Daggerfall Unity on GOG

[Interkarma]

I'm disappointed to hear not every mod creator was contacted or didn't have time to give permission for their mod to be included. I've emailed GOG and asked they respect the wishes of anyone who does not want to be included in GOG Cut. I'm not directly involved, so that's all I can really do.

Otherwise, it's incredible to see a bundled version of DFU on GOG like this. It feels like a first for this kind of project and shows how far things have come. The impression I have is the people at GOG who put this together really love Daggerfall and wanted to give everyone a free remastered experience with all the hard work of assembling the build taken out. I do appreciate the concept and hope GOG's Cut creates many positive experiences for people new to the game.

[Jay_H]

It also gives us some unexpected optimism: Bethesda had no objection to the release, which means (1) they're definitely aware of DFU and (2) they seem to have no objection to it. Those are great steps forward I didn't expect from this.

[ShortBeard]

I for one am pretty happy about the mod pack in terms of the intention. I love that our work as a community can be made easily-accessible to gamers, without barrier to entry, mod load orders, tweaking settings, etc. We as developers & mod authors can easily forget that most people just want to pick up a game and play it. Just reading the comments on Zakh's video makes me happy to see that so many people are enjoying the fantastic work we have all done over the years.

Obviously, the execution in terms of gaining permission from all the mod authors was less than great. I was personally contacted, but as I understand it many of you weren't. I'm hoping this was due more to an oversight or an honest mistake on GOG's part, to give them the benefit of the doubt - and I am hoping this gets all smoothed out over the next few days and the mod authors are all contacted and asked. Obviously it's up to the individual mod authors, but I am hoping that the pack remains relatively intact after this is sorted out. I get a lot of joy seeing so many people enjoy an experience we've all put together, but I also understand that some other authors might have a different perspective based on the circumstances.

This is my 2 cents anyway.

ShortBeard

[Interkarma]

I do believe there was no ill-intent on GOG's part re. modders who weren't properly contacted or credited. The people involved at GOG seem to have pulled this together in their spare time and in good faith (it's still a free game after all) and they're just as passionate about Daggerfall as the rest of us. Mistakes happen and they'll no doubt make things right and remove the mods for creators who don't want to be included in the GOG Cut.

[FloydFire]

I also am pretty happy as user of DFU and part of the people that already enjoyed DFU modded, i've got experience in modding bethesda games so DFU was pretty much the easier experience i could have in modding, i also have some mods on the nexus for other bethesda games and while i understand the permissions issues (sorry i'm not an english native speaker so please excuse my poor sentences) i hope the GOG cut remains or at least doesn't lose all the appeal that it could have to less experienced people in modding, i downloaded and i'm trying the "cut" in the next few days (if it doesn't get taken down), still i'm thankful for all the work the modding community (and the DFU team) put together to have this reach other people, i wouldn't ever thought of playing daggerfall before discovering DFU and it's modding community. Although i didn't contributed much in terms of modding i always been back into modding DFU and seeing a package pre-modded did make me a little more happy, it's sad i had to discover that people weren't contacted first. Anyway i was just putting my thoughts in here. I think in the end the people that download that modpack are still going to love (or some hate, but that would happens anyway you cannot please everyone and most of the time are the vocal minority) the work that this community made. Sorry if my post was not needed feel free to remove it, i saw a lot of posting and mostly negativity (valid negativity about not asking for permissions) and wanted to add to the positivity that the modpack brought

[duendeinexistente]

I question a lot of choices in this (Someone already mentioned reviews ranting about dream, one of them was me. Though my criticism was rather the logistics of packaging a mod by default that changes enough things to not be for everyone and makes up a hefty chunk of the filesize) but something I didn't point out there was the settings. Going of off the screenshots there some less than ideal settings the game is shipped with, and so odd I can't help questioning if there was an effort to make the original release look worse than it really does.

Why is bilinear filtering on? I recall it being off by default in DfU. I haven't had an actual argument about bilinear filtering in ages, at least since... 2005? Back when I was getting a friend into emulation. There's no real questioning that it worsens pixel art, which is what daggerfall definitely is.
And regardless of tastes on aesthetics- why have it on in the screenshots? They're there for comparison. It presents an unfair comparison of what the original looked like- I can inderstand someone rguing that the pixels are hard to figure out upclose (Upclose specifically; It's kind of funny how pixel art can become harder to understand when it's too large on the screen) but blurry like this I have trouble telling what's what. It's all so muddy.

And that's without getting into the logistics. Will they keep the mods updated? Did they check for compatibility issues (Going of off a reddit post, the answer is no as it ships two incompatibl mods) before shipping this? Is this another morrowind overhaul? Are the modders going to have to deal with years worth of people bitching about outdated copies of their mod malfunctioning? Why no linux relese?

Just so odd. It all feels like nobody took time to seriously think about the logistics of this and how to make it work and happen properly, and the intentional decisions are even weirder, like the bilinear or sending emails asking for permission but just to some people and then not waiting for answers . Don't really know what to think about it all.

Does anyone know this gamerzahk guy who was supposedly involved and could they ask him for input on all this? I've never even heard of him.

[ByteMixer]

I'll remain cautiously optimistic that GOG will work to smooth things over with mod authors. But it remains that they were a bit sloppy about getting in touch with all the mod authors involved in the curated bundle. Still, everything boiled down, I know GOG tries to be one of the better distributors out there, and they do try to generally do things the right way. I do agree there was probably some oversight, and they weren't deliberately ignoring mod authors.

I do agree with Jay_H's assertion that it's kind of nice to know that Bethesda is definitely aware of the project, and they gave the green light to have it available on GOG.

Funnily enough, there was also a recent article in PC Gamer about DFU that mentioned the "must have" mods for 2022, which, of course, DREAM was mentioned, and by proxy, there was a short half-sentence blurb about the included remastered music work being part of DREAM. So yeah, that gave me a feelgood moment, even if I wasn't specifically mentioned, haha.

[Interkarma]

Why is bilinear filtering on? I recall it being off by default in DfU. I haven't had an actual argument about bilinear filtering in ages, at least since... 2005? Back when I was getting a friend into emulation. There's no real questioning that it worsens pixel art, which is what daggerfall definitely is.

Bilinear is off by default in DFU. It's not a preference of mine either. It's mainly there for HD mods to enable if needed. I always hate seeing it enabled over the default pixel art.

My guess is that Zakh or someone else took those screens after just disabling mods and didn't revert settings back to factory.

[Interkarma]

It also gives us some unexpected optimism: Bethesda had no objection to the release, which means (1) they're definitely aware of DFU and (2) they seem to have no objection to it. Those are great steps forward I didn't expect from this.

Jay, did you see the Steam update listed better compatibility with DFU in the patch notes?

https://twitter.com/gav_clayton/status/ ... 0531340288

They integrated the .213 patch and put the .VID files in the right place. Someone at Bethesda seems to helping on that front.

[XJDHDR]

Does anyone know this gamerzahk guy who was supposedly involved and could they ask him for input on all this? I've never even heard of him.

I've known about him for a number of years. He is most well known for his videos about the Impressions City Building Strategy Game series. I am also reasonably well known on his Discord server for the widescreen patchers I've released for two of the games in that series.

As for his input, he posted a reply on his video about this GOG release:
"I have seen those [discussions that GOG didn't get the approval from some of the creators to have their mods in this compilation]. Note I'm not a GOG employee and have no access to communications, so I'm unsure of the exact state of things or timelines. I've also not been personally contacted by any mod author about permissions as I'm not really in charge of that. As it's only been a few hours, I'll wait and see how things are sorted, but one thing that is possible is for the modlist of this to be updated or changed, so that isn't a problem."