When I received this game as a Christmas gift in 1996 I started playing it without realizing there was fast travel. My first character was level 10 by the time he stumbled into a town after I had played for the better part of 50 hours over the course of two weeks. So, yeah, I'm acutely aware of how big Daggerfall is.
@@jondo7680 The game will pound the scale of its map on your mind repeatedly, since fast travel spends (in-game) time and almost every quest in the game is timed. Meaning you have to take into consideration the (several days-long) travel time in between places when accepting quests.
The way that Josh describes it here makes it sound like Daggerfall used to have the record for largest map, but then the UK came along and beat it slightly ;D
Yeah, same way as No Man Sky has a bajillion trillion zillion planets and they're all procgen slop without character. Procgen is like the bun in a hamburger, you want just enough to hold the actual meat.
Weren't people who tried to manually go to planets met with 2D sprites? At least you can walk to stuff in daggerfall, they even managed to fumble that. Unless it got fixed, dunno, not touching that unless it costs less than 15€
Starfield doesn't have a lot of empty space between everything, it has a lot of loading screens between everything. You can't travel from a planet to its moon by just flying toward it in Starfield let alone from one planet to another, but in Daggerfall you can absolutely go from the mouth of the Iliac Bay to the Wrothgarian Mountains on foot if you really want to. Daggerfall's fast travel has you choose whether to be fast and arrive at any time without restored stats or slower and guarantee arriving with a full heal at daytime, whether to spend money at inns for the night to shave off a few days or camp out to save that money and arrive later, and whether travel by land only or take boats when possible, the later of which is incredibly expensive to hire if you don't own a boat yourself. Also, you can own a boat. The name of the game with Daggerfall is ambition, and it has it in spades.
@@tnecniw Difference is Daggerfall was made in 1996, this was groundbreaking stuff in that era where the vastness was there to serve a purpose of the world feeling massive, while Starfield is something completely different, it's not groundbreaking, and certainly doesn't have expanses between planets but loading screens, they are not comparable. Instead, it's more like it's Huge in the same way Elite/Elite Dangerous is Huge, these games are way better comparisons lets be real.
For me the most impressive part is giving the time the game released a neighborhood rumor like "if you walk for 4 hours west you'll find a legendary city" was enough for people to try it
Back then that was just how information spread back then, rumours and gaming magazines. It was at about the same time as the "secret code" to make Lara Croft naked.
Yeah I'm still miffed about this when I played it back in 96. In the manual it tells you that their might be dragons in the Alik'r Desert in Hammerfell. This was before you had wikis or people would just break into the code so we went on the assumption (every rumor in RPG's are true). With the exception of the dragonlings and the deadra prince there isn't any dragons in the game. So imaging people combing this desert for hours on end searching every dungeon and town for nothing. Also the manual says there is suppose to be Centaur porn and there isn't any of that either.
Considering daggerfalls development it feels like the manual might have been written before the game was finished given what you said, likely the dragons were cut.
@@scorcher117 The exact line from the manual. "Centaurs are ancient and mysterious creatures, alternatively worshipped and despised. Legends of their exploits range from the epic to the pornographic, perhaps for no better reason that they varied personalities. The Council of Artaeum have called the Centaurs "true followers of the Old Ways" of Tamriel, referring to the complex system of ancestor worship that Artaeum itself espouses. All that one can certainly say about Centaurs is that in battle, there are few who are equal."
@@zander2758 That is very possible but there is nothing in the code that states that their were any dragons. If they were cut you would think there would be some remnants in the code somewhere.
@@GallowglassAxe Content can be cut without any remnant in the code because it never was in the code, cut content can also be things they planned but never got to implement
Without the right mods I don't want to play Daggerfall anymore. Namely forced player controller (sped up) travel and random travel events. Like getting raided by animals or bandits, finding guard or bandit camps, finding traders on the road or even stumbling into a fight between two hostile factions (and maybe getting attacked if they hate you). Clicking to/back from random quest dungeons is just not particularly fun to me. Without mods the game sucks, but with mods it does become kind of magical.
World of Warcraft is pretty huge at just under 500 square miles - not as big as Daggerfall but then it's not a barren wasteland nor procedurally generated at all.
0:59 while it was procedurally generated initially to create such a vast world, every area in Daggerfall is identical to every copy. They generated a massive world and then went in and hand crafted certain areas. It’s actually the same way Oblivions forests were created. Arena fits more in live with what you’re saying. That game generates the world as you travel through it, so it will be different for every player
@@TheMetastasia Yeah, that could happen. But you could just teleport back of float away. In any case I *think* they did patch it (I could be wrong). The only issue that was never solved was the transmutation magic.
I've played this game quite a bit, and lets just say that (without modding) places that aren't related to the main quest are just procedurally generated. And the same for the quests, most of them are "Go here, kill this" or "Enter there, rescue that" or "Bring me my item from that place". Also, most dungeons are also generated the same way, making some quest impossible to complete early game by having the quest objective deep underwater, or behind locked doors... All that said tho, playing Unity with around 10 or 15 mods fixes some of that and the roleplay options are insane; I had lots of fun playing a thief climbing walls and sneaking into shops at night, or straight up being a merchant with my own horse and cart, without any fast-travel (with a mod that lets you "auto-run" on roads at x5/x10 speed ofc). And you can create your own spells as well, if you know what you are doing you can easily make a mana regen spell at lvl1.
I've played the game from the day it launched. I've never had a computer which didn't have daggerfall in it. Only things in daggerfall that are "generated" are quest locations (Including the completion location inside the dungeon) and quests themselves. They are procedural in the sense they are made from a set of building blocks, but they aren't random. If you go to a specific dungeon in any save game, it will be exactly the same. The quest locations inside the dungeon are picked from a list of preset locations each dungeon has. Also every dungeon has the same layout. Which can be considered a weakness of the game, but also easy to explore once you understand it. Being able to climb and breathe underwater are fundamental for daggerfall, the first main mission dungeon after you escape the cave is meant to teach you that. Water breathing potions are easy to craft as well, all you need is rain water, elixir and ivory, all which can be bought on shops. But yeah, daggerfallunity was a game changer. Love all the mods, creativity and hard work the community gives to this amazing game.
@@soulwynd IIRC they *were* procedurally generat*ed*, but there is no real-time procedural generat*ion* that happens while you play. In other words, it was randomly generated by the devs before release, and then they released that specific generation. It's the same map for everyone who plays, but it was not built by hand.
@@Zanador Generated is a bad word now? Anyway, they are procedural because they rely on building blocks, and yes, they were made at random with a given set of rules. Some of them have specific pieces for the story elements tho. It's pretty much what I've said up there. They're not randomly generated during gameplay, but the quest room inside the dungeon is randomly picked when you get the quest unless it's a story quest.
Is there a mod that adds roads to Unity? I always found the lack of roads frustrating. You have this entire huge country without any infrastructure between towns!
@landoflogic107 Basic Roads does just that! You might also be interested in World of Daggerfall Project, which adds camps, enemies and NPCs to the wilderness overworld, and Beautiful Cities of Daggerfall/Beautiful Villages of Daggerfall which adds crops, livestock, windmills (among other things) to the towns themselves which really helps them feel like believable places.
Daggerfall is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to Daggerfall!
This was mind blowing in ‘96. The reason it was cool is the sense of danger. No stupid quest markers and every area scaled too easy. Just stumbling into vampire ancients and recall spell. Monster fx and creaking doors too. A pixel that represents an entire settlement and traveling across seas for main quest drove home the sense of scale.
The thing about Daggerfall is, that is the true scale of Tamriel. Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim are all shrunk down to be a more rich game world, to varying degrees.
Flight Sim 2024 totally lets you walk around (and is a 1:1 recreation of Earth)... And I wouldn't exactly call it low-poly, though it totally can look odd in some areas... Edit: "ObsidianAnt" has a video named "The Worlds's Best Walking Sim? Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024" which shows it off pretty well
@@thegrouchization Yeah, as much as I like to travel, it costs you a lot of time and money. Plus you can't do dumb game stuff in reality like "I'm gonna walk the English channel using the tunnel just to see how long it takes."
That the land is big doesn't really matter much, you aren't going to walk any of that. I once tried to walk around Betony, but gave up a quarter of the way because I was on the edge of falling asleep. The real thing you should be showing off is the cities. I love how they actually feel like cities. Obviously the buildings all look very '90's, but they're very busy and very big. The Iliac Bay feels like a real place. Also goes for the factions. It might be a little boring to just keep getting sent on fetch quests, but I really like how many factions there are. With some more fleshing out and maybe some more ingame literature to explain, say, the differences between the knights orders and the likes, it could be super cool. You really do feel like you're working for a faction and with how much stuff there is, you're guaranteed to be able to play out any character you want to RP. I absolutely adore Morrowind, but I would've really loved to see LeFay's Morrowind too. I guess that's what Wayward Realms will do when that comes out eventually.
Yeah I like having cities you can actually get lost in. Daggerfall really needs the openMW treatment of being modified and polished by a loving community.
> Also goes for the factions. It might be a little boring to just keep getting sent on fetch quests, but I really like how many factions there are And there are WAY more than you think. And one faction reputation influences the other. Back then I used a save editor because I got grandmaster in all the guilds (and a few temples) except one, where I was stuck at the second-best rank. Not only it turned out they REALLY didn't like my other allegiances, but the list of factions, temples and guilds was never-ending. There were literally hundreds of them, which 90% of those I've never even encountered (and I played thousands and thousands of hours).
I remember walking out of privateers’ hold to find a huge bay north of it. I thought it was all of the Iliac Bay right there. Then I opened the world map and realized that it was just a small random bay at the tip of the Daggerfall region.
thats exactly how the size of daggerfall set in to me just "oh this has to be the whole iliac bay or close to it this is ginormous" and then no it wasnt
Wow, Bethesda should do another game where 90% of the content is procedurally generated, empty and requires fast traveling but this time in a space setting. People would love that
What I like about this is the fact that it’s genuine. The vast expanse creates a sense of realism, and gives the feel of embarking on a long journey in a sprawling, medieval world. Taking four hours to travel to the next town over would be quite reasonable for the period it represents. With Skyrim, however, you see a change in design philosophy where scale is traded for a meticulously compact map, densely populated with unique experiences and detail. Both have their merits, but with the latter you have a more streamlined experience that prioritises accessibility and enjoyment.
That change in design philosophy occurred immediately afterwards - the next game, Morrowind, abandoned the insane scope of Daggerfall and is a compact map more in-line with what Oblivion and Skyrim would be.
Daggerfall is effectively almost entirely randomly generated. The game is like a minecraft word, with a fixed seed that every player uses. Only story locations are hand crafted, and when playing the game properly, fast travel is effectively mandatory.
Just spent half an hour working out which keybinds work best with a controller. Then the third enemy in the game killed me because my equipment was trash. But at least there's pixellated nudity.
Does Unity have controller support? I'm considering diving back into this game. Beat the main quest in quarantine after hardly playing any video games for years. I remembered really liking pretty much everything about the game despite having played Morrowind
whoa you might be onto something here. People like me who love driving simulators would absolutely play that. Drive a carriage for hours across the wilderness ?! Sign me the f up! I really do hope a mod for that gets made.
Yeah, thats always a thing that bugs me. Places are really small, i understand why, but seeing the great city of whiterun being like 10 houses and 20 persons is super shit. I don't think that the aproach of Daggerfall is better though
@@Kayther33 The problem is that real-life scale cities are just unplayable. Skyrim should have bigger cities, that's true, but not much bigger than they already are. Anything more than that would just be hundreds of inaccessible houses and would turn simple things like going to the market and then back to your housing into 10 minute journeys.
Daggerfall is the most realistic fantasy adventurer life sim ever made. But Todd always wanted to make a third-person action-adventure game with more of a focus on story instead. You can even see it in his first game, Redguard, and Morrowind took the series more in that direction than any TES game before or since. (And it turned out to be a good direction for it.)
more focus on story... are you kidding me? todd can't write his way out of a wet paper bag and neither can his friend, Emil. They're both terrible and they ruined TES *and* Fallout trying to turn actual RPG properties into fucking action games. No it wasn't a good direction for it. It was the worst direction they could have possibly taken. I dont mind if Todd wants to make crappy action games, but he could have done it without ruining RPG properties to do so.
@@Sephirajo Who said anything about *good* writing? I'm saying that Redguard showed the direction the series was going to head towards back in 1998, and Morrowind was the first step on that path.
@@saffral I don't think it had anything to do with Redguard, I think it had more to do with Bethesda in danger of going out of business and at that time it may have been easier to make a game like Morrowind that had more focus, then it would have been to make another Daggerfall. Actually it's really strange to assume, as you could say that for battle spire, however it was game like Battle spire and Red guard which contributed to Bethesda's financial problems, which necessitated their need for a game like Morrowind because it was their hail mary. There isn't actually much Morrowind shares with redguard.
@@rorrim0 Redguard was the first game that Todd Howard was the lead game dev on, and if you look back at it you can see many attributes that have come to the main series in the years since. It had an almost Oblivion-esque dialogue system where the characters can emote and are fully voiced. (Unlike the more complex dialogue menu that came before.) In addition dialogue is chosen from a list, akin to Morrowind or Oblivion, very unlike Arena/Daggerfall. It is a third-person game, first and foremost, something that was first included as a mode with Morrowind but expanded on throughout the years. (And the exclusively first-person Arena/Daggerfall/Battlespire.) It features a smaller cast of more memorable and reoccuring characters throughout the story as we'd see especially in Oblivion (unlike Daggerfall's political leaders who, while personable, aren't going to compare to Martin, Baurus, or Jauffre.) It features a significantly smaller but custom made open map, something Morrowind brought to the main series. (Battlespire took place across a linear series of open maps.) Also Redguard is just generally where the aesthetic of TES really started. The races all generally look "normal", including the Khajiit finally looking like cats and not just weird furry people. It's even the first one with steampunk Dwemer technology, no longer the generic dwarves referenced in the previous titles. And in terms of lore, Redguard is the game where a huge amount of it came from. It's the first one Kirkbride had a hand in and it came with the first edition of the Pocket Guide to the Empire. Don't get me wrong, Battlespire is cool, and it's probably the most traditional RPG-y game in the entire series, but it was made by the devs of Daggerfall and it shows.
I really get the vibe most people here are judging a game that they've never even played. Just for the record, you never have to explore this giant world - it's never required. It's just there. The game happens in villages, cities, and dungeons. The fast travel is done through a menu, not this mod that Josh is using. The procedural generation is more robust than in Starfield - yes dungeons are nondescript, but they're not the exact same layout with the exact same premises/enemies like what SF does. The world is huge, the atmosphere is off the charts, the different joinable factions enable lots of roleplaying and a sense of progression that just wouldn't be possible in a more handcrafted world. Seriously folks, Daggerfall is free, Daggerfall Unity is free. It takes like 20 minutes to set up. There's a reason dozens of people volunteered their time for free for several years to rebuild the game in Unity. Give it 2 hours of your time and THEN decide how you feel about the game. Don't just say "Quality over quantity" and write the game off. It shows ignorance.
I had extremely much fun with Daggerfall Unity. Until I couldn't stand the huge-ass dungeons anymore: I caught myself immediately console-teleporting me to the quest goal in order to save myself from another 2-hour dungeon crawl. At that point, I figured I might as well leave it be. But the journey up to that point was amazing, immersive, sometimes goofy and always amusing. I can wholly recommend a go at Daggerfall to any RPG enthusiast.
@captainash6581 Having played it, even with a bunch of mods to make it better, I have to agree with the people saying they prefer quality over quantity. This game is just not very fun to play and the sheer size of the world is a major part of the problem. I've always thought Bethesdas best games were the ones that used the least procedural generation. Playing this game proved me right.
@@Kuchenwurst Yeah, play it with smaller dungeons and it's great. They're still big by modern standards but not so much it's literally impossible to navigate. It feels just right
Starfield's mistake is that for some reason, while the dungeons are all hand-crafted, the actual *pool* of dungeons that can spawn in random locations is like literally 20 dungeons or so, meaning they repeat extremely frequently. It is not outside the realm of realistic statistics to encounter the same dungeon on the very first two planets you explore.
I think what a lot of people are missing here is that Daggerfall isn't like Oblivion or Skyrim. Yes, you were given the opportunity to do the main quest. However, if I'm not mistaken you can fail the main questline if you take too long. You aren't the chosen one like in those games. Daggerfall is more of a medieval life sim than an epic chosen one story. The world doesn't care if you live or die. It goes on as if you don't matter.
I'd rather have vast worlds to explore, even if the content is sparse, my headcanon gets free reign. I hate tripping over distractions and/or "something else to do" every 10 steps.
@@kleinesdaisukii I don't think we ever will. The only way to get high quality assets and level design and all the content you'd want, in mass scale of that magnitude Is machine learning and AI generation. Which don't get me wrong, i have full faith in those becoming really really good, like more consistently putting out decent content than your average AAA game right now But i believe you and most other people would be well aware just how that content was made, and find little pleasure in interacting with it. Because you know it was just made in a microsecond by a machine with the same parameters as the other few thousand locations in the game world. So I don't believe it'll ever get to the mass scale you imagine where it feels "meaningful".
@@Alex_Was_Taken I don't think you understand just how much nothing is actually in Daggerfall my friend. You genuinely probably think you want a hundred thousand square miles of nothing, but no, no you don't. If you think otherwise, give Daggerfall a shot and come back to me.
@@baneblackguard584 I mean I had fun with daggerfall but without mods, it got boring pretty fast I love the concept and for its age the gameplay is amazing but I just don’t find fetch quests and simple combat gameplay very fun Glad you enjoy the game vanilla though
I've been to 151 countries in the past 50 years, visited thousands of cities, towns and sites, met more people than I can remember. I will never see all that there is in a lifetime and that is perfectly fine. It just feels the same with massive games that use procedural generation. To know it is all really there is enough to make it all enjoyable for me.
Mate got oblivion and we ran home from school to play it at his house. His mom used to play daggerfall and one day she showed us it and all though we scoffed at the graphics, the sheer size of it blew me away completely.
If there's one thing I hope for in the following decades, its an official Daggerfall remake, with the exact same map size and scale. Just modernized. Surely the supercomputer I have by then will be able to handle the size without burning out.
GOG released Daggerfall Unity in 2022, a collection of fan-made mods to modernize it. The mods have continued evolving, but the GOG version is convenient. The graphics are much improved, even if it's often just better textures for the sprites. I''m sure the latest version of the mods are better still.
@@SkorjOlafsen do NOT play GOG cut, it's horribly out of date and runs terribly and GOG hasn't updated it since 2022 and will not update it. Get DFUnity straight from their website, and you can actually run up to date mods that don't crash every 5 seconds like the scuffed GOG cut.
@@SkorjOlafsen No no no, Daggerfall Unity is NOT AT ALL something released by GOG. It's an open source project started by Interkarma in 2014 building on the Unity engine (a poor choice since it's proprietary junk, but it is what it is). GOG just offers a convenient bundle of the original Daggerfall content, Daggerfall Unity and a whole bunch of mods. Speaking of which, do not use that pack, it's a terrible compilation. Better still, do not use any mod pack. Just compile a list for yourself. Most of these modlists/modpacks are about as dank as it gets, and are just sloppily and haphazardly thrown together. Just look for mods you might like yourself.
The largest game map ever that isn't procedurally generated is the map of the lord of the rings online which faithfully recreates the entirety of Middle-earth
I am in fact aware of how huge Daggerfall is because I'm a fossil who was *obsessed* with this game when it came out, and tried on multiple occasions to walk manually, and always ended up reverting to fast travel.
@@Pwnopolis for whatever reason my second comment dissapeared but Daggerfall and Arena are free and the mod is free so everyone should give it a try if they are interested
that's great and all, but that entire sped up section was just going through the forest that looked almost like it was looping with nothing of value there
That's exactly what it is, outside of POIs for the main quest, everything is procedurally generated. Dungeons, wilderness, I think even town layouts. I believe they're the same every playthrough, but they were not play tested to make sure they made sense. Daggerfall is big to be big, but also so you do have an entire world in the background of your exploits. I don't think Bethesda intended anyone to spend years of their life scanning every nook and cranny of Daggerfall
Yes, but this is not skyrim you are not suppose to go everywhere you can go. Daggerfall's purpose is to show you that you are in a world where the world exists even when you arent playing
Back when "fast travel" did NOT mean "free teleportation thanks to your magic map." A game's world is only as big as the fastest method of travel allows it to be.
I believe one of the best map sizes I've seen in video games - were in Might and Magic series - maps were big enough to explore, to get lost at times and to have points of interest scattered enough not to feel overfilled (like skyrim, where you can't take a step aside without stumbling into something), yet maps were small enough not to feel empty and pointless - it was that golden center.
Yes, I agree, that would be a very good example for me as well. In all of those games (both old and newer ones) you're very free to explore and discover, your hand is never being held, but it's all manageable and you can still keep it in your head. Good example!
Small maps are repetitive too, you take the same routes, see the same streets. You can't get away from it. Big or small, you see the same stuff over and over.
This is a game so large in landmass that people who tried to travel across it manually back when it came out frequently ran out of RAM capacity. Also I now have to find his modlist because that map icon set is way better than vanilla.
That is one of the reasons why Daggerfall is in my top ten games of all times and certainly my favorite Elder Scrolls game. It doesn't do very much for the gameplay but I KNOW it's there, and there's something about that feeling of a vast world that adds a lot to the experience.
Too many people are way too quick to dunk on this game. Like we get it, 90% of the comments are "we don't care there's no content!!!" Yes the map was big but thin on content. It was the mid 90s. It's easy to dunk on it now, but if you were around then it was impressive. It was the era before any of the now-standard game formulas were figured out, devs were able to make whatever they wanted to see what sticks. The game wasn't terrible, some parts were great and some didn't land. And it let people's imaginations run wild, which made it a good game for so many back then. It's literally that 4chan post where someone posts a screenshot of daggerfall and says "boomers shat their pants over this?" And someone responds, "It must be hard to wrap your head around progress being made since your whole generation has known nothing but stagnation." It's like dunking on a 20s pickup not having ac or motorized windshield wipers or power steering. Valid criticism? Probably. But it's only because you're used to all the progress made since then. It's best to view these things in the context of their time and enjoy them for what they are
I was around then, bought the game, and still have it boxed on my shelf. I didn't think it was that impressive. This game came out in 1996. You're talking about it like it was an early 80s game. We already had big RPGs. We had Doom 1 and 2. We were in the golden age of PSX and N64. Daggerfall got maybe 10 hours of play from me before I shelved it because there was too much else for me to play. You had to be a certain type of gamer to enjoy Daggerfall and appreciate it. Don't pretend that everyone was that type of gamer.
I mean, I get what you say but still, the size is absolutely pointless. It's a huge waste of time and even though it's interesting to think of, who would really walk several hours through a boring wasteland of nothingness to reach the next town? I don't get it. If this was a science project in 1970 this would interesting to read a paper about, but this is not a game. Or at least it's not an interesting element of a game. It's just something you write on the box and once you think about it, is loses all it's magic, since it's absolutely pointless. Minecraft was revolutionary, this was just scaled to a size tech was not ready for yet to fill with interesting content.
@@4everdex It was a novelty that they built into the mechanics. The player wasn't expected to walk from town to town, they were expected to fast travel. But fast traveling in Daggerfall has real consequences since quests tend to be time-sensitive.
It really wasn't that novel or impressive in 1996 though. But I think you're kinda missing the point people are making. As I've said a billion times myself, I really like Daggerfall. I'm not dunking on the game as a whole. But the procedural content is my least favorite part of it. I'm sure I would have liked it more if it had like 5% of the landmass but 4 times as much handcrafted content. Yeah, I get that the large landmass is very cool and inspiring. But that feeling quickly fades after about an hour of getting to the point where you use the world map. The positive aspects of the huge landmass (the overwhelming feeling you get at the start of the game) disappear rather quickly IMO. And I'm not sure Bethesda's ambitions of an RPG Life Sim couldn't have been fulfilled by sticking with less generated content and more hand-crafted content. Furthermore, I'm also not criticizing the use of procgen per se. Rather, I don't like the over-reliance on it. The ratio of hand-crafted vs generated is just out of balance. Most generated dungeons in the game are borderline unplayable IMO, they're insane labyrinths that you sometimes can't even complete because the algorithm for generating them isn't robust enough not to generate impossible dungeons. I would have preferred to have seen much more handcrafted dungeons, and leave the procgen dungeons for random landmarks with little or no questing attached to it. Personally I would always recommend people tick the "Smaller Dungeons" option if they play Daggerfall Unity, because it's just such a big problem. I'm also rather unsure about the "progress" argument you're making. The choice to make the entire landmass procedurally generated really has nothing to do with whether or not the technology or game design standards of the time were developed enough. No, it was just a design decision they made. If they wanted to go for a smaller, more handcrafted map, they could have done that, like many of the other RPGs that came before Daggerfall did. If they wanted to make a game of the same size and scope as Daggerfall, they would have to use precisely the same techniques in 2024. It would also have to be procedurally generated slop. Yes, we would undoubtedly have more interesting procedural content to generate, but the idea would be precisely the same. The choice between handcrafted and generated would be the same tradeoff, just like it was in 1996. So really I'm not sure I see what you're saying if I'm being honest.
It was impressive but it was also extremely buggy to the point of being unplayable. A lot of mechanics were under developed or cut right before launch because they just didn't work right.
it's insane that this game with unity engine looks better than it ever could have been. With low resolution(320x240 i suppose in this game?) and draw distance(10-15 meters at max i think, it was very limited in original game) you couldn't appreciate how important proper big distance in a game. Yes it's empty, yes it's pre-generated seed. But it's also realistic approach that is really underappeciated. For example Minecraft, there is a mod that adds proper LoD background to the game, where you can turn on pretty much unlimited view distance that only depends on your hardware. ALSO, since not a long ago, it supports shaders. It's actually insane how good it looks. It gives me similiar vibes to seeing Daggerfall scale... it's very rare when games can actually do something like this, or devs even trying to do.
I like how people, be all like, the world is empty etc etc. But! Let's imagine medieval world that we had. People had to travel hours, and sometimes days in-between settlements, and let's be fair they were hoping to have as little extra content as possible, less content safer travel. So in that regard the game is actually realistic in a way. Some extra content like bandit camps and wild animals would make experience much more immersive thought. P.s.: I love Daggerfall, made like 5-6 playthroughs. The roleplaying potential is very, very vast.
@@youareacoward8459 You can fast travel to every dungeon. There is literally no reason to go by foot, unless you want to experience the size of the world. So yes, the world itself is mostly empty. Unless it's a dungeon or a city there is literally nothing going on. The game, mostly, is a dungeon crawler. And don't get me wrong I don't criticize the game for it, there is enough content in the dungeons for a lifetime.
@@HostageMax for me its not about the empty spaces, I agree there are things to do, places to explore, but even then I think the playtime is lower in reality due to the repetitiveness that goes with a world that seems huge but has nothing going on in it with very little unquie gaming experiences in it. look again cool for its time, but I think many are overhyping the experience here, 100+ dungeons are great, but it loses its novelty very quickly. I think daggerfall is great for people who really wanna experience a true classic role playing open world game , but the average player will only play oh so much before losing interest within the first few hrs
Daggerfall is one of the main reasons why Bethesda started scaling down the provinces in the following games. Yes, Vvardenfell, Cyrodiil and Skyrim feel small but in lore they are massive landmasses
When quantity becomes a quality. Of course, one which inherently makes proportionately giant compromises. Back then? Playing this as a kid? I would not care one bit. Normal games already felt infinite, I never snapped out of the immersion to realize the finite reality and programmed nature of games. If there was a place I couldn't go in Pokemon, it was just a matter of finding a way to me, nvm the complete empty void that's actually over there. I miss being a stupid kid
Early TES games be like: Hello, here's a game with a map that's one portion of Tamriel, which is also several times larger than the earlier game which had the entire map of Tamriel. Yeah, go figure that one out, why don't ya?
Its not WRONG that Daggerfall has a huge open world but I think its a little bit misleading. You can wander around in the wilderness and encounter absolutely nothing for hours. Its a huge game and a huge map but you're not going to be exploring it without fast travel very much without mods for the Unity version.
To be fair, Skyrim’s game size is not lore accurate. The map, towns, cities, and everything is supposed to be so much larger, but there’s only so much they could do.
What's funny is this just shows more how small Skyrim really is. If you think that comparing Daggerfall to the UK is meant to make it sound big, but then realize that in Earth terms the UK is scarcely more than a dot... Skyrim is basically the size of a large farm in America. It's a very condensed representation of a state. But that's why it is so good, because it is packed with stuff to explore. There is no corner of Skyrim that doesn't have something to be discovered. Map size is such a small part of what makes a good game. It's density of content that really matters.
Look at fallout new Vegas, it's actually pretty tiny. Like you download a sprint mod and the map gets really small. But I've been playing it for a decade and I'm still finding new things and having a blast playing it. You definitely have a point
You cannot just walk from A to B in Skyrim, not really at least, you always stumble on something new to do on the way. It's so densely filled that even though the map is actually kinda small, the game does feel huge.
Skyrim is a very condensed map that is much smaller than real scale, yes. So is practically every open-world game ever made that isn't called Daggerfall. Every Spider-man game renders Manhattan at like 1/2 - 1/4 scale, for example.
@@Zanadorwell to be fair most gamers do not like taking hours to get to a mission marker at the other side of manhattan ...thats why open game maps are more condensed these days Huge 1:1 travel times are more the speed of sim players
remember the world and dungeons and towns were manually PRE-generated ahead of time by the devs. so a town layout won't be different in different save games. then the devs overlaid custom towns and dungeons that were handmade, mainly main story ones, on top of that. there are like 4000 pre-generated dungeons, and like 100 custom hand-made ones.
Back when games had the right (as in believable) amount of scope. Skyrim with it's (at most) 5000 inhabitants has a completely wrong scale. Made it feel like solving problems in my local village that were just made into world shattering problems by the locals because they'd never left the area.
@ Exactly. After a while you lose all sense of importance since (even if) at most a dozen people die. I hope that‘s the one thing they do better for TES6 but looking at Starfield which should literally have a population count faaaaar beyond anything else they did before…I kinda lost hope.
"Back when games had the right amount of scope" Uh, not sure what you're on about here. Most games back then just had the same scope as video games do now: the right amount fit for the purpose of the game. Yes there were certainly a lot of other games with huge scopes like Daggerfall, but it's not like that was the standard or anything. Most games don't set out to make a "realistic" scope (otherwise every game would have to model the entire galaxy, which is impossible since we don't even know how to map that out properly). Rather, they want to make a certain game and the scope is regulated by its design. Yes cities in Skyrim or Morrowind are rather small, but that works well with the design of the game. Imagine if, in order you had to the game's scope "realistic", you had to take the bus to get somewhere. But you have to wait 10 real life minutes before it arrives. But then it doesn't show up, and you have to wait 10 minutes before it actually arrives. Then you have to sit on the bus for 25 minutes before you arrive at your destination. That would give you a very believable scope, but it's hard to fit compelling game design into that experience. Having a smaller city and small population numbers allows you to become familiar with the area and explore it effectively. You can get to where you need to be rather quickly, and you can get familiar with all characters. Going to the Jarl from the entrance would have taken maybe 45 minutes on foot in a realistically sized city, but that again doesn't really sound very fun does it? Okay, fast-travel can be introduced, but then you slowly come to be entirely at the mercy of fast travel, gives no opportunity to actually explore what's in between and makes it impossible for the developers to put interesting content in between fast travel points. At that point, how realistic is your city even then? Really, it's no longer a city, but a series of points you get to travel to that are isolated from the rest of the all the similar points of interest. In Morrowind, I can travel from one city to the next and experience parts of the world naturally, and come across interesting sight, potentially interesting NPCs, etc. And I get to feel how the entire world of Vvardenfell is interconnected, and I get to see the landscape change as I go through different biomes, and get familiar with the wild life, etc etc etc etc. All of that would be impossible in a game with a "believable" scope. All but the most hardcore of simulations go for practical scope that enhances the game design, rather than work against it for the sake of having something "believable" (side not: plenty of games have believable game worlds even if they're unrealistic in size. It's called suspension of disbelief). And even those hardcore sims still recognize that they're not the real thing. After all, that's what they are: simulations.
It’s big but it’s dull. How big a game map can be is just a math equation connecting the graphics resolution to the users’s GPU RAM. What you want more of is stuff to do, characters to talk to. That’s what fleshes out a game world. The Witcher 3 world is bigger than daggerfall, in every way apart from geography.
Well, you kind of can. You can get a few little quests off people you talk to, you can ask for directions and information. You can get quests from guilds that have you go in people's houses to do things, like kill, steal, rescue and so on. There's also little dungeons and the like dotted around to come across. Yeah it's repetitive, but then so are modern games like the Witcher.
People complain about empty land. But I'd rather have space than theme park layout like World of Warcraft where they stick quests and stuff over the top. Music and story changes all the time when you make a walk for a minute, not good. There's just no value where there's value in every step.
It's true that not every step should be valuable. But there has to be a middle ground. I don't play games that ask me to walk for over an hour straight before my next step that contains value.
@juanex721 yeah, his argument doesn't make much sense. If we are stuck between those two choices and there being no in-between, how is nothing the preferable option?
The size was part of the gameplay also back then - it took a lot of time (in game days and weeks even) and planning to travel from location to another for some timed quests etc. It felt big as well, not just empty wastelands between cities, even if you didnt go there.
@@staticcharm3808 Yeah, but it didnt feel empty, because of the game mechanics made it so you just didnt want to accidentally travel somewhere far and then back like its just one click.
That realtime travel thing is a mod, for the record. In the vanilla game, and even unmodded Daggerfall Unity, you'll just pop over to wherever you fast travel to. Travel time is only measured for the purposes of quest-scheduling. I don't actually think that travel would have taken you four REALTIME hours; but it would take four hours in in-game time, meaning that amount of time would pass and you'd be that much closer to your deadlines.
You’re putting this forward like it’s a good thing. The fact that Skyrim’s world is so packed with content is great. They obviously could have spread each landmark out between 4 hours of empty plains and forest, but I’m infinitely glad that they didn’t.
That's one of the things that made Morrowind so good. The game was almost the same size as Skyrim, but it was packed with way more to do in it than Skyrim was.
If you think Skyrim is "packed with content", you haven't played Oblivion or Morrowind. There is a reason people say Skyrim is "wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle".
@@tarael86On one side I agree that Skyrim lacks good stories and deep/long questlines, but where it shines is blind exploration. Just going somewhere without a quest, there are tons of little details to uncover everywhere. Oblivion is the opposite, you have good/interesting quests with actual good writing, but the dungeons, enemies and overland are very bland and repetitive. Oh and oblivion has a completely butchered leveling system that’s basically impossible to use without mods. That in itself makes the game unplayable for lots of people.
@@wingthomaux I'd say every single TES game has a terrible leveling system. If you craft 500 iron daggers in Skyrim and then go out into the world again, enemies will be much stronger for absolutely no fucking reason because you leveled up a bunch of times but gained zero power.
@ but you did gain power. You leveled up your smithing-> better gear. You also gained the equivalent of the individual skill xp to your overall xp. The big difference in oblivion is that you have to level the individual skill perfectly evenly, so that your overall level doesn’t outgrow them. In oblivion you can gain 15 overall levels (and meet enemies according to that level) with only "crafting 500 iron daggers“ in Skyrim you would maybe gain 3. So you might disclose the simplicity of Skyrim’s leveling system, but claiming it’s broken like oblivion‘s is just bs. In Skyrim the only times you can meet overleveled enemies is when they have a certain min level and you go into that dungeon too early. Then you either take the hard fight (and spam healing pots) or you leave to come back later. In oblivion you can fuck up a whole playthrough if you level a certain skill faster than the others. Like someone smarter than me once said: "in oblivion you’re at your strongest at level 1 and with every level up you get weaker relative to the world, you have to actively counteract this by preplanning your leveling with a spreadsheet.“ That’s why some people who don’t want to get into mods, simply play the game without leveling up once. I personally fucked up my first oblivion playthrough, because I went to the fighting arena, with the mindset of leveling my combat skills, did that, then leveled up in the nearest tavern and in the next dungeon got blasted into oblivion :) by the first mobs I encountered.
It reminds me Arcanum, when you tried to go from one location to another without fast travel, and you ran and ran and your marker on the map barely moved. But from the other side it gave sense of freedom in open world.
Think the time mentioned is ingame time. Cause from he started to reaching destination it only took 1 min and that was with it at 30 for 13 sec, 20 for 14 sec, 15 for 12 sec and 10 for 21 sec. Meaning if he had run in the same path it would have taken him around 1060 sec or 17m40s. Ofc this time is only true if the fast travel speed is equal to normal running. So yes the game is huge, but it's not as insanely huge he make it sounds.
@@TeamSevenStar well, 70% of the areas are just enemies that give you 100 runes, some useless items and a boss that gives you some runes you don't need lol. Mountaintop of the giants, bayle mountain etc.
On one hand, I love games that are developed with a large scale and scope. On the other hand, New Vegas is tiny, yet it's filled to the brim with notable encounters. You gotta know how to work with the size you're given.
I’d rather have a map that takes 4 minutes to walk around but full of interesting stuff over having a giant map that is just trees and grass for 20 minutes
Seeing skyrim be used as a baseline for so many game's size makes me realize not how big everything else is, but just how profoundly *DENSE* skyrim is, it feels huge but its not really as big as it looks, just the amount of random bullshit everywhere slowing you down or constantly finding things makes it feel so much bigger.
doesn't matter how big it is, if it has nothing in it.. it's basically as boring as no mans sky or elite dangerous. i'd prefer a well crafted experience than a procedural desert
If anyone wants to try daggerfall, use the "smaller dungeons" option in daggerfall unity. It's a lifesaver since you can actually complete side quests instead of running around aimlessly in some massive labyrinth just for the sake of completing some fighters guild quest for 200 gold. And the main quest dungeons are unchanged (since those were handmade not proc gen) so you can still get the classic daggerfall dungeon experience there
Daggerfall was procedurally generated, but every copy shipped with the same seed, so layouts weren't random they were all identical
It's only the dungeons then that are proc gen
@@YOGI-kb9tg The dungeons all used the same seed too, so the same dungeon would be identical for all players who encounter it.
@@YOGI-kb9tg The only random thing about the dungeons are the inhabitants and the respective loot tables might be worth mentioning.
@OutsiderLabs really? I thought they were all proc genes but that's interesting info to have.
So is there a way to enable it?
Damn... that ship on the map must be massive.
Must be the end boss. 😅
Jesus... that sea monster is twice it's size. It's bigger than some regions, even!
@@TheEDFLegacy Maybe it's a Kingdom Hearts final boss.
Noah's ark fr
@@thomasbuckley1436 sea shenron
When I received this game as a Christmas gift in 1996 I started playing it without realizing there was fast travel. My first character was level 10 by the time he stumbled into a town after I had played for the better part of 50 hours over the course of two weeks. So, yeah, I'm acutely aware of how big Daggerfall is.
That's actually adorable 😂😂😂
I didn't play the game but I think fast travel takes away what such a big map gives you. Your play style sounds better.
@@jondo7680 bro
@@jondo7680 not in daggerfall the map is pretty much empty
@@jondo7680 The game will pound the scale of its map on your mind repeatedly, since fast travel spends (in-game) time and almost every quest in the game is timed. Meaning you have to take into consideration the (several days-long) travel time in between places when accepting quests.
The way that Josh describes it here makes it sound like Daggerfall used to have the record for largest map, but then the UK came along and beat it slightly ;D
Tbf, we were/are the world champions at painting the map in our colours.
Less knife fights in Daggerfall.
@@joseph1150 and a clear map of the regions
Damn
@@joseph1150Fewer
Yes, it's huge. Which is also true for an Excel sheet when you just scroll long enough.
Best way to put it tbh
lmao
- 🤖
Excel Scrolls
@@thefatbob3710Bot
Daggerfall is indeed huge.
But lets be fair here, it is huge in the same way that Starfield is huge.
A lot of empty space between.
Yeah, same way as No Man Sky has a bajillion trillion zillion planets and they're all procgen slop without character. Procgen is like the bun in a hamburger, you want just enough to hold the actual meat.
Weren't people who tried to manually go to planets met with 2D sprites? At least you can walk to stuff in daggerfall, they even managed to fumble that. Unless it got fixed, dunno, not touching that unless it costs less than 15€
Starfield doesn't have a lot of empty space between everything, it has a lot of loading screens between everything. You can't travel from a planet to its moon by just flying toward it in Starfield let alone from one planet to another, but in Daggerfall you can absolutely go from the mouth of the Iliac Bay to the Wrothgarian Mountains on foot if you really want to.
Daggerfall's fast travel has you choose whether to be fast and arrive at any time without restored stats or slower and guarantee arriving with a full heal at daytime, whether to spend money at inns for the night to shave off a few days or camp out to save that money and arrive later, and whether travel by land only or take boats when possible, the later of which is incredibly expensive to hire if you don't own a boat yourself. Also, you can own a boat.
The name of the game with Daggerfall is ambition, and it has it in spades.
@@andream5690 Sure.
But the point remains that 90% of the space between each holding in daggerfall contains nothing.
@@tnecniw Difference is Daggerfall was made in 1996, this was groundbreaking stuff in that era where the vastness was there to serve a purpose of the world feeling massive, while Starfield is something completely different, it's not groundbreaking, and certainly doesn't have expanses between planets but loading screens, they are not comparable. Instead, it's more like it's Huge in the same way Elite/Elite Dangerous is Huge, these games are way better comparisons lets be real.
For me the most impressive part is giving the time the game released a neighborhood rumor like "if you walk for 4 hours west you'll find a legendary city" was enough for people to try it
Unverifiable because they'd all fall through the floor within 10 minutes of that. Devilish.
Is that way Josh was ~4h west from Charley?
they meant 4 hours west irl in fast-travel
Damn
Back then that was just how information spread back then, rumours and gaming magazines. It was at about the same time as the "secret code" to make Lara Croft naked.
Yeah I'm still miffed about this when I played it back in 96. In the manual it tells you that their might be dragons in the Alik'r Desert in Hammerfell. This was before you had wikis or people would just break into the code so we went on the assumption (every rumor in RPG's are true). With the exception of the dragonlings and the deadra prince there isn't any dragons in the game. So imaging people combing this desert for hours on end searching every dungeon and town for nothing.
Also the manual says there is suppose to be Centaur porn and there isn't any of that either.
Considering daggerfalls development it feels like the manual might have been written before the game was finished given what you said, likely the dragons were cut.
Wanna expand on that last part?
@@scorcher117 The exact line from the manual.
"Centaurs are ancient and mysterious creatures, alternatively worshipped and despised. Legends of their exploits range from the epic to the pornographic, perhaps for no better reason that they varied personalities. The Council of Artaeum have called the Centaurs "true followers of the Old Ways" of Tamriel, referring to the complex system of ancestor worship that Artaeum itself espouses. All that one can certainly say about Centaurs is that in battle, there are few who are equal."
@@zander2758 That is very possible but there is nothing in the code that states that their were any dragons. If they were cut you would think there would be some remnants in the code somewhere.
@@GallowglassAxe Content can be cut without any remnant in the code because it never was in the code, cut content can also be things they planned but never got to implement
Nothing like walk for 2 hours on empty land to feel the magic.
Nothing like getting home from work to open a cold one and walk 4 hours in a videogame
Without the right mods I don't want to play Daggerfall anymore. Namely forced player controller (sped up) travel and random travel events. Like getting raided by animals or bandits, finding guard or bandit camps, finding traders on the road or even stumbling into a fight between two hostile factions (and maybe getting attacked if they hate you).
Clicking to/back from random quest dungeons is just not particularly fun to me. Without mods the game sucks, but with mods it does become kind of magical.
World of Warcraft is pretty huge at just under 500 square miles - not as big as Daggerfall but then it's not a barren wasteland nor procedurally generated at all.
@@MetalDude-s1cyeah but that was a game worked on for ages
Considering this was made in the 90s it's pretty impressive still....
0:59 while it was procedurally generated initially to create such a vast world, every area in Daggerfall is identical to every copy. They generated a massive world and then went in and hand crafted certain areas. It’s actually the same way Oblivions forests were created. Arena fits more in live with what you’re saying. That game generates the world as you travel through it, so it will be different for every player
I imagine that you can easily mod the game to modify the seed
How about the Dungeons. I remember that Dungeons could be almost impossible because they can have Obstacles that can be made by certain Skills.
Its the same thing they do to this day and thats why players mock Bethesda
@@TheMetastasia Yeah, that could happen. But you could just teleport back of float away. In any case I *think* they did patch it (I could be wrong). The only issue that was never solved was the transmutation magic.
I've played this game quite a bit, and lets just say that (without modding) places that aren't related to the main quest are just procedurally generated. And the same for the quests, most of them are "Go here, kill this" or "Enter there, rescue that" or "Bring me my item from that place".
Also, most dungeons are also generated the same way, making some quest impossible to complete early game by having the quest objective deep underwater, or behind locked doors...
All that said tho, playing Unity with around 10 or 15 mods fixes some of that and the roleplay options are insane; I had lots of fun playing a thief climbing walls and sneaking into shops at night, or straight up being a merchant with my own horse and cart, without any fast-travel (with a mod that lets you "auto-run" on roads at x5/x10 speed ofc).
And you can create your own spells as well, if you know what you are doing you can easily make a mana regen spell at lvl1.
I've played the game from the day it launched. I've never had a computer which didn't have daggerfall in it.
Only things in daggerfall that are "generated" are quest locations (Including the completion location inside the dungeon) and quests themselves. They are procedural in the sense they are made from a set of building blocks, but they aren't random. If you go to a specific dungeon in any save game, it will be exactly the same. The quest locations inside the dungeon are picked from a list of preset locations each dungeon has. Also every dungeon has the same layout. Which can be considered a weakness of the game, but also easy to explore once you understand it.
Being able to climb and breathe underwater are fundamental for daggerfall, the first main mission dungeon after you escape the cave is meant to teach you that. Water breathing potions are easy to craft as well, all you need is rain water, elixir and ivory, all which can be bought on shops.
But yeah, daggerfallunity was a game changer. Love all the mods, creativity and hard work the community gives to this amazing game.
@@soulwynd IIRC they *were* procedurally generat*ed*, but there is no real-time procedural generat*ion* that happens while you play.
In other words, it was randomly generated by the devs before release, and then they released that specific generation. It's the same map for everyone who plays, but it was not built by hand.
@@Zanador Generated is a bad word now? Anyway, they are procedural because they rely on building blocks, and yes, they were made at random with a given set of rules. Some of them have specific pieces for the story elements tho.
It's pretty much what I've said up there. They're not randomly generated during gameplay, but the quest room inside the dungeon is randomly picked when you get the quest unless it's a story quest.
Is there a mod that adds roads to Unity? I always found the lack of roads frustrating. You have this entire huge country without any infrastructure between towns!
@landoflogic107 Basic Roads does just that! You might also be interested in World of Daggerfall Project, which adds camps, enemies and NPCs to the wilderness overworld, and Beautiful Cities of Daggerfall/Beautiful Villages of Daggerfall which adds crops, livestock, windmills (among other things) to the towns themselves which really helps them feel like believable places.
Daggerfall is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to Daggerfall!
ohoho, that's a good one
You could walk around most the biomes of Earth and not find much . God was a shitty Dev.
42
In Caldera, [The dunmer] they're eating the silt striders! They're eating the cliff-racers!
"Its the size of...a gas station! Its huge!"
This was mind blowing in ‘96. The reason it was cool is the sense of danger. No stupid quest markers and every area scaled too easy. Just stumbling into vampire ancients and recall spell. Monster fx and creaking doors too.
A pixel that represents an entire settlement and traveling across seas for main quest drove home the sense of scale.
The thing about Daggerfall is, that is the true scale of Tamriel. Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim are all shrunk down to be a more rich game world, to varying degrees.
and world of warcraft is better than every bethesda game combined
@@MetalDude-s1c how many chins do you have
@@MetalDude-s1c imagine playing an MMO 🤮🤮🤮
@@omphya6229 awww little bethesda fanboy gonna cry?
@@Kayther33 MMORPG... call yourself a gamer? Imagine fucking playing a Bethesda game and thinking it's good
the sahara desert is also big, and has the same entertainment value as the parts of the daggerfall map that arent related to main quests
Probably more entertainment.
I would pay handsomely for a 1:1 low-poly recreation of the Earth that you could walk around in.
Flight Sim 2024 totally lets you walk around (and is a 1:1 recreation of Earth)... And I wouldn't exactly call it low-poly, though it totally can look odd in some areas...
Edit: "ObsidianAnt" has a video named "The Worlds's Best Walking Sim? Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024" which shows it off pretty well
There's a really cool game called outside you should try out
@@popcornhead5154 Outside has things called "borders" and "travel expenses".
@@thegrouchization Yeah, as much as I like to travel, it costs you a lot of time and money. Plus you can't do dumb game stuff in reality like "I'm gonna walk the English channel using the tunnel just to see how long it takes."
There is a Minecraft map for that
That the land is big doesn't really matter much, you aren't going to walk any of that. I once tried to walk around Betony, but gave up a quarter of the way because I was on the edge of falling asleep. The real thing you should be showing off is the cities. I love how they actually feel like cities. Obviously the buildings all look very '90's, but they're very busy and very big. The Iliac Bay feels like a real place. Also goes for the factions. It might be a little boring to just keep getting sent on fetch quests, but I really like how many factions there are. With some more fleshing out and maybe some more ingame literature to explain, say, the differences between the knights orders and the likes, it could be super cool. You really do feel like you're working for a faction and with how much stuff there is, you're guaranteed to be able to play out any character you want to RP. I absolutely adore Morrowind, but I would've really loved to see LeFay's Morrowind too. I guess that's what Wayward Realms will do when that comes out eventually.
Yeah I like having cities you can actually get lost in.
Daggerfall really needs the openMW treatment of being modified and polished by a loving community.
@@jmw1500There is Daggerfall Unity that does exactly that.
@@Knoloaify Very cool
Damn interesting
> Also goes for the factions. It might be a little boring to just keep getting sent on fetch quests, but I really like how many factions there are
And there are WAY more than you think. And one faction reputation influences the other.
Back then I used a save editor because I got grandmaster in all the guilds (and a few temples) except one, where I was stuck at the second-best rank. Not only it turned out they REALLY didn't like my other allegiances, but the list of factions, temples and guilds was never-ending. There were literally hundreds of them, which 90% of those I've never even encountered (and I played thousands and thousands of hours).
I remember walking out of privateers’ hold to find a huge bay north of it. I thought it was all of the Iliac Bay right there. Then I opened the world map and realized that it was just a small random bay at the tip of the Daggerfall region.
thats exactly how the size of daggerfall set in to me just "oh this has to be the whole iliac bay or close to it this is ginormous" and then no
it wasnt
Wow, Bethesda should do another game where 90% of the content is procedurally generated, empty and requires fast traveling but this time in a space setting. People would love that
Hahaha and fill it with the same 3 procedurally generated mini dungeons over and over, players love familiarity
Fr, like another user said you can scroll infinitely on a spreadsheet and it’s about as impressive as the world of daggerfall
What I like about this is the fact that it’s genuine. The vast expanse creates a sense of realism, and gives the feel of embarking on a long journey in a sprawling, medieval world. Taking four hours to travel to the next town over would be quite reasonable for the period it represents. With Skyrim, however, you see a change in design philosophy where scale is traded for a meticulously compact map, densely populated with unique experiences and detail. Both have their merits, but with the latter you have a more streamlined experience that prioritises accessibility and enjoyment.
That change in design philosophy occurred immediately afterwards - the next game, Morrowind, abandoned the insane scope of Daggerfall and is a compact map more in-line with what Oblivion and Skyrim would be.
Like the other reply said, they switched in morrowind because that's also when they switched to 3D.
The feeling of opening quick travel between areas and more time happens to tick by
Imagine wanting to "play" a game where you walk for 10 hours lol
@ you could say the same about any JRPG and interactive game
Doesn’t make it not fun, it’s got hella issues but it’s fun
Daggerfall is effectively almost entirely randomly generated. The game is like a minecraft word, with a fixed seed that every player uses. Only story locations are hand crafted, and when playing the game properly, fast travel is effectively mandatory.
Yep, exactly like Oblivion and Skyrim. In fact, many open world games today procedurally generate their worlds then go in and edit them.
@@subsume7904 Not at the same scale, yes procedural generation is often used for stuff like vegetation but this is then baked as models in the game.
Just spent half an hour working out which keybinds work best with a controller. Then the third enemy in the game killed me because my equipment was trash.
But at least there's pixellated nudity.
There's WHAT?
@@bettyspaghetti3018 some of inn/taverns have naked ladies sitting on the floor
Time to play this game now
Does Unity have controller support? I'm considering diving back into this game. Beat the main quest in quarantine after hardly playing any video games for years. I remembered really liking pretty much everything about the game despite having played Morrowind
@@redakdal If you actually played as a woman you'd realize your character is also nude.
We need a version of Desert Bus but in Daggerfall.
Just live travel from Daggerfall to Wayrest by horse and carriage, using the map only to determine where the heck you currently are.
Tedious Travels achieves basically that.
whoa you might be onto something here. People like me who love driving simulators would absolutely play that. Drive a carriage for hours across the wilderness ?! Sign me the f up! I really do hope a mod for that gets made.
Elsweyr Carriage
The Daggerfall's main story also canonically took 12 years from the Agent being sent there to the Warp in the West.
Damn, that must be even emptier than even starfield
I remember spending months exploring Tamriel back in the late 90s. I blew through multiple months of severe illness in this game.
Fun fact: Skyrim is lager in Daggerfall than in actual Skyrim.
Yeah, thats always a thing that bugs me. Places are really small, i understand why, but seeing the great city of whiterun being like 10 houses and 20 persons is super shit.
I don't think that the aproach of Daggerfall is better though
@@Kayther33the PC's would explode if they tried to copy a 1:1 scale of lore skyrim
@@Larsnotme Bethesda lost it's programming edge!
@@Larsnotme you pc wont, your harddisk would lmao, 3 teras game
@@Kayther33 The problem is that real-life scale cities are just unplayable. Skyrim should have bigger cities, that's true, but not much bigger than they already are. Anything more than that would just be hundreds of inaccessible houses and would turn simple things like going to the market and then back to your housing into 10 minute journeys.
Daggerfall is the most realistic fantasy adventurer life sim ever made.
But Todd always wanted to make a third-person action-adventure game with more of a focus on story instead. You can even see it in his first game, Redguard, and Morrowind took the series more in that direction than any TES game before or since. (And it turned out to be a good direction for it.)
The fact that Kirkbride had to fight tooth and nail to keep the weird and wacky stuff in Morrowind is really telling. Modern Bethesda is washed
more focus on story... are you kidding me? todd can't write his way out of a wet paper bag and neither can his friend, Emil. They're both terrible and they ruined TES *and* Fallout trying to turn actual RPG properties into fucking action games. No it wasn't a good direction for it. It was the worst direction they could have possibly taken. I dont mind if Todd wants to make crappy action games, but he could have done it without ruining RPG properties to do so.
@@Sephirajo Who said anything about *good* writing? I'm saying that Redguard showed the direction the series was going to head towards back in 1998, and Morrowind was the first step on that path.
@@saffral I don't think it had anything to do with Redguard, I think it had more to do with Bethesda in danger of going out of business and at that time it may have been easier to make a game like Morrowind that had more focus, then it would have been to make another Daggerfall.
Actually it's really strange to assume, as you could say that for battle spire, however it was game like Battle spire and Red guard which contributed to Bethesda's financial problems, which necessitated their need for a game like Morrowind because it was their hail mary. There isn't actually much Morrowind shares with redguard.
@@rorrim0 Redguard was the first game that Todd Howard was the lead game dev on, and if you look back at it you can see many attributes that have come to the main series in the years since.
It had an almost Oblivion-esque dialogue system where the characters can emote and are fully voiced. (Unlike the more complex dialogue menu that came before.) In addition dialogue is chosen from a list, akin to Morrowind or Oblivion, very unlike Arena/Daggerfall.
It is a third-person game, first and foremost, something that was first included as a mode with Morrowind but expanded on throughout the years. (And the exclusively first-person Arena/Daggerfall/Battlespire.)
It features a smaller cast of more memorable and reoccuring characters throughout the story as we'd see especially in Oblivion (unlike Daggerfall's political leaders who, while personable, aren't going to compare to Martin, Baurus, or Jauffre.)
It features a significantly smaller but custom made open map, something Morrowind brought to the main series. (Battlespire took place across a linear series of open maps.)
Also Redguard is just generally where the aesthetic of TES really started. The races all generally look "normal", including the Khajiit finally looking like cats and not just weird furry people. It's even the first one with steampunk Dwemer technology, no longer the generic dwarves referenced in the previous titles.
And in terms of lore, Redguard is the game where a huge amount of it came from. It's the first one Kirkbride had a hand in and it came with the first edition of the Pocket Guide to the Empire.
Don't get me wrong, Battlespire is cool, and it's probably the most traditional RPG-y game in the entire series, but it was made by the devs of Daggerfall and it shows.
I really get the vibe most people here are judging a game that they've never even played.
Just for the record, you never have to explore this giant world - it's never required. It's just there. The game happens in villages, cities, and dungeons. The fast travel is done through a menu, not this mod that Josh is using.
The procedural generation is more robust than in Starfield - yes dungeons are nondescript, but they're not the exact same layout with the exact same premises/enemies like what SF does. The world is huge, the atmosphere is off the charts, the different joinable factions enable lots of roleplaying and a sense of progression that just wouldn't be possible in a more handcrafted world.
Seriously folks, Daggerfall is free, Daggerfall Unity is free. It takes like 20 minutes to set up. There's a reason dozens of people volunteered their time for free for several years to rebuild the game in Unity. Give it 2 hours of your time and THEN decide how you feel about the game. Don't just say "Quality over quantity" and write the game off. It shows ignorance.
I had extremely much fun with Daggerfall Unity. Until I couldn't stand the huge-ass dungeons anymore: I caught myself immediately console-teleporting me to the quest goal in order to save myself from another 2-hour dungeon crawl. At that point, I figured I might as well leave it be.
But the journey up to that point was amazing, immersive, sometimes goofy and always amusing. I can wholly recommend a go at Daggerfall to any RPG enthusiast.
@@Kuchenwurst there's a game option for smaller dungeons.
@captainash6581 Having played it, even with a bunch of mods to make it better, I have to agree with the people saying they prefer quality over quantity. This game is just not very fun to play and the sheer size of the world is a major part of the problem. I've always thought Bethesdas best games were the ones that used the least procedural generation.
Playing this game proved me right.
@@Kuchenwurst Yeah, play it with smaller dungeons and it's great. They're still big by modern standards but not so much it's literally impossible to navigate. It feels just right
Starfield's mistake is that for some reason, while the dungeons are all hand-crafted, the actual *pool* of dungeons that can spawn in random locations is like literally 20 dungeons or so, meaning they repeat extremely frequently. It is not outside the realm of realistic statistics to encounter the same dungeon on the very first two planets you explore.
I think what a lot of people are missing here is that Daggerfall isn't like Oblivion or Skyrim. Yes, you were given the opportunity to do the main quest. However, if I'm not mistaken you can fail the main questline if you take too long. You aren't the chosen one like in those games. Daggerfall is more of a medieval life sim than an epic chosen one story. The world doesn't care if you live or die. It goes on as if you don't matter.
I'd rather have one district that is packed with content like in yakuza than 100000 km2 of empty forest space lmao.
i think thats why Morrowind feels so good and big, so many sidequests and things to see
I'd rather have vast worlds to explore, even if the content is sparse, my headcanon gets free reign.
I hate tripping over distractions and/or "something else to do" every 10 steps.
I hope one day we have the tech to have a game this huge that still has meaningful stuff all over its world!
@@kleinesdaisukii I don't think we ever will.
The only way to get high quality assets and level design and all the content you'd want, in mass scale of that magnitude
Is machine learning and AI generation. Which don't get me wrong, i have full faith in those becoming really really good, like more consistently putting out decent content than your average AAA game right now
But i believe you and most other people would be well aware just how that content was made, and find little pleasure in interacting with it. Because you know it was just made in a microsecond by a machine with the same parameters as the other few thousand locations in the game world.
So I don't believe it'll ever get to the mass scale you imagine where it feels "meaningful".
@@Alex_Was_Taken I don't think you understand just how much nothing is actually in Daggerfall my friend. You genuinely probably think you want a hundred thousand square miles of nothing, but no, no you don't. If you think otherwise, give Daggerfall a shot and come back to me.
it's not just huge in size, it has an ungodly amount of places to go to.
And an ungodly amount of stories, if you try to dig into it.
All the same place with nothing interesting really
@@taxevasion0336 i disagree with that opinion. I guess different people find different things interesting.
@@baneblackguard584 I mean I had fun with daggerfall but without mods, it got boring pretty fast
I love the concept and for its age the gameplay is amazing but I just don’t find fetch quests and simple combat gameplay very fun
Glad you enjoy the game vanilla though
The sheer scale of Daggerfall makes me wonder if there are any eastereggs/secrets nobody ever found 🤔
If there was it would certainly have been found through data mining by now.
no it's just rehashed procedurally generated crap
witches coven were special. there were other secret areas not on the main map too
@@23Scadu Yeah probably. But you can never be 100% sure you know?
@@3NC3PH4L0N don't bother. Zoomers gonna zoom.
I've been to 151 countries in the past 50 years, visited thousands of cities, towns and sites, met more people than I can remember. I will never see all that there is in a lifetime and that is perfectly fine. It just feels the same with massive games that use procedural generation. To know it is all really there is enough to make it all enjoyable for me.
What you said isn’t even possible for many reasons including passport viability
@@Lira-j4g
You apparently know my life better then I do. You must be special/gifted. Take care.
Mate got oblivion and we ran home from school to play it at his house. His mom used to play daggerfall and one day she showed us it and all though we scoffed at the graphics, the sheer size of it blew me away completely.
The travel system really reminds me of DnD travel rule. Can definitely see the origin of this world was indeed their homebrew
What is that? I'm curius
If there's one thing I hope for in the following decades, its an official Daggerfall remake, with the exact same map size and scale. Just modernized. Surely the supercomputer I have by then will be able to handle the size without burning out.
GOG released Daggerfall Unity in 2022, a collection of fan-made mods to modernize it. The mods have continued evolving, but the GOG version is convenient. The graphics are much improved, even if it's often just better textures for the sprites. I''m sure the latest version of the mods are better still.
@@SkorjOlafsen do NOT play GOG cut, it's horribly out of date and runs terribly and GOG hasn't updated it since 2022 and will not update it. Get DFUnity straight from their website, and you can actually run up to date mods that don't crash every 5 seconds like the scuffed GOG cut.
Why would you need to have a supercomputer to run a game with a large map?
@@SkorjOlafsen No no no, Daggerfall Unity is NOT AT ALL something released by GOG. It's an open source project started by Interkarma in 2014 building on the Unity engine (a poor choice since it's proprietary junk, but it is what it is). GOG just offers a convenient bundle of the original Daggerfall content, Daggerfall Unity and a whole bunch of mods.
Speaking of which, do not use that pack, it's a terrible compilation. Better still, do not use any mod pack. Just compile a list for yourself. Most of these modlists/modpacks are about as dank as it gets, and are just sloppily and haphazardly thrown together. Just look for mods you might like yourself.
@@robinmattheussen2395 This very much. Low end/mid end gaming PC's can max out daggerfall unity with the best graphics mods already.
The largest game map ever that isn't procedurally generated is the map of the lord of the rings online which faithfully recreates the entirety of Middle-earth
Can't wait for it's spiritual successor Wayward Realms to drop
Thank you for commenting this, without you I would not have discovered that game in my entire life.
I am in fact aware of how huge Daggerfall is because I'm a fossil who was *obsessed* with this game when it came out, and tried on multiple occasions to walk manually, and always ended up reverting to fast travel.
It was an absolute buggy mess back in the day but I loved it. Except for dungeon quests, they can go fuck themselves.
That game looks a lot better than I would expect.
It recently got a big mod to run in unity which has improved it a lot and why youll see a lot of people playing it right now
(Its also free on steam and bethesda host it for free also on the own website i believe)
Josh is playing a Unity mod of Daggerfall with some quality of life update to fit more modern playstyle
@@JoshStrifeSays If they would do some UI polishing, that would look pretty modern
@@Pwnopolis for whatever reason my second comment dissapeared but Daggerfall and Arena are free and the mod is free so everyone should give it a try if they are interested
that's great and all, but that entire sped up section was just going through the forest that looked almost like it was looping with nothing of value there
Also not great to run 5seconds to the next point of interest like in many open world games
That's exactly what it is, outside of POIs for the main quest, everything is procedurally generated. Dungeons, wilderness, I think even town layouts. I believe they're the same every playthrough, but they were not play tested to make sure they made sense. Daggerfall is big to be big, but also so you do have an entire world in the background of your exploits. I don't think Bethesda intended anyone to spend years of their life scanning every nook and cranny of Daggerfall
No one said it was good in its hugeness. Just that it was huge.
Yes, but this is not skyrim you are not suppose to go everywhere you can go. Daggerfall's purpose is to show you that you are in a world where the world exists even when you arent playing
Yep.
Back when "fast travel" did NOT mean "free teleportation thanks to your magic map." A game's world is only as big as the fastest method of travel allows it to be.
Fast travel in Daggerfall was pretty much instant. That quick walk is a mod.
@@Xegethra it’s instant for the player, but it does take in-game time
@@Woopor That it does.
Developers: "How big do you want the map to be?"
Bethesda: "Yes."
I believe one of the best map sizes I've seen in video games - were in Might and Magic series - maps were big enough to explore, to get lost at times and to have points of interest scattered enough not to feel overfilled (like skyrim, where you can't take a step aside without stumbling into something), yet maps were small enough not to feel empty and pointless - it was that golden center.
Yes, I agree, that would be a very good example for me as well. In all of those games (both old and newer ones) you're very free to explore and discover, your hand is never being held, but it's all manageable and you can still keep it in your head. Good example!
Yes it's big, yet - it's just repeating.
Small maps are repetitive too, you take the same routes, see the same streets. You can't get away from it. Big or small, you see the same stuff over and over.
Damn, and I thought Kenshi was big, being like 10 times bigger than Skyrim. Turns out Skyrim is just that tiny.
Ah , Daggerfall unity .
A classic.
This is a game so large in landmass that people who tried to travel across it manually back when it came out frequently ran out of RAM capacity. Also I now have to find his modlist because that map icon set is way better than vanilla.
That is one of the reasons why Daggerfall is in my top ten games of all times and certainly my favorite Elder Scrolls game. It doesn't do very much for the gameplay but I KNOW it's there, and there's something about that feeling of a vast world that adds a lot to the experience.
wow thats crazy how big they can make the map when absolutely nothing is in it 😯
Too many people are way too quick to dunk on this game. Like we get it, 90% of the comments are "we don't care there's no content!!!" Yes the map was big but thin on content. It was the mid 90s. It's easy to dunk on it now, but if you were around then it was impressive. It was the era before any of the now-standard game formulas were figured out, devs were able to make whatever they wanted to see what sticks. The game wasn't terrible, some parts were great and some didn't land. And it let people's imaginations run wild, which made it a good game for so many back then.
It's literally that 4chan post where someone posts a screenshot of daggerfall and says "boomers shat their pants over this?" And someone responds, "It must be hard to wrap your head around progress being made since your whole generation has known nothing but stagnation."
It's like dunking on a 20s pickup not having ac or motorized windshield wipers or power steering. Valid criticism? Probably. But it's only because you're used to all the progress made since then. It's best to view these things in the context of their time and enjoy them for what they are
I was around then, bought the game, and still have it boxed on my shelf. I didn't think it was that impressive. This game came out in 1996. You're talking about it like it was an early 80s game. We already had big RPGs. We had Doom 1 and 2. We were in the golden age of PSX and N64. Daggerfall got maybe 10 hours of play from me before I shelved it because there was too much else for me to play. You had to be a certain type of gamer to enjoy Daggerfall and appreciate it. Don't pretend that everyone was that type of gamer.
I mean, I get what you say but still, the size is absolutely pointless. It's a huge waste of time and even though it's interesting to think of, who would really walk several hours through a boring wasteland of nothingness to reach the next town? I don't get it. If this was a science project in 1970 this would interesting to read a paper about, but this is not a game. Or at least it's not an interesting element of a game. It's just something you write on the box and once you think about it, is loses all it's magic, since it's absolutely pointless. Minecraft was revolutionary, this was just scaled to a size tech was not ready for yet to fill with interesting content.
@@4everdex It was a novelty that they built into the mechanics. The player wasn't expected to walk from town to town, they were expected to fast travel.
But fast traveling in Daggerfall has real consequences since quests tend to be time-sensitive.
It really wasn't that novel or impressive in 1996 though. But I think you're kinda missing the point people are making. As I've said a billion times myself, I really like Daggerfall. I'm not dunking on the game as a whole. But the procedural content is my least favorite part of it. I'm sure I would have liked it more if it had like 5% of the landmass but 4 times as much handcrafted content. Yeah, I get that the large landmass is very cool and inspiring. But that feeling quickly fades after about an hour of getting to the point where you use the world map. The positive aspects of the huge landmass (the overwhelming feeling you get at the start of the game) disappear rather quickly IMO. And I'm not sure Bethesda's ambitions of an RPG Life Sim couldn't have been fulfilled by sticking with less generated content and more hand-crafted content.
Furthermore, I'm also not criticizing the use of procgen per se. Rather, I don't like the over-reliance on it. The ratio of hand-crafted vs generated is just out of balance. Most generated dungeons in the game are borderline unplayable IMO, they're insane labyrinths that you sometimes can't even complete because the algorithm for generating them isn't robust enough not to generate impossible dungeons. I would have preferred to have seen much more handcrafted dungeons, and leave the procgen dungeons for random landmarks with little or no questing attached to it. Personally I would always recommend people tick the "Smaller Dungeons" option if they play Daggerfall Unity, because it's just such a big problem.
I'm also rather unsure about the "progress" argument you're making. The choice to make the entire landmass procedurally generated really has nothing to do with whether or not the technology or game design standards of the time were developed enough. No, it was just a design decision they made. If they wanted to go for a smaller, more handcrafted map, they could have done that, like many of the other RPGs that came before Daggerfall did. If they wanted to make a game of the same size and scope as Daggerfall, they would have to use precisely the same techniques in 2024. It would also have to be procedurally generated slop. Yes, we would undoubtedly have more interesting procedural content to generate, but the idea would be precisely the same. The choice between handcrafted and generated would be the same tradeoff, just like it was in 1996. So really I'm not sure I see what you're saying if I'm being honest.
It was impressive but it was also extremely buggy to the point of being unplayable. A lot of mechanics were under developed or cut right before launch because they just didn't work right.
gonna nickname my pp daggerfall
it's insane that this game with unity engine looks better than it ever could have been. With low resolution(320x240 i suppose in this game?) and draw distance(10-15 meters at max i think, it was very limited in original game) you couldn't appreciate how important proper big distance in a game. Yes it's empty, yes it's pre-generated seed. But it's also realistic approach that is really underappeciated.
For example Minecraft, there is a mod that adds proper LoD background to the game, where you can turn on pretty much unlimited view distance that only depends on your hardware. ALSO, since not a long ago, it supports shaders. It's actually insane how good it looks. It gives me similiar vibes to seeing Daggerfall scale... it's very rare when games can actually do something like this, or devs even trying to do.
It's a giant empty world.
Josh sounds like Gandalf but for RPGs
desert bus is also big according to this guys logic!!!
Well, no this game is actually big.
I like how people, be all like, the world is empty etc etc. But! Let's imagine medieval world that we had. People had to travel hours, and sometimes days in-between settlements, and let's be fair they were hoping to have as little extra content as possible, less content safer travel. So in that regard the game is actually realistic in a way.
Some extra content like bandit camps and wild animals would make experience much more immersive thought.
P.s.: I love Daggerfall, made like 5-6 playthroughs. The roleplaying potential is very, very vast.
Also it seems like the people complaining about the empty space don't really understand that the game doesn't really force you to experience it.
Empty? it has thousands of caves, temples to explore.
@@youareacoward8459 You can fast travel to every dungeon. There is literally no reason to go by foot, unless you want to experience the size of the world. So yes, the world itself is mostly empty. Unless it's a dungeon or a city there is literally nothing going on. The game, mostly, is a dungeon crawler. And don't get me wrong I don't criticize the game for it, there is enough content in the dungeons for a lifetime.
@@HostageMax That is true what you said. Unless you have a disease Like I had, then you die when you frast travel.
@@HostageMax for me its not about the empty spaces,
I agree there are things to do, places to explore, but even then I think the playtime is lower in reality due to the repetitiveness that goes with a world that seems huge but has nothing going on in it with very little unquie gaming experiences in it.
look again cool for its time, but I think many are overhyping the experience here, 100+ dungeons are great, but it loses its novelty very quickly.
I think daggerfall is great for people who really wanna experience a true classic role playing open world game , but the average player will only play oh so much before losing interest within the first few hrs
Daggerfall is one of the main reasons why Bethesda started scaling down the provinces in the following games. Yes, Vvardenfell, Cyrodiil and Skyrim feel small but in lore they are massive landmasses
If starfield taught us one thing it's that's size doesn't matter.
When quantity becomes a quality.
Of course, one which inherently makes proportionately giant compromises.
Back then? Playing this as a kid? I would not care one bit. Normal games already felt infinite, I never snapped out of the immersion to realize the finite reality and programmed nature of games.
If there was a place I couldn't go in Pokemon, it was just a matter of finding a way to me, nvm the complete empty void that's actually over there. I miss being a stupid kid
what is the name of the soundtrack playing at 1:54
incase you are looking for it the ost is 'snow is falling' took me 2 weeks lol
2:40 this particular part of music really sounded like BBC Sherlock for me :D
Wtf, it does😂
The world of Skyrim is beautifully crafted and implemented though. The best hiking simulator around.
Early TES games be like:
Hello, here's a game with a map that's one portion of Tamriel, which is also several times larger than the earlier game which had the entire map of Tamriel. Yeah, go figure that one out, why don't ya?
Its not WRONG that Daggerfall has a huge open world but I think its a little bit misleading. You can wander around in the wilderness and encounter absolutely nothing for hours. Its a huge game and a huge map but you're not going to be exploring it without fast travel very much without mods for the Unity version.
You're not really meant to explore it. It's only there to serve believability of a big world. You are meant to 100% fast travel between towns.
To be fair, Skyrim’s game size is not lore accurate. The map, towns, cities, and everything is supposed to be so much larger, but there’s only so much they could do.
What's funny is this just shows more how small Skyrim really is. If you think that comparing Daggerfall to the UK is meant to make it sound big, but then realize that in Earth terms the UK is scarcely more than a dot... Skyrim is basically the size of a large farm in America. It's a very condensed representation of a state. But that's why it is so good, because it is packed with stuff to explore. There is no corner of Skyrim that doesn't have something to be discovered. Map size is such a small part of what makes a good game. It's density of content that really matters.
Look at fallout new Vegas, it's actually pretty tiny. Like you download a sprint mod and the map gets really small. But I've been playing it for a decade and I'm still finding new things and having a blast playing it. You definitely have a point
the UK is not 'scarcely more than a dot'
You cannot just walk from A to B in Skyrim, not really at least, you always stumble on something new to do on the way. It's so densely filled that even though the map is actually kinda small, the game does feel huge.
Skyrim is a very condensed map that is much smaller than real scale, yes. So is practically every open-world game ever made that isn't called Daggerfall. Every Spider-man game renders Manhattan at like 1/2 - 1/4 scale, for example.
@@Zanadorwell to be fair most gamers do not like taking hours to get to a mission marker at the other side of manhattan ...thats why open game maps are more condensed these days
Huge 1:1 travel times are more the speed of sim players
Yes, we have all played Minecraft
remember the world and dungeons and towns were manually PRE-generated ahead of time by the devs. so a town layout won't be different in different save games. then the devs overlaid custom towns and dungeons that were handmade, mainly main story ones, on top of that. there are like 4000 pre-generated dungeons, and like 100 custom hand-made ones.
Back when games had the right (as in believable) amount of scope. Skyrim with it's (at most) 5000 inhabitants has a completely wrong scale. Made it feel like solving problems in my local village that were just made into world shattering problems by the locals because they'd never left the area.
Whiterun's under attack? Okay? Like 20 people live there. lmao
@ Exactly. After a while you lose all sense of importance since (even if) at most a dozen people die.
I hope that‘s the one thing they do better for TES6 but looking at Starfield which should literally have a population count faaaaar beyond anything else they did before…I kinda lost hope.
"Back when games had the right amount of scope" Uh, not sure what you're on about here. Most games back then just had the same scope as video games do now: the right amount fit for the purpose of the game. Yes there were certainly a lot of other games with huge scopes like Daggerfall, but it's not like that was the standard or anything. Most games don't set out to make a "realistic" scope (otherwise every game would have to model the entire galaxy, which is impossible since we don't even know how to map that out properly). Rather, they want to make a certain game and the scope is regulated by its design. Yes cities in Skyrim or Morrowind are rather small, but that works well with the design of the game.
Imagine if, in order you had to the game's scope "realistic", you had to take the bus to get somewhere. But you have to wait 10 real life minutes before it arrives. But then it doesn't show up, and you have to wait 10 minutes before it actually arrives. Then you have to sit on the bus for 25 minutes before you arrive at your destination. That would give you a very believable scope, but it's hard to fit compelling game design into that experience.
Having a smaller city and small population numbers allows you to become familiar with the area and explore it effectively. You can get to where you need to be rather quickly, and you can get familiar with all characters. Going to the Jarl from the entrance would have taken maybe 45 minutes on foot in a realistically sized city, but that again doesn't really sound very fun does it? Okay, fast-travel can be introduced, but then you slowly come to be entirely at the mercy of fast travel, gives no opportunity to actually explore what's in between and makes it impossible for the developers to put interesting content in between fast travel points. At that point, how realistic is your city even then? Really, it's no longer a city, but a series of points you get to travel to that are isolated from the rest of the all the similar points of interest.
In Morrowind, I can travel from one city to the next and experience parts of the world naturally, and come across interesting sight, potentially interesting NPCs, etc. And I get to feel how the entire world of Vvardenfell is interconnected, and I get to see the landscape change as I go through different biomes, and get familiar with the wild life, etc etc etc etc. All of that would be impossible in a game with a "believable" scope.
All but the most hardcore of simulations go for practical scope that enhances the game design, rather than work against it for the sake of having something "believable" (side not: plenty of games have believable game worlds even if they're unrealistic in size. It's called suspension of disbelief). And even those hardcore sims still recognize that they're not the real thing. After all, that's what they are: simulations.
It’s big but it’s dull. How big a game map can be is just a math equation connecting the graphics resolution to the users’s GPU RAM. What you want more of is stuff to do, characters to talk to. That’s what fleshes out a game world. The Witcher 3 world is bigger than daggerfall, in every way apart from geography.
Well, you kind of can. You can get a few little quests off people you talk to, you can ask for directions and information. You can get quests from guilds that have you go in people's houses to do things, like kill, steal, rescue and so on. There's also little dungeons and the like dotted around to come across. Yeah it's repetitive, but then so are modern games like the Witcher.
People complain about empty land.
But I'd rather have space than theme park layout like World of Warcraft where they stick quests and stuff over the top.
Music and story changes all the time when you make a walk for a minute, not good.
There's just no value where there's value in every step.
It's true that not every step should be valuable. But there has to be a middle ground. I don't play games that ask me to walk for over an hour straight before my next step that contains value.
Sorry dude, i prefer a theme park where i can have fun over kilometers and kilometers of...nothing
@juanex721 yeah, his argument doesn't make much sense. If we are stuck between those two choices and there being no in-between, how is nothing the preferable option?
@@Ed95366 i know right? dude has such a weird take, i guess he felt like a child in a playground when he played NMS or fallout 76 then...
The size was part of the gameplay also back then - it took a lot of time (in game days and weeks even) and planning to travel from location to another for some timed quests etc. It felt big as well, not just empty wastelands between cities, even if you didnt go there.
It was totally empty.
@@staticcharm3808 Yeah, but it didnt feel empty, because of the game mechanics made it so you just didnt want to accidentally travel somewhere far and then back like its just one click.
That realtime travel thing is a mod, for the record. In the vanilla game, and even unmodded Daggerfall Unity, you'll just pop over to wherever you fast travel to. Travel time is only measured for the purposes of quest-scheduling. I don't actually think that travel would have taken you four REALTIME hours; but it would take four hours in in-game time, meaning that amount of time would pass and you'd be that much closer to your deadlines.
You’re putting this forward like it’s a good thing. The fact that Skyrim’s world is so packed with content is great. They obviously could have spread each landmark out between 4 hours of empty plains and forest, but I’m infinitely glad that they didn’t.
That's one of the things that made Morrowind so good. The game was almost the same size as Skyrim, but it was packed with way more to do in it than Skyrim was.
If you think Skyrim is "packed with content", you haven't played Oblivion or Morrowind. There is a reason people say Skyrim is "wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle".
@@tarael86On one side I agree that Skyrim lacks good stories and deep/long questlines, but where it shines is blind exploration. Just going somewhere without a quest, there are tons of little details to uncover everywhere. Oblivion is the opposite, you have good/interesting quests with actual good writing, but the dungeons, enemies and overland are very bland and repetitive. Oh and oblivion has a completely butchered leveling system that’s basically impossible to use without mods. That in itself makes the game unplayable for lots of people.
@@wingthomaux I'd say every single TES game has a terrible leveling system. If you craft 500 iron daggers in Skyrim and then go out into the world again, enemies will be much stronger for absolutely no fucking reason because you leveled up a bunch of times but gained zero power.
@ but you did gain power. You leveled up your smithing-> better gear. You also gained the equivalent of the individual skill xp to your overall xp.
The big difference in oblivion is that you have to level the individual skill perfectly evenly, so that your overall level doesn’t outgrow them. In oblivion you can gain 15 overall levels (and meet enemies according to that level) with only "crafting 500 iron daggers“ in Skyrim you would maybe gain 3.
So you might disclose the simplicity of Skyrim’s leveling system, but claiming it’s broken like oblivion‘s is just bs. In Skyrim the only times you can meet overleveled enemies is when they have a certain min level and you go into that dungeon too early. Then you either take the hard fight (and spam healing pots) or you leave to come back later. In oblivion you can fuck up a whole playthrough if you level a certain skill faster than the others.
Like someone smarter than me once said: "in oblivion you’re at your strongest at level 1 and with every level up you get weaker relative to the world, you have to actively counteract this by preplanning your leveling with a spreadsheet.“ That’s why some people who don’t want to get into mods, simply play the game without leveling up once. I personally fucked up my first oblivion playthrough, because I went to the fighting arena, with the mindset of leveling my combat skills, did that, then leveled up in the nearest tavern and in the next dungeon got blasted into oblivion :) by the first mobs I encountered.
Daggerfall is the Aerogel of video games.
if Daggerfall is so big, why wont it fight me?
It reminds me Arcanum, when you tried to go from one location to another without fast travel, and you ran and ran and your marker on the map barely moved. But from the other side it gave sense of freedom in open world.
2:00 Linkara running
Think the time mentioned is ingame time. Cause from he started to reaching destination it only took 1 min and that was with it at 30 for 13 sec, 20 for 14 sec, 15 for 12 sec and 10 for 21 sec. Meaning if he had run in the same path it would have taken him around 1060 sec or 17m40s. Ofc this time is only true if the fast travel speed is equal to normal running.
So yes the game is huge, but it's not as insanely huge he make it sounds.
It is indeed ingame time. His sped-up overworld traversal is part of a mod, you usually aren't expected to actually manually travel anywhere.
as wide as the ocean, as deep as a puddle.
Clearly you've never played daggerfall if you think it's a shallow game.
@@johnjoyce2202 i have and it is.
Wide as the ocean, deep as a puddle
Sir, this is a video about Daggerfall, not Skyrim.
@ 😂 no one brought up Skyrim but you kiddo
@@TeamSevenStar so elden ring?
@@mihaimercenarul7467 😂 sure
@@TeamSevenStar well, 70% of the areas are just enemies that give you 100 runes, some useless items and a boss that gives you some runes you don't need lol. Mountaintop of the giants, bayle mountain etc.
16x the empty space. Daggerfall 2.
On one hand, I love games that are developed with a large scale and scope. On the other hand, New Vegas is tiny, yet it's filled to the brim with notable encounters. You gotta know how to work with the size you're given.
Ah yes, the game with 99% air and 1% content.
heretic spotted
I’d rather have a map that takes 4 minutes to walk around but full of interesting stuff over having a giant map that is just trees and grass for 20 minutes
Exactly my thought, this just looks so empty and the same, let alone the graphics are terrible.
@@youarenotspecial I mean this is just an fan-made remake of 1996 game lol
Sounds like you would enjoy the yakuza games (ik I have).
Yeah, though starfield kinda proves that just because something is HUGE doesn't mean its gonna be filled with interesting stuff.
I can still hear the guards..."ALT! ALT! ALT!"
Seeing skyrim be used as a baseline for so many game's size makes me realize not how big everything else is, but just how profoundly *DENSE* skyrim is, it feels huge but its not really as big as it looks, just the amount of random bullshit everywhere slowing you down or constantly finding things makes it feel so much bigger.
i would like to claim to be the first in the comments, but the sexbots were faster
Who cares if there's nothing to interact with along the way?
doesn't matter how big it is, if it has nothing in it.. it's basically as boring as no mans sky or elite dangerous. i'd prefer a well crafted experience than a procedural desert
it's ok, little boy, you tried
And yet, I went almost nowhere and instead focused on riding my horse in the sea and killing 100s of guards with a single swing of my sword.
If anyone wants to try daggerfall, use the "smaller dungeons" option in daggerfall unity. It's a lifesaver since you can actually complete side quests instead of running around aimlessly in some massive labyrinth just for the sake of completing some fighters guild quest for 200 gold.
And the main quest dungeons are unchanged (since those were handmade not proc gen) so you can still get the classic daggerfall dungeon experience there
I'm so glad that games abandoned this oversized, dead space approach to open worlds.
Few worlds have been as big as this, so it seems like they abandoned this degree of it right away.
So why does starfield exist then?
it doesn't really matter how big the map is when 95% of it is empty space with nothing to do
And this map is still a lot smaller than Arena, which is almost the size of Australia
Ah good old Daggerfall. Where you can walk through walls, be attacked by disappearing enemies, and fall through the bottom of reality.
No one need a space on maps, everyone need a content on the map.