The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall Retrospective and Mod Summary
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Then there's the XL Engine, which is the main reason for this post if you discount the nostalgic warbling that follows these two paragraphs. If you haven't heard of the XL Engine already, it's a custom-built framework to run old games. Essentially, it totally overhauls them, with all sorts of visual enhancements and improved modding support, so it's almost as if they are being ported onto modern systems. Daggerfall XL is far from finished yet but it's a hugely intriguing project, which is seeing steady progress.
It goes without saying that Daggerfall is never going to look like Skyrim, but the results, even in the current 0.199 version, are impressive. As with so many mods, the work that has gone into this is astounding. The assets for the games aren't publicly available so they have been rebuilt from the ground up. And in Daggerfall's case that's a lot of ground.
It's about more than improving the game's visuals though. Projects like XL keep these worlds alive and, hopefully, create fresh interest in them. The engine also supports Dark Forces, which is at a more advanced stage than Daggerfall, and ports of Blood and Outlaws seem to be coming along nicely as well. That's Blood, the Build3D game starring Caleb, who was a trenchcoat wearing Ash-alike with a borrowed quip for every situation. And Outlaws, one of the very few decent PC versions of the wild west. It's worth visiting the XL site just to be reminded of how incredible those games were and to look forward to playing them again.
