Early Daggerfal preview demo

[MrFlibble]

The Daggerfall preview v0.1 is one of the earliest (but not the very first) public demo versions published by Bethesda, and naturally it has quite a few noticeable differences from both the later demos and the final release of the game. This demo is mentioned in the old unofficial Daggerfall FAQ v0.992:

The first demo is currently 10.3MB zipped (46MB unzipped), which includes a swap file on your hard drive. It has also been available on different Game Magazines (those funky CD-ROMS demo things). The first demo is no longer available since it contains lots of bugs and is greatly inferior to the second demo (below).

The demo will run with the Matrox Millenium video card only with 1.9 BIOS which is available from The Matrox WWW Site.

It includes Demo versions of the character generator, the item maker, the potion maker, the spell maker, a tour of sites of interest, and a playable dungeon. Your character will be a pregenerated male 16th level spellsword. There will be no save in the demo. The Demo's 3D rotatable automapping function combines areas covered by your various dungeon explorations, until you log out of the Demo proper. The Demo also contains water, no magic items, and some 'eye candy'. Due to space restrictions, there is no monster AI in the DEMO.

The dungeon is from the pit of jagadha. The dungeon consists of 4 8x8x8 3D blocks. Each block loosely has 8 "levels": there are many partial levels, intersecting ramps between the levels, stairs, balconies, overhangs and rooms with different height ceilings.

The demo works in DOSBox, albeit the regular build has some speed issues, but it runs at an acceptable framerate in a custom build called DOSBox-X (still not perfect though).

The demo dungeon is full of high-level monsters, some of which are generated randomly, but it's actually rather easy, if you keep your distance and attack the monsters with fireballs or ice bolts. In open areas, spell reflection renders all possible enemy projectiles useless, and in many cases you can cast your offensive spells from behind the corner without even any need for defensive magic.

The game does generate new monsters over time, but does this rather slowly. Sometimes you re-enter a previously explored area and find a monster where there wasn't any.

There are quite a few interesting features and/or bugs in the preview demo.

Once the game generated several Orc Warlords near the starting location. Curiously, both had female armour sets on them:


I tried picking the armour hoping that it'd change into its male version somehow but it didn't. I could put on the female leather cuirass, but chain boots crashed the game. Orc Shamans also have female versions of armour, if any at all is generated by them.

That said, the male character always gets male armour on the start, and whatever armour pieces or clothes are found on other monsters also seem to be of the male design. Obviously, the Orc Warlord and Orc Shaman have leftovers from the earlier demo with a female character.

You can also notice a statue in the inventory on the second screenshot. Sometimes you can also find the "large statue" item which is also black but looks more like a staff than anything. I think neither is used in the full game (the small statue looks different in the final version).

Liquid ingredients are stored in bottles, although you probably know that.


If you drop a bottle on the ground, its contents disappear. You can drop them on the ground from the bottle though, and they'll stay there:


Unlike treasure piles, all dropped items are shown either in their original graphics (like bottles) or using their special "item on floor graphics". Here's a buckler and a dagger, for example:


The problem with this is that if you drop many items in one place, their graphics will overlap one another, and while you move and the item pile is visible, different sprites will flicker one over another, creating a weird effect. Perhaps this has something to do with the screen redrawing routines, but at any rate, this is probably why the idea was dropped in favour of random treasure pile sprites for dropped items.

In the preview demo, you can also get into everyone's favourite location in Daggerfall: the Void!


Got there by levitating through a staircase, but in another place in the dungeon there was a floor that also allowed to levitate through somehow.

One more thing I've noticed, there's a skill called "Disguise" in this version, which apparently was responsible for how well one can impersonate other people or fool guards:


There are also such language skills as Faerie and Elvish which were later scrapped. These are also asked about in the career-defining questions section of character generation procedure.

Also, the Missile skill is apparently what has become archery. Maybe one was supposed to be able to throw other items (like darts or stones) and not just use the bow?


Concerning items, all shield types you may get report a similar +1 to armour rating for some reason. It seems like many things just weren't tweaked at this stage yet. For example, there doesn't seem to be a way to view the exact amount of spell points, except for the meter on the HUD. Clicking on the STR parameter tells your maximum encumbrance but current encumbrance is not displayed and it actually does not affect movement speed or fatigue. On the other hand, if you jump into water sometimes the game will tell you that "you carry too much weight to stay afloat".

[MrFlibble]

Hallfiry was able to obtain a copy of the early demo CD of Daggerfall, which has the female Spellsword. Details and download links are here. And here are the photos of the CD and its cover.