#ian plays: daggerfall

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[ID: Three screenshots from the Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. They show the character’s game-generated history with yellow text on a brown background styled to look like old parchment paper. End ID.]

“Your father was the healer for a very small village deep in the forests of Valenwood. You have few memories of your mother, a beautiful, kind woman who taught you magic. You always will remember her entertaining you for hours with tricks. Your favorite was her casting a smell that made it impossible for you to speak. The plague that took her was too strong for her or your father to fight. It was her wish that you be trained in the School of Restoration, and there you showed promise exceeding your father.

As you grew, it was apparent that you had unusually strong magical powers. Soon you were able to dispel sound from the air yourself. You remember your father talking about an evil Battlemage, Jagar Tharn, how it was known in his circle that he has usurped the power of the land away from its rightful ruler. No one dared to move against him. If it weren't suicidal, you would have enjoyed working against him. One day in your twentieth year, a courier arrived at your house with the news that a powerful hero had killed Jagar Tharn and restored the rightful Emperor to the throne.

Your tender-hearted father openly wept with joy at the news.

The courier also brought the news that there would be a great celebration in Imperial City and that all the people who had worked secretly to depose Tharn were invited. Once the courier left, you asked your father if you could go to the celebration. Your father turned to you and said that it was time you made you own way in the world. He gave you a marvelous book and a very unusual staff and sent you on your way to the Imperial City and the celebration.

After many days of travel, you approached the capital of the realm, the Imperial City. You noticed a small band of travelers only a short distance in front of you. As you were about to hail them they were attacked by brigands who had been lying in wait in the woods along the road. You rushed to help the other travelers. As you approached one of the brigands raised his short sword to strike you. In a natural reflex, you tried to deflect the blow with the staff your father gave you. As the sword struck the staff, a great bolt of lightning erupted from it and both weapons shattered. The brigands and the travelers all stopped and stared at you. As the thunder subsided, the brigands ran back into the woods. You were mobbed by the travelers who thanked you profusely for saving them, members of the Imperial Family who had been visiting in the country and were returning to the Imperial City for the celebrations. They insisted that you come with them to the palace and have an audience with the Emperor.

The Emperor was very impressed by your bravery and knew your family as loyal supporters of the Empire. He presented you with an ebony dagger. The celebrations continued for weeks, and the Emperor often called on you for informal talks. When you were not in audience, you usually spent your time swimming in the murky black waters of the Caledon River. One night you were called to the Emperor's presence in a manner such that you knew the business was serious. He met you in his study and there told you he had a favor to ask.”

[terryblount]

New RPG in the works by The Elder Scrolls’ original developers

OnceLost Games is a newly formed studio, by veteran developers of The Elder Scrolls series.  Some of these devs are Julian LeFay, Ted Peterson,  Vijay Lakshman and Ian Phoenix. These guys have worked on many great games. Some of them are The Elder Scrolls: Arena, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind , The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Spyro the Dragon and many more.

All we know so far, is that the game will be a massive open-world RPG with “revolutionary technology and game design”, while staying faithful to the old games. From what I understand, they want to keep the complex design of those games but bring it closer to nowadays technology. Ambitious yet troublesome. I do hope they succeed, because it sounds intriguing.

The word is getting out. OnceLost Games is a new studio formed of The Elder Scrolls creators https://t.co/OtDvJTAkXx via @VideoGamerCom

— Ted Peterson (@CharlesPeterson) September 17, 2019

I don’t know about you guys, but for me, those old The Elder Scrolls games were amazing. Don’t get me wrong, I really like Skyrim, but Morrowind & Oblivion were just..marvelous.

Legendary role-playing game design for both newcomer and veteran RPG fans…

OnceLost Games is an independent game development studio dedicated to reinvigorating the role-playing game genre with much-needed new ideas. Founded by veterans of two generations of gaming enthusiasts and experts, we aim to meet the gap between the deep, complex design pillars of games from the 1990’s, with the production values, improved controls and quality of life features in games today.

We’re hard at work on our debut role-playing game title, which will be a massive open-world fantasy adventure, and will boast revolutionary technology and game design by some of the most celebrated veterans of computer gaming, who have created multiple Game of the Year-winning titles.

OnceLost Games will officially announce their first game by the end of this year.

Thanks PCGamer & VideoGamer.

The post New RPG in the works by The Elder Scrolls’ original developers appeared first on DSOGaming.

New RPG in the works by The Elder Scrolls’ original developers published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

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[ID: Three screenshots from The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, with yellow text on a grey, stone-patterned background. The top screenshot shows the custom class sheet with a class, titled “Fool’s Errand.” The class stats read as follows: 60 strength, 70 intelligence, 65 willpower, 60 agility, 60 endurance, 10 personality, 65 speed, and 10 luck. The primary skills panel reads as follows: mysticism, illusion, and archery. The major skills panel reads as follows: short blade, backstabbing, and stealth. The minor skills panel reads as follows: streetwise, etiquette, hand-to-hand, medical, restoration, and thaumaturgy. The class can gain the maximum 30 hit points per level and the skills advancement bar is pointed at easy x0.3.

The second screenshot shows the class’ special advantages, reading as follows: regenerate health in darkness, immunity to magic, expertise in short blade, expertise in missile weapon, increased magery x3 spell points, athleticism, and bonus to hit humanoid. The third screenshot shows the class’ special disadvantages, reading as follows: critical weakness to paralysis, critical weakness to shock, critical weakness to poison, critical weakness to disease, inability to regenerate spell points, darkness powered magery with lower magic ability in daylight, and forbidden weaponry axe. End ID.]

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This doesn’t seem like a very good idea.

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Playing Daggerfall is weird because I’m more comfortable using the built-in cheats (and tbh I have to be) than I am in most games I play.

Today’s cheat was using the square brackets in a massively complex dungeon to just.... get to the quest target. I was super encumbered with stuff, miles away from the entrance, and the map (which CAN be parsable at first if the dungeon isn’t too twisty) became genuinely unreadable.

I use the console in Skyrim semi-liberally if I need to fix something or if I want to test something or uhhh can’t find something. But I never do it in order to obtain an item for a quest unless it’s bugged or something. b: The most recent example is using the console to finish a broken quest for the Thieves Guild... but that’s also after I’ve gone out, gotten the quest item from the world, and have already returned to Delvin or Vex and their dialogue doesn’t trigger it to complete.

I make an honest attempt at the dungeons, but they’re so... ughghghghghgh. It’s kinda fun to explore them at first! 

But for some reason Raka’s mana bar is always tanked. I’m not sure if that’s because they have Stupid Dumbass Disorder (their INT is at 50, they have SP Doesn’t Regen, and they don’t have any mana boosting perks). Not sure if that’s normal. It also flashes/fluctuates when they’re outside. edit: I did not read the Class Maker page carefully enough. they have darkness-powered magic which not only makes their magic less good in sunlight but also just lowers their magic cap in general. and that’s fine, I can spit some extra points in INT over time as they lvl up, and that might boost their SP a little. My problem is that they don’t have enough mana to cast recall, meaning I have to use cheats to return to the entrance.

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So after setting up a 100+ plugin modlist for Raka, I started their official Skyrim SE run with SkygerfalI. This is really long. Like, really really long. And it’s packed with spoilers, so my fingers are crossed that the cut works on mobile because otherwise I am so, SO sorry to mobile users.

Links: Legendary - Special Edition

What a hell of a mod. It was so much easier to swallow than Daggerfall proper, I’ll give it that! For one, the 3D map in Daggerfall drives me batty. I can’t read it at all, and the samey graphics in every dungeon make them really hard to navigate. For another, Daggerfall notably averts the “take your time” trope where players are allowed to fuck off and do whatever they want while the main quest stays politely paused in the background - almost every single quest is timed, and exceeding the time limit is an automatic fail. It’s possible to lock yourself out of the main quest this way.

Thankfully, the Skygerfall mod recreates all the main quest dungeons with a significantly more helpful Skyrim-style local map. The mod page describes the dungeons as hand crafted, and... well, I’d personally describe it as LOVINGLY put together. The attention to detail is exquisite, and it absolutely feels like a recreation of the dungeons. In fact, it’s so carefully and thoroughly remade that for the most part, the original walkthroughs on UESP came in handy for the few places I got stuck (ahem... Direnni Tower). There’s so many twisting corridors, right angles, and those big huge pyramid-esque centerpieces. My unabashed favorites are the little diagonal rooms hidden within other small rooms, tucked into corners in and of themselves. My own playthrough of Daggerfall made me look forward to those spaces as good places to rest or find loot.

There is not much going on outside the cities or dungeons though! Since it was, for the most part, a single dev putting the whole thing together in their spare time, it’s just the main quest. Even the main towns are largely empty, save for tavern owners (who act as general good merchants), a blacksmith in Daggerfall proper, and any NPCs directly related to the main questline. Ironically, Scourg Barrow is one of the most populated places in the entire game, if only by volume of nonhostile NPCs! The palaces also have merchants and guards around, and there’s a... cheerful little kid over at Wayrest who would love to meet your Agent.

That means no questlines for any of the side factions, very few extra merchants to buy your high volume of crap (though you wont actually need more than one or two at a time), no side dungeons to explore, and nothing in the landscape between the map markers. There’s not even any generic NPCs to populate the towns, and almost no interiors.

Still, it’s entirely worth playing, if you want the basic runthrough of Daggerfall’s main quest in a familiar, modern engine. Particular props goes to some of the scenery and levels. Where there’s very little going on outside of your quest targets, the places that have been built are stunning. Shedungent’s exterior in specific enchanted me, looking exactly like a medieval castle with plenty of nooks and crannies to poke into (though no loot, unfortunately... not that I need any extra with how much garbage I haul out of those dungeons). Another particular detail that I loved were... pigs, actually. I loved the pigs. There’s a few dungeons that contain pigs, which existed in Daggerfall.

I love them. They’re darling.

I dunno, the fact that Oracus0 put so much time and effort into making sure that Skygerfall was a true to the original as possible, down to the animals passively hanging out, really brought me into it. Sure, I wish there weren’t giant scorpions in any game ever, but I can also appreciate that since they were in the original, they were there in Skygerfall (and that they dropped a Raka certified safe alchemical ingredient). And who doesn’t get excited when they see the loot pile model tucked behind a locked door?

I also ADORED - spoiler alert - Aetherius, which turned the game into a full-fledged puzzle platformer. Note to anybody playing through the Room of Fire? You can and will fall off if you’re not careful! But the scenery there is also gorgeous, with a stunning backdrop of swirling stars and galaxies, hellfire, and a wonderfully dapper Sheogorath (whose voice actor does a great job, by the way, of holding true to Sheogorath’s canon voice).

Bonus points for having (and I must emphasize) FULL VOICE ACTING. Every NPC available in the game has a voice. All of the custom NPCs have custom voice acting, and every voice actor did a real bang up job. There wasn’t a single character I encountered whose voice didn’t match them.

It’s also way more... cartoony? Than Skyrim, and it shows a lot in places where custom and vanilla 3D assets were used right next to each other. There’s a lot of blocky, and almost plastic-y walls, floors, sconces, etc that made some of the rough-and-tumble stuff stick out, but it’s not actually enough to take you out of the game unless you’re a really picky bastard imo. It works really well for being a faithful recreation of Daggerfall, which looked like... well. This:

I had a habit of taking pictures of any cool animals I saw in Daggerfall, especially if I haven’t seen them in TES before. Speaking of this awesome camel picture, not to fear if you’re worried about hauling all your crap out of the dungeons like I am (my partner has a hard time watching me play Skyrim with the way I lug out everything that isn’t nailed down to hawk later)...

There’s a mount waiting for you near Sentinel!

...(: That’s right. You get a camel. No need to buy it, it’s not tagged as theft (as of 11/12/19, a little under a month post initial release). It works exactly like a horse - hop on and it’ll help you bounce between map markers, even if you’re overencumbered by several hundred pounds of loose swords, gemstones, potions, and your enemies’ underwear. It looks AMAZING, and though you kind of clip through his hump a little bit, it’s again not really an issue unless you’re overtly picky.

The only thing I absolutely cannot stand is... mythril.

Mythril in this mod is... blue. The armor is gray, but the weapons and shield are blue. Not a silver blue or a dark slate blue in the way you’d expect from something metallic. No, I’m talking about Hawaiian Punch Blue Typhoon, I’m talking blue raspberry Airheads, I’m talking about Lapis lazuli from Minecraft and/or Steven Universe, Cornflower Blue Crayola, “her cerulean orbs” fuckin BLUE. That was the ONLY thing that really stuck in my craw. Raka is an archer, but in the event of an emergency they dual-wield daggers and for a period the best one I had on hand aside from the ebony dagger was mythril and I hated it. I resented it. Every time Raka had to get into close quarters I grumbled with distaste as soon as that goddamn Manic Panic deep dream knife popped out on my screen. I replaced it with adamantium as soon as I was able to.

Everything else was copacetic! As with the set dressing, a lot of the custom armor and weapons were kind of cartoony and might stick out in Skyrim proper, but they’re pretty charming in that way. If for no other reason than collection purposes, I took one of everything with me to Skyrim at the end of the questline with the intent to maybe display it in one of Raka’s player homes. Especially the adamantium, which out of everything fits in the best with vanilla Skyrim’s assets (as far as I can tell, don’t quote me on that, please!).

Again, it’s a very lovingly made tribute to the original game, with a lot of time and effort put into it. A lot of modder resources were used in order to achieve this end, and what an end it is. For all of the places where there might be criticism, it’s still a fantastic piece of work that deserves a lot of praise and appreciation, especially since it was largely a single dev working and learning by themselves to put it together. It’s still hours of content to work through, having taken me about 4 days to get through via my playstyle, even when it primarily involved jumping between map markers and delving into dungeons. God only knows I’d have never gotten to the actual main quest of Daggerfall in the original engine, and likely not even in Daggerfall Unity, as I was too busy messing around, getting headaches from the procedurally generated dungeons, and trying to climb the ranks of the Mage’s Guild and Thieves Guild. Not to say that that isn’t a fun and completely valid way to play the game. But Skygerfall allowed me to play through the actual main quest, kept me engaged with voiced characters and a streamlined series of events, and a thorough and faithful recreation.

A lot of people mentioned wanting more stuff between the towns and cities currently in the mod, but personally, going forward, I’d love to see what already exists be expanded. I’d love to see more shop interiors, some generic NPCs to chat with or ask about rumors from (or even just to fill out the space! I’m not picky!), and maybe some basic structure for some of the guilds.

That being said, it’s still a complete mod in and of itself. It has all the components anyone could reasonably ask for. It has its dungeons, it has its armors and weapons, it has custom spells, potions, and ingredients. It makes use of monsters from the Mihail mods, populating the underground with lots of scary and lore-appropriate foes to fight. It has very little to explore outside of that, but still offers a LOT, and I was able to enjoy the main quest of Daggerfall in a way that was comfortable and easily playable for myself, which is more than can be said for the clunky DOS the original game is built in. I would not be mad if Oracus0 decided to close it up, call it good, support bugs for a while, and moved on. They’ve done plenty in the way of Skygerfall, and though I’d love to see more I’m also incredibly happy with what I got! I’m pleased as punch, got to roleplay my little idiot moron bosmer in their original context, and then was able to seamlessly integrate them into the world of Skyrim (via Live Another Life, which is supported by Skygerfall) to enjoy the rest of their modlist. I can’t recommend it enough, especially if you want to get a feel for Daggerfall with some of the comfort and convenience of a better engine and less stingy limitations.

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I figured out the weird bank glitch!

Turns out I had a “letter of credit” on my character instead of raw gold, so I had to deposit that instead because the game considers them different (for whatever reason). =/

The point is that I managed to put my gold in the bank so I’m not toting it around. Now I just need to find a place to put all my loose clothes, potions, and alchemy ingredients. I want a house, even despite how annoyingly expensive they are lol. But I have to know where Scourg Barrow is and what the closest town is that I could buy a house in. Because houses are prohibitively expensive in Daggerfall, I want the best one that fits into my roleplay experience right away. I’m also figuring that I could probably buy a ship to keep Raka’s stuff in.

I also did a surprisingly fast dungeon dive for the Mage’s Guild. I found the item, a bit of decent loot (unfortunately I also found lots of spiders and a scorpion), and was able to navigate my way back to the exit by hand.

The most exciting part was when I left the dungeon, however, because I got a letter telling me I’d been “seen” thieving around after managing to pick my way into a shop using the pickpocket skill, which I leveled up by savescumming pickpocket on random denizens of Daggerfall. Thus I had 91 days to steal some random garbage item in order to prove my worth.

Thus, Raka is now a proud member of the Thieves’ Guild of Daggerfall! An important part of their roleplay experience. (;

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Just hit a frustrating bug where I couldn’t deposit the gold from my inventory into the bank.

I had a small collection of holy daggers and holy tomes sitting collecting dust in my wagon worth 2,500 gold apiece. I figured I’d keep one of each for collection purposes, and even though I don’t necessarily need to clear space in the wagon just yet I’m saving up for a house and ship and those items are mostly just vendor junk, as far as I can tell.

(I was SO disappointed the first time I found a Holy Dagger and tried to equip it, only to find out it was a misc item.)

Anyway, I actually had a GOOD dungeon experience for once! It was full of great loot and I found the quest target (flesh atronach for the Mage’s Guild) relatively easily, so I didn’t have to use the square brackets to jump around searching aimlessly. I was even able to navigate my way back to the entrance at all times and I came out with a great haul (of holy daggers). It felt slightly more linear, with offshoots, kinda like a cross between a Daggerfall dungeon and a Skyrim one.

I also leveled up once I got back to town. Currently I’m slowly building my strength up to 100 and adding a little into intelligence where I can. I’m hoping soon I have enough to cast a legitimate “teleport” spell to get back to a dungeon entrance as opposed to using a cheat.

At level 6, here are my stats:

I should make a character sheet for Raka. I figure it would include screenshots of their base stats and background info about their factions and shit. =/c And let’s my real, their Skyrim playthrough modlist LMFAO. And in that case I would make one for Cecil, my Dragonborn OC, who is the only other fleshed out character in my TES playthroughs (I have chars for Morrowind and Oblivion - they’re dunmer twins, but they’re not fleshed out as I haven’t touched those games yet).

Frankly, I would love to do a Cecil playthrough on Daggerfall but that’s probably not likely. Raka’s sprite thankfully looks moderately like them, including their hair. Unfortunately, when I first designed Cecil I didn’t realize that the majority of Bretons across the series were white-coded, as Skyrim was my first game I just had fun with character creation before I knew anything about the series and I’m not sure how I would go about adding a custom sprite into Daggerfall (and modding for the first two games is quite difficult).

Anyway, I’m going to make one more attempt at banking before poking around the internet looking for fixes.

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just talking abt my first runthru of daggerdall under the cut. b:

I gave myself such a rotten headache doing a dungeon dive today. I’m level 2 and ran into a vampire ancient which meant I had to pop on God Mode for a minute while I killed it. Also, I really like archery in Skyrim and that.... doesn’t translate super well to TES II lmfao.

on the bright side, I aggro’d a spider from across a pit and it died trying to get to me.

spiders are... really awful in this game actually but they’re not as bad as frostbite spiders nor are they even as bad as Daggerfall’s scorpions, even, in large part due to their sound byte. honestly it sounds like a purring cat to me.

I joined the Temple of Kynareth after doing a RP run in Skyrim just to get the character’s details kind of set up before doing a run in the infamous Daggerfall itself. Raka is actually a bosmer and doesn’t... necessarily ascribe to the ideals of a Cyrodillic or Nordic pantheon (and after reading up on it I probably should have joined the Temple of Arkay anyway =/// especially with my roleplay intentions for this character. too late now) but I figured that Kynareth would kind of suit them best even though they... don’t actually worship her, considering she’s the goddess of the wind and hunt and stuff. or whatever.

slightly enraging, but the quest target was just a couple rooms away from the entrance/exit. I went in and made a whole effort to actually do the dungeon and came up on that at the very end. but yknow, at least I didn’t drive myself nuts trying to re-find it after obtaining the item I needed.

my partner called the (probably incomplete) map “like the Windows screensaver but bad.”