Sunday 3 December 2000

Pic of the day: A lucky Khajjiit girl has got hold of the Staff of Magnus. But how long will that last? Screenshot from Daggerfall (Bethesda Softworks).

Staff of Magnus

Through the genius and hard work of Donald Tipton, his new Daggerfall Tools have seen the light of day. In particular, there is a quest editor that lets any seasoned Daggerfall player modify or create new quests for the game. You may need a basic understanding of programming, but it's on about the same levels as editing a macro in Word or a formula in Excel. No engineering required. Just a sense of logic.

As one of the more seasoned Daggerfall players in the world, it is natural that I have taken upon myself to test the tools. And now that they seem reasonably stable, I try to create a little bit of add-on for my old favorite game. So today I have written, compiled and tested version 1.0 of the Staff of Magnus quest.

***

Daggerfall is the second in the Elder Scroll series of free-form roleplaying games for the MS-DOS computer. Both it and Arena, the first one, kept referring to the Staff of Magnus. It is supposedly an ancient artifact of power. In Arena, you only got vague rumors like "some people have gone searching for the Staff of Magnus. The fools." -In Daggerfall, the Staff is actually included on the CD but the player will not normally see it.

The Elder Scrolls are set in the world of Tamriel, a fictional continent and empire, with various distinct races each occupying one nation within the empire. Each race has names typical of them. For instance, a Breton may be named "Andistyr", a Redguard "Dirc'i", and a Nord "Fenrik". The name Magnus don't really fit in anywhere. So naturally there is a fair bit of curiosity connected to this artifact, among the regular gamers.

According to the in-game information, Magnus was an archmage long long ago, and created the Staff to maintain a balance of forces. For this reason, it will not stay with any one owner for long. While held, it allows the wielder to absorb spells and to slowly regenerate health.

To the Daggerfall community, as seen on alt.games.daggerfall, the artifact has become associated with another Magnus, namely your humble Daggerfall veteran writing this. So what is more natural than trying to justify the name by making a good, memorable Mages Guild quest?

Version 1.0 is a simple "carry this artifact to this safe hiding place in a dungeon". But now that I've tested it and found it to work, I am adding plot elements one by one. Given time, this could be a memorable addition to the game.

***

The quests are the heart and soul of Daggerfall. Most newbies concentrate on the Main Quest, which is described on the outset: To put the ghost king to rest and find a missing letter to a queen. This is quite a complex story line, and even casual errors may bar it from ever being completed. This makes many players angry. "Just because I was a bit too slow, I can't complete the game!" What they don't understand is that Daggerfall is not a Sierra style game where you do the right things in the right sequence, solve the puzzles and win the game. No, there are several different outcomes of the main quest. The most common is that things stay the way they were - the ghost keeps haunting Daggerfall, and the letter is never found. Life goes on.

There are dozens of small independent quests. You may deliver a packet for a merchant, or guard a bartender as he travels to another town, or help a temple deal with an undead creature, or punish an oathbreaker for the witches, or guard a sleeping mage, or clean out a house filled with vermin, or hunt down a rampaging werecritter, or steal some jewelry for the Thieves Guild, or poison someone for the Dark Brotherhood, or ... Well, there are dozens and dozens of quests, and hundreds of people and factions that may or may not be allied or in conflict at any given time.

The general opinion of the Daggerfall playing community is that most quests are too simple. Not necessarily too easy: Often the quest relies on a dungeon for complexity. The dungeons in Daggerfall are absolutely horrible, convoluted passages that cross at almost any angle, and big enough that you can spend a day of real time exploring one and still not know it. And there are hundreds of those, too. So it is easy to make a quest large by just sending the player off to a dungeon and fetch some stuff or deliver some stuff or slay something. But that's a cheap solution. What we want is a quest that has several characters, several possible outcomes, and takes some time even not counting the dungeons. One such quest is the "false prophet" quest for the temples, and an exorcism quest, also for the temples. I aim for something at that level, if I have the time and energy.

People have asked me if I made the game Daggerfall. The answer has always been "no". But now, thanks to our friend Tipton, the reply may perhaps someday be "not alone"...

Alternatively, of course, I could get a life. Do you have one to share? :)

(That was a rhetorical question, people!!)