https://web.archive.org/web/20070117035204/http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=2875

6.5

An RPG in which you can wander about aimlessly as a brazen and naked six-foot Amazon? That sounds right up Charlie Brooker’s street. There again, p’raps not…

So then. daggerfall. also known as ‘Arena: Elder Scrolls Numero Two-o’. It’s an rpg with a bit of a difference – the storyline is more or less decided by you, Mister Player Sir. The idea is that rather than setting everything out before you in an orderly fashion, ie providing you with a rigid set of ‘quests’, it acts more like a human ‘Dungeon Master’ would in a game of tabletop D&D.; So, if you suddenly decide you want to bugger off and slay a dragon or something, you can. If you want to behave like a complete bastard and merely wander around picking pockets and breaking into houses, you can do that too. You can even choose to play as a six-foot blonde amazon type and stroll round shamelessly without a stitch on, if that’s what turns you on (although bizarrely, the characters you meet are unlikely to comment on this – you won’t even get an involuntary ‘Phwoar!’).

Point your retinas in the direction of the screenshots and you’ll see that Daggerfall is played from a first-person perspective. As is more or less de rigeur these days, the engine will allow you to look up and down, jump, push things around, and climb. However, that’s where any sort of concession to bang up to date pc gaming end, as all the monsters and characters you’ll encounter come in the form of horrendously jerky, blocky bitmaps (they look as though they’ve been built out of Lego), and appear to be ‘moonwalking’ since they’re capable of moving from side to side effortlessly while still facing forwards. There are sections which feature some pretty nice architecture – some of the castles and palaces in particular are really quite impressive – but on the whole it isn’t that inspiring. In other words it ain’t Quake, but then again, it ain’t Duke Nukem 3D either. Ultima Underworld II is smoother and better. Put Daggerfall against any of today’s half-decent 3d games and it looks… well, it just looks a tad dated.

Hack, slash, yawn…

Still, at least you get to swing loads of weapons and cast loads of spells, right? Er… yeah. But there’s a problem here too. Despite including nice first-person representations of all the weapons, which include daggers, swords, hammers (and my own personal favourite, the bloody big mace), the combat itself is rather uninspiring. It works like this: you hold down the right mouse button and slide the mouse from left to right (to swing at about stomach height), or up and down (to jab ’em in the guts or bring the weapon down on their head), while your opponent wibbles about in front of you in a manner reminiscent of the rubber skeletons that dangle from the roofs of fairground ghost trains. Perhaps I’m not that easily convinced, but at no point did I feel like I was actually taking part in a real fight to the death. Instead, I felt like a flailing buffoon taking swipes at an unconvincing bitmap. Presumably Mister Computer is working hard at all sorts of background ‘dice-rolling’ as the game works out how much damage you’re inflicting, but all the same I can’t help thinking that it would be about ten million times more enter-taining if it could persuade you that there was at least a modicum of real-time skill required.

It’s also incredibly difficult. When you start the game you’ll be hard-pressed to survive an encounter with a mere rat, for god’s sake. In the early stages, your chances of ever being able to build up your character to an accept-able level seem remote to say the least. The fact that it is so difficult had an adverse effect – because I was unable to make any real progress over a lengthy period of time I got just a bit bored.

Feel the width

Daggerfall is a large game. A very, very large game. The playing area is immense – walking from one side of it to the other is inadvisable, as you’d probably expire of old age (in real life, that is) before you managed to get even half-way across. There are more villages, towns and cities than you could ask for, as well as dungeons, palaces and mountain ranges. Each town or village has its own mass of inhabitants too, so you’ll never run out of people to meet (and slaughter, if that’s your thang), and naturally there are shitloads of homes, taverns and shops to amble into should you see fit. That’s good then. Isn’t it?

Er, no. Unfortunately, none of the towns are any more interesting than say, Norwich on a wet Thursday afternoon. The inhabitants aren’t much better either. They’ll often ask you to do favours (in the form of little sub-quests), but on the whole they’re pretty dull. You wouldn’t want to find yourself sitting next to one of them on a long train journey – especially if you were heading towards Norwich.

Perceptive readers should be aware by now that I didn’t exactly warm to Daggerfall’s charms. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. The basic concept behind the game – an ‘automated’ Dungeon Master, as it were – strikes me as a sound one, but one that’s more or less impossible to pull off effectively on today’s computers. To illustrate my point, I’ve provided a handy table on the next page. It’s designed to do two things: (1) To highlight the limitations of Daggerfall’s ‘open-ended’ structure, and (2) to irritate our art department a bit. Because I’m evil, eeeeevil.

Oooh, you bitch, you I’m being slightly unfair, but you get the point don’t you? You see where I’m coming from. Don’t get me wrong – Bethesda have taken this idea and pushed it as far as it can currently go.

And besides, it’s a good idea, this ‘Never Ending Story’ stuff. When I first heard about the concept, I was genuinely impressed. Having played it though, I’ve changed my mind. The basic idea is still a sound one, but until it’s possible to create a genuinely believable world inside the program, it’ll never really work. What’s the point in being able to go where you like and do what you want if none of it’s as interesting as real life? Why include thousands of characters if there’s very little to distinguish between them, bar a few variables? Why set out to emulate a real human Dungeon Master if it’s not possible to emulate the human mind first? Use of a rigid, linear storyline may not be entirely compatible with the hard-core Dungeons & Dragons ethos, but at least it ensures that the player always has a sense of purpose and direction and that there’s always some-thing really interesting going on. The sprawling narrative of Daggerfall will never hang together as neatly as a story that someone’s sat down and written. The game does have a main ‘quest’ behind it – even if it is almost a token gesture – but before long you’re bogged down in all the periphery and it all starts to feel a little disjointed. The only way this kind of game could merit any success would be as a kind of Internet-based mud in which each of the characters you meet is ‘played’ by a real live person who’s also dialled in. But it doesn’t work like that, and it shows.

Well, that’s my opinion, and many of you may disagree. If you just luurrrve the whole ‘Sword and Sorcery’ mythos, and the prospect of guiding your own character to whatever fate you see fit appeals to you, then you might want to give this a look. If you’re a hardened rpg enthusiast who’s looking for a game that emulates the D&D; experience as closely as possible, given the technology currently available, Daggerfall may very well fit you right down to a tee. I’ve got a fairly low boredom threshold when it comes to tinkering about with swords, inventories and hit points – but as I said, if you fall into the D&D; camp you may well find that Daggerfall is right up your alley. Z