The incredible wait for Daggerfall has finally come to an end, and it ends with a bang. Normally, computer RPGs are a niche product for a niche market. Software just hasn't been able to approach the level of depth of a true pencil and paper game.

The folks at Bethesda software took on an incredibly ambitious project in attempting just that. Daggerfall has many foibles and imperfections, but for those willing to look beneath the unpolished surface beats the heart of the finest CRPG ever.

Normally CRPGs come and go without making any waves in the game industry, but this time, game magazines of all types have taken notice of Daggerfall's incredible early sales. In one week, it achieved a sell-through of over 100,000 copies, prompting Bethesda to arrange for extra production facilities to keep up with the demand. It's a certain bet that all the companies racing to make yet another Doom or Command & Conquer clone have also taken notice. An RPG breaking into the top 20? It seems likely that this will prompt more companies to make their own interpretations.

In a world of Quake and Wing Commander IV, Daggerfall stands out for being remarkably rough-edged. The graphics are primitive VGA, all characters are low-res bitmaps, and even the music isn't the CD orchestra many of us have become accustomed to. If your sound card's built-in music ability is merely FM synthesis, then you will be listening to some really primitive sounding music; Daggerfall really needs a proper wavetable sound card for the music to sound decent.

You may be wondering why Daggerfall doesn't use CD music. It's because they had better things to do with all the space on a CD. Most games use about 5% of a CD for the entire game, and the other 95% is wasted by the 44 khz, 16bit stereo CD music. So what Bethesda do with all that extra space?

Well, I've visited about 30 towns so far, 13 dungeons, 10 roadside inns and temples, but I've only been to about 7% of the "kingdom." But that's only one such kingdom out of forty-three. Yes, there are literally thousands of cities to visit and supposedly 16,000 different quests you could go on, in addition to the one central quest.

The game has all kinds of guilds and orders to join. Each one has its own membership requirements and benefits, some of which are very potent.There is a thieves guild and an assassin's guild, but you don't go and petition them. They come to you if you're deemed worthy. Werecreatures and vampires exist, as do Lycanthropy and Vampirism, meaning that you may find yourself transformed into a werewolf or vampire if you're sufficiently unlucky. There are even rumors of vampires having their own internal factions and struggles, but it isn't clear yet if this is true.

So what kind of character do you want? Daggerfall allows incredible latitude and is flexible enough to allow transcribing your favorite RPG character with a remarkable degree of accuracy. Don't like the existing character classes? Make your own with a nicely balanced custom class generation system.

Most games seem to reward Knight-Wizards (you know what I mean) and punish any character class that is more subtle. Only strength and magic ability seem to have any value in CRPGs. Daggerfall's rules actually encourage using the less direct classes and having better scores in stats other than strength and intelligence. Thieves can even backstab!

Be warned, though. This game has more bugs than you can shake a stick at. It isn't compatible with Cyrix CPUs out of the box - although there is a patch for that available online. Many quests won't recognize that you've done what you're supposed to do. You can hit things through walls if they're close. Building your character's stats up past 100 can cause crashes.

Occasionally the code will degrade gradually and crash if you don't reboot and start over. Climbing characters can climb sheer walls but not steep slopes.There's also a repetition problem - even though there are many many dungeons, and they're all in 3-D, they use the same basic set of rooms and corridors. Helping a little is the occasional unique chamber and the fact that some dungeons are so huge that you can get lost for hours in them. All the quests are basically "retrieve this for me" and "kill that for me" which can get pretty repetative.

Got a loaded computer? Good, because you'll need it. While even a 486/100 can handle the game well, you'll need gobs of RAM and hard drive space. Install sizes vary from around 20 to 400 megabytes of space! If you choose the small install, be prepared for many occasions where the game will pause and wait while the CD loads more data. In general, it is a good idea to use the 90 Mb install if you have 32Mb of RAM (so you can set up 16 of it on disk cache) or use the 200 Mb or 400Mb install if you have about 16Mb of RAM. These are high-performance recommendations, and you can go a lower if your hardware isn't up to snuff - just beware the performance penalty.

You'll have to be the type that can look past the bugs, the repetition, and the lack of polish to enjoy the game. However, if you can do that, a good day of Daggerfall is much better than a bad day of pen-and-paper gaming. Daggerfall is indeed the closest thing to a real RPG in the computer world yet.

Editor's note:

Currently, several Daggerfall patches have been released. Make sure you have the latest one. Patches and other Daggerfall support can be found at www.bethsoft.com, as well as fan sites.

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