Let's Play The Elder Scrolls Daggerfall - Part 58 - Daggerfall Unity (0.3 Build #49, 10/13/16)
10Download Link - https://developer.cloud.unity3d.com/share/WkvX886IWG/
Without any other mods to really check out and DaggerfallXL breaking on me, I decide just to jump to Daggerfall Unity. I am using the latest test build at the time, dated October of 2016. Made by Interkarma of Daggerfall Workshop, this is possibly the most promising thing about Daggerfall, its legacy and a modern source port fixing a lot of the problems with the original game. As I keep saying, this is pretty much an early beta with little gameplay in place, so this is more a proof of concept than anything at the moment, but if it continues it could be a better alternative to Dosbox for anyone interested, especially with DaggerXL barely being worked on.
It seems the project was started by someone that has made a lot of tools for Daggerfall, but only realized that porting to Unity would be an option in 2014. Even then, it was intended just to be a part-time project that took a bit to get off the ground.
Beyond showcasing the project, I also use this as an excuse to showcase the final enemy we have yet to see in the game, the Spriggan. This is because it is normally a massive pain to actually find a Spider Nest dungeon, but in Daggerfall Unity it is currently able to show all locations by default, probably for testing purposes. In any event, I abuse it to finally find this guy.
So, big changes to the original game of course can involve a lot of graphical stuff, which aren't the most important for us old-school players but are a thing. We get some newer lighting effects around the various dungeons. We also get some tweaks to various textures to make them less pixelated than the original. Nothing really crazy here, just some minor changes. The biggest thing to notice is that we now have a crosshair in the middle of the screen that makes things a bit more convenient. Weather has been changed around, now snow is a lot more visible and thunderstorms exist. Also, ghosts look different for some reason.
Another big thing about the project is that it opens a lot of roads in the future. As we have seen, Daggerfall has very little offered for it, mainly because it is a pain to edit for. Daggerfall Unity seeks to change that by making it portable to mobile devices and also allowing mods to be installed or uninstalled on the fly. This could be pretty powerful in the future. A major focus for the project is aiding creators to make stuff for Daggerfall, thus fixing what has been lacking from Daggerfall for years. At the same time it strives for compatibility with the original game, I could easily load up one of my old saves if I wished, the biggest problem being that it will boot you out of a dungeon if you were in one.
Note many of the graphical changes are actually community made mods that were added to the startup menu. Reflective surfaces are now supported, grass is a lot more visible, heath/fatigue can be flipped, birds can be seen in the sky, and the sky has had an overhaul.
A major change here and probably the most important at the moment is performance. Daggerfall on DOS is like every other DOS game, slow and clunky, meaning we get very bad performance half the time. Controls feel smoother here, jumping and gravity are massive improvements on the original formula, and we don't need to wait for constant messages to appear. As it is all running on Unity, we also get a lot more stability, which hopefully means less crashes and audio glitches.
Another really great thing about this is the removal of draw limitations. The original game is better than Arena's draw distance, but is still quite limiting and often results in me having absolutely no idea where I am going. See all the previous episodes and count how many times I got lost trying to enter a dungeon because I couldn't see the giant fortress I spawned nearby. A bigger draw distance isn't just a nice feature, it honestly is something heavily needed in Daggerfall. The only problem is that it reveals things to be quite empty, especially when you decide to explore the world. At least it doesn't feel like a pointless void anymore though, now it is just a massively abandoned area filled with thousands of trees and little else.
Dual wielding is apparently a lot more possible, even with heavy weaponry. Hovering over weaponry will state the name of the object. You can have more than 6 saves. We also have access to a console now. When leveling, you can also see what you are actually improving. VR support exists as well.
Needless to say, this will make Daggerfall a lot more bearable in the future, hopefully with some UI overhauls and other such improvements. As the video shows, everything is still pretty empty, we don't exactly have people we can talk to or interact with yet, but you can do some dungeon delving. We also can't level or really have any purpose to doing anything just yet, but we still have a basic game with dungeons in particular being mostly functional.
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