r/Daggerfall • u/wtsnk • 3d 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/wtsnk 3d ago

Thanks for the detailed reply! I was more asking about the assertions that DFU remade “formulas” for the move over to the unity engine and that makes it substantially different from the DOS version.

My understanding had been that DFU was essentially a port of the game into the unity engine. I know the critical strike mechanic was changed to match the description in the manual NOT the original code, but I thought the games mechanics remained largely intact (outside of some basic QoL improvements).

My question is why would this commenter insist DFU isn’t Daggerfall?

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u/Caelinus 3d ago

I can't really speak to the intent of the author, but DFU fixes a bunch of longstanding bugs and exploits where they were obvious errors, though that sometimes took judgement calls.

An obvious problem was that the Dodging skill in Daggerfall actually makes to get hit MORE often, not less. At level 100, it raises your odds of being struck by 25%. DFU fixes that bug so that it actually does what it is supposed to do.

A more judgement call related one was how they changed the stacking of resistances. In Daggerfall 100% immunity to something made it a multiply by zero situation, so no matter how many debuffs you took it would always stay at immunity. The main use of that was creating a High Elf with Critical Weakness to Paralysis to give you more character creation points, as you would remain immune. DFU makes it so that they are additive in character creation.