Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall #5 - Kowloon

It's the long-awaited return of Daggerfall as I finally figure out how to get the damn game to work again so I can finish this. Featuring Medora. She's sexy and she knows it.

Well, after I made the decision to resume the game from an earlier save and try to hopefully trigger the dungeon that wouldn't appear before, I discovered that all my saved games were gone. What followed was several hours of trying all kinds of things to get the game to work right and constantly running into brick walls.

Finally, I opted to just start the game over after a reinstall, only to have it freeze every time I created a character. Right on this spot.

I downloaded an existing character that was near where I left off, just to hopefully be able to play through the game without incident.

 This guy is a super-overpowered hunter who looks like Jack of Blades from Fable. He's quite badass, and gives us a glimpse of what a maxed-out character would look like. I was all ready to roll over the game with this guy, when...

...I managed to recover my Gazpacho saves. AWESOME. Isn't he still stuck, though?

Well, no. I discovered that if I downloaded the fully-patched version of the game and moved my backed-up saves to that version, I could use a cheat code to make every location appear on the world map.

Yep, the game forced me to use a cheat code to progress. Amazing. It's almost as bad as Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 actually being un-finishable if the Mines of Moria gate doesn't open when it's supposed to. From what I've heard, this game was unfinishable 100% of the time when it first hit retail stores. Which is pretty appalling for a major game company to try and get away with. Good thing they didn't go out of business and went on to make some actual quality-tested games after this.

Well, when the sorceress in question looks like Medora, I don't think anyone's going to complain about getting visions of her at random intervals.

On the flipside, Gortwog the orc chief has quite a mug. He sends me off to the Masoleum of Darkivaron, and thanks to the code it's actually on the map now. I wonder how big of a problem this Dust of Restful Death quest is for people due to dungeons not appearing.

Extreme Protip: If you're going to play this game, make sure you download the fully patched (2.13) version that I mentioned before. NOT the disc version that comes with Elder Scrolls Anthology. Not only does the 2.13 download seem to be bug free, but it supports cheat codes that can cure just about any glitch that does happen to get by. I can't emphasize this enough. I wish I had done that from the start, because playing the unpatched version for 60% of the game damn near ruined my experience with it.

YES. BY GOD, YES. It sure is good to see this place finally appear. Thanks, cheat codes!

I'm eager to get this game over with.

Next up, our hero steps in camel dung as I try to find a meeting place where I'm supposed to talk to an emissary. Talking to them unlocks another dungeon that I need to go to.

...and I look and look and look. I checked EVERY HOUSE IN THIS TOWN trying to find one that had a name rather than just "Residence", as the named building was the one with my liaison.

Most of my problems with this game are glitches, but this one is just flat-out poor game design. Having to check every house in a huge town to try and find the right one so you can go in and meet with someone? Ridiculous. The townspeople don't even point you to it like they do for bars and stores. I must have spent a good twenty minutes doing this before I got nauseous and gave up.

This is like my greatest peeve about Japanese RPGs (running around lost because you need to talk to one specific person in one specific place to unlock an area or move on)... and for a game like this (that purports to give the player total freedom to progress as they wish), forcing you to check every house in a huge town to find someone to proceed is absolute bollocks. This is worse than anything I've gone through in any Japanese RPG that I can think of.

Finally, it occurs to me that I don't even need to do that because my world map now has everything unlocked. No need to find someone to talk to to unlock a dungeon that I need to go to for an item when I can just warp to the dungeon. CHEAT CODE~!

Speaking of dungeons and peeves, I'm getting really tired of how it rarely lets me rest mid-dungeon. If there are any enemies on the other side of nearby walls even, you can't rest.

At the end of Darkivaron Masoleum, I finally get the item that caused me all of this trouble.

...And Gazpacho promptly snorts it.

Gaz does not give a fuck. He's a WILD MAN!

Time to return to ::sigh:: Medora. I think she has a fan installed in her room so that her hair is perpetually fluttering in the breeze.

Lots of drama and political intrigue follows. Medora needs 21 days to prepare the necromantic nasal dust, which means you the player need to leave her tower, return, and re-climb it for the 18th or so time.

After all of that, the powder is ready. Now I just have to sprinkle it on the corpse of Lysandus. His tomb is the second-biggest dungeon in the game, so let's hold off on that for now. If nothing else, I really hope I'm done climbing Medora's tower.

Speaking of beautiful women, the Queen of Daggerfall, Aubk-i, is quite shapely. ...and evil, apparently. Since she's hot, if this were most RPGs she'd turn out to be under mind control by some uglier person or some shit.

At this point it's time to backtrack and do an early-game quest chain that I skipped before because I was focused on the Medora/Lich King stuff. This busty laundry-wench suspects that the queen of Daggerfall City isn't the benevolent creature she appears to be.

I don't know if you want to be using that kind of language with Gazpacho.

What has to be the quickest, easiest chapter in the game follows, as I'm sent to a small dungeon on an island to take out a werewolf. This is another place where the game can glitch out and become unfinishable due to a dungeon not appearing when it's supposed to.

Of course, I'm ARMED WITH CODE and warp right over to Tristore Laboratory.

I find the werewolf soon into the dungeon and easily dispatch him. Turns out it's the brother of the busty laundry-wench.

One warp back to Daggerfall Castle, and the wench sends me to meet the king's mother. It seems the mother was married to this Lysandus guy (...so he was having an affair with Medora) and they ruled as king and queen. Once Lysandus passed on, their son became king. He's completely P-Whipped by Queen Aubk-i, though. Of course, the mother suspects the queen of being evil.

You yourself can go and question the queen, but it's most likely to just get on her nerves. If you poke around enough she'll put out a hit on you and you'll get attacked by assassins every couple of minutes for a little while. For my part, I just avoided her.

I need to find a residence to talk to a contact again. UUUUGH. The return of the worst mechanic in the game. BUT WAIT! This time, townspeople tell me where the residence is like it's a normal building, so it's no problem. No idea why the game wouldn't give me any information on the previous residence, making it a complete needle in a haystack until I gave up.

I talk to the contact and stuff happens. So much political drama!

I return to Piccolo Gortwog yet again. He makes me traverse the dungeon of his orc citadel to find a letter that the Emperor of Tamriel once wrote. But first, I do battle with...

...SABER-TOOTHED TIGERS. KIDS GET BACK IN THE CAR!

There's the letter. A bunch of orc guardians charge out from their hiding-places to ambush me right after I grab it. This whole area reminds me of Doom.

With that quest chain finished and a tenuous peace reached between the kingdoms and tribes, it's onward to the final chapters of the game.

I have so many backup saves now. And separate-folder backups of the backup saves. No way this game is screwing me over again.

Course, with the game all patched and functional now, all of these seems somewhat unnecessary...

Next up is a fairly huge dungeon. Everything has been sorta building to this point.

...where the hell is it? WHY CAN'T THIS GAME EVER DROP ME WHERE I NEED TO BE?

Oh. There it is. Here we go.

A hall of statues awaits inside. I like when story dungeons have unique visuals. It doesn't happen often in this game's procedurally-generated dungeon hell. Then again, I've completely avoided all of the sidequests, which all consist of randomly-generated stuff. So it hasn't been that bad for me.

For some reason, the vast majority of the enemies that attack me are Ghosts. It has been like this for most of the game. I run through them like they're goblins at this point. It's irritating, though, because ghosts are nearly invisible. So I'm constantly bumping into them and finding myself unable to move, or getting attacked and not knowing where it's coming from.

Finally, Lysandus' Tomb. I half expect The Undertaker to sit up out of the casket and turn towards the camera dramatically.

Gazpacho frees the immortal soul of Lysandus thanks to the Lich Dust. He wants me to slay his murderer, Lord Woodborne. Until this happens, he can't truly rest.

The search for Lord Woodborne begins. He could be anywhere. Actually, there are a number of options at this point. You can track him down yourself and kill him, or you can go to his castle, fight your way through, and rummage around until you find his diary. Giving his diary to various NPCs will allow them to prove his guilt in the murder, and they'll do the work of having him brought in and executed. OR you can give it to one of his allies, like the traitorous queen, and they'll end up destroying the evidence and sending their troops after YOU instead. There are all kinds of ways this can go. All of them lead directly to the final two chapters, either way.

I decide to track him down personally and put him to death. Boss fight time!

It wasn't much of a fight. He got stuck in the same space I was occupying so I couldn't even really get a shot of him, but he had a standard bandit model.

The curse of Lysandus' ghost and his Army of the Dead seems to be lifted, so they can stop haunting Daggerfall City. Now that this is over with, I can go about the final quest of the game: Reviving the Giant of Babil massive golem, Numidium, which once ravaged the continent. Whoever controls Numidium will become the dominant power in Tamriel from here on out, and I'll hold the key to it. Let the bidding begin.

Other Elder Scrolls Posts