“Since 2019, things have progressed from ‘a bit burned out’ to standing in the ashes of b🐓urnout and fighting on anyway,” Daggerfall Unity creator Gavin Clayton tells me. “Keeping the momentওum through all this has been challenging.”
Daggerfall launched in 1996, propelling The Elder Scrolls from being a fairly bog-standard action RPG into something special with many now-iconic hallmarks of the series making their debut. It introduced the Dark Brotherhood, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:gave Khajiit tails, and featured dragons nearly 20 years before 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Skyrim pitted us against them. I🎃t’s a vital entry into Bethesda’s catalogue, but further evolutions🉐 in the genre saw it become an obtuse, archaic relic. That is until Gavin Clayton started a project to bring Daggerfall to the Unity engine, overhauling it to be more approachable and intuitive for new players.
But Clayton took it a step further. Not only did he seek to open Daggerfall’s rusted gate after years of being clamped shut, he also brought back axed ideas and pushed the game’s boundaries thanks to new tech at his disposal. “I looked at early screenshots and read old developer interviews, trying to get a sense of what Daggerfall wanted to be relative to how it 🅺arrived,” Clayton says. “For example, I found an early concept screenshot showing rolling terrain with a town right up against a hill and noted that elevation data was still in the game files. This was a stark contrast to how flat Daggerfall ended up being with only the occasional jagged bumps.”
The changes made to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall in Clayton’s remake do wonders for opening it up to modern audiences. I managed to slog through the first Eld🍃er Scrolls a couple of years ago, back when I first got in contact with Clayton. I was hesitant to play the sequel even though I’d heard great things because of how much of a ꧟headache Arena - the first game - was, but then I stumbled on Daggerfall Unity, a giant project seeking to address people like me.
“I added scrollbars, mouse wheel support, t🔯oolti✨ps, smoother fonts, more reactive buttons, and crisp, responsive controls, just to list a few early enhancements,” Clayton says. “I found I could take advantage of higher pixel density on modern displays to make the UI scaling cleaner while still looking retro. When it came to controls, an easy choice was to skip the clunky cursor-based default control scheme and work on getting it right as a first-person game with smooth mouselook and WSAD-styled controls.
While you could configure classic to use mouselook and WSAD, it still didn’t feel very good. You couldn’t move diago൩nally and would often get stuck for no reason or fall into the void or rocket into the air. You had to use float up and down keys when levitating rather than camera direction. Classic movement just feels rough most of the time. We did a lot of work early to make the movement feel silky smooth and responsive and kept working on this as feedback rolled in.”
Bethesda never got in touch with Clayton nor did it ever try to shut the project down - it’s known for its leniency with mods, after all, even integrating them into its latest games. Meanwhile, Daggerfall is now free-to-play, meaning there’s no risk of infringing on any profits. Seemingly, the project was safe to start, work on, and publish, just as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Skywind and Skyblivion move ahead with their own 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:ambitious remakes, but unlike those, Clayton worked with someone who played a key role in the original’s deve﷽lopment.
“One of the most wonderful interactions I’ve had is with Dagger𒁏fall’s lead designer Ted Peterson,” Clayton says. “Ted has sent me kind words and seems to enjoy watching his game come to life all over again. For those who don’t know, Ted wrote many of the in-game books in Daggerfall and Morrowind. He’s behind a lot of the lore and the world inside The Elder Scrolls.
“Ted has started writing a series of in-game books for Daggerfall Unity, intended to be available in the world only after the main quest is complete. These books explore the motivations and backstory of Lord Woodborne, the antagonist in Daggerfall who murders King Lysandus and sets the main story in motion. Ted is writing these books and releasing them to our community one at a time for feedback. Onc𝓡e he’s finished and ready, they𒀰 will be introduced into the game. It really is an honour to have the lead designer and creative force behind Daggerfall making such a contribution. It makes all the years of effort feel worthwhile and special.”
Still, Clayton is well aware that the genre has moved on. This isn’t an attempt to claw bac💎k the past so much as it is to preserve it. “It was Daggerfall that first grabbed me and while I believe people should try to enjoy classic games for their history and experience the evolution of this artform firsthand, I don’t 𝄹think it’s necessary to go back and play older games in a series unless that’s something you really want to do,” Clayton says. “We all experience games for the first time in our own way. One of the first CPRGs I played was Pool of Radiance at 13 years old. This game lived in my imagination for months.
“I could tell someone about the experience and how deeply I felt, even♏ convince them to try it, but there’s almost no chance they will have the same emotions. What I saw and felt was a product of my time, age, and bookish imagination. Even today, I couldn’t repeat this with the same game. At best, it will evoke a shadow of that memory and time in my life. Daggerfall Unity for me is a little bit like shadow painting. I’ve projected my memories and feelings about this game onto a wall and started painting the shapes. Sometimes it comes out exactly how it was and sometimes it comes out how I remember or wanted it to be. As others have arrived, we’ve gradually created a game that’s both the same and the result of a collective unconscious love for a time and memory that, while in the past, can still live and breathe within the people who animate it.”
- it was my first ever interview asꦅ a journalist. He was sharing development updates on Twitter, adding new quality of life features like being able to click to attack, and he was ironing out the kinks of magic. I remember when vampirism made its long-awaited return - that whole period was incredibly exciting as a classic was being remade before our very eyes. A lot has changed since then. Chiefly, the project is done, and Clayton is back to his hobby of baking sourdough bread and developing new games.
“For a large game with dozens of contributors spanning years, it’s a huge relief to finally reac✃h the end,” Clayton tells me. “There were so many reasons for Daggerfall Unity not to succeed that it almost feels unreasonable to be so complete today.”
“This all began as a one-man hobby in 2000 that somehow kept escalating over the years into a remake even more ambitious than the famously over-ambitious original,” Clayton says. “I was 21 when Daggerfall launched, and I started building those early exploring tools at 24. Now, I’m 47, and here we are at what seems like the logical conclusion to it all. While the Daggerfall Unity project spanned around six years, this game has now been a part of my life longer than I had been alive 𝓰when I first pulled the shrink wrap off Daggerfall’s box. That’s a heavy realisation for anyone to consider.”