Daggerfall FAQ
Version 0.95
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.
Last modified 2006-01-16