Friday, July 18, 2014

Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall #4 - Wildfire

GAZPACHO~! returns with what may be the unceremonious final post in this series, unless I fix the latest game-ending bug from this pain-in-the-ass game. In other news, that is one NICE stormy sky right there.




The next substantial bit of the game revolves around Medora's Tower, which is located on an island. Above we saw the exterior, now here's the interior. Place is really cool-looking for a 3D PC game from 1996. Only problem is, you have to do this dungeon FOUR TIMES by my count - possibly more - and it's very long. Repeating dungeons is not my bag.

Vampires attack in here. They look like female Assassin's Creed assassins, except not hot.

 God, this woman is like a human lollipop.

Speaking of human lollipops, Medora Direnni herself is quite fetching. If this game had an ill-advised romance minigame like Mass Effect, I'd totally go after her to be my love interest. ...I need to go outside more.

Speaking of being outside and lollipops...


 She sends our hero in a quest to find a unicorn's horn. And of course, that horn is in the depths of another dungeon. Off we go.

 JESUS CHRIST! Underwater fighting is bad enough, but it's even worse when you leap into a pool and get mobbed by serpentine Lamia. This was probably the first legit freak-out moment of the game for me so far. The fact that there are skulls everywhere underwater here makes it even more freaky.

Remember how Arena had all those cool riddles? Nothing like that in this game. Matter of fact, this is the one and only time that I've had to enter text to open a door. ...and it's "shut up". Huh. Arena, this ain't.

At last, the unicorn horn is mine! Not sure why Medora wants this so much. Maybe it vibrates in multiple settings.

Quest over! I had to climb the tower a second time to do the quest turnin. This might be the only game I've ever played that puts quest mobs at the end of dungeons.

I can see a small amount of Medora thigh under the text. .....I really need to get out more these days.

As a quest reward, she gives me an enchanted Daedric Claymore. Damn! Is that a normal quest reward for something halfway through the main quest (at the most)? This is the best sword in the game... plus magic effects. Replaces my old run-of-the-mill Daedric Claymore.

It has electricity strobing around it when I attack...

......OH YEAH 

With my awesome new glowing sword, it's off to talk to the Queen of England. Er, Sentinel.

1175 gold?? Wow. With the 1,200,000 gold that I stole from banks, I can take this 1175 gold and just... blow it all on hats.

The next quest sends me to the dungeon of Wayrest to retrieve a painting. After going there I wander lost for like a half hour while fighting off knights. I guess I'm enemies with Wayrest? This was definitely the most stuck that I've been in the game so far. I soon discovered that there are two entrances to the dungeon, and only one of them gets you to the goal. The other one just leads you to a side-area full of dead ends, which is why I was running around for a half hour unable to find any way to proceed. Lovely.

Next up, our hero runs into a Princess Leia Cosplayer. Oh yeahhhh. I'm padding this post out a bit with shots of women non-game shots because I simply don't have enough game shots for a full post due to the glitch that I'll get to soon. Here, have RL Leia Cosplayers!





Finally, I find the painting (which didn't take long after I found the damn correct door to the dungeon). It's a magical painting that shows moving images of something that transpired in the past. Sounds like modern technology.

 Gazpacho takes a moment to look at a flute-player creepily. Look at him go. What a face he has.

Our hero brings the iPad back to the Queen of England, who wants to know if I looked at it. I deny it, because she specifically told me not to before. Also, hello Queen Boobs.

 Side-note: Here are Gazpacho's attributes, his critical strengths/weaknesses. Not sure if I covered these after I remade him earlier. If you want to make your own Gazpacho, this is what to go for. He's quite overpowered, I'll say that much.

 Next up, I need to talk to Gortwog the Orc Chieftain to get the location of a dungeon.

 Seriously, dude?

 So I need to go to the Masoleum of Darkivaron to find the Dust of Restful Death for Medora, though it's very likely that Gazpacho will snort it.

The only problem is... ::record scratching sound::

...the place didn't appear on my map like it was supposed to.

So...yeah. Apparently this is a "rare bug" in the same way that my earlier game-ending glitch was a "rare bug". There's nothing I can do to make it appear, so that means I've encountered TWO game-ending bugs in the first half of this game.


I seriously question how this game made it to stores in this condition.

Well, there's a patch that fixes this issue, but the patch doesn't run on Windows 8. I'll need to patch it on an older computer. It'll be a lot of trouble to get it working properly again, so I don't know when I'm going to do that. I could also resume from an earlier save, but no idea if this same thing will happen again and my closest save is at least an hour behind where I am. ...There comes a time when a game is simply too much of a pain in the ass to continue with. I tried. I tried REALLY HARD.

In any case, this is the last Daggerfall post on here for now, possibly ever. Whenever I work up the strength, I'll see if there's something I can do to continue the game, whether it be starting from the closest earlier save or going through the trouble to patch. Otherwise, that's it.


7 comments:

  1. Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!

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  2. I say reload the earlier save and just try your luck. That would be better than giving up on the game entirely! Sucks that it has been so frustrating. Maybe step away from it for a little while and get back to it later.

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  3. Hmm, that's the thing with games with a ton of freedom like this: way more bugs too. Not surprised, especially since they made it in just 2 days. I'd say this is a good place to stop, though, since you'd basically figured it out already. Thanks for giving us a look at it.

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  4. What patch are you talking about? I can't find any information about it or this specific game-breaking bug.

    "I seriously question how this game made it to stores in this condition."

    It was worse when it was initially released, it couldn't even be completed back then.

    I guess I'm lucky that I've never encountered any game-breaking bugs in this game. I've encountered several small and annoying ones, god yes, but nothing major. Though S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is another matter. I had to cheat to complete my first time because I encountered every single goddamn bug in that game. Strangely enough, my second playthrough went smoothly; the only bug I can recall encountering was during the very last objective and that actually made it easier to complete.

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  5. There's a patch called Daggerfall patch 2.13 (or Dag213) that fixes a lot of the bugs in the game. There's also Fixsave, which checks your Daggerfall saves and fixes any bugs. The bug I'm dealing with is in the Dust of Restful Death quest, sometimes the dungeon you have to go to for the dust simply doesn't appear on the map like it's supposed to. Fixsave would detect that and fix it, while Dag213 would probably fix any future issues. Unfortunately I can't run either on Windows 8. I got a heads-up to try running them through DOSBox, but that doesn't work either. I get nonsensical messages about how they aren't in the Daggerfall directory (they are) or how I need to put the game CD in (it's in).

    It couldn't even be completed at release? Wow. Ya know, I've often wondered if this game would have completely changed my game-playing trajectory had I played it in 1996. I REALLY wanted a game like this, but I didn't know it existed, and ended up getting into things like FFVII and SaGa Frontier instead. Now that I'm playing Elder Scrolls and actually prefer it to most of Square's fare, it's like... what would have happened had I gotten into this sooner? Would I have never played later FF games at all? Would I have even stuck with consoles? However, Daggerfall has proven to me that the answer is... nothing would have changed, really. It may have been everything I wanted in 1996, but if it was unfinishable and full of bugs, I likely would have given up on it and gone back to the things I was already into. Chrono Trigger may not supply the AD&D experience I wanted back then or the depth or whatnot, but at least it has swords and magic and is playable.

    Having to cheat to finish a game is the worst. I had to cheat to finish Lord of the Rings: Vol. 1 for the SNES, which I covered on here in Sept 2010 I believe.

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    1. Thanks, I'll look into that. If all else fails I might be able to resume the game from my most recent backup save (which is two dungeons back) and hopefully have the next dungeon appear like it's supposed to.

      Actually, it's possible that my version includes that patch. I'm playing the Anthology disk-based version which I assume is as up-to-date as the one you linked. Regardless, I'll give that version a try and I'll give the backup save a try.

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  6. I was able to get this working again by backing up my saves, deleting the Anthology disc-based version, and reinstalling the game fully patched as was linked above. That worked fine, and I was able to use the Cheatmode 1 trick at that point to make all world map locations appear and continue with the game. Whew.

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