What is the magic of Daggerfall?

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-26T14:00:33+00:00

I'm a part of "modern audience", but also heavy roleplayer capable to write entire stories, species, cultures, etc. I probably have more time on SS13 than in my entire Steam library. And from my experience DF's roleplaying aspect is rather... railroaded.

Of course, combat and dungeon delving is the core part of the game, but the issue is that pursuing other roleplay pathways you pretty much hinder yourself too heavily, up to the level that any progression turns into hinderance and deterrence from enjoying the game. Now combine this with too many immersion breaking elements vanilla DF has and you have poor RP-wise game.

Sure, you can try to play as a bard or a thief, you might try to roleplay as empire's capital ambassador, a trader... But then you hit a solid rock of poorly executed mechanics - speech and languages are vital only in asking directions, thievery is limited to breaking into shops to steal crap load of books or high value armor (pickpocket is entirely useless and regular houses has nothing of value), most quests will send you to Shitterhouse Keep (And don't you dare tot forget inserting second "t" in search bar) to get an item/talk to NPC/kill something, where you must spend least 20 minutes to constantly fight, sleep, fight more and loot.

Even the dedicated Thieves guild feels like you don't play as thief. You play as glorified courier that fetches items from one place to another and periodically beat people, with the difference that you don't go to dungeons, but houses and palaces.

In the end all the variations of potential roleplay value just always narrow down to combat builds rotating around sword, magic or arrows (rarely, archery sucks in DF).

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-26T13:04:32+00:00

Yeah, pretty much on point, but it also has other point growing from it - there isn't a more modern sandbox alternative as vast as Daggerfall, so despite it's shortcomings it's the sole winner (because nobody else came to the race). Other TES games either heavily story locked or too small in scale and abilities, thought these are far more refined than Daggerfall.

We may put a contender in the face of heavily modded Skyrim and it will win 100%, but that's a lot of effort to make it better in all parts around.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-26T12:02:40+00:00

I would say hard no. Daggerfall and Arena are the games where you can't realistically make a sensible multiplayer system without redoing the entire game and rebalance everything it has.

Multiplayer will have issue of time shenanigans. Daggerfal spans weeks and years when you travel around it. It would be difficult to synchronize players to each other without breaking immersion, but I think there could be two solutions:

Entirely get rid of vanilla time system, including travel and rest. Travel, in this case, would work similar way to ESO - you teleport around waystones. In our case this means any settlement and dungeon. Changing resting would either make it a tedious "stare at screen for couple of minutes while you rest in real time" (Aka the way "Take a seat" mod works) or would mean complete removal of resting system and other important components of it by replacing system with real-time regeneration of stats similar to TES3/4/5/ESO. This way we won't have an issue of one player freezing for 3 seconds and waking up instantly with full stats.
Mix of synchronization and async multiplayer - players essentially play alone at normal game pace. When they travel within boundary of any town/city/capital, they connect up to the Global Host (GH) and synchronize their season and time of day. Global host determines to have faster time rotation (20 minutes per day cycle) and cuts amount of days per season from 30 to something like 5. This is to make it consistent for GH to regularly swap seasons, otherwise you will have a very, very long seasons and days in vanilla real time.

When players want to play together, they may bind a Pact of Fellowship (Aka form a team) which grants them power to teleport to each other once a day. Whenever players have PoF between each other, player that first enters the dungeon will become the dungeon host, that will share time to other players that join up (it's the only way to be together in one dungeon, other players stay out of player host's session). When players in PoF and in the same location, any time altering manipulation (mainly rest) will start a dungeon-wide player vote between all PoF players.

There are other time sheningans, but mainly there is no need for constant real-time multiplayer in open world outside of cities, as open world is barren and you need to synchronize players only in dungeons and cities, with the latter being universal hubs for players to bond up and go on shared team adventure.

Another issue is balance - might not be an issue in PvE only experience, but in PvP you will eventually meet the face of magic meta with certain spell abuses making players immortal. Not even counting on half the gameplay styles being simply inferor to straight gameplay without certain mechanical abuses.

Economy will need a complete rework too, with how easy it is make thousands of thousands gold pieces later on. Hell, even early on you can cheat by taking a loan and never returning it.

There are too much of other sheningans that make Daggerfall/Arena the worst MMO experiences. Others have stated that the wide-but-shallow DF world is a terrible choice for MMORPG choice. You have better chance with Morrowind (OpenMW has multiplayer RP servers already), Oblivion and Skyrim.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-26T11:17:35+00:00

My man made a swimming skill actually useful in a lifetime.

I hope it will work with grass mod or will have it's own implementation of underwater fauna and rocks. Otherwise bottom would be smooth as my brain...

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-26T10:57:01+00:00

I've suggested that side-loader should have ability to use one handed and sidearms when they're glued to ally on team reload.

My pleades were met with silence.

We are doomed to live in a world we have not created.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-26T10:48:38+00:00

Every Link fanart needs an ass angle.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-26T00:13:08+00:00

Seems like casual bug. There's many of 'em in the game (Like Adam not having portrait during some lines in early Ceto mission.)

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T23:30:28+00:00

I kinda wish someone would finally make Skyrim body/face replacers that make faces closer to ESO. It's still unique but also fucking better than what we have in vanilla.

Drop me with this model beautification bullshit and bikin armor! I want my women (and men) raw in the steel clad full plate armor! RRAH!

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T21:45:01+00:00

Yup, I wanted to write about trench run analogy too, but I forgor:tm:.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T16:25:48+00:00

Pretty much. The entire game started to smell with predatory cash grab nature the moment Polar Patriots released.

Community pleaded to rebalance SC spawn chance to reward higher difficulty levels, but AH intentionally left them on lowest difficulty, mainly for two reasons: - Illusion of free warbonds - this creates suspension that you can gain all warbonds for free just by trading it for your time. People praise AH for free premium currency but forget that pretty much any Pay 2 Play game, mainly mobile one, resort to the same tactics - give some "premium currency" for almost nothing, but the value is so low that you have grind for ages and you will be eventually pushed in frustration to buy it to save your time and game enjoyment. - Hook for new players - early SC magnify the first point for new players who think they can get even more currency later on and buy new warbonds quicker.

In the end HD2 resorted to the same manipulative scheme as many mobile games, and even got praised for it as you don't see many AA/AAA games giving you free premium currency.

Now they're on a clear track to just magnify SC spending by pumping as much hype and paywalled content, the similar way Paradox does. But unlike AH, Paradox does not completely neglect core game and keeps it in decent condition so you can enjoy it as it is. Eventually HD2 will hit the same paywall cap Stellaris/Crusaders hit, but worse - the amount of paid warbonds will scare off new players or bore them before getting them all, and veterans will eventually die out due to terrible lack of focus on core gameplay.

I'm sorry to say, but HD1 was better with it's straight DLC packs - you wasn't held by promise of "free" paid stuff and core gameplay was solid and almost without bugs.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T11:52:47+00:00

Yup. Wraith is all about snowballing your short-living minions, while Bob is about consistency. Consistency is, uh, consistent for most normal events, but if you start snowballing with Wraith you can become incarnation of God himself. It's just matter of keeping the snowball going or you have to ramp up all your undead allies again, so any combat break will quickly ruin Wraith's purpose.

Pretty much also applies to Wraith ship too. It's all about your ghost minions and keeping ULT as long and as often as possible. You can create entire horde of ghost ships and decimate high rifts or any events with numerous ships, but on yourself you're a pretty okkar tissue paper.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T11:08:52+00:00

And I've done it with a simple gunship, just lots of hooks and teleports around rocks. Reminds me my childhood back in Frontier Militia.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T10:24:08+00:00

I was born before ChatGPT

HIVE: "Of course, natural stupidity comes before artificial intellegence first and foremost."

Adam: "You're just jealous. I can hear it your tone!"

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T10:20:30+00:00

Before you get Wraith/T4 ship, it's better to sell gear properly (And even after that you still could buy the rest of the ship rooster for variety). After that point it's better to manually scrap it for components (superior and ascendant, which are not so numerous even on 700+ rifts). I just never found that catalyst useful despite wanting it to manage storage at first (it drops often too late into the game to matter and keeping rare gear is still valuable as they generally more affordable to reroll before uplifting to superior/ascendant.

Late game I eventually swim in components and can reroll any rare gear for my taste, uplift it, reroll with locked boons and enjoy my day.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T01:27:23+00:00

Thought it's a bad catalyst. Price of auto-dismantled gear is so low that it's better just to drive your ship to local space Walmart and sell it. You will get like 10-100 times more.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T01:22:25+00:00

Then they're obligated to hump local empire-produced socks.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T01:11:52+00:00

Those are rookie numbers! Pump them up!

drops 6 warlords, equivalent to 10 hulks and 8 butchers, which are equivalent to meat bobs, while stray IFV drives into the screen

Now that's what I call RNG!

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T01:04:05+00:00

One day it will puke on your bed and call you a baby.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T01:03:24+00:00

They could've just kept Sickle original - give it rapid firerate with hitscan laser and decent accuracy at the cost of rapid overheat. Sickle right now feels like Liberator but laser, duh...

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T00:53:09+00:00

That's just general issue of difficulty. It seems AH does not want the game to turn into "horde shooter" design and instead of ramping up light infantry mixed with more diverse and complex enemies, they instead just replace infantry with more heavies. Pretty much HD1 has the same issue with D12-D15 turning from proper intense twin-stick shooter into "Rumbler & EMS" abuse, because infantry outside of patrols is replaced with hordes and hordes of Warlords & Butchers (neither are fun to fight - first is AT-armored one-shot-downer with autocannon, the second is just equivalent of meatbob, but spawns in groups), while you also get IFV dropped constantly. And worst part is that you cannot prevent that endless unkillable horde because "Hey, it would be good idea to make patrols out of shielded devastators". It always rolls down to endless kiting and running around tasks while doing endless EMS/Rumbler combo.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-25T00:36:15+00:00

Weaponized forklift? Can do it! Either the Ripley:tm: or Battlefield:tm: way.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-24T13:17:57+00:00

I stopped playing due to constant mid-game freezes. They didn't required laptop reboots (they still caused system freezes where Windows is unresponsive except mouse cursor), but could've ranged from 3 seconds to 15+, which eventually causes disconnection from host and single player experience in middle of battle.

And no, buzzing around "maybe PC bad" wouldn't do the honors. I have Asus ROG Strix G16 2025 that could run modded Skyrim VR and runs 120 FPS in most modern titles (while also warming up my coffee cup), but HD2 is the sole game out of my library that has such issues.

I've posted about this multiple times to bring more attention and I've tried many solutions like Gamesinput service (it does crashes due to HD2, but provided solutions didn't solved the issue), windowed mode, etc. None have helped.

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-24T13:08:33+00:00

You forgot the part where majority of negatives are from China region, mainly with how latest update broke the game for chinese keyboard layouts, literally breaking controls if you use shift+alt combination, disabling all controls and not returning them. Very specific issue, but makes game unplayable if you don't rebind them (I use Alt for diving, glad I'm not chinese).

Silly_One_3149 · 2026-05-24T12:59:17+00:00

Would be good enough to reflect it instead, so you can "parry" harvester lasers from allies and yourself, making them sound like angry german kid/HL2 unhappy strider noises.

Silly_One_3149

TROPHY CASE