Roads would have helped, but who’s supposed to pay for them? I’ve been in Daggerfall for years and never paid a dime in taxes.

In classic Daggerfall, there are two ways to travel between locations on the province map: Fast travel, or traveling on your own.

You can literally walk or ride from one town or dungeon (or village or graveyard or farmstead) to another, simply look at the map to find the direction and use your compass to go in that direction. Eventually you will arrive, or else miss it and walk right past, since Daggerfall (unlike the other Elder Scrolls games) does not have roads outside of the habitation. (This is probably not realistic to make with a mod, given that Tamriel is the size of Great Britain or above, but that would have been ideal.)

Fast travel on the other hand is virtually instant for the player, but not for the character: You click on the destination and get an estimate of how long it will take given a couple different options. Then you confirm, and the new location loads. Time and date will have updated accordingly, but you the player don’t feel  like it has taken time. The time is only relevant if you are on a deadline. Most quests have very generous deadlines, but if you take on several at the same time you may need to factor in the time.

What if you could experience distance in the game without having to hold down the forward button the whole time? There is a mod for that.

“Tedious Travel” 

Thanks to a mod developer known as jedidia, you can replace the fast travel option with what he (?) calls ‘a convenient “autopilot” and adjustable time compression.’ The autopilot is extremely simple, it just points the nose against the target and off you go. If you start it in towns, you may get stuck in buildings; but overland it is quite effective. Unlike fast travel, but like traveling on your own, you may run into hostile encounters, but the mod thoughtfully pauses the game when this happens so you can take control of the situation: Kill or be killed, or try to run away, or – if you are a linguist – convince the rampaging orcs that you are on their side and they are obliged to guard you against wild animals while you take a nap.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, why would one want to do tedious things in a game? Well, not all have a super vivid imagination. When you are used to just clicking on a map, it can be hard to get a feel for how an actual character in a medium-tech, medium-magic world would feel about distance. For instance, I’ve found myself not bothering to look for bargain shops in an unfamiliar town, instead fast traveling to a town where I know I can get good prices for my loot. That would be a lot less likely to happen if I actually had to ride for several days to get there!

Luckily you don’t have to spend several days in the wilderness even with Tedious Travel. This is where the “adjustable time compression” comes in handy. By default you move 10 times faster than normal walking / riding speed (your choice of transportation matters for travel time, obviously). You see the terrain fly by like on a train. You can slow this down if you want to enjoy the scenery, or speed it up. I got to 45 before I gave up. At some point I guess it won’t be tedious anymore, although I assume the risk of wilderness encounters remains even at high speed. (Time compression is turned off for the duration of the encounters, so don’t worry about that. Also as mentioned, the game stops and wait for you to take the reins.)

Even if you go for higher speeds like 40x or even 50x, you should still get a good idea of the difference between local and regional travel. Visiting the next village over may be a short trip, but traveling from the west coast to the north-eastern mountains or the south-eastern jungle will still be an adventure. There are two reasons for this. The first is the random encounters, as mentioned – on a long journey there will be lots of them. Related to this, there is the matter of stamina.

Stamina is not a problem during the original fast travel. In fact, if you choose cautious travel, you will arrive at daytime with full health and stamina, no matter your starting condition. But with Tedious Travel, as with manual travel, you will eventually get tired. Traveling by cart or horse is less tiring than walking, but after a day in the saddle you will no longer be able to go on. Letting your stamina get too low is also a problem if you run into bandits or monsters: Fighting them takes stamina, and if you run out of energy during the fight, they are not going to show you any mercy. Also, the chance of unfriendly visits increase if you camp out at night rather than the day.

Luckily, rural Daggerfall has a decent number of hostel villages, typically named after a long gone tavern but now occupied by one to three inns and a few other buildings (presumably where the staff lives). They always have plenty of room these days, although if you explore them you will occasionally find NPCs in various states of undress in some rooms. If you’re not looking for more combat experience, for instance because you are a linguist traveling on some scholarly quest, you may prefer to set your course for the nearest such village in the general direction you are going, and get a good night’s sleep there before moving on. They are generally very affordable. Once you start approaching travel in Daggerfall more realistically, it becomes obvious why there are so many of them – in fact, the question is why there aren’t more.

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Yes, I am easily amused, I guess. In the highly unlikely case you want to try out this or any of the innumerable recent mods for Daggerfall Unity, you should go to the Daggerfall Workshop Forums – Released Mods.

Screenshot from outside the Mercy of Stendarr, Charley, Daggerfall.

(Open the picture in a new window for more detail.) Not your grandpa’s Daggerfall: The sky is high-resolution, with birds flying in it. The temple sign is haindpainted in loving detail and does not devolve into blocks when seen fairly close. The house walls are in high resolution, with the house to the left in the background having a whole new texture. The snowy trees have a painted look. The wilderness beyond the village limit is rendered with vegetation and terrain rather than a standard background picture.

After yesterday’s update I downloaded around 3 GB of mods for Daggerfall Unity, most of them high-resolution graphics, but also a couple hundred new quests and the Archaeologist Guild. Yes, a whole new guild for the game, aimed at intelligent characters who don’t use magic or weapons much but prefer to talk their way out of things. Language skills and high intelligence are requisites for advancing in this guild. Unfortunately it is a rival of the Mages Guild, so I haven’t gotten to test it yet. It definitely looks like a guild Language Grrl would have loved, for those who remember her. (OK, that would be deeply disturbing if you did – it’s been around two decades. I barely remember her myself.)

Despite the massive graphics upgrades, the game looks very much like old Daggerfall, just less blocky. The artists are generally very faithful to the original look and atmosphere of the game, and have gone for a “painting” look rather than a “photo” look when adding detail. The result is that if you don’t replace every part of the graphics, the new high-resolution items blend very well with the machine-expanded original sprites.

That said, there are sure to be people who prefer the “old school” graphics. In that case, the graphic mods are not for you. And there are even various degree of “retro” settings in the game for those who want the blocky, low-resolution style. Me, I like it shiny.

I haven’t had time to test out the new quests and the new guild. Maybe I’ll never take the time for that. I know I said that I’d like to play this game for a thousand years, but as my actual years run out, I get a bit more picky. Still, as games go, Daggerfall holds a special place in my heart, so I take some pleasure in seeing people still playing it and expanding on it in 2019.

Still very much Daggerfall, just slightly better. And better and better with each passing month.

Those who have undertaken the arduous task of reading my early archives, will remember Daggerfall, the greatest single-player roleplaying game of all time. The game remains the largest single-player game ever in terms of sheer geography, with a game world roughly the size of Great Britain. It takes weeks of Real Life to cross the land on foot, although luckily fast travel is available in the game. There are hundreds of centers of habitation from cities to farmsteads, and many dozens of dungeons, each of them enormous in size. (You can and will get lost in them, even after years of playing. Or at least I did. Luckily a patch to the game gave a way to cheat yourself to the exit after completing a dungeon quest.)

I could go on and on about the skill system, the magic system, the item system, the crafting etc which were all far ahead of their time. But unfortunately the ambitions were too high for the computers of the time. In further bad luck, the game was developed for MS-DOS but released only after Windows had largely replaced MS-DOS as the dominant operating system. (Windows 95 made away with the need for MS-DOS, and Daggerfall came in 1996.) And of course, pushing the boundaries as it did, the game was buggy. Also of course, trying to make the most of the available hardware, it became unplayable not only on older PCs but also on newer. As such, only a few of us got to play it for years. Some of the most enthusiastic players formed an informal online community known as the “Daggerfools”. I have lost touch with them over the years, but clearly we were not alone.

The game got a second lease of life with the coming of DOSbox, a program that allowed MS-DOS games to run within Windows. It created an environment the game could not distinguish from a real MS-DOS machine with the specifications set by the program. The two games I used DOSbox for were Master of Magic, and Daggerfall.

But even with that, it was clear that time had run away from Daggerfall. The graphics were quite blocky by today’s standard, especially on modern screens. If you played it in its original resolution, it would just make up a small box on the screen. If you played it full-screen, it would be distorted on wide-screen monitors and the picture would consist of colored squares.

***

Daggerfall Unity uses the original resources from the game (which Bethesda has given away for free for years now, honor to them for that) but the game engine is replaced by the modern Unity game engine used in various multiplayer games. The game is still single-player, but it is improved in many other ways.

The graphics still use the old sprites, but with modern software that scales up the images to a wide range of screen resolutions without visible distortion, including the wide-screen formats that are common today. The game also allows modded resources, so you can replace the original sprites with new, more detailed ones. Some such mods already exist, as well as the first gameplay mods

In addition to less blocky graphics, view distance is greatly enhanced, letting you see things in the distance. Random terrain generating in the wilderness is fixed and the odd “dead zone” around towns is also gone.

The many bugs and instabilities in the game engine have been removed. (There are probably new ones but I haven’t seen them yet.) Controls are more like those in modern games (like mouse look and mouse click attacks instead of mouse swing attack – yes, you would swing your mouse side to side to swing your sword in the old game. You can still do this if it feels right for you.)

The game runs faster (which makes it harder) and the enemy AI has been improved (which makes it harder). Enemies of different types may now fight each other (which makes it easier). Luckily you can turn these off in the settings and also make various other changes if to make the game look and act more like the original, if you so prefer.

I was unhappy to find that Daggerfall Unity has removed the “donation piles” in temples. As a new member of the Mercy of Stendarr, I was used to rooting through the donation piles for money, potions and better items than I already had. Later when my fortunes had improved, I would drop my own gifts in the donation pile. Please bring back the donation piles! They are an essential expression of the spirit of the game.

The old game only had 6 savegame slots. Daggerfall Unity has the modern system where you can give each save a unique name, or re-use those that are no longer relevant. Savegame location has also been moved to a standard location for each operating system (the game runs under Windows, Linux and Mac) and at least in Windows, this is a hidden folder unless you change your settings in Windows. (I have done that long ago for other reasons.) I would assume that the old savegame editors like Daghex will not work with the new games, or at least those with a higher number than six, but I have not tried yet.

***

I mentioned that Unity is moddable. The first mods are already out, and a search for “daggerfall unity mods” should give you an up to date view of what is available. I expect new mods to trickle into the world for as long as the generation who played the original game is still alive. After that, I do not know. Maybe we, as Lord Stone once mused in alt.games.daggerfall, will go to Daggerfall when we die. If I have understood the author of Narnia correctly, this is not entirely impossible, but I don’t pray for this to be my eternal destination. Despite my claim long ago that I could play this game for a thousand year. Obviously I can’t in this body. But even if I could, I would probably not have explored all of Daggerfall’s towns and dungeons, or all of its magic and crafting options. The most ambitious single-player RPG of all time will most likely outlive me by a good many years, thanks in no small part to this project.

Link to Daggerfall Unity’s home: https://www.dfworkshop.net