Things that Arena did better then Daggerfall

[L57]

Just as an aside, I re-read your previous comments about magic being limited to the select few in the earlier games, and I'm not really sure if this was actually what the developers intended to convey, and not what the player might infer from how the game mechanics are designed.

If you look into the various in-game books, there are examples which contradict the notion of magic being limited, arcane knowledge. In The Real Barenziah, the future queen is taught some magic, including an invisibility spell, by a smith's wife who has no social standing and certainly not a member of the Mages Guild. She "had a gift for certain kinds of magic", and that is assumed to be enough to not only use it herself, but to teach it to others who are also magically inclined. I can't think of other prominent examples from books at this moment, but I can look up when I have the time.

Thanks, that would be interesting. I'll be willing to change my mind if there's enough evidence that special talents for magic aren't needed and/or guilds aren't protecting their privileges.

I didn't remember well the contents of The Real Barenziah at the moment honestly, but I wouldn't infere a lot from these words. I would say that the "real life" guilds also set a monopoly on certain craft only in their reach. So independent magicians - hermits or 'rural' mages - should be possible. There are semi-legal magic-related factions, such as witch covens, after all. And a person who has a talent for magic can teach another person who has a certain talent for it ('magically inclined') too, as is written in the book.

I'm hesitant about the monopoly of magical services hypothesis myself, but 'obligatory' magic-related talents seem to be almost out of the question.

The biography of the Mages Guild founder, Galerion the Mystic (yes, you can read this book in Daggerfall), makes it abundantly clear that the developers intended for magic knowledge to be widely available.

You don't even have to be a member to buy spells that intentionally set people on fire. Peasants don't do that, because daggers are cheaper and they don't need high spell points or Destruction skill to keep using them.

I dare say that potions would have also been available in the Mages Guild if the developers had more time, unless they changed their minds halfway through development and never got around to changing the promotion messages from the temple factions that clearly imply the Mages Guild provides potions.

Potions would look appropriate in the Mages Guild, but if they would also be available only upon reaching a higher rank, it would be consistent with my vision.

Perhaps you're right, although I am not really sure what you are referring to in Galerion the Mystic. If you mean that Mages guild is quite democratic and seeks to spread magical knowledge ('his philosophy of sharing knowledge.'), it can be understood in many ways.

My own interpretation is as follows. On the one hand, in Daggerfall NPCs tell you that prior to Mages guild, mages preferred a solitary lifestyle. On the other, I think there is still a clear evidence that magic is dangerous for unitiated, at least. In Skyrim we see four apprentices who died through experimenting with spells. I remember that in Morrowind it have been implied that cast failure suggests a chance for injury to the caster, but this was removed from the gameplay for the sake of simplicity (I can't find the proof right now for the latter though, so I can be wrong).

Therefore, I would read 'sharing knowledge' as implying to share it among solitary and self-taught mages themselves, to make magic more controllable, less destructive, and institutionalized.

I agree in advance that my reasoning here is rather speculative and requires further study. But it's good to remember that TES series are known for how the content of the books diverges from reality sometimes (don't forget about the presence of heresies and so on). The author of the book can embellish reality and present state of things in the better light. Just as in Antiquity freedom was extended only to citizens, and not to slaves. Perhaps mere peasants are not even taken into account?

I won't be surprised if there is a general unintentional inconsistency in the game, because developers might not think too much about it, while I tend to overthink it myself. On the one hand, developers apparently want to reproduce the world close enough to our everyday experience (therefore people cook food on a fire, and not with destruction fire magic), on the other hand, they want to add a lot of magic there, and this does not always fit perfectly together.

[MrFlibble]

I dare say that potions would have also been available in the Mages Guild if the developers had more time, unless they changed their minds halfway through development and never got around to changing the promotion messages from the temple factions that clearly imply the Mages Guild provides potions.

While I have no direct evidence, I've always assumed that this was the other way 'round, namely that the option to buy potions from the Mages Guild was intentionally removed to give temples more unique value. After all, buying potions and doing alchemy is the major benefit of joining temples, apart from the cure disease service.

There are some Mages guildhalls that have rooms with alchemical apparatuses on the table and a guy standing nearby, who I suppose was originally a potions seller, but now he's giving some other random service like buying or making spells.

But I'll be willing to change my mind if there's enough evidence that special talents for magic aren't needed and/or guilds aren't protecting their privileges.

I'd never argue that being magically gifted is not required to use magic to any degree. After all, this is directly implemented in the game mechanics with the various INT multipliers for magicka points for different classes.

However, I'd not strictly go along with the idea of the Mages Guild being some sort of an exclusive club for magic users. In fact, it is consistently represented in Daggerfall and later games as more of an academic research institution than a circle of select magical elite (which may exist within the guild but only as a part of it). They're very clearly open to admitting students who qualify, i.e. display a level of ability in the magical schools. When you are rejected, the guild member you talk to will tell you to study more, not that you are ineligible for good.

Clearly, not everyone in Tamriel is a magic user, but this is likely for the same reason as why not everyone plays a musical instrument, which, too, requires both a natural inclination and training to be successful in. To draw out the analogy, musically gifted people may have different levels of training and skill, and certainly the majority of those who can play an instrument to some degree don't end up joining a conservatory to complete and expand their formal education and then possibly teach others in an academic environment.

That said, there is no better source on the matter than the developers themselves. I've just looked up the manual and it is pretty clear on the subject of magic:

Tamriel is a land rich in magic. Magic in its raw form is called magicka. All people have a certain amount of it, and it is as much a part of them as blood and bone. Given skill and a sufficient amount of stored energy, this magicka can be spun into an almost limitless tapestry of effects.

Because of its potency, training in the arcane arts is only officially done in Mages' Guilds. Unofficially, many other organisations, from certain knightly orders to Thieves' Guilds and the Necromancers, train their members in magical skills. However, the Mages' Guilds are the acknowledged masters of magic.

This clearly confirms that anyone can do magic to some degree, but everything else depends on the level of training and the strength of this natural ability. Quite likely, the majority of the population does not use magic because they're both not educated in this field and their natural ability is not very prominent.

However, also don't forget that certain quests imply that even commoners can do some sorcery, like that merchant or innkeeper that wants the player to get a scroll that summons a fire atronach.

I don't fully agree with your point about underwater though. Just think about it from a different perspective: it is not really that obligatory to complete any quest in game. Magic provides unique advantages and if you don't invest in magic, it is not at all necessary that there should be guarantees to compensate for this somehow (and even then, you still can buy a potion, as you said, it is perfectly legitimate to use them for a non-mage).

Whether a player decides to explore an underwater section of a dungeon or not has no bearing on the simple fact that if you go underwater without the Buoyancy spell, you're likely not going to swim very far, especially if wearing armour and having a bunch of stuff in the inventory. It's a problem of game mechanics, and I suspect that the Buoyancy spell was intentionally made so cheap that anyone can cast it, because you're not going to get potions for a while, whereas anyone can buy this spell from the nearest Mages Guild as soon as you exit Privateer's Hold.

I like that in Arena there were classes who cannot cast spells at all, and I regret that already in Daggerfall they started to abandon this rigid approach.

I believe that it was the whole point of Daggerfall's skill system to avoid all the class restrictions railroading character development.

There isn't really a big difference between saying:

(1) Since my character has low Thaumaturgy skill, I'm going to refrain from casting Thaumaturgy spells, no matter what.

and

(2) Since my character has low Blunt Weapon skill, I'm going to refrain from using blunt weapons, no matter what.

This kind of directly contradicts the developers' intention to give players more freedom in building up their characters as they like. I always go for blunt weapons as a secondary/tertiary option, as they are durable and work best against the undead, and are good for bashing doors. By the same logic, there is no reason not to use spells if this is helpful, even if your character is a non-magic user.

There's even the option to join the Temple of Julianos to get access to spells and magic items even if you're not good at magic and can't get into the Mages Guild.

[L57]

However, also don't forget that certain quests imply that even commoners can do some sorcery, like that merchant or innkeeper that wants the player to get a scroll that summons a fire atronach.

Should reading scrolls really be classified as sorcery though? I always thought it is implied that it is enough to be able -to read- to use them - workaround for non-mages as is. Like a kind of tradable magic service that can be postponed in the future. Magic is in scroll, not in user.

Otherwise, a good summary. Sometimes it is useful to recall just a basic manual to get things together.

This kind of directly contradicts the developers' intention to give players more freedom in building up their characters as they like. I always go for blunt weapons as a secondary/tertiary option, as they are durable and work best against the undead, and are good for bashing doors. By the same logic, there is no reason not to use spells if this is helpful, even if your character is a non-magic user.

I understand the logic behind the developers' intentions, but I still don't like it. What I mean is not rigidity in choices, but rigidity in chosen roleplay. Why couldn't they leave the ability to remove mana altogether? Unless you count the fact that they really decided to endow every creature in the game with minimal magical abilities, according to the lore perspective.

But even if I accept it, I don't like being able to use spells without talent, or at least deep preliminary study and skill. This is why I also don't like that cheap Buoyancy spell. It feels to me almost like a cheat for non-mage PC. I understand that people generally don't like to fail the quests, but I would rather prefer to fail a quest than to have access to this spell with non-mage PC, even if game does not allow any viable alternative to it.

[L57]

Some more evidence that from the lore perspective magic is highly dangerous for a spellcaster if used by unskilled (from https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:2920,_Rain%27s_Hand,_v4):

Sotha Sil turned to Thargallith for only a moment, but he knew instantly from the screams what had transpired. The Nord lad Wellig had not cast the spell properly and was burning. The smell of scorched hair and flesh panicked the other students who were struggling to get out of the basin, pulling him with them, but the incline was too steep away from the entry points. With a wave of his hand, Sotha Sil extinguished the flame. Wellig and several other students were burned, but not badly.

...

"Fear does not break spells, but doubt and incompetence are the great enemies of any spellcaster."

Savos Aren from Skyrim (https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Savos_Aren) implies that student deaths are common:

"Please don't tell me that another one of the apprentices has been incinerated. I have enough to deal with right now."

Also from Skyrim, in the 'Midden Incident Report' (https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Midden_Incident_Report):

The bodies were found together, each suffering the same deformities: peeled and bubbling skin on the arms and face. Conjurer's burn, as it's commonly referred around the college.

Another interesting one regarding failure to maintain a spell, though it is not clear whether spellcaster did not calculate the duration correctly or simply lost focus (from https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Breathing_Water):

...He had not been paying attention to the grim, tireless advance of the world on his spell. It was fading away, his ability to breathe water. There was no time to surface. There was no time to do anything. As he sucked in, his lungs filled with cold, briny water.

A few days later, the smugglers working on the wharf came upon the drowned body of the former Tollman. Finding a body in the water in Vivec was not in itself noteworthy, but the subject that they discussed over many bottles of flin was how did it happen that he drowned with two potions of water breathing in his hands.

In sum, what can be gathered from gameplay and lore evidence is that spells can fail and not only fail, but also cause heavy damage to spellcaster. This is, in principle, already a sufficient justification for why only very few practice magic. I think Morrowind spell-casting gameplay mechanics appear to be the closest to how it depicted in lore (although still far from it).

[L57]

Selling spells is also an interesting topic. If I remember correctly, the spell itself is just an entry in your notebook, so it doesn't require any labour or materials to replicate it. And the majority of spells is known for centuries, so you don't even need usually to invent them from the scratch. Does the Mages Guild holds intellectual property on them? How to enforce it and prevent copying of spells to keep prices high enough? How pricing for spells *REALLY* work at all? So many problems even on the surface, even if we abstract from already mentioned oddities.

Of course, developers simply didn't care to work the lore and gameplay that deep and seriously... This is just to remind, how arbitrary and inconsistent on closer inspection are many things that we see in the game. You cannot really rely that much on in-game experience to justify or explain many things, and there is simply no lore for such details at all. So, you need (if care at all) to complete this lore for yourself in the direction that seems more consistent and interesting to you personally, after all.

[MrFlibble]

Why couldn't they leave the ability to remove mana altogether? Unless you count the fact that they really decided to endow every creature in the game with minimal magical abilities, according to the lore perspective.

Oh, I also asked myself this question at some point, I suppose I was not super happy with class restrictions being diluted too. My first guess was that making an exception for non-magic users to not use magicka altogether was probably a bit too complex to implement, taking into account all the game mechanics related to it (even if there is no magicka regeneration at rest, there are spells and other effects which drain or damage magicka -- perhaps it would break the respective calculations if some characters did not have any magicka at all).

It's hard to tell if the original intent was to make magic such an integral part of the world that it flows through everyone, like the Force in Star Wars, or this piece of lore arose from certain technical limitations of the engine.

But even if I accept it, I don't like being able to use spells without talent, or at least deep preliminary study and skill. This is why I also don't like that cheap Buoyancy spell. It feels to me almost like a cheat for non-mage PC. I understand that people generally don't like to fail the quests, but I would rather prefer to fail a quest than to have access to this spell with non-mage PC, even if game does not allow any viable alternative to it.

Truth be told, I've not encountered many dungeons where the quest location was underwater. It's not really about being completist here, it's about how you generally interact with the game world with the tools that you're given.

I think the main problem is that so many aspects in Daggerfall are simply unbalanced. True, the Buoyancy spell does feel like a cheat, but the swimming skill is not working very well on its own. There are dungeons were you can end up in a flooded area without being able to even drop off your gear and inventory stuff -- in the hopes that it will improve your chances at swimming without spells -- somewhere where you can pick it up later. It's possibly more realistic that way, but the game does not really make a consistent play around such hazards, so it feels unfair compared to other challenges.

I've just checked if you can get anywhere underwater without spells while wearing to armour and having very low encumbrance (and without a high skill in swimming). The horizontal movement rate is still about the same as when sneaking, meaning that unless you're Argonian, air will go out very fast. Possibly, with a higher swimming skill, you move faster, but then you're either spending money on trainers, or do the boring routine of dipping and swimming for a while to train the skill the natural way. It's going to be a very slow and uninteresting waste of time.

Even for a non-caster character, you'll be way better off using potions of waterwalking and water breathing. Some temples give access to potions at rank 2 and IIRC one right after joining (not sure). Is there much difference between using a potion and casting a low-level spell? If it breaks your character for you, don't use spells and throw away the spellbook that you've started with.

Morrowind fixes the magic skills system a bit by adding the chance to fail a spell altogether, inversely proportional to the skill level. That way I felt like my character was really learning magic from a low start (I picked Breton and wanted to go for a Spellsword, but ended up taking the quiz and it offered me a Rogue; but a Breton has a magicka points boost, or is it an INT boost, so I realised later on that I could learn and use spells anyway). Perhaps a DFU mod an introduce a similar mechanic.

Some other non-magic skills are similarly skewed. You can have a great climbing ability but will still not be able to climb over a waist-high fence, because the game does not count it as a climbable obstacle. *This is not correct, you can climb fences if you crouch first. There's that infamous window in Wayrest and some random dungeons, it feels odd to have to use a potion of levitation while crouching to get through it. It's simply a flaw of game design.

But the beauty of Daggerfall is in the fact that if you don't want to use a skill, you just don't use it. If you feel something is cheating (Create Item, cheap custom open spell that opens any door), just don't use it. There's a tradeoff though, as some aspects of gameplay are not really well thought out and can become tedious (sorting through dozens of potions in the inventory for example) or outright unhelpful. Just do what seems best for your own playing experience.

Another interesting one regarding failure to maintain a spell, though it is not clear whether spellcaster did not calculate the duration correctly or simply lost focus (from https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Breathing_Water):

I remember that book. I've always assumed that it simply described how the spell effect dissipates after a while.

Selling spells is also an interesting topic. If I remember correctly, the spell itself is just an entry in your notebook, so it doesn't require any labour or materials to replicate it. And the majority of spells is known for centuries, so you don't even need usually to invent them from the scratch. Does the Mages Guild holds intellectual property on them? How to enforce it and prevent copying of spells to keep prices high enough?

I think it's not that unrealistic at all. I suppose this is indeed how the system works: you come to the guild and they allow to you copy a spell from their grimoires for a fee. Kind of like real-life document archives work when they offer users to photograph or make copies of documents.

Assuming one buys spells for personal use, there is generally no incentive to let others copy them for free or for a lesser charge. It's not like a commodity anyone can use, but rather very specific forms of knowledge that, for the most part, is useless to general citizenry. (I can imagine some renegade mages' underground network that wants to break the Guild's monopoly on spells; but it does not exist in the game.) Also it does not seem that selling spells is really a major source of the Mages Guild's funding, so perhaps they'd not have a tight control over attempted piracy of spells at all.

You can always assume that other parties which sell spells exist (BTW, it's the Temple of Kynareth that sells spells and has a spell maker, not the Temple of Julianos as I previously suggested; the latter has magical items), it's just that the player never comes across them.

[L57]

Some other non-magic skills are similarly skewed. You can have a great climbing ability but will still not be able to climb over a waist-high fence, because the game does not count it as a climbable obstacle. There's that infamous window in Wayrest and some random dungeons, it feels odd to have to use a potion of levitation while crouching to get through it. It's simply a flaw of game design.

On a side note, didn't Daggerfall Unity fix these issues in particular? I mean inability to climb over some of these fences. I haven't come across it yet.

Morrowind fixes the magic skills system a bit by adding the chance to fail a spell altogether, inversely proportional to the skill level. That way I felt like my character was really learning magic from a low start (I picked Breton and wanted to go for a Spellsword, but ended up taking the quiz and it offered me a Rogue; but a Breton has a magicka points boost, or is it an INT boost, so I realised later on that I could learn and use spells anyway). Perhaps a DFU mod an introduce a similar mechanic.

I agree, I came to conclusion that Morrowind had pretty much the best magic system (and perhaps RPG system as a whole) in TES series. It would be interesting to look at Daggerfall with Morrowind gameplay elements.

[11th_defender]

Oh, I also asked myself this question at some point, I suppose I was not super happy with class restrictions being diluted too. My first guess was that making an exception for non-magic users to not use magicka altogether was probably a bit too complex to implement, taking into account all the game mechanics related to it (even if there is no magicka regeneration at rest, there are spells and other effects which drain or damage magicka -- perhaps it would break the respective calculations if some characters did not have any magicka at all).

I don't understand what you mean about having characters without magicka being hard to implement. You seem to be making a distinction between not having magicka and not having magicka regeneration. Ultimately, this doesn't seem to have much of a difference in my view. The latter option would simply not allow for any magicka gain through potions or enchanted items. Perhaps something as simple as resetting the magicka pool to zero every few frames would work as an implementation. That wouldn't mess up any calculations right?

Truth be told, I've not encountered many dungeons where the quest location was underwater. It's not really about being completist here, it's about how you generally interact with the game world with the tools that you're given.

I think the main problem is that so many aspects in Daggerfall are simply unbalanced. True, the Buoyancy spell does feel like a cheat, but the swimming skill is not working very well on its own. There are dungeons were you can end up in a flooded area without being able to even drop off your gear and inventory stuff -- in the hopes that it will improve your chances at swimming without spells -- somewhere where you can pick it up later. It's possibly more realistic that way, but the game does not really make a consistent play around such hazards, so it feels unfair compared to other challenges.

I've just checked if you can get anywhere underwater without spells while wearing to armour and having very low encumbrance (and without a high skill in swimming). The horizontal movement rate is still about the same as when sneaking, meaning that unless you're Argonian, air will go out very fast. Possibly, with a higher swimming skill, you move faster, but then you're either spending money on trainers, or do the boring routine of dipping and swimming for a while to train the skill the natural way. It's going to be a very slow and uninteresting waste of time.

Even for a non-caster character, you'll be way better off using potions of waterwalking and water breathing. Some temples give access to potions at rank 2 and IIRC one right after joining (not sure). Is there much difference between using a potion and casting a low-level spell? If it breaks your character for you, don't use spells and throw away the spellbook that you've started with.

Morrowind fixes the magic skills system a bit by adding the chance to fail a spell altogether, inversely proportional to the skill level. That way I felt like my character was really learning magic from a low start (I picked Breton and wanted to go for a Spellsword, but ended up taking the quiz and it offered me a Rogue; but a Breton has a magicka points boost, or is it an INT boost, so I realised later on that I could learn and use spells anyway). Perhaps a DFU mod an introduce a similar mechanic.

Some other non-magic skills are similarly skewed. You can have a great climbing ability but will still not be able to climb over a waist-high fence, because the game does not count it as a climbable obstacle. There's that infamous window in Wayrest and some random dungeons, it feels odd to have to use a potion of levitation while crouching to get through it. It's simply a flaw of game design.

I don't believe having magic do similar things to other skills is necessarily a problem inherently. I will be talking more about potential solutions in general for a game design discussion, I am well aware that many of these solutions are not possible to be modded in to dfu. When talking about the buoyancy-swimming problem, it is more of an example of how you can think about solutions and can be extrapolated to other issues like the levitation-climbing problem. The balancing of skills is a big problem in df, but I feel like this is because of df not thinking about or not being able to implement potential solutions.
There are a few things that set swimming apart from buoyancy, but the pros and cons of both are not balanced at all.
Swimming pros:
-doesn't require magicka
Swimming cons:
-absolute waste of a skill selection
Buoyancy pros:
-a cheap spell
-uses a magic skill which is useful for other spells
Buoyancy cons:
-uses magicka(though not much)

The fact is, buoyancy is better in pretty much the only way that matters, having a magical skill which can be used for other spells. Some problems I can think of and potential solutions(and the problems with those solutions):
Buoyancy is too cheap: maybe spells can be made to be more expensive. The problem is that this is sort of a band-aid solutions that makes more problems. It would seriously weaken spell-casters if spells were more expensive to cast. Perhaps only utility spells like levitation, buoyancy, water walking, etc. would have a higher magicka cost. This could mean that spells like climbing and swimming might be more useful in the early game.
Not requiring magicka is not actually that much of a benefit: dungeons in df only have short bursts of water, which means you can go everywhere you need to without using up mana. Then you can just rest and do it again. A solution to this would be having a new type of dungeon which would be flooded. These dungeons would be with longer water sections and very crucially, some water sections that allow for going up to the surface to catch your breath. Without this, those sections would require water breathing, which just makes the problem worse. Having a few places in this sort of dungeon where it's solid ground and you can rest to recover health, stamina, and magicka is also required for obvious reasons, but flooded dungeons would have less of these.
Magic skills are too useful: maybe magic skills could be split up into more skills, but again, this really harms a pure mage user. There could also be some sort of splitting in between general skills like mysticism and specific skills like swimming and orcish. You would have, say, 5 general skills and 10 specific skills(arbitrary numbers). There would need to have more specific skills such as blacksmithing, herbology, etc. added to the skill pool to make this a useful system. Like I said, I know this is ridiculous for dfu and it would be very difficult to implement, but I'm just thinking about rpg systems more broadly.

Specific skills is kind of a way to balance the fact that some skills are more used than others. The problem these ultra-specific skills have in df is that they are simple a waste of a skill slot. The specific skill solution works to force people to make their characters have more distinct interests rather than just metagaming(though of course people will metagame specific skills as well). Bethesda sort of actually used a lot of these solutions before with climbing. Levitation costs more magicka than buoyancy, and more importantly, climbing is actually used enough in the overworld to be useful. Swimming is pretty much never used in the overworld, and this is a massively missed opportunity. Not being able to go underwater while fighting enemies and going inside ruined dungeons was a missed opportunity. Another missed opportunity that relates to swimming is using ships. If ships could be steered and moved, the swimming skill could be more useful. Most likely it would have it's name changed to seafaring or the like, and be used for swimming and sailing. The obvious next step is having ship on ship combat, crews to fight each other and the like. Like I said, obviously not possible for daggerfall.

Phew, that took a while. I will not be proofreading this lol.

[MrFlibble]

I don't understand what you mean about having characters without magicka being hard to implement. You seem to be making a distinction between not having magicka and not having magicka regeneration. Ultimately, this doesn't seem to have much of a difference in my view. The latter option would simply not allow for any magicka gain through potions or enchanted items. Perhaps something as simple as resetting the magicka pool to zero every few frames would work as an implementation. That wouldn't mess up any calculations right?

I never gave this much thought, honestly. Just in theory, a character completely without magicka would have zero as the maximum amount of magicka points. Perhaps that was problematic, I don't know. But Arena is way more rigid with class distinctions, yet IIRC, every character has some magicka, even non-spellcasters.

I don't believe having magic do similar things to other skills is necessarily a problem inherently.

I never said that this was a problem. In theory, magic-users and non-magic characters should have more or less equal abilities in tackling obstacles and hazards in the game. However, it appears that the developers have cut down on certain mundane ways of solving problems and only left magical options of doing so.

Climbing is a good example because it mostly works as an alternative to levitation, except you can only climb vertical walls, and only upwards. IIRC, there is evidence that at some point, it was intended to also have ropes in the game which you could use to reach elevated areas, and possibly also climb down (as a non-magic counterpart to slowfalling). These features were cut for either the lack of time or they did not know how to properly code this in to be a 1:1 equivalent of levitation/slowfalling.

Similarly, there are unused items in the game like bandages and torches. Very likely, the former's purpose was to serve as a healing aid, and the latter to illuminate the surroundings. Again, in the final game we're only left with magical ways of accomplishing either.

In many ways, Morrowind is clearly doing Daggerfall's homework in a proper way, and it has brought many of these things on a more level ground. You can swim quite well without magical aid, and heal yourself a bit without relying on spells. Daggerfall, on the other hand, often pushes non-magical characters towards using magic (be it spells, potions or magic items), without giving a non-magic alternative to certain actions.

This isn't really a big problem on its own though. There are other RPGs which will give you plenty of magic items and spells, regardless of your class, like NetHack. It's just that because Daggerfall was from the start intended to be a more "realistic" game, that it feels that in some aspects it is falling short of this mark.

[MrFlibble]

You can have a great climbing ability but will still not be able to climb over a waist-high fence, because the game does not count it as a climbable obstacle.

I need to correct myself here, fences can be climbed, but only if you crouch first. The same way you can climb out of water in certain dungeon areas where the dry floor is somewhat above the water level.