Daggerfall 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. Comments by the Museum staff are in italics.

• An SGI Machine was used to create a 3-D, texture-mapped engine, Bethesda's new full, 3-D X(n)gine (also used in Bethesda's THE TENTH PLANET and the soon-to-be-released Terminator: Future Shock), which promises to redefine the role-playing genre. The new engine allows quicker actions, unrestricted viewing angles and complete freedom of movement. Having taken 3 years to make, this powerful proprietary technology allows full 360 degree rotation with fully textured polygons, multiple shaded light sources, VGA graphics and specialised video effects. The X(n)gine can create weather such as snow, sleet, and fog, as well as realistic shading and a fully contoured fractal terrain. In DAGGERFALL, the player can stop by a stream and watch a waterfall while listening to the ambient sounds of birds and running water, and thus actually feel like they are there.

  Apart from the waterfall, all this made it into the release version. Water is the big disappointment here. There are no rivers or streams, let alone waterfalls, there are only puddles, and the sea itself is just an oversized puddle. The weather effects, on the other hand, are superb.

• The X(n)gine will not support 3D Accelerated GFX boards in the initial DAGGERFALL release; but it is certainly planned
• The video refresh rate will vary depending upon what is on the screen at any given time. The 3D X(n)gine should average between 16-20 frames per second and should probably never have to do more than 40. It has no ceiling.
• A fully topographical landscape with elevations marked every 6 metres, an area the size of Turkey
• Thousands of towns, fortresses and villages to explore
• Texture maps considerably more complex and detailed than ARENA's, allowing for larger, even multi-story buildings.
• much improved plot over ARENA; your character is asked to undertake a special mission for the Emperor and obtain artifacts before rival groups of the court of the town of DAGGERFALL can get them & use them to instigate an uprising. In investigating the court of DAGGERFALL, stories of madness, unrequited love, dark sorcery, seduction, betrayal, and a plot to recreate a powerful force from thousands of years past will be revealed.

  Instead of these artifacts, your initial main quest is to lay the soul of King Lysandus, who haunts Daggerfall at night, to rest and to investigate a vanished letter.

• the plot is a lot more "active" than ARENAs, involving many non player character types. For example, you can arrive at a town to find it under siege.

  One of the features that didn't make it. A movie has survived somehow, somewhere.

• keeping with TES "open ended" philosophy, it is even technically possible to win by working against the Emperor.

  With the changed main quest, you do not have this option. But it is possible to simply ignore the main quest.

• Conversation remains handled via a menu driven branching strategy, with the new feature of being able to select your conversational goal.

  Dialog options in the release version are rather poor. You can ask for directions, rumors, and information about a limited list of general topics. It is possible to ask these questions polite, normal, or blunt, with different results. There is no branching dialog.

• greatly improved player interaction with NPCs, both in dialogue and action. For example, depending on the circumstances, the completion of say a mini-quest by a character will be remembered later on either positively or negatively by a particular NPC social group, a NPC, a NPC's family, the NPC's allies or enemies, or all of the above. DAGGERFALL keeps track of your characters reputation with each NPC. This applies even to characters that are imported into later games in the TES series. Player language skills, though based on the common tongue, will reflect specific groups & social affiliations and will also affect interaction with NPCs. Character clothing, weapons & armor, which can be changed in shops, also affects NPC interactions.

  Dialog is rather poor in the release version. Only with a limited number of NPCs you have an individual reputation. And what you wear seems not to influence reactions at all.

• Adventure in intricately designed caves, castles, homes, highlands, lowlands, rivers, cliffs, sand dunes, swamps, underwater and different dimensions: a whole range of environments.

  This catalog has been reduced a bit. There are mainly four types of landscape: woodland, mountains, swamps, and desert. There are underwater scenes, usually in dungeons. Homes and castles are on the whole not very well designed.

• many objects in the world have mass and can be moved or picked up by the character. These objects follow the normal laws of physics e.g. inertia. Some objects, such as houses and pebbles, can't be moved.

  This interesting feature was dropped, probably because it would have been a programming nightmare. Basically there are only treasure piles in Daggerfall, with random graphics not relating to their contents. These piles do not follow the laws of physics in the least and are sometimes found floating in mid-air. It is, however, possible to push monsters into an abyss in combat.

• buy & use houses, castles, ships and other crafts. Property can be furnished with furniture & treasure. Option available which will protect your property against burglary.

  You can own one house and one ship in Daggerfall. Both are mostly good for dropping your stuff there. There is no way to furnish or decorate them. Neither has burglary been implemented.

• travel from town to town by foot, horseback, horse drawn carriage or ship. Beware! you can be attacked while using any of these transport methods.

  Most of the time you'll use fast travel, where you cannot be attacked.

• use banks to safely deposit gold, get letters of credit & take out 1 or 3 year loans to finance large purchases.
• join guilds, temples & knightly orders to help enhance your character's reputation with various social groups; trade goods and services, even smuggle.
• new spells include identify, polymorph, shadow, slowfall, telekinesis, teleportation, waterbreathing and water walking: there are some 78 standard types.
• Create more unusual and powerful spells with the spellmaker.
• Customizable spell duration icon which flashes towards the end of the spell period.
• New improved special effects e.g. polymorphing.
• Surface dependent walking sounds.
• 3-D graphical movement is handled much more efficiently than in ARENA.
• Random monster encounter will be largely done away with. It will only occur where it has a direct relationship to the plot, or in a "cleared out" dungeon in a period of time.
• Each created character, must take 3 primary skills, 3 major skills, and 6 minor skills. When characters begin the game, they are naturally better at the primary and major skills, and worse at the minor and miscellaneous skills (the latter being the skills not chosen, but in which advancement can still be made with great difficulty). It is easiest to advance in primary and major skills, because of the formula used to check the chance of increasing a point every night, and due to you're character being most likely to use the primary and major skills and thus advance in them. Advancement of your character's primary and major skills will cause them to advance in their class as well.

  Little was changed here. The skills that make you advance in level are now the threeprimary skills, the two best major skills and the best minor skill. It is now actually easier to improve the miscellaneous skills, since the lower a skill rate is, the faster it improves. Whether or not you should choose those skills that you are going to use most as your primary and majors is a subject on which Daggerfall players are divided.

• Customizable character classes. Characters will be able to take on up to 7 special advantages/disadvantages, which will increase/decrease the amount of experience needed to make the next level.

  This is available only if you create your own custom character class. You cannot change the advantages and disadvantages of pre-made classes.

• Bethesda has attempted to reduce the potential power of high level characters in DAGGERFALL by including negative effects for some of the items produced by the ItemMaker and by ensuring that, for instance, "high level characters face up against up high level monsters". There will be no "levelling up" like that occurring in ARENA, an orc will remain a weak monster, regardless of your level increasing the relative "toughness" of some of the monsters.

  I am not sure I completely understand this sentence. Anyway, as far as I know non-human monsters have fixed stats, while human enemies are always the same level as you.

• Advanced, multi-channel, digitized sound effects and music.
• Although speech will be a part of the game, there was not enough room to implement full speech.
• Enjoy a large variety of song/ballad lyrics written especially for DAGGERFALL.

  As far as I know, only one of them made it into the final version of the game, the "Rude Song," which is available as a book. I think there are some hidden texts on the CD.

• A large variety of quests and adventures offered by individuals and guilds.
• A standard character generator similar to ARENA will also be available, allowing you to choose one of the 18 character types.
• Create potions and magical items as an extension of ARENA'S SpellMaker. Like in character creation, items can be made more powerful if a side effect is included.
• Magical items appear with a green background in your inventory.

  Magical items now have animated sparks around them, the green background is used for quest items.

• You have eavesdropping ability.

  This was present in the pre-release demo but dropped later. The ear button was replaced by the walk button, which lets you change your means of transport.

• You can choose an option so that the terrain will have an affect on your constitution.

  You can choose the disadvantage "take damage in holy places." Otherwise, terrain can have no influence on your character; day and night can.

• Read virtual books graphically covering aspects of Tamriel.
• Like ARENA, the layout of major dungeons are fixed. The random dungeons will be more variable than those in ARENA.
• import your old ARENA character into DAGGERFALL or begin a new one; most spells can be transferred over.

  This was dropped.

• Unlike ARENA, there will be no dungeon riddles.

  There are a few in the dungeons relating to the main quest.

• A new CHILDGUARD feature which allows parents to set the amount of violence and sex displayed with password protection.
• will be a CD-ROM only game.
• The following Virtual Reality Helmets will be supported: Virtual I/o, CyberMaxx, Forte VFX1.