Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall #2 - The Keep on the Borderlands

 

Chapter II of many. If they stay on their current trajectory, we'll get Elder Scrolls IX in  2032.

(Future Editor's Note: lololololol)

Originally Posted: July 2014, now remastered for 2025

This FMV contains real people! They look like refugees from a LARP, and talk on and on for way too long.

Long story short, your character is stranded in a cave. Because these early ES games HAVE to start with a painful dungeon just to weed players out. This one isn't anywhere near as painful as the one at the beginning of Arena, at least.

The graphics are immediately smoother and less blocky than the previous game. Much more three-dimensional, too.

I start with several spells, and casting them looks a lot better than the previous game.

Here's our hero, Gazpacho Zapatero. He keeps his shirt open... for the ladies.

I find a yellow poncho before too long. I think the best thing about this guy is the face I went with. That face... My God.

Gazpacho fights demonic bats in claustrophobic hallways. Movement in this game is slower than the previous game and feels "heavier". Like it has real weight to it. I actually like this more, though I miss zipping around. Perhaps it'll get better as I up my Speed stat.

This nefarious bandit gets stuck behind a counter, allowing me to blast him with spells from out of reach. Looting humanoid enemies is your primary source of equipment early on.

As for the three spells I begin with, here they are. Shock damages things, Chameleon makes me harder to see (which is awesome and goes hand-in-hand with Stealth to give me the element of surprise on most foes). Slowfalling is barely useful at all and I wish it had given me a heal spell instead. It can let you soar off an elevated area without dying as you fall down, but you can't control yourself as you slow-fall and there aren't many places where this is needed.

The linearity of the first area ends with this huge room. Safefall actually has a use here. There's a throne near the banners on the right, and clicking a lever next to it causes the throne to go up like an elevator to get to the next area.

...this post is almost turning into a walkthrough. Well, given how hard this game is to start, I'm guessing a few people will need it at some point.

Gaz faces his most fearsome challenge yet: GRIZZLY BEAR.

At this point I take a moment to read my character's biography. The hero mentioned at the end? That'd be the guy from the first game.

The exit of the dungeon is this very nondescript wall-panel. Doesn't look much like an exit and I imagine lots of people completely missed it as they continued to get more and more lost in this place.

I try to explore some more, but run into trouble. Even tougher than the bear is this skeleton knight. It proceeds to beat me down before I can get off enough Shock spells to defeat it. Seems like attacking as fast as possible is probably my best bet once a fight begins. Before a fight is the time for throwing spells, or if I have the element of surprise, running in for a backstab.

I'm basically a Battlemage-Rogue that can use two-handed swords and plate armor. This guy is rad.

I step outside for the first time, and...wow. This game looks SO MUCH NICER than the first one. There are lots of separately-scrolling dimensions here, meaning foreground objects, mid-ground objects, and background objects all move in different ways. It's very realistic and looks great in motion.

The music is also wonderful. While the music in the first dungeon was just the dungeon music from the first game (uugh), the overworld has numerous themes that play. It changed two or three times as I ran around, and every theme that played was excellent.

Here's the actual "world map", which covers Iliac Bay (most of High Rock and the edge of Hammerfell). This is such a small corner of the world; hard to believe this game has more surface area and more locations than any other game in the series.

Here's a zoom-in on the kingdom of Daggerfall, on the upper west side of the above map. Each one of these dots is a location, be it a town or dungeon or even just a remote inn. Seriously. There are 15,000 locations in the game, in total.

Soon it gets to be night-time as I wander the fields listening to amazing music.

Then it's daylight again, and I get brutally murdered by a centaur. MOTARO WINS.

I fast travel to a town. Looks like you can fast travel anywhere from the start, much like the first game. This time it costs money, though. I can already see that money is going to be my biggest problem in this game. ...aside from my slow leveling speed. In any case, the towns look great.

Now I'm roaming around in the desert. Did I get transported to Mars?

After traveling between a couple of locations, an event finally gets triggered to move the story along. This courier drive-bys me with a letter; Let's see what it says.

 It's a lady, and she wants our hero to visit her at the inn. Gazpacho is ready for action!

Speaking of ladies, in this game they seem to all be sporting the perkiest breasts.

Is this the lady who sent me the letter? Where are her clothes?

Nope, it's just a random "lady", and I get my first real experience with the NPC interface system. Can choose how you talk to people and ask them about a number of different things. Here, Gaz asks her about the "rusty chasm"

In the inn, a rogues gallery of NPCs awaits. The busty milk-wench can't make up for how weird-ass everyone else in here is.

I find the lady who sent the letter and talk to her, thus ending the first quest of the game. It was quick and easy. Come to think of it, that intro dungeon kinda was too. Maybe because I'm overpowered. No idea. I'm still level 1, and now the game gives me zero clue what to do next because I'm supposed to go out and explore.

Just gotta find things to do as I slowly level up. Level 20 is good for finishing this, like the previous game. It can be done sooner, again like the previous game. 15 is doable, 10 might be possible with great hardship (maybe not for this OP character).

As for what to do to get there... there are main story quests, yeah, but they don't seem to follow a set order. So I can seek those out and get them done, or I can work on any of the massive amounts of sidequests for various guilds and factions. Unlike the first game, the sidequests in this game actually have a point and aren't all cut/pasted.

With the game completely open as to what to do next, this is a good stopping point for now. I'll get back to this in the near future. It's a really intimidating game, to say the least. Moreso than Arena, which had a simple story mode and not much else.

GAZPACHO~! The Enraged Hippie might be level 1 forever. As always, a comment below would be appreciated, and stay tuned.

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