Elder Scrolls Daggerfall Lands On GOG With Fantastic Fan-Made Unity Port And User Mods
Arena garnered some attention for its hubris, but its ambition outstripped its means. It wasn't until the sequel, The Elder Scrolls Part II: Daggerfall, that Bethesda would deliver on the promise of Arena. Daggerfall made use of a new in-house fully-3D game engine called the XnGine. Most people don't think of Bethesda as a company that pushes technological boundaries, but the XnGine was truly state-of-the-art at the time, with support for massive open environments with 3D objects and characters.
To be sure, most of these places were fundamentally identical, being generated by procedural means as they were. Still, the textures, objects, and layouts changed as you traversed the game's nine climate regions and 44 different kingdoms. It was immersive in a way that no game before had ever been, and truly mind-blowing back in 1996.
Times change and technology marches on, so the original Daggerfall is hard to play these days. It doesn't even necessarily work well in DOSBox. Bethesda quietly released both Arena and Daggerfall for free in 2009, but relatively few players got to enjoy the titles in their original DOS form due to the aforementioned difficulty.
In 2014, Gavin "Interkarma" Clayton started a project to port the game from DOS to the Unity game engine in 2014. Daggerfall Unity was a follow-on from his earlier work modifying and tweaking the game, and while development continues, it's now well beyond the "feature-complete" stage, meaning you can play the whole game. It's really quite fantastic and stands tall among the best user mods (like ZDoom and SKSE) for PC games.
Unfortunately, setting up Daggerfall Unity can be a bit of a chore. You need the original game files, and you need to place them in specific folders to make it all work properly. Then there's the configuration stage, and if you want to improve the experience beyond the 1996 original—because this is an Elder Scrolls game, and you definitely want mods and unofficial patches—you'll need to download user mods by hand and carefully install them.
A side-by-side of stock DFUnity vs. the GOG Cut. (click to enlarge)
Alternatively, you could just go get the Daggerfall Unity - GOG Cut from GOG.com. Released today, this free package bundles up the original Daggerfall game with the Unity port and 40 fan-created mods that add to and enhance the experience of the classic game. Included among the mods are massive texture reworks, hand-painted 3D model replacements, extra quests and items, mechanics refinements, quality-of-life updates, and a bunch of bugfixes.
Longtime fans of Daggerfall should try out the package, as it's enough of a new experience to make the game worth playing again. Folks who've never fooled with this classic PC title might be better served by disabling the mods to have an authentic experience, but then, the mods might also make this janky old game much more palatable to someone raised on the fourth or fifth Elder Scrolls title. Whatever the case, you can configure everything yourself using the in-game menus that let you toggle mods on and off as you please.
If you're keen to do some classic-style dungeon delving, head over to GOG to grab the DRM-free game. You'll need a free account, of course, but who doesn't have a GOG account in 2022?
Note: This post was originally published with a headline that inaccurately stated that the Daggerfall Unity port was created by GOG, in conflict with the text of the article. The headline has been amended. Our apologies to both Interkarma and GOG.
