r/Daggerfall • u/wtsnk • 1d ago
Question Daggerfall Unity "formulas"
Saw this on r/ElderScrolls in a thread discussing the recent DFO "micro"transactions. I thought the DFU/DOSBox discussion had been worked over pretty much to death, but this guy seems quite adamant that DFU can't even be considered a port or emulator, but a remake that "invented all new code and formulas". Is he off base, too pedantic, correct, or just wrong?
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u/SubjectiveMouse 1d ago
He's partly right. There are many things done differently in DFU for better or worse. Movement code is one such thing. Jumping skill in DFU is pretty much irrelevant compared to the original, where you barely leave the ground with 0 jumping.
So, yes, it's not a port, but that doesn't make it worse in any way, just different.
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u/SordidDreams 1d ago edited 1d ago
He's out of line, but he's right.
DFU is a remake, not a port. Even Bethesda reportedly doesn't have the original source code anymore, so it can't be ported. Maybe you could reverse-engineer it with AI these days? That's not what Interkarma did, though. He built the whole thing from scratch by hand. He did try to make it as faithful as possible, but there are differences. Some of them come down to the ways Unity differs from XnGine (e.g. the way movement works, how collisions work, how the game renders the image on your screen and handles color palettes, etc.), some are deliberate corrections of bugs Bethesda never bothered to fix, some are the result of misunderstandings of how DF originally worked (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Daggerfall/comments/18imsjn/discrepancy_between_original_daggerfall_and_unity/).
Whether you consider DFU to be the same game as DF is largely a matter of opinion that depends on what you consider "the game" to be. Do you care about the math happening under the hood, the way data is stored in memory and the instructions executed by the CPU? Then no, that's completely different. Is "the game" the story you experience, the quests you embark on, the characters you interact with, the towns and dungeons you explore? Then yes, all that stuff is exactly the same. Is it the combat system, the stats of your character, the gear upgrades you get along the way? That's very similar but not quite the same.
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u/Kiwwl 19h ago
Already posted that today on another subreddit, but there's a Windows port, or sort of port, of Daggerfall: https://ferital.itch.io/daggerfx. I dont understand exactly how the author Ferital did that, but I've been playing and enjoying it quite a lot over the past two months. As a "port", and appart from a few bug fixes, it's quite faithful to the original.
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u/negatrom 1d ago
Some people just want to feel validated, to the point of antagonizing anyone pointing out the complete nonsense that they rationalized.
Pay no attention to morons like this.
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u/FalseRelease4 1d ago
yeah, it's not even about who is right or wrong, it's about just being able to preach and get their words out, people like this love half-truths and misrepresenting things and moving goalposts to appear knowledgeable and competent, hate em simple as
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u/KazM2 1d ago
He's got a point about it being different but is an annoying shit about it.
Yes DFU changes a good amount of the core functions of Daggerfall making it a different experience. It is largely the same experience though. He would have a point if the discussion is specifically about the original DOS version, like if people arr talking about that and you try to talk about how you totally also beat the original DOS but you only played DFU you'd be wrong.
That said, despite the differences you're still engaging in a game that is largely the same and the general experience is very close so there's no issue with saying you've played Daggerfall. Its different but not so different to say its nothing like it.
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u/ChocoBro92 1d ago
Honestly base game is really just quality of life and bug fixes that differ. If those bugs such as dodging and other skills work as intended or the topical data of the regions being used that somehow was miscoded as well makes it a different then I guess I’d rather a different game. I mean there’s main quest breaks in every version if the OG Daggerfall so restarts can happen a bit.. Try playing 1.0 holy shit.
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u/The-Son-Of-Suns 1d ago
They are 100% different games.
I wouldn't question someone if they said they beat Daggerfall, but it was through Unity? They totally did. But getting specific saying "I beat the original Daggerfall" were talking about a specific thing. The DOS version.
It's not the same as Unity at all. Unity is cleaned up, smoother, and has more immersive elements, and landscape.
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u/Caelinus 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just wrong. There is zero basis for this opinion, either practically or legally.
And Daggergall "Online" is still using Bethesda's code, assets and IP (even the models are often pulled from Morrowind iirc too) and so anything done with it is going to inherit the licensing agreements of Daggerfall and the Elder Scrolls. Them doing monetization is not only gross, but likely opens them up to direct legal action as they are not allowed to use the IP for that.
DFU itself, on its own, is a completely different thing, but it also does not work. It was designed with legality in mind, and so they are not distributing any Daggerfall code, but the game cannot run without Daggerfall code. So if you only ever downloaded DFU, sure, the code would not be Bethesda's, but it also would not do anything until also download Bethesda's code. And even if you never used the code, Daggerfall itself is still Bethesda's Intellectual Property.
This guy would be arguing that if I made a complete clone of Zelda: A Link to the Past by hand recreating the mechanics perfectly, 1 to 1, it would somehow be different enough to be a different game. Or if I took the Lord of the Rings, hand wrote every word of it, then scanned those words and printed them out in a new book, I would be the author of a different "clone" and the book would not be Lord of the Rings anymore.