Re: (What are your) First memories of Daggerfall
Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2022 12:12 pm
Oh man.
I played Arena when it came out, got it from the computer shop (damn I miss those. Actual boxes and media to reinstall from instead of 'Hour 9 of downloading'), so I was revved to play DF. When I got the notification that UPS had it, I went to the arrival area with ticket in hand to grab it and go.
Then I ran into the AMD K6-200 Causeway issue. Have to say though, that Julian and Co. were fast getting those first few memory issue patches out. Then we fired it up and finally got into the game I managed to tweak my hardware enough that causeway errors were on the rare side).
I surfaced like 12 hours later, wondering where the time had gone (I had an AWE-32 sound card, so the MIDI was never the tinny plinking of basic sound, but a nice orchestral soundbank. Swoon). I think I was cussing out those damned imps in PH. The outside world was mind blowing; having dungeons actually out in the wilds? Not having them spitting distance from undefended villages with kids and animals and unmolested by the creatures? I'd been on the bethsoft forums as the DF team was whacking away at their game, and even with the glitches it was living up to a lot of the hype. You could see where the tech had failed to function as intended, and those of us who followed knew at least some of the content cut at the last second, but it worked.
Then it snowed, and that wonderful, sweeping orchestral theme of riding free as the wind played, and I was lost. I could spend a couple of hours just clopping along, listening to that theme (hell, I -STILL- have the extracted midi files and the .ogg player that the format company put on their website). There were some disappointments, but all I could think was 'Next iteration, they will have nailed it cold'.
Then we got the hip pocket sized rats nest maze of a world called Morrowind, which took one of the largest nations in Tamriel and reduced it to function on a gen 1 Xbox. Excellent story telling (Yay Ken!), but the way they did things screamed 'maze' to every sense I had. Never got into it (hoping the Skywind might correct some of that).
I played Arena when it came out, got it from the computer shop (damn I miss those. Actual boxes and media to reinstall from instead of 'Hour 9 of downloading'), so I was revved to play DF. When I got the notification that UPS had it, I went to the arrival area with ticket in hand to grab it and go.
Then I ran into the AMD K6-200 Causeway issue. Have to say though, that Julian and Co. were fast getting those first few memory issue patches out. Then we fired it up and finally got into the game I managed to tweak my hardware enough that causeway errors were on the rare side).
I surfaced like 12 hours later, wondering where the time had gone (I had an AWE-32 sound card, so the MIDI was never the tinny plinking of basic sound, but a nice orchestral soundbank. Swoon). I think I was cussing out those damned imps in PH. The outside world was mind blowing; having dungeons actually out in the wilds? Not having them spitting distance from undefended villages with kids and animals and unmolested by the creatures? I'd been on the bethsoft forums as the DF team was whacking away at their game, and even with the glitches it was living up to a lot of the hype. You could see where the tech had failed to function as intended, and those of us who followed knew at least some of the content cut at the last second, but it worked.
Then it snowed, and that wonderful, sweeping orchestral theme of riding free as the wind played, and I was lost. I could spend a couple of hours just clopping along, listening to that theme (hell, I -STILL- have the extracted midi files and the .ogg player that the format company put on their website). There were some disappointments, but all I could think was 'Next iteration, they will have nailed it cold'.
Then we got the hip pocket sized rats nest maze of a world called Morrowind, which took one of the largest nations in Tamriel and reduced it to function on a gen 1 Xbox. Excellent story telling (Yay Ken!), but the way they did things screamed 'maze' to every sense I had. Never got into it (hoping the Skywind might correct some of that).