Ah Daggerfall, one of the most important games of my childhood. There was just something about games starting with the letter D back in the 90s. I first played the demo, which was restricted to the island of Betony and did not allow custom classes. I took the class quiz and got battlemage. I have since done that quiz numerous times with battlemage being the most common result, but occasionally something similar. For my recent unity playthrough I went online and did every question for the quiz to see what class I would get without the randomization. The results were 17 warrior, 17 mage, 6 thief. I would agree that battlemage was the class most 50/50 between warrior and mage, but I prefer heavy armor, healing and protection magic over destruction. When I got the retail game I played several characters but never came close to beating the game. My main was a high elf paladin mage custom class, which was somewhat similar to a spellsword with plate and etiquette. I played different variations of this character over the years but cannot recall much. Those ancient PCs no longer exist and I never bothered to preserve any save files. Pretty sure I had stuff like expertise in long blade and/or blunt, bonus to hit undead and daedra, 1.7x mp like battlemage, forbidden leather but not many other disadvantages. I do remember playing with lower magic ability in darkness or light but it was very annoying when trying to put down recall outside, since recalling indoors was bugged. I also remember abusing critical weakness to paralysis at least once but likely not on my early characters. I also had a paladin, which was a similar class but with less magic. This was a game that I spent endless hours playing, staying up late at night then wondering where all the time went when dawn arrived. I also had hotseat fun with my cousins and sister playing, where we could take turns making themed characters and seeing who could get out of the starting dungeon. They also had their own full characters, with Andrew being a lizard fighter thief (based on the rogue), and Adam being a straight thief. This was the only way I seen the crime underworld aspect of the game, since my characters did not do anything like that. I also remember a character that got lycanthropy. I had no idea and suddenly kept dying to a rat, then looked at my hp to see that my max hp was single digit. I had to look up online that the only way to fix that was to occasionally kill an innocent town person. Later I got sick of that and looked up how to cure it using the witch coven.
Many years later I resolved to finally beat the game on my old xp PC using dosbox, though it did not run as smoothly as original dos on PC from the 90s. I used the few mods that were available online at the time. The save files on my newest PC say created 2016, but was that when I copied them to that PC or when I actually played? It was sometime between 2010 and then. I did beat the game with that character though do not recall much specific about it. I definitely used cheat mode to teleport around dungeons, including back in the day. Usually I would go into a dungeon and explore until I was forced to use the 3D map, then teleport to a random quest location and explore from there. Repeat until I found the objective, though I was more strict about using it for main quest dungeons. Teleport to entrance was far preferable to trying to navigate using the map. A fun thing I did back in the day was strip my character of all gear, go into a dungeon, teleport to a quest location, then try to get out on my own. I loaded my dos saves into unity and was surprised at what I had done with my character. I did not optimize so it was more of a roleplay challenge run, and the character was significantly less powerful than my unity spellsword.
High elf paladin mage: resist magic, resist disease, expertise long blade, bonus to hit undead, forbidden daedric, 1.75x mana, immune to paralysis. The leveling difficulty for this character was high. Recreating it in unity the highest hp I could get was 16, and that with the difficulty at max allowable.
Level 16, 145 hp, 187 mp, 97 str, 75 int, 75 will, 64 agility, 98 end, 62 per, 95 speed, 56 luck.
Fighters guild: guardian
Mage guild: warlock
Knights of dragon: commander
Mara: adept
Primary: long blade 70, blunt 58, etiquette 63 (this skill is such a pain to raise)
Secondary: restoration 63, alteration 49, mysticism 70
Minor: destruction 50, dodge 44, axe 40, medical 24, illusion 52, thaumatergy 49
Misc: Running 87, stealth 79, critical 49, archery 45, backstabbing 26, swimming 23, mercantile 21, climbing 15, jumping 13, short blade 11
Equipment:
Orc katana: cast ice bolt on hit, potent vs daedra, undead and humanoid, bad reaction from daedra x2, animals and humans, bad rep underworld x2. Bad reactions give hit and armor penalties so I should not have been using that.
Ebony mace of stunning: paralysis on hit, bad rep underworld. I was dual wielding these and I sort of like what I was doing there. Stun with mace then kill with blade, raising both skills.
Adamantium crusader helm: 50% weight boost, bad rep underworld
Ebony left pauldron
Mithril right pauldron
Mithril cuirass: feather
Mithril gauntlets of haste: + dodge, bad rep underworld
Amulet of spell reflection
Engineer bracers: repairs items
Bracers with improved hearing, athleticism and adrenaline rush, bad rep underworld
Spell power diamond: extra mp for every season and moon, and near undead. Bad rep underworld
Ruby of spell resist
Warlock ring
Amulet of protection: spell reflect and spell resist while held, bad rep underworld, bad reactions daedra and animals
Mark of shielding: spell shield on use, bad rep underworld, bad reaction daedra and animal
Ring of life: regen hp, damage from sun
Ring of invisibility: while held and on use
Sapphire of water: both walking and breathing while held
Orc vampiric axe
190 arrows
Slightly over 1 million gold
Large ship
Spells:
The spellbook was an absolute mess with many stock spells, custom spells for pretty much every possible effect, and somewhat cumbersome spell names. I did not have good custom nukes, only the stock nukes. Not going to list every single spell just point out what was interesting.
Ranged paralyze: all 1s
Pacify spells (seems like a worthless effect)
Levitate: all 1s, plus the stock levitate spell with just 1 more duration for some reason
Jump and climb
Find treasure, detect magic and sense evil. Did I actually use these?
Restore attributes. I remember these were important because buffs caused attribute drain. Likely a bug but I considered it a feature to make enchants have a drawback.
Minor resist for each element: all 1s
Teleport and stock recall for some reason. They are the same effect. Sadly there was no spell effect equivalent to the mage guild teleportation
ID: 1 + 1 per 2 lvls
Open: 1 + 1 per 2 lvls
Minor conjuration: create
Cure minor wounds: heal, all 1s
Minor refreshment: restore stamina all 1s
Magic arrow: magic nuke at range, all 1s
Minor shielding: all 1s
Training spells: illusion + rest + thau, then just dest and myst for some reason. Then individual training spells for each school. I don’t know why I did that when 2 spells combining all 3 schools was enough
Open minor lock: all 1s
Cure poison: 60 + 2 per lvl. Stock?
Regen: all 1s
Cure light wounds: 5-10 + 1 per lvl
Cure moderate wounds: 5-10 + 5 per lvl
Cure serious wounds: 10-20 + 2 per lvl
Cure critical wounds: 13-22 + 5 per lvl
Cure deadly wouds: 20-25 + 10 per lvl
Complete heal: 5 + 30 per lvl
Moderate shielding: 5 per lvl
Heavy shielding: 5 + 5 per lvl
Vampiric for each attribute, nymph for stamina, touch and punch for hp
Elemental shield spells: 1 for each damage type, and mp. Damage in area around caster for all 1s. Cool idea but numbers were way too low
Minor, major and deadly mana drain
Minor lock: all 1s. Probably useful with archery since enemies did not beat down locked doors.
Minor charm. This would not work on vendors so seems useless
I had 3 other saves at the beginning dungeon. A wood elf paladin, lizard fighter thief, and Breton ice mage. The mage was level 2 and outside the dungeon, had 100 int and the class was 3x mana, crit weakness to fire, low tolerance shock, immune to frost, no armor, similar to stock mage. I would not want to play that character though.
Daggerfall was a legendary masterpiece that was one of the best games of its era, of all time even. It had such great world building and immersion, many intricate and overpowered mechanics, and amazing exploration and combat that pretty much continued on as the core of the entire series. The biggest flaw was the labyrinthine dungeon design combined with the brain fatigue inducing 3D map. Really, the main problem here was rooms and corridors on higher floors obstructing those below. If the map was more intuitive to use so you could clearly tell where to go at a glance instead of having the complexity of a puzzle cube, then the dungeon design would not have been such a problem. Other than that and glitches, the other flaws were very minor in nature. Random stat rolling, and point/hp gain on level up, which have no place in video games and only encourage save scumming. And you better believe I scummed the hell out of it. The lack of better material versions of leather and chain armor. Silly crime stuff like taking out bank loans in minor provinces with no penalty, loitering in shops until after closing to steal everything with no consequence, and killing guards in the major castles without getting criminal record or even reputation loss. There are things that Daggerfall did better than Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, and other things that it did worse, such that I can’t rank them against each other. Much like some other games of that era that began with D, Daggerall is as close to a 10/10 game as you can get.
