Daggerfall Unity on GOG

[BadLuckBurt]

Congratulations Interkarma?

Just opened the GOG site and was greeted by Lysandus staring me in the face:

Spoiler!

https://www.gog.com/en/game/daggerfall_unity_gog_cut

Clicked through to the page and this is a modded installation for Windows only?

[Lywzc]

Is IK involved in this? And in my opinion this modlist is far too aggressive and alter the original gameplay too much. Not to mention how will they update all these mods and have they contacted the authors of these mods to get permission to distribute these mods.

[BadLuckBurt]

Is IK involved in this? And in my opinion this modlist is far too aggressive and alter the original gameplay too much. Not to mention how will they update all these mods and have they contacted the authors of these mods to get permission to distribute these mods.

I have no idea, I was happy at first but that's starting to change after realising it's Windows only and essentially a mod-pack.

[Ralzar]

My biggest concern is mod and dfu settings. Because if those are not set right, there are going to be problems with that list.

[Lywzc]

My biggest concern is mod and dfu settings. Because if those are not set right, there are going to be problems with that list.

So as an author of one of its mod you are not contacted by them for permission to bundle your mod?
And they even listed some mods twice...

[Interkarma]

I'm not directly involved, but GOG did contact me and let me know ahead of time. They also informed me Bethesda gave it their approval and that GOG contacted every modder listed for permission. The modlist was selected by GamerZakh and the GOG Cut release coincides with a video of his about modded DFU.

I'm really happy for people to have a convenient click-and-run method of installing Daggerfall Unity. If nothing else, it lowers the tech barrier to setting up. I think it's a huge win for the modders whose work is featured here. They deserve recognition and I'm happy to see each mod author linked and credited on the GOG store page.

The GOG Cut might not be everyone's cup of tea depending on mod preferences, but it is still DFU at the core. It's possible to strip back the mods just to classic gamedata and build it back up however you like. I might put up an article later on how to "demaster" the GOG Cut for anyone who prefers to play without mods.

Some notes based on my testing and what I know so far.

• The GOG Cut release is built from 0.13.5.
• The GOG Cut will deploy their settings and keybinds over yours if you already have DFU installed.
• It uses the bundled gamedata, so your classic saves (SAVE1-6) won't be visible unless you copy them into the GOG Daggerfall folder.
• Cloud sync for saves was enabled in my test. If you have thousands of saves like I do, you might want to disable that.
• The GOG Galaxy default screenshot key is F12, so the the QuickLoad key is one of the keybinds they changed.
• GOG said this release might be temporary but they'll try to keep everything updated while it remains on the store.

[Lywzc]

Cool. I still think eye-candies only is more appropriate to be included in this version to attract more people to play. However those gameplay enhancements mods IMO should not be included by default. They may be mentioned with link to this forum or Nexus but including these in a "base game" per se is, in my opinion, not great. It may mislead people into thinking something changed in mods is vanilla. Visual enhancements have no such problem since a 1997 game can not have such visual.

[Interkarma]

Agreed. I'm happy they added a bit of their own branding to it with "GOG Cut" as it helps differentiate their build from the core game I'm involved with.

With DFU being free and open source with a nice license, it's only inevitable someone would eventually remix and repackage. Just like there's a thousand variants of Doom, I expect we'll see a lot more spins on DFU in the future. This is only the start.

When it comes to offering my support time, I'll still only support the core game without mods. It's almost unreasonably difficult just to support this game in my own time as is. I definitely can't afford to support other people's remixes of the game as well.

[Lywzc]

Yes there will be many modlists and they are absolutely fine since they are definitely unofficial. My concern is that even with "GOG Cut" added since it is "officially" sold for free many not so advanced gamers will still take it as the official base game, the base DFU or even the base Daggerfall which IMO will cause problems. DFU does have its own additions and gameplay refinements but they are all disabled by default. The problem with gameplay mods is they often not only add things to vanilla which are easier to spot, they change things that are already in vanilla which are hard to find out unless you know what mod changes what. Maybe separate the gameplay mods and offer them as an optional download and clearly label them as mods?

And this is also from my own experience with Skyrim. In our forum (not here) there are always people asking for support for modlist bundled version of Skyrim (Of course pirated and illegal) despite forbidden by the forum rules. And since they do not know which mod do what since they are bundled together they will blame it on the base game and call it trash. I sincerely do not wish this to happen to Daggerfall.

[haloterm]

Interesting. A while ago I asked / offered in this forum to create a few curated mod packages for different tastes and that suggestion was not really met with interest.