/vr/ - Retro Games

Start with Morrowind or Skyrim, Daggerfall is a shitty, empty, clunky meme.
The Elder Scrolls really is shallow trash all the way, gameplay and story are garbage and just an excuse for a first person open world sandbox. Morrowind at least has a vaguely good story to sugarcoat that, and Skyrim has mods for pretty much anything.
Daggerfall has neither and is riddled with bugs, has mind numbing shitty combat, empty space, so much fucking empty space, shitty radiant randomly generated quests and the worst dungeons I've ever had the displeasure to get lost into.
It's shit, play it as a curiosity when you have nothing less shitty to play.

Just play the Ultima Underworld games if you want a dungeon crawler or Darklands If you want a sandbox rpg, TES games are shitty

>>6333591
Aren't there mods which populate the wilderness with random encounters (not just the occasional werewolf)?

>>6333779
who gives a shit, even ignoring the wilderness everything else is still empty

>>6333584
Sure. Arena is still fine too.

Although ultimately seconding >>6333631 , TES isn't as good as the competition (outside of maybe Morrowind's weird setting but notretrolmao).
But if you've played the rest and just want more single-character dungeon crawling, sure. Why not.

>>6333631
Where to start with Ultima? Akalabeth?

>>6333584
These games will unironically turn you into a pleb.
>>6334660
Ultima 4 for the main series. You can play Ultima Underworld independently, though.

>>6334660
if you're just looking for a dungeon crawler, just play Ultilma Underworld
If you want to play the Ultima serie, start with 4 or 6 or 7
doing 4,5,6 in a row is obivously best but probably not for everyone either

>>6334660
Akalabeth is a tech demo, lol.
1-3 are pretty much declared not-canon by IV and play like 50 different student projects jammed into a couple of products, which they pretty much were. A lot of grand ideas - spaceflight, time-travel, party management, bitching key art - but not a lot of follow-through and ultimately not key to the identity of the series.

Pretty short though, you could probably blast through them in an afternoon since you're not playing them on an Apple 2 or some shit waiting for turns to process.

Fresh install of DFUnity, why is my movement jittery as fuck when i try to move forward or backwards? The first step I take is a huge stutter step and it's mega annoying, the game definitely did not perform anything like this in vanilla or in older versions of DFUnity for me.

>>6333584
Daggerfall Unity is fully playable and a faithful recreation of the original. Anything extra is an option. It does fix a bunch of bugs though.

But like other anons pointed out TES series and Daggerfall are well.. Complicated. Daggerfall stands out as this weird outcast in the series that had big ideas put into it but because of the tech at the time
they weren't fully fleshed out. So it plays more like an experiment of what could've been.

TES from Morrowind onwards are these buggy clunky RPGs that only really get good after modding. And even then their combat remains shit so it's really up to the individual if you enjoy the rest that the games have to offer.

I can't really say anything about Arena as I haven't really played it properly.

>>6334881
Haven't played DFU in a while but it could be a bug that accidentally made it into a release. Try an older version.

>>6334954
>Daggerfall stands out as this weird outcast in the series that had big ideas put into it but because of the tech at the time
they weren't fully fleshed out. So it plays more like an experiment of what could've been.

Experiment, lol. It was just bad design badly implemented, and that's before they started cutting content. Ultima Underworld had more interactivity in 1992.

>>6334973
Yes. It has a lot of bad design. But the scale of the game isn't even comparable to UU. Don't tell me playing Daggerfall doesn't make you imagine what could've been. Or what a shame it is that no dev tried to go there again?

Ultimately it's a shit game but it makes me dream of something better.

>>6334990
Daggerfall makes me imagine the same things I do when I play Arena. They drew the wrong conclusions from that game and just kept adding more, more, more stuff without fleshing out anything in the gameplay. It's puddle-deep and the generated content is interchangable regardless of scale.

Daggerfafll is a fun game but it'll give the wrong impression of the series, which is why so many people who are only familiar with Morrowind on have difficulty coming to terms with it. Younger players in particular can never seem to grasp the idea that fundamentally Daggerfall is an indoors game, you fast travel from cities to dungeons and there's no point in "exploring" the wilderness because there's nothing there.

>>6334954
Arena is just Daggerfall lite minus half the series lore. Combat and magic mechanics are similar, but that's about it.

>>6335309
Forgot, it also had the exp system instead of advance skills to gain levels, and classes defined what abilities you can have, how much exp is require to advance a level, and what items you can use (although that last one was probably in Daggerfall as well).

>>6335116
Too bad, because those trees. I fucking love the aesthetic.

Daggerfall is the last time I was seriously disappointed with a game. I was on an RPG binge and Daggerfall sounded like it was right up my alley. Kept hearing about all the shit you can do and that atmosphere is really comfy. Then when I actually looked into playing it... it turned out half the mechanics are broken, if you don't cheese the game you're pretty much guaranteed to have a useless class and the majority of the game is just walking through giant maze-like dungeons which you can do in 100 other games.

All the Bethesda Elder Scrolls games have this weird thing where they feel procedurally generated even when they aren't. Playing them feels like playing Minecraft, a Minecraft in which you can't build anything but only run through dungeons and landscapes with a mounting sense of futility. The most enjoyable part of Morrowind is reading the in-game books, some of which are legitimately engrossing stories with great characters and twists. It's hard to understand why they didn't get the same dude who wrote the books to write the NPC dialogue, which is godawful copy & pasted stock responses that makes almost every single character in the game feel like the same person. By contrast, somehow bioware can imbue a one inch tall sprite with personality just with a few sentences of corny pirate dialogue, and the end result is much more enjoyable games.

>>6333584
Daggerfall Unity is ideal for a newcomer.

The port has a lot of quality of life improvements with the interface and combat. The mod support is a godsend for the wealth of improvements. Little stuff like a clock at the bottom corner greases certain aspects of play. Also the shorter dungeons mod is practically mandatory if you don't wanna overuse cheats. That being said cheats help for issues with the procedural generation. I like the graphics overhaul because it makes it all look like painted paper cutouts which really sets the feel for playing some bizarre papercraft tabletop fantasy session in a basement where every adventure involves respecting bare chested women with fireballs. You get more than enough save slots to run lots of different characters so you can experiment and roleplay a little. You can also take the option of skipping Privateer's Hold, the shitpiece of fuck starting dungeon.

i started Daggerfall a few days ago and I'm liking it, yeah it's kind of janky, but it's fun.