Why do I keep playing Daggerfall?
It’s not much of a game. You get quests, go to dungeons, fight monsters, then go turn the quest in.
And most of the time the goddamned quests are broken! As in, cannot actually be completed by my character, and I end up having to use console commands in order to finish the damned things.
Like the latest one I did. I went all over that dungeon looking for the Nyah-Nyah of power or whatever. No dice.
So finally I use a command to just teleport me to where it is. And I immediately see what the problem is : in order to get there, I would have had to swim underwater down a very long corridor and my character could not hold his breath that long.
Oh wait, you didn’t put a bunch of points in Endurance? Sorry, it is literally impossible for you to finish this quest.
Not that we told you that or anything. Would have been nice to know that BEFORE I spent all that time killing harpies and giants for nothing.
Another time the McGuffin was behind a locked door, and there was no key lying around or anything. Oh no. So, not a Thief with a high lockpicking skill? Well then fuck you. No quest completion for you!
Yet another time the kid I was supposed to rescue was behind a SECRET door! Apparently I was expected to just stumble across it!
And yet I just keep on playing.
There’s not even much of a plot. Basically, you join a guild, the guild gives you quests, doing the quests advances you in the guild’s rankings, and… that’s it.
Besides the usual levels and treasure, that is. And the treasure is pretty crappy. The same bunch of armor and weapons over and over plus random amounts of gold.
Yippie fucking skippy.
The graphics are also pretty basic, and that’s with them modded up the wazoo. I shudder to think of what the game looks like unmodded.
And yet I seem to be hooked on the damned thing.
Even though I have access to much, much better games, including the later entries in the series like Oblivion, Morrowind, and Skyrim.
No word a lie, I am tempted to install Skyrim yet again. But that way madness lies.
Besides, I could still play the two I have not played, Oblivion and Morrowind. I own them both on Steam. It would be trivial to install one or both, and there are mods a-plenty for both of them out there.
And yet I will probably keep on playing Daggerfall for the time being.
Hell, it even took me making six characters before I made one actually worth playing. All my attempts to make mages were thwarted by the game’s atrocious magic system which makes it so that whn you start out, you can cast a spell twice and then you have to rest up to regen your MP.
That’s not enough spell power to kill anything.
The game was only playable once I made an archer. Sure, arrows are not infinite in supply, but at least I have enough of them to kill things.
Plus in Daggerfall, arrows are apparently indestructible, so you can always retrieve them from the corpses of your victims.
I guess I keep playing because, despite all its shortcomings, that dungeons and quests and leveling RPG thing is still very addictive and it has me hooked.
But I can feel its grip in my overheated brain slackening, so I am confident that the spell will be broken soon enough and then I can go play something from this millennium.
More after the break.
So very tired
It’s just occurred to me that I’ve been very tired most of the time lately.
It’s a hard thing to gauge, though, because as long I am active and engaged, say in a video game, I don’t feel tired.
But the moment I stop and disengage, it hits me, sometimes with the force of an avalanche. I get very sleepy and I have to lay down and take a nap even if I don’t want to do so.
That whole, “I should try to stay awake all day and see if it leads to better sleep” idea of mine has never seemed further away.
God, do I miss caffeine.
And yet, the fact that it can seemingly go away when I keep moving makes me wonder what exactly is up.
My fear is that this is a sign that my untreated sleep apnea is getting worse and moving into a more severe stage.
This theory is somewhat bolstered by these attacks of severe yawning I get from time to time. It’s quite strange to yawn so hard it makes your jaw ache.
Just looked it up. Apparently yawning is no longer considered to be caused by a need for an extra dose of oxygen to bring blood oxygen levels back up to normal.
I was just about to type to that effect when I suddenly thought, “wait a minute, I learned about that way, way back when I was a kid…. I better check that out. ”
And unsurprisingly, it’s total crap. Good to know.
I should probably do that more often. There are a lot of very dusty old books in my mental library, I should probably vet their contents more often.
Anyhow, I worry that my sleep apnea is worsening. I have done absolutely nothing to treat it except for very brief flirtings with CPAP, after all, and while sleep apnea itself can’t hurt or maim you, the heart attacks, strokes, and high blood pressure caused by smothering thousands of times a night in your sleep sure as fuck can.
Dunno what I can do about that, though. I keep telling myself that I need to take another, more concerted try to make peace with CPAP but my desperate fear of smothering (ironically caused by the sleep apnea) prevents it.
Even looking at the CPAP machine makes me feel panicky. While also making me feel guilty about how I just plain abandoned it without even telling anyone.
And what does that guilt make me do?
Continue to not think about it while I die, of course!
I am so very fucked.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.