New to Daggerfall, is it better to start with vanilla?

Discuss Daggerfall Unity and Daggerfall Tools for Unity.
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SickBoy
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Joined: Sun Jul 22, 2018 2:44 am

New to Daggerfall, is it better to start with vanilla?

Post by SickBoy »

Hey there everyone, I'm brand new to playing Daggerfall and was wondering if it'd be better to start by just playing the vanilla experience rather than Daggerfall Unity... at least for the time being?

For some background: I love that era of graphics (so no issues with it looking 'dated'), have played a ridiculous amount of Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim (Morrowind being my favorite), LOVE the TES universe/lore, prefer to truly roleplay while playing, and don't mind the quirks of using DOSBOX. That said... the control schemes, especially when it comes to mouselook or the lack thereof, in older games can be pretty brutal for me since I've gotten too used to the convenience of modern sourceports and the like.

I've already messed around a bit with DFU and have quite enjoyed it, but since the quests/faction stuff isn't implemented yet I'm assuming I'll be missing out on a huge portion of the game... and perhaps be totally baffled at times since I'm not familiar at all with the details of what should/shouldn't be working (outside of the more generalized info on the roadmap).


So... thoughts from the more experienced out there? Either way I definitely plan to keep a close eye on this project, I just want to make sure my first serious dip into this era of TES isn't plagued by total confusion due to missing features.

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daggerfallman
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Re: New to Daggerfall, is it better to start with vanilla?

Post by daggerfallman »

FWIW, I'm in the same boat.

Once I get around to setting it up, I'll probably do a playthrough of vanilla (perhaps with the fixes/mods to the vanilla game). Then if I do a second playthrough, dfu will be further along towards being feature complete.

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Interkarma
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Re: New to Daggerfall, is it better to start with vanilla?

Post by Interkarma »

Welcome to the forums. :)

I think it's worth playing at least some classic first. Even if you don't play all the way through, it's a grounding experience before playing Daggerfall Unity. You can setup Daggerfall similar to a modern FSP with mouse-look and WSAD controls. It's a little clunky still, but far more playable that way than the default interface.

BTW, Daggerfall Unity might be a little further along than you think. The guilds/factions, reputation changes, main quest, and side quests have been up and running for while. You can play the game start to finish, plus most of the side content, but keep in mind that magic is still under development (currently around 60% of spell effects available but no magic items or potions yet). Check out the Roadmap to see what has been completed and what is in progress now.

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SickBoy
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Re: New to Daggerfall, is it better to start with vanilla?

Post by SickBoy »

Ah, I had a hunch that I was misinterpreting the roadmap when it came to quest stuff... and turns out I was right :) I think I must have skimmed past the actual quest section (0.4) and instead focused on the "Progress related spell and quest support" bulletpoints that are mentioned in the 0.6-0.9 sections. Oops! Not sure how that happened, I'm usually pretty good about reading everything carefully :oops:

I did actually setup a duplicate Daggerfall install earlier today using the DaggerfallSetup version and played for a few hours. Was very pleasantly surprised at how well the game could be adapted to more modern WASD+mouse controls, with the only quirk that threw me off being how bows fire with the activate key (wasted a few arrows in doors on accident)! Certainly beats some of the misery I've had trying to deal with other first person games from the era! I just can't go back to right-handed keyboard controls anymore.

Thanks very much for the info, I'm super excited to know that DFU is so much further along than I expected! The allure of some of the DFU mods was making the choice between DFU and DF pretty brutal :) I'll still probably dip back and forth just for fun, but DFU will definitely be my go-to now!


Side note: Not sure if you know, but on the default roadmap the link for "Quest System Status" actually leads to a Microsoft page (specifically: https://support.office.com/en-us/articl ... 05d654b4c4 ) when I assume it should lead to https://www.dfworkshop.net/projects/dag ... em-status/

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Interkarma
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Re: New to Daggerfall, is it better to start with vanilla?

Post by Interkarma »

Ha! Thanks for the heads up, that's clearly a copy paste error while I'm trying to do too many things at once. Will fix that soon!

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MrFlibble
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Re: New to Daggerfall, is it better to start with vanilla?

Post by MrFlibble »

SickBoy wrote: Sun Jul 22, 2018 3:06 am That said... the control schemes, especially when it comes to mouselook or the lack thereof, in older games can be pretty brutal for me since I've gotten too used to the convenience of modern sourceports and the like.
SickBoy wrote: Mon Jul 23, 2018 7:12 am Was very pleasantly surprised at how well the game could be adapted to more modern WASD+mouse controls
Bethesda was actually quite ahead of its time in this department, even more so with the other title running on the XnGine, The Terminator: Future Shock, which had the default control scheme similar to WASD (A/LShift/Z/X), mouselook on by default (with the option to invert the Y mouse axis in the controls), and the throw grenade key bound to the right mouse button. Did I mention the demo came out in late October 1995 and the full game in December 1995?

In fact, when the shareware version of Duke Nukem 3D was released in late January 1996, players asked the developers to add the option for "Future Shock controls", which was implemented in the shareware v1.1 update.

To give some perspective to this, the very first public test version of Quake came out in late February 1996, a few days after the patch for Duke Nukem 3D that added the mouse look option.

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