Do you wish to see procedurally generated world in TES 6?

Daggerfall had it, but it was simple and just boring. Nobody wanted to travel by foot. There was real size world, about 16 000 km? I would want to have that big world in TES VI. Random generation is powerfull now and can generate really nice looking landscapes.

Look at these screenshots from Realm Exploer (wip): http://www.realmexplorer.com/images/updates/dyox/update001/1.jpg, http://www.realmexplorer.com/images/updates/dyox/update001/2.jpg, http://www.realmexplorer.com/images/updates/dyox/update001/3.jpg, http://www.realmexplorer.com/images/updates/dyox/update001/4.jpg, http://www.realmexplorer.com/images/updates/dyox/update001/5.jpg. Doesn't look like Daggerfall? Game has infinite sized world, dynamicaly generated when exploring.

Would you want it in TES VI?

Yes, but not overly excessive, somewhere between 15-20% of the total space could be generated I wouldn't mind. I think Skyrim's world was too small for a proper traveller/wilderness explorer/horse riding hunter experience. That's why I would spread the towns / points of interest a little further apart for longer travelling distances. I would generate more random encounters at the same time to compensate and I would make the carriage/boat transport in real time, with "skip to destination" option. A map 50% bigger than Skyrim's would be a good start, with less dense dungeons and other points of interest, for better world scale. If they need procedure generation to accomplish this then I'd say yes, but of course like every other player I'd prefer bigger world and handcrafted environments if possible.

In at least 3 other threads on this subject, I remarked that I'd like to see a bigger world, using procedural generation to place content, but then reviewed and hand-tweaked by a real live human. I don't trust a computer to do everything and have it look "natural", but it can do 95% of it properly, and fixing the other 5% should take a lot less time than doing everything by hand. Daggerfall's biggest problem with procedural generation was that most of it was not reviewed and corrected after generation, so various anomalies like inaccessible areas and monumentally stupid arrangements of elements were not only possible, but relatively common.

The second problem with DF is that it used relatively bland, blocky, and repetitive elements in the first place. Even its hand-placed content wasn't exactly spectacular looking.

Morrowind had several far larger and diverse sets of "tiles" for building interiors and exteriors, and a wealth of individual smaller pieces which could be used to build up unique content or extensively alter the standard sections. The net result was not only more detail, but a lot more possible variety in placement.

Unfortunately, OB didn't have the same variety of pieces within a tileset or the range of individual elements, so the dungeons tended more on the "cookie cutter" side. Clutter helped hide the fact, but I couldn't help but notice the same broken step on every flight of a staircase, the same chip on the wall trim every so many steps, the same crack in one floor tile in a group, etc. A procedurally generated layout needs a bit of human "TLC" after the fact to customize a few things, and remove the obvious signs that it's just another of the 1483 examples of the same old "tile". Add to that the fact that a few "alcoves", jinks, dead ends which served no purpose, and other anomalies were not manually removed or cleaned up after being generated, and you have another example of "how not to do" procedural generation. Granted, the dungeon layouts which were used were selected from a larger group, and the most blatantly "silly" ones discarded, but they still needed a bit more work, for the most part.

"Speedtree" was apparently used to procedurally place trees and plants, and I don't have an issue with it, other than the limited variety of tree "types" for different environments. It did what it was told to do well enough, which was to fill in "another generic happy forest" with more of the same trees and plants.

I think procedural generation could be used to create masses of "peasant" housing to produce a city that actually LOOKS the part, with some degree of variation in building interiors and exteriors in case you want to explore a few at random, but any "meaningful" content would still need to be done by hand. Picture 3 different house "layouts", each with 3 different beds and three different pre-arranged tables and chairs to choose from. Each house may or may not have a set of shelves, a fireplace or a stove, a storage chest, a separate chair, a nightstand by the bed, etc. The specific items on the table, shelves, etc., could be chosen from a list, so one house might have yellow glassware, another green, and a third could have metal cups and plates, which would be placed according to the pre-defined arrangements above. You could look at 10 houses and see a totally different combination of elements in each, so they'd look unique. If you checked out 100 or more, you'd start to see the "design rules" behind it, but there'd be little point in investigating that many without some specific quest or reason to do so. Good enough, and a fraction of the time spent to crank out 500 houses as you'd take to make 100 houses by hand. The designers could split their time between a quick inspection of every interior generated and hand-tweaking about 5% of them to make them a bit more interesting and unique for those players who insist on seeing ALL of them, or for the few which you might visit on a quest. We could have "cities", not villages with fancy titles and illusions of grandeur.

No, nothing beats a hand crafted world.

I hope they don't do this again. The world scale can go 2x bigger than in Skyrim and still make everything by hand. How? It's simple: hire more manpower. Zenimax and Bethesda can.

Nah.

Let Daggerfall keep its record (of largest in-game world) and let's just continue with handmade worlds, like they did with Skyrim.

Skyrim's world was made by hand...

I agree.

Those screenshots look really impressive. If they can do that with procedural generation then I'm with Kovacius on this. I like handmade detail, but the last three games have all felt too compressed. I want a game set in real life scale.

This.

Absolutely.

I like procedurally generated worlds for some types of games, such as rogue-likes, but not for a sandbox exploration game. Fortunately, there was a huge outcry over Oblivion, and BGS listened, so I don't think it's likely that they'll even consider it for a while.

Oblivion was mainly procedurally generated. It's a built-in feature of the Construction Set. I've tinkered with it myself. Bethesda seemed very proud, in interviews and press statements, of all the time and effort they put into gathering geographical data to plug into the software.

My hunch is that they probably began by creating a rough "first draft" of Cyrodiil using software and then tweaked it by hand. I'm guessing that areas near towns and cities and along roads were heavily modified by hand and that wilderness areas were mostly left as the computer originally generated it.

I have no idea what they did with Skyrim. I didn't keep up with interviews for that game. Some of it feels generated to me and some feels hand-made. On balance, Skyrim feels a lot more hand-made to me than Cyrodiil.

Since consoles can hold more data than was possible back in 2006 and 2011 I'm hopeful that the next game may be significantly larger. We may find more wilderness and longer distances between cities, with much of that terrain generated by computer. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

An NPC in Skyrim said after a group of other npcs left for the nearest village - 'I hope they get lost in the wilderness' Me: Yeah, right, like that's gonna happen

I would really love to see huge areas generated by the computer, especially wilderness between settlements to make it feel more real. Build the core areas by hand and have the computer fill in the rest. You can of course handplace content within the generated wilderness also. It would be great.

Here's a http://youtu.be/xIqgW4cxlu4 on procedural generated wilderness. It has come a long way since Daggerfall I think

Having run that... There are still some (actually, a good number) of the problems people complained about with Oblivions environment. You know, improperly clipped rocks, floating trees, random clusters of grass hovering a meter off the ground... It's come a long way, sure, but it's to the level of hand-crafting yet.

The only way i'd tolerate the head-shaking placement errors of procedurally generated landscapes is if we got a significant size increase. At least twice the area of Skyrim. Even then, i have yet to see any procedural generation which can handle caves, so all the dungeons would still have to be hand crafted. And twice the size requires twice the dungeons, which still means more work for the environments team.

It's just a tech demo. A game production will of course have the devs going over the areas and fine-tuning the environment.

Also. Twice the area does not need twice the dungeons/forts/etc, Skyrim is crammed with them. A gameworld 10x of Skyrim's, with the same number of dungeons, villages etc, would be just fine. That would bring some feeling of exploration into the game.

But I guess it's a matter of taste. Allot of people want their worlds to be super packed with things. Me, I prefer a bit of distance and immersion, why else would we have horses.

Mountain Parkour, of course.

I do agree that Skyrim was rather cluttered... but it's always been that way. Even in Daggerfall, there were literally hundreds (if not thousands) of dungeons. Even if not riddled with dungeons, there would have to be pre-set 'encounters' throughout the wilderness, such as the remains of a raided caravan, a magical little grove with a Spriggan, or a random chicken coop guarded by El'Pollito Diablo. Otherwise, the world becomes a chore to travel around. Oh look another tree... So exciting.