you have killed them all.
• One clothing item turned invisible when I changed its appearance by "using" it, and could be removed only by replacing it with another that fills the same slot.
• On the town map, you are supposed to be able to enter your own comments. Sometimes, the editor reacts only to numbers and nothing else. This is not a big problem, but annoying. It happens about one out of four or five times (encountered on the Pentium).
• There are suddenly no sound effects any more. Only remedy: Exit the game and restart it.

From what I read, bugs are not only dependent on machine type, but also on the install. Reinstalling might solve a problem sometimes.