im searching in my retailers for the game currently and been wondering,what actually makes this game so random?

People have tried to make engines like daggerfall's but they have always failed,daggerfall's programming/engine is probably the only one in the world that can do such things.Whos the genius who programmed the game?

i think there are a few things.

- the world is static and it's huge. so you can always go to the same towns & the same dungeons. helps with the atmosphere, it actually feels like you travel far to remote locations and go deep underground (cause you do)

- there are lots of parts used and more variation than you'd think. for dungeons there's quite a bit of variation, different sections can have flooded/partially flooded/dry versions. so you rarely see exactly the same thing twice. same goes for towns. you will recognize sections but besides that there are really a lot of individual variations. if you use a program like daggerfall explorer you can browse all the components of the game. it's really quite varied.

- there are also lots of quest templates (more than 1 hundred?) that each offer lots of possibilities since you can have an almost unlimited number of combinations of person/item/locations.

- its unpredictable and glitchy. there are some things you know couldn't happen but because of the buggines it kind of feels like anything could happen at any time.

- it can be pretty tough.

- the graphics are primitive and there's no in-game voice acting. makes it more immersive in my opinion.

it actually has a lot of things going for it in terms of immersiveness. it's got a nice color pallette, sound, music and controls.

I agree on every points of Jammer1.

Since I'm a very nostalgic person, I'm still amazed to this day how a complex game like Daggerfall can have existed in 1996. There were very few games in that time that offered a full 24 hour day-night cycle, four different climates, full weather system along with the vastness of the land it offered. Arena was also one of its kind back then (Buildings reflected on some of the water spots! )

I'd like to add also that Daggerfall's soundtrack and sound effects are unique. Walking in a town during a snowy night can be spooky. When walking at night in town, I'm ALWAYS on my guard. You can never tell when you might hear rats or bats trying to ambush you! Daggerfall is one of the few RPGs where I am relieved when I arrive at a tavern, finally safe from the dangers of the night.

When I'll be too old to play games, I'll put my Daggerfall copy in my bank's vault. It's an artifact I can't give away or sell to someone...

Speaking of musical immerision, i cant get mine to work...

Ahh for my contribution, I dont really know why, but Im obsessed with... my ship. My ship is base, my center of the world everything is there in my ship the big 200grand big boat, I LOVE IT! I dont really know why maybe you'll be like me but the, ship in all of daggerfalls perfection the ship makes it, and I still dont know why.

Im obsessed with... my ship. My ship is base, my center of the world everything is there in my ship the big 200grand big boat, I LOVE IT! I dont really know why maybe you'll be like me but the, ship in all of daggerfalls perfection the ship makes it, and I still dont know why.

I sort of agree. It's big, it's quiet out there for the most part, you can get a little rest without worrying about anything, you can practice your spells, there's plenty of room to sort and hoard your loot...I spend a lot of time on my ships. The houses just don't cut it.

this game was a momument to what was possible with a computer game, and no other has every had the same scope. It is sad that it will take many decades to get back to that pinicle because of the way games are made nowadays, but never fear, we will get there.

thank you for telling me how good the game is,but i was asking how does the thing work.

The randomness isn't all that complex, when you get down to it. The dungeons are pieced together from large blocks (about 2-5 for each dungeon) that are just stuck together and then surrounded by endcaps. Each turn and corridor is not randomly generated, just which blocks are placed next to each other. Same goes for cities. Look at a city map long enough and you can see the grid of building blocks.

Of course, there's also the randomly generated names for all NPCs and locations, and the filling in of the templated quests (which is really quite amazing when you think about it).

Yes, it is.. I often catch myself reflecting on, "how did they make it do this?" kinds of questions when I'm playing. I mean, yeah.. The grammar errors in the dialogue tend to annoy me, and I do find the graphics, in retrospect, rudimentary, but the nature & result of the included algorithms always astound me. Why the hell else would I have come back to this again after 10 years before finishing Fallout3 (which I was enjoying without CTDs et al before Daggerfall snagged me again) and while unopened boxes of BioShock & TES IV: Shivering Isles sit next to my workstation since Christmas (well, admittedly some of it might have to do with the knowledge that the implementation of SecuROM in BioShock has been rumoured to be much more pervasive than in Fallout).

oh daggerfall.

I am trying it again, on my old win98se machine.

I have read of, for years, just how "sameness" rules the towns.

but once long ago, I found a town that had nothing but BOOKSTORES in it! about 10 to 15 bookstores and that was all of the stores that this town had!


lets not talk of the DRAGON that was rumored to be in the game, someone actually found it, it exists!

then there was that telephone booth that someone wrote of, out in the desert lands. It appeared, then the Dr WHO sounds, of his booth, sounded, then it was gone!

never know......

freestone

Someday I'd like to see that. As I occasionally wander around in the wilderness, the weirdest thing I've seen so far is just a couple of "landscape tears" where it looks like the engine didn't generate the landscape correctly. But I've wondered if some places, way out in the middle of nowhere, held some weird little surprises left by the developers.

i once heard a story about a guy who found a NPC mage and some NPCs wandering in the middle of nowwhere (like they do in the towns) in Wrothgaria soem years ago but i never found anything like that.

perhaps a unloaded village?

That's a Fallout 1 easter egg. (Or Fallout 2. I don't remember)

It's worth noting that Daggerfall was generated by Bethesda - it doesn't generate the maps on its own.

It's certainly not the only game to generate maps/terrain like this but it has become less common in favor for more hand-crafted design.