What! Holy crap! I still have my original CD, but that's still awesome.

Thanks Qbix for the info!

Todd Howard Interview:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/fullsto … y.php?id=159095

http://www.elderscrolls.com/downloads/downloads_games.htm

Daggerfall Now Available for Download
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls, we've released The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall as a free download. Head here to download the game.

http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?s … owtopic=1012682

Posted this on Bethblog a few moments ago... […]
Show full quote

Posted this on Bethblog a few moments ago...

Five years ago, to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of The Elder Scrolls, we released The Elder Scrolls: Arena as a free download. If you do the math, that means the series is now celebrating its 15th Anniversary. So despite saying we’d never do it, we’ve decided to release The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall as a FREE download too!

One thing to keep in mind — the game is over 10-years-old and we’re releasing it “as is.” In other words, we’re not providing customer support or technical support on the game at this point. That being said, I successfully started up the game running DOSBox and following QA superstar Mike Mazzuca’s detailed walkthrough for installing the game. Follow the directions and you should be in good shape.

Having heard many stories of how you guys wanted to get your hands on the game, we’re excited that many of you will get to experience Daggerfall for the first time. Head here to download the game. Enjoy!

Moved to Release Announcements.

http://static.bethsoft.com/downloads/games/da … nstallation.pdf
instalation instructions. The spaces are more clear than with arena. I recall some problems as people didn't see spaces between cd and arena or something like that

DosFreak wrote:

Thanks Qbix for the info!

Todd Howard Interview:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/fullsto … y.php?id=159095

Interesting quote:

If you could go back in time and change one thing in one of your games, what would it be? Or would you not change anything at all?
I’d have no level cap in Fallout 3. Oh wait, you probably meant The Elder Scrolls, hmmm. I still regret having Redguard only support Glide for 3d acceleration. We should have made it Direct3D based. We missed the technology window on that one. That killed that game. There are other regrets, but most of those decisions made sense at the time and weren’t game killers, so we fix them game to game.

So if DOSBox supports Glide 5 years from now we may get a free release of RedGuard!

DosFreak wrote:

So if DOSBox supports Glide 5 years from now we may get a free release of RedGuard!

Nah, Battlespire in 5 years and Redguard in 10 😁

Qbix wrote:

http://static.bethsoft.com/downloads/games/da … nstallation.pdf
instalation instructions. The spaces are more clear than with arena. I recall some problems as people didn't see spaces between cd and arena or something like that

Why did they not included a frontend which has a "install" button and a "play" button? "Install" launches DOSBox and the users have to install the game as per the document. The "Play" button however appends the appropriate commands to the autoexec section in the DOSBox config file eliminating the end user from having to repeatedly enter instructions each time they want to play 😀 anyways, a lot of the stuff could have been automated afaik but they probably wanted to spend as little money as possible 😦

With "step 3" in the document, does that "edit config" option close DOSBox? if it doesn't then maybe step 4 should be to close DOSBox once done editing the config file 😄"

They probably didn't want to bundle DOSBox, so some kind of all-in-one installer wouldn't be possible. They could have zipped up a pre-installed "play without the CD" version, but I think they way they did it is better because it lets you roll your own full DF CD in case you want to do a minimal install on an old computer 😀

Freddo wrote:

DosFreak wrote:

So if DOSBox supports Glide 5 years from now we may get a free release of RedGuard!

Nah, Battlespire in 5 years and Redguard in 10 😁

Nope, for the 20th anniversary they will release Morrowind as freeware! 😁

temptingthelure wrote:

Nope, for the 20th anniversary they will release Morrowind as freeware! 😁

I would be very surprised if they aren't still selling Morrowind GOTY on Steam 5 years from now.

They'll probably release Battlespire. I don't know that they'll ever release Redguard for free because there isn't an official build of DOSBox with Glide support. The problem with Battlespire though is that it's a bit touchy about how you configure DOSBox, but maybe it won't matter in 5 years thanks to Moore's Law.

Freddo wrote:

temptingthelure wrote:

Nope, for the 20th anniversary they will release Morrowind as freeware! 😁

I would be very surprised if they aren't still selling Morrowind GOTY on Steam 5 years from now.

But five years from now Morrowind will be as old as Daggerfall is now. They'd have to sell the GOTY edition for like 4.99$ to make players buy it.

HunterZ wrote:

They'll probably release Battlespire. I don't know that they'll ever release Redguard for free because there isn't an official build of DOSBox with Glide support. The problem with Battlespire though is that it's a bit touchy about how you configure DOSBox, but maybe it won't matter in 5 years thanks to Moore's Law.

But those games were crap, and they werent really proper Elder Scrolls titles. Morrowind OTOH...

temptingthelure wrote:

Freddo wrote:

temptingthelure wrote:

Nope, for the 20th anniversary they will release Morrowind as freeware! 😁

I would be very surprised if they aren't still selling Morrowind GOTY on Steam 5 years from now.

But five years from now Morrowind will be as old as Daggerfall is now. They'd have to sell the GOTY edition for like 4.99$ to make players buy it.

And? That's a lot of 4.99$ when they release TES5 and TES6 and the newcomers wanna play the older titles. And currently it's 19.99$ on Steam for a 7 year old game. So since the retail was released the price has only gone down 50% in 7 years.

When Daggerfall was 7 years old it had already been out of print for years, not to mention that it couldn't run properly on a 2003 computer, so re-releasing it wouldn't make much sense. While Morrowind happily runs on modern computers.

temptingthelure wrote:

HunterZ wrote:

They'll probably release Battlespire. I don't know that they'll ever release Redguard for free because there isn't an official build of DOSBox with Glide support. The problem with Battlespire though is that it's a bit touchy about how you configure DOSBox, but maybe it won't matter in 5 years thanks to Moore's Law.

But those games were crap, and they werent really proper Elder Scrolls titles. Morrowind OTOH...

It's more likely that we will recive "crap" games for free than a good game they still can sell.

Oh, wow, this is great. But I must say I'm very surprised about this. I sent an E-mail asking if Bethesda planned to ever re-release Daggerfall close to a year ago. I still have the response with my original message attached in my inbox.

"From: Matt Grandstaff (***) on behalf of Press2005 (***)
Sent: Fri 9/05/08 5:27 PM
To: nothing to see here

Sorry, Daggerfall will not be released again - free, as a download, or in any other way.

-----Original Message-----
From: or here
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2008 4:12 PM
To: Press2005
Subject: game_question

Name: not here either
Email: wait, maybe here- psych

Subject: Daggerfall
Message: Hello. I would just like to know if Bethesda has plans to ever re-release Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall in some form in the future, or put it up for download either as a digital download purchase or a free download like Elder Scrolls: Arena one day.

I am a fan of both Arena and Oblivion, and would like to play Daggerfall as well, but you unfortunately no longer sell it, and the only places I know of that I can purchase a copy from are Amazon and eBay. However, they're second-hand copies, and they're extremely expensive.

If you know of an online retail store or a digital distribution service that still offers it (or if you know whether or not the upcoming Good Old Games service on GOG.com will feature Daggerfall), please point them out to me. If not, do you as a company plan to ever make Daggerfall available to the public once again in any form whatsoever, at any point in the future? I would gladly pay a reasonable price to play this old game of yours.

Thank you very much for any response."

When I talked about this on the Gamespot PC forum after getting that response, I learned that Bethesda at some point apparently lost the source code to Daggerfall when they moved their studio to another building, and that that was likely why they couldn't, and not just wouldn't, re-release the game. So this is a delightful surprise indeed. I'd accepted that I'd never see an official release of Daggerfall back then, but what do you know. I wonder, maybe my E-mail had some effect, afterall. 🤣

You should reply to the email and say "never say never" :p

People needs to realize that "never" is a really, really, REALLY, long time.

Freddo wrote:

And? That's a lot of 4.99$ when they release TES5 and TES6 and the newcomers wanna play the older titles. And currently it's 19.99$ on Steam for a 7 year old game. So since the retail was released the price has only gone down 50% in 7 years.

When Daggerfall was 7 years old it had already been out of print for years, not to mention that it couldn't run properly on a 2003 computer, so re-releasing it wouldn't make much sense. While Morrowind happily runs on modern computers.

$4.99 for a crappy 14 yr old game plagued with Steam DRM? I'll pass on that "deal". And I would urge others from doing so too. BTW Daggerfall could run on an older computer, if it had like win9X and you booted to dos. 😀 Maybe Morrowind will start losing it's out of the box install features with future windows releases.

Freddo wrote:

It's more likely that we will recive "crap" games for free than a good game they still can sell.

Yeah, usually we do get the short end of the stick, dont we?