| Score Magazine: Ted Peterson on Daggerfall | |
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| (link) | |
| Medium/Format | Optical Disc Magazine |
| Date | April 1996 |
| Interviewee(s) | Ted Peterson |
| Hosted By | SCORE |
SCORE: What is the story behind TES: Daggerfall (in short)?
Ted: Without giving too much away, you are summoned to the chambers of the Emperor of Tamriel at midnight for a furtive and mysterious conference. The Emperor orders you to investigate a situation in the royal court of Daggerfall. The king of that land, who was a great ally of the Emperor, was killed on the field of battle and his ghost now haunts the land he once ruled. Once you begin to investigate the haunting and discover the cause of the king's unrest, you will realize that there is a lot more going on beneath the surface. Exactly what I don't want to say -- that's part of the fun of the game.
A number of different kingdoms and other entities will attempt to secure your help aiding them in their schemes for power. Their ultimate goal I'm not going to go into right now, but it's big and your actions or lack of action will determine who wields this power. So, in a very real way, the story is up to the player. We've given the land some history and the NPCs some motivations, but how it all works out depends on you. After all, you're the hero and main character.
SCORE: We have learned that the main story in TES: Daggerfall should be just the small part of the game. What about the rest of it -- the subquests, special items, etc.?
Ted: The Elder Scrolls, as a series, has the philosophy that the player should have, above all, freedom. The "main stories" are designed so you can pursue them at your own pace and method, or even choose to abandon them altogether. I think that it's the right way to do a role-playing game.
More so than in Arena, the main story in Daggerfall permeates much of the game, but you're right in that there's a lot of stuff to do more or less unrelated to the main story. All of the factions from Arena, the Mages Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, the Thieves Guild, and so on, are all in Daggerfall, but this time you can join them, work for and with them toward their individual goals. As you improve your relationship with these organizations, you will be given access to more and more information , and, of course, more and more power. They will also entrust you will more important quests.
The quests also are more interconnected with the world in Daggerfall than they were in Arena. You will be offered different quests depending on different conditions -- for example, a merchant in an economically depressed region would offer you a different quest than his prosperous neighbor. Completion of some of the quests may result in the end of a condition or the sudden appearance of a new condition or any one of many possibilities.
As far as special items go, all of the artifacts people know and love from Arena are back, though you will have to go to ... questionable sources for them. There are also about a dozen new artifacts, as well as the means to custom create your own magical items. Of course, enchantment services are not open to just anyone.
SCORE: Does the game have different endings? If so, how many?
Ted: Well, first, they aren't really endings, since you can keep playing the game after you see the end animation, but things will be different in the world. You will really see how your decision affects the whole region. There are seven different scenarios, each with its own animation.
SCORE: What about the interaction with NPCs? It is said the NPCs will react according to your behavior and could actually "remember" it not only for the rest of the game, but also for the rest of the TES series. How does that work?
Ted: Reputation is very, very important in Daggerfall in a number of different ways. In actual conversation with NPCs, you can usually tell how that person feels about you and even whether your conversation is changing his or her mind about you. We pay attention to your reputation not only with individuals, but with entire organizations and even with groups of people, like scholars in general. A lot of it is behind the scenes, so you may not know that the man you insulted in Tigonus is second cousin to the Duchess, just as you wouldn't in real life. But you'll definitely see the results.
NPC reaction can run from the NPC refusing to talk to you and calling the guards to the NPC promoting you to the highest rank in a guild and showering you with gold and quests. And, of course, everything in between.
SCORE: In some of the earlier press releases, it was stated that TES: Daggerfall will be -- in some ways -- more adult-oriented than any other game and will eventually contain some form of 'parental-lock' or something. Is this true and if so, what's so hot about the game?
Ted: Well, it's probably not true that Daggerfall is more adult-oriented, if 'adult-oriented' is the euphemism for pornographic, than any other game. There are a number of games I've seen in which the only point is to bed as many women as possible. That certainly is not the point of Daggerfall, but, because it is a game by which we tried to create a world with all the possibilities and options of the real world, we couldn't ignore sex. After all, a lot of the game does have to do with improving one's reputation and forming relationships, and sex is naturally a part of that.
As to the parental-lock, the actual name of the feature is ChildGuard. It's rather a revolutionary feature, I think, in that it's a watchdog that turns off certain possibly offensive scenarios, mostly in the sex 'n nudity department. There are some off-color books in the libraries, some quests that deal with subjects inappropriate for children, and other such things that disappear when ChildGuard is on.
SCORE: Assuming you strictly follow the storyline, how many hours/days/months/years of gameplay would it take to complete the game and how many dungeons would you have to explore?
Ted: Obviously, it would depend on the gamer, but, without hacks and cheats, it will certainly take months for a good player to finish the game to its conclusion. I'm almost tempted to pass on this question, because there's a group of power-gamers out there whom I don't want to encourage to try and beat the game as quickly as possible by whatever means. I can understand the competition, but Daggerfall is an immersive experience, a place one should explore and get lost in; the people whose primary motivation is to 'beat' the game aren't, I think, going to enjoy it as much as those who want to get into character and investigate the possibilities. There are, for example, a hundred books in the libraries and bookshops in Daggerfall, and you don't have to read them all, but they will give you insight into why things are how they are. And just finding and reading all the books should take weeks.
SCORE: The size of the land in TES: Arena was huge, but we were assured that the scale of the land in TES: Daggerfall is far bigger. But HOW big it actually is and, more importantly, what is in there? Is it the same continent as in TES: Arena or is it completely different?
Ted: Technically, there's more geographical area in Daggerfall than there was in Arena, because you can actually, in real time, walk through from one town to another through the wilderness. On the other hand, the scale of the land in Daggerfall is actually smaller than Arena; it's the depth that's bigger. Arena took place all over Tamriel, which is an empire and a continent about the size of Canada. Daggerfall takes place in a section of Tamriel about twice the size of Great Britain. We decided to shrink the playing area down so we could add all the details and idiosyncrasies of a real world. In a sense, we outlined the world in Arena, but we're beginning the process of coloring it in Daggerfall. As you said, what is in it is more important than the size. By paying more attention to details, we could create mountains, deserts, swamps, woodlands, and all sorts of other terrain features. Even if we had the engine to support it, we would never have been able to add this level of detail to Arena. The memory requirements alone would have killed the project.
SCORE: One of the most important question is: is it possible to transfer your existing character from TES: Arena to Daggerfall? If so, how does it work? Does the character recover also his level/experience plus the money, equipment, and special objects found in TES: Arena?
Ted: Ah yes, you will be able to port your Arena character over to Daggerfall if you have a saved game, but the port won't be 100% in all probability. For one thing, in Daggerfall, characters are skill-based rather than class-based. A thief is now no longer defined as a character who can do certain things and not do certain other things -- a thief is a character class with high proficiency in skills like lockpicking and climbing and weaker proficiency in skills like spellcasting. The difference is important: a thief is capable of casting spells, he or she is just terrible at it at first. Given a lot of time and a lot of training, a thief in Daggerfall can improve in magical skills, but a mage, by nature, is better at learning such things. Skills as such were non-existent in Arena, and so the ported characters need to be re-interpreted. We may decide to place a ceiling on experience levels, gold, and equipment on ported characters, depending on the feedback from our beta-testers, but to what extent will depend on the individual ported character.
SCORE: Is the game different every time you play it with different characters? Does it depend on character level and class only?
Ted: It is both the charm and, from the testing point-of-view, the horror of the game that if you and I both started the game at the exact same time with the exact same character, ten minutes later, we'd be playing in different worlds. All sorts of things can happen to influence the evolution of things: a mad wizard may come out of retirement and start a plague in a little village in the north, this may lead to religious persecution or a war in which in the king of the land is killed. Meanwhile, in my game, the little village has a banner year for crops and forms an alliance with a powerful temple. Of course, you and I can get involved in the situations and alter their courses, but things are never going to be exactly the same.
Character level and class have very little to do with this evolution, or at least, not nearly as much as character behavior does. Your class may help or hinder you in making certain relationships: merchants are sometimes dubious about dealing with thieves but the criminal underworld likes them very much; and peasants are often frightened of sorcerers but the intelligentsia revere them. All of this is set at the beginning of the game, but a thief, for example, can work toward being more trusted by a particular merchant. We don't want to limit you based on the class you've chosen, but we do want you to understand that certain types of people have certain types of friends and enemies.
SCORE: Is it the same engine (or should I say XnGINE) as in Terminator: FS or is it different? Also, there were talks about the SVGA option in Terminator: FS which never made it into the final version. Can we expect high-resolution graphics in TES: Daggerfall?
Ted: We're using the same engine in Daggerfall as we used in Terminator: Future Shock. We're also using it in our forthcoming car racing game, X-Car, which will have a SVGA option. Unfortunately, in Daggerfall, as far as SVGA and hi-resolution modes go, they're supported in the engine, but the memory and system requirements would go sky-high. We're looking very seriously into implementing them in TES III, but they will probably not be in Daggerfall.
SCORE: How many months/years does it take to create a huge game such as TES: Arena? And how long is it going to take to finish TES: Daggerfall? Is the work any easier now with the TES: Arena experience and probably huge feedback or is it like starting over again?
Ted: Arena took, from concept to finish, a little over a year to complete. Daggerfall has, so far, taken twice that, and will probably take a little while longer now that we're in beta testing. How much longer is mostly dependent on what the beta testers find, not only in terms of bugs, but play balance, user-friendliness, and other tweaky issues. Obviously, in a game the scope and depth of Daggerfall, with many dependencies and codependencies, anything can go wrong and a problem's source can come from most anything. And, as the Zen master said, it's always that last 10% of a product that gives you the most trouble. Or words to that effect.
In a lot of ways, we were able to avoid potential problems in Daggerfall by learning our lessons in Arena, but I don't think I'd go so far as to say that Daggerfall has been easier than Arena. Both were very ambitious projects with difficulties unique to each. In Arena, you could say a character was a 5th level Argonian Spellsword fighting an orc, and that was enough. In Daggerfall, a 5th level Argonian Spellsword might be using an axe, and his axe skill is 43, against an orc shaman, with whom the Spellsword has a certain reputation and language skills, but who has offensive and defensive spells all its own. Or the Argonian may not be a Spellsword but an Orcslayer, a unique character class that the player invented, with all new abilities and weaknesses. From the program's point-of-view, there is hardly ever anything simple in Daggerfall.
SCORE: Is it maybe too soon to ask such a question, but are you planning to do 'Chapter 3'? If so, do you have any information on that subject or is it just too far away?
Ted: Well, yes, it probably is too soon to give any details, but plans for TES: III are underway even now. Very exciting stuff, but I'm unfortunately not at liberty to talk about it. Suffice it to say, the Elder Scrolls have a lot more stories to tell.
Ted Peterson,
Chief designer of Daggerfall