Daggerfall release info
Richard Graham
For those of you who have not checked yet, this is the lastest
information
from the Bethesda Daggerfall page. The address for the article is
included at the bottom of this message. I cut and pasted this, forgive
me if the
spacing is bad.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For more information, contact:
John Lee 301-926-8300 x 260
Brenda Wheeler 201 762-8683
Website Info.: www.bethsoft.com
DAGGERFALL TO ARRIVE IN STORES IN SEPTEMBER
Highly Awaited Role-Playing Game Pushed to September Release as
Pre-sales Soar
Rockville, MD (August 28, 1996) - Bethesda Softworks announced today
that its
highly-anticipated role-playing game, THE ELDER SCROLLS: DAGGERFALL,
will
arrive in stores in late September, three weeks later than previously
scheduled.
Daggerfall , sequel to Bethesda s award-winning, The Elder Scrolls:
Arena, is
the largest computer role-playing game ever created. Players will be
able to
roam around the empire of Tamriel, roughly twice the size of the Great
Britain.
Players can explore more than 16,000 locales, meet 750,000 different
characters
and experience hundreds of quests. Daggerfall will provide more hours
of
gameplay than any other computer game on the market, and most closely
mirrors
the freedom of a pen and paper role-playing game environment.
It is the huge scope and size of the product that required additional
compatibility testing with hundreds of different hardware and software
configurations. The immense size of the game has meant that our final
beta-testing process was longer than originally forecasted and much more
involved than most other computer games, said Christopher Weaver,
President of
Bethesda. Ideally, any known condition which has the potential to
disrupt
gameplay severely needs to be addressed during beta-testing. We are
never
pleased when we have to push back a launch date. Given the physical size
of
Daggerfall the chance of finding and fixing every bug is probably not
possible.
Nevertheless, we are being cautious because we want to put out a product
worthy
of the Bethesda name and The Elder Scrolls series, Weaver said.
The level of initial consumer demand has taken Bethesda by surprise.
The initial build of product was supposed to be a two months supply, but
the
entire inventory has been depleted in the first week of orders. While
new
product is being manufactured, Bethesda will be forced to place retail
stores
on allocation until supplies can be replenished. This is a great problem
to
have, said Vlatko Andonov, Director of Bethesda sales, but it is a
problem
nonetheless. We intend to fill all preorders first and then work on
keeping up
with sell through in the channel. Bethesda has implemented various
retail
promotions including a pre-sell kit to encourage gamers to reserve a
copy
of Daggerfall . It has been an extremely successful program.
Headquartered in Rockville, MD, Bethesda is the third largest privately
held
publisher of PC entertainment software. Bethesda's success and
long-standing
technical expertise has attracted world-class programmers as well as
Hollywood studios. They recently announced a software partnership with
the
creators of the hit movie Independence Day. Bethesda is the
entertainment
software division of Media Technology Limited, an engineering research
and
development firm originally founded by members of the Architecture
Machine
Group from MIT.