It sounds like you are correct on all counts (though I didn't test the behavior with saved games).

There is an easy way to get the money for a ship: If you are at least level 2, take a loan out for 100,000 and you can use the money to buy a ship. You have a year to pay off the loan, which is plenty of time. (Just note that the back of the hull of the small ship has a hole in the geometry, allowing you to fall into the void.)

Thanks. I just want to see this glitch with my own eyes and have fun with it :-) - no need to pay the loan back!

Daggerfall is by far my favorite of the series. I put a couple hundred hours into it back in the day and never touched the main story. To this day, I feel like it did the best at making me feel like I was "just wandering" around a living world as an anonymous person. Some cities were huge...there were three or four of every store type and half dozen taverns. Make no mistake, it was a highly broken mess with randomly generated dungeons that could easily leave you in impossible to escape situations, and an automap that was impossible to read, but I love it anyway.

In Skyrim for example, you do one quest for the thieves guild and then every single guard in the world says "don't think I don't know a thief when I see one" or some crap like that.

In Daggerfall, I could scout an area, break into the second story of house, rob it blind, accidentally get caught, run away from the guards and flee into the wilderness....and in the next town nobody knew me from adam.

Anyway, I tried to play Daggerfall again a while back and ran into a game breaker. Despite getting it to mostly run perfect in DosBOX, there was a problem with the magic timer. Any time a magic user was in line of site (say a vampire wandering the street as they are wont to do in Daggerfall), they would instantly kill me by casting 500 spells a second.

Even though the rest of the game was running at "normal" speed, NPCs could cast magic spells infinitely fast. Has that been corrected and/or does anybody know what I did wrong with my dosbox settings?

It's gloriously far from done, rendering the problem essentially the same; a buggy incomplete game, but at least Daggerfall was originally released, shipped, and patched. And, given the scope of the project and the trackrecord of the developer, probably it will never be done.

http://xlengine.com/wiki/index.php?title=Frequently_Asked_Questions#When_will_the_XL_Engine_be_finished

Unpaid long-term ongoing projects such as these tend to eventually have real-life get in the way. When it gets in the way long enough, the developer tends to never get back to them. I present you exhibit A.

Never heard of that. Is it reproduceable, does it require specific circumstances? I've been attacked by many magic users in the cities and towns of Daggerfall, but never in the way you describe (with and without DOSBOX).
By the way, I can hardly imagine that the effect you describe can be caused by DOSBOX.
Are you using a mod (like werefall)?

It works! :-)
I fast-traveled to the Dragontooth Mountains, switched to "ship" and back to "foot" - and was standing in the middle of hilly bumpy terrain! It looks a lot better than the original game, in my eyes. And the effect appears to be permanent, too! At least, it didn't disappear after I had exited and re-loaded Daggerfall. And it worked for old save games as well.
Will experiment further.
Thanks for mentioning this phenomenon!

But, to be honest, if I had had to decide to keep this effect in or to take it out, I think I had opted for taking it out (or I might.have left it in as an option). Simply because I don't think it would appeal to the majority of people to walk through Daggerfall as if you were on a sailing ship in the middle of a storm. I guess most people would prefer smoother movement.
My personal initial reaction, however, was "wow, great!" I like it!

I'll throw m opinion and say that yes, these games haven't aged well. At all. They're an interesting piece of history, but unless you're an hardcore RPG fan, there's not much point in finishing them.

And I'll add that yes, Daggerfall is full of bugs. Probably the buggiest game Bethesda ever made. Most of it is due to the randomized nature of the game (it's not rare for the game to generate random data that clashes with some other data). Outside of crashes, quests not functioning (which I experienced), corrupted saves and falling in the void, the biggest problem for me are the randomly generated dungeons which are broken beyond belief. The dungeons are huge and complex (way more than they should be in a game that expect us to eat them like candy) but it happened incredibly often that the game generated a dungeon where the objective was impossible to reach (having a quest item in a room with no point of entry, for example) requiring the use of cheat codes to even complete it.

A lot of them got patched (when the game came out, it was originally impossible to complete the main quest), but again, due to the randomized nature of the game, a crapton of them, both big and small, are left in. And sadly, the engine isn't exactly mod-friendly so fan-made patches are unlikely. And you have to tweak the hell out of it in DOSBox to make it a little less crash prone.

I really wanted to like this game, but the bugginess and the lack of focus really made me lose interest. I kept waiting for a fan-engine recreation (like DaggerXL) that would provide me with a mostly bug-free experience, but it seems like it will never come to pass.

In Arena, however, outside of having a lot of trouble finding a specific person to continue a quest, a lack of feedback in combat (Daggerfall improved that a lot), ludicrous speed (Daggerfall improved that too) and poorly coded sound (the game can only play a sound effect one at a time, creating the lack of feedback mention above with a game that plays that fast), I didn't have much problems. Except for an occasional out of memory crash. It's a more stable, but tougher and more repetitive experience.

Thanks for the warning!! Some games make me violently ill, even when using my vertigo meds. I really appreciate the heads up!!!!!!

P.S. Descent. Im not looking at you. ever again.

I'm inclined to agree with this summary. Arena and Daggerfall are role-playing games in the first place, and as such among the best you can find in the computer world - and they have aged extremely well (as RPG's).

I think Daggerfall has aged just fine as a gameplay experience if you can get past the DOS era graphics and resolution. I played it years ago when it first came out, and since grabbing this version on GOG haven't stopped playing. I'm running on DosBox Daum now, with direct3d and pixel filters applied to the screen, and I like how it looks.

While it may be a bit old fashioned, and graphically is very 90's, I'm actually enjoying this more than any of the more modern ones now.

Bug wise, I've only crashed about three times, usually when asking repeatedly for directions from a single NPC until they mark everything on the map for me.

I'm amazed at how varied the world is - travelling through snowing villages, or desert hovels with camels, the places are huge and some dungeons can be really, really huge compared with later games, and I don't have a problem with the dungeon map system - it's awkward at first, but I like it now.

If you check the 3D map, you can even see gaps in walls if a secret door is located in the room you are in, so that helps too when exploring.

At first I thought dungeons were rather repetitive, but then I started travelling further from the start region, and encountering underwater bits, cavern bits, lifts with levers, an Orc Chieftain hiding behind tapestries that I had to click on to push them aside so I could fight him, maps leading to even more dungeons that weren't marked on the world map when the game started, there's always something new to discover.

I was in a big chamber, and it looked like there was nowhere left to go in the dungeon, then I looked up - and saw an opening high up in the wall. So I climbed the wall and found a whole new section of the dungeon. I had to use the Slow Fall spell to get back down again without breaking my neck. You don't have moments like, gotta climb a wall and hope I don't fall, in the later games. Simply being able to scale a city's walls at night has such a coolness factor about it.

And I can ride a horse with a cart, that I can keep putting loot into instead of having to walk back to town, then when I've cleared out the dungeon, I just sell all the contents of the cart back in town. Things like that are just awesome for gameplay. I wish I had a cart in the other Elder Scrolls games!

And there's more to join than just the standard fighter / mage / thief guilds. I joined the Knights of the Dragon and now travel for free if I stay at an inn on the way, and sleep for free in any tavern.

So much content in this game it's astounding!

Most of those bugs were thankfully fixed throughout years.
Complex dungeons is always cool, especially in this age, when dungeon is expected to be super-short and more linear than a tunnel. Though inability to complete dungeon objective isn't cool.

Dtgreene mentioned, that dungeons aren't truly random. Does it mean that game has one and only "random seed" and procedurally generates all the same dungeons (and quests) each time? How random is the random nature of Daggerfall?
I had opposite experience here (with old unpatched versions). Arena excited me by its start, but then it kept crashing in the very first city at random, so I gave up on it. Daggerfall was much more stable for me.

What I *think* happened with Daggerfall is that Bethesda randomly generated the towns and dungeons beforehand and then tweaked a few things by hand, most notably main quest areas. Quests, however, are randomly generated each time you are asked to go on one. The game has a list of random names for when a name is required, and the towns and dungeons for those quests are chosen randomly.

If you explore enough dungeons, you will notice that the dungeons consist of certain dungeon "modules" combined in "random" ways. Eventually, you will learn how to navigate each module, where possible quest locations are, and where there are holes in the geometry that lead out of bounds.

Of interest is that the items sold in shops are the same everytime. This means that if a certain city's Wizard's Guild sells a certain useful magical item, it will sell that item for all players. (This is also true of shops in Arena and can be a reliable way to get an item that casts a certain useful spell, such as Force Wall.)

Arena's wilderness, on the other hand, *is* generated from a random seed that's different for each town. It is because of this that there is an infinite wilderness around each town that is the same from playthrough to playthrough.

Both Arena and Daggerfall have fixed (and well-designed) "story-dungeons" and random quest and whatever dungeons.
In Daggerfall, they experimented with modular 3D dungeons. Pole7645 described them quite well a few posts ago.
There is a set of assorted modules (there are a couple of different dungeon themes) which are used according to some algorithm to construct smaller or bigger random dungeons. The story-dungeons consisted of these modules, too, but they were not random and contained additional stuff. Read tsmpaul's post, if you are interested in a role-player's way to view these dungeons (and the rest of the game - I liked this post very much).
All in all, these 3D dungeons were not received well. so they went back to extremely simple dungeons in Morrowind - but that's another story.

I'd say that Arena has not. It might be interesting to try out for an hour or so if you're a huge fan of the series - but I'd only recommend a full playthrough to my worst enemies. Regardless, it's plot (and relevant lore) is simple and summarized in only a paragraph or two on the UESP wiki.

Daggerfall would hold up slightly better if it wasn't for it's overly-large and confusing randomized dungeons, created with no apparent algorithms for rhyme and reason. The non-randomized main quest dungeons aren't much better, and dungeon-crawling is unfortunately the meat of the game. The overworld was boasted as being "twice the size of Great Britain", but it just means there's a lot of copy-pasted towns and villages over an enormous (mostly) flat field.

Also note that both games are ridiculously buggy - like, even buggier than Bethesda games are known for being nowadays. In Daggerfall's case, Bethesda more or less released an unfinished beta copy on store shelves.

EDIT: Since no one else seemed to acknowledge it, I thought I'd say that project someone linked looks pretty interesting. I didn't know you could use Unity as a classic engine recreation. I should play around with it some time.