The Daggerfall Museum

The Daggerfall Museum is dedicated to researching and displaying the ancient, pre-release, history of Daggerfall. Read about left-out features, admire unused graphics, and contemplate what Daggerfall might have been.

Exhibits

Sex and Prostitution

You should have been able to have sex with NPCs, including prostitutes, and even become one yourself.

The Order of the Lamp

The protectors of the Mages Guild, and one of the dropped joinable guilds.

The Notebook

There is still a rudiment of this in the game, you can copy dialogs to your log, but originally this was supposed to work like a text editor.

A Mill?

There is a texture for a grindstone and a wooden wheel in TEXTURE.091. It is a small detail but shows that the world of Daggerfall had been planned more realistic than it came out in the end.

Importing Arena Characters

In Arena, you could save your character after beating the game. The idea was that you would be able to import it into the sequel. Two interface graphics (PICK01I0.IMG and PICK02I0.IMG) still reflect this planned option.

Documents

pre-release FAQ

Little is known about this document. It might be an official pre-release FAQ, or patched together from various texts. Anyway, it describes not what Daggerfall is, but what it was meant to be.

Beta Screenshots

While as yet insufficiently documented, these screenshots do give interesting insights in earlier versions of Daggerfall.

Further Topics

Children

Yes, there are some, if not many, children in the game, but they obviously were supposed to be a faction. They are still listed as allies of some other factions in the rep log.

Politics

Originally there was the idea that all those numerous provinces would engage in an ever-changing system of wars and alliances. Since you would acquire citizenship in one of those provinces, you always had to be careful. Besides, a town you wanted to enter might have been under siege; a movie has survived somehow, and the catapults used as decoration outside some castle dungeons might be another remnant.

High Treason

This is still mentioned as a crime in in-game sources, and alone the fact that the three main castles are technically dungeons implies that the option of regicide was originally considered. Now, the only critters you can attack in a court are the guards using the 3D enemy sprites.

Fighting on horseback

You will find five types of enemies on horseback in the TEXTURE.491 - TEXTURE.495 files. These graphics were used in the Andyfall mod.

Carpenters

There are some furniture stores across the Iliac Bay, but they are not functional and only figure in some quests. But carpenters and furniture stores are listed along with the other types in the quest resources. Maybe the original idea was that you would buy your house empty and then furnish it yourself.

Ropes

You will still find it in at least some of the manuals, that to climb down you equip a rope. But there are no ropes in the finished game, and the only way down is to jump.

Climate Survival

This is listed as a special advantage in character creation in at least some of the manuals. In itself this would hardly be noteworthy, did it not indicate that climate was originally meant to be more than an optic effect. That you can "use" some items of clothing to put a hood up or down, for example, falls in the same line.

Travel options

Discarded interface graphics (TRAV00I0.IMG) show options like most direct route/roads and halt travel for temples, dungeons, villages, or inns. Now roads would have been a really nice feature! As would have been the list of locations (TRAV02I0.IMG).

Clothes

While there are all kinds of clothes in the game, they have no function. It is but a theory, albeit a very plausible one, that according to the original concept this would have been different. You may notice that some pieces have operable hoods that might have concealed your identity or protected you from the weather. Furthermore, most clothes can easily be associated with the nobility, the merchant class or the peasants. It might have been the original idea that wearing the appropriate type of clothes would have increased your acceptance with the related group.

Armor and Stealth

In a similar vein, your clothes should have influenced your sneak skill, at least some manuals still say as much (there were several editions of the manual with different errors). Primarily this would probably have been the case with heavy and therefore noisy armor, but on the other hands the original purpose of the Khajiit Suit may well have been to enhance your stealth. What else should it have been good for?

Eavesdropping

Older screenshots (pre-release demo and beta) still show an ear icon. It was meant to listen in on conversations.

Lights

Sometimes, in a dungeon you will find torches, candles, or lanterns. The torches and candles have animated graphics, which is remarkable in itself. You can sell them at pawnshops for a trifle, but it is probable that they were originally supposed to be functional, to light up dark rooms. The Light spell is a remnant of this concept and shows how it might have worked.

The Dragon

Originally there should have been a huge dragon in the game, not a sprite, but a 3D model. The textures are still on the CD, in TEXTURE.084.