Daggerfall Views

                An article by Carolyn Brown

I have reached Level 15, after about five months playing, and am
getting deeply into the main game quests. I would like to thank
Brian Burke for all the hard work he put into his articles, which
I have found extremely helpful. In fact, without them I would
probably have wallowed around for ages and finally given up.

I have to say that, although I am quite enjoying `Daggerfall' or
maybe `enduring' would be a better word, I do have one or two
minor whinges, unlike Brian and Bill Commons whose `Daggerfall
Views' appeared in the last issue. Undoubtedly Bethesda Softworks
put an awful lot of work and imagination into creating a
believable fantasy world, but why did they have to spoil it with
silly things such as the frequent spelling mistakes and, even
given that all RPG quests are pretty daft and not to be taken
seriously I do find it ridiculous having to go to someone's house
to slay a tiger(!!), or even a zombie only to find the householder
sitting in the middle of the room occupied by said zombie/wild
beast, refusing to acknowledge me or thank me for my time and
trouble! I also find the inventory system clumsy, it would be much
easier to manage if items of the same type, such as potions, could
be kept together especially in the Wagon.

Then there are the bugs. I have what I believe are the latest
patches installed, including `FixSave' but I still have problems.
Recently on two occasions letters were delivered to me but failed
to show up in my inventory, so I have no means of knowing what
they said. `FixSave' did not help. I don't think the letters
related to main game quests, but I can't be sure. Another silly
glitch happened when I was instructed to go to a palace to meet a
character in four days time. I duly arrived on time, but the
character did not show up. I wasted an hour or so re-loading and
playing around trying to find the missing person, then I looked in
my log only to find that, although the original instruction had
told me four days the log said nine days! Then, when I finally
`met' the character her name was different from the one originally
given me. I have found many other little quirks like this as I
have played, hopefully none of which has spoiled my chances of
finishing, but irritating nonetheless.

By the way does anyone know how to reinstate lost attribute
points? To my disbelief I discovered yesterday that my Strength
had gone down from 98 to 70 and my Speed, which had been nearly
60, had dropped to 20 and then fell to an unbelievable minus 8! I
have no idea how that could have happened and the only way I can
function now in the game is to keep using magic items to keep my
Speed above 50 Again, FixSave was no help with this problem.

Another weird thing is that l had been playing for months quite
happily through Windows 95 when suddenly one day I clicked on the
shortcut icon and was shown a message to the effect that the game
would only run through DOS. Since then I have not been able to
access the game through Win 95. I've no idea why. It does crash
less in DOS, however.

Anyway, there are my `Daggerfall Views' for what they are worth.
It would be interesting to know what other people think - maybe I
am being a bit too nitpicking because I am hooked enough on the
game to want to play it during every spare moment, so it can't be
that bad!
















                              - o -