I think they should randomize NOTHING. Apart from dungeons. That way, I'll get happiness from exploring.

Psst-- Morrowind's dungeons were, for the most part, generic too.

I would rather not see randomly generated dungeons, having spent quite a bit of my youth playing Diablo clones where the dungeons have no style beyond what the tileset looks like. I would be okay with having some of them be random, or have one of those infinite dungeon type things somewhere for masochists, but for the most part I'd rather they be designed with a specific goal in mind.

Daggerfall's dungeons are also a good example of what I absolutely hate. I hate those oversized, always the same, labyrinth-like dungeons. I can't stand them. The Morrowind/Oblivion dungeons are far superior, in my opinion, both in design style and in variety(the occasionaly interesting place in the two games). I recently came across an Daggerfall, despite its massive size, doesn't have one, single dungeon like that, not one at all. There are also, in Oblivion alone, that I know of, Sideways Cave, Fort Urasek, Vilverin, the various non-quest-related goblin tribes(Goblin Jim's is great), Fingerbowl Cavern, Smoke Hole Cavern, Greenmead Cave, and several others, including some I'm sure I haven't even discovered, yet. That list did not include quest-related dungeons or random cool things. From Morrowind's dungeons, I found plenty of hand-placed loot. I was overjoyed when I managed to kill the first enemy I found with ebony armor in an underground portion of a Daedric ruin. The hard part was deciding what to drop to be able to carry that armor out of the dungeon.

Arena and Daggerfall lacked both of the interesting backstories/designs typical of Oblivion's best dungeons and the hand-placed loot typical of Morrowind's best dungeons. A combination of Oblivion's and Morrowind's typical interesting dungeon styles are what I want from the next game. Random-generation can't do that, and why bother exploring dungeons if there is no chance to find something cool at all?

I wouldn't call them generic.

When I enter a tomb, I feel like I'm in a tomb. The same with strongholds, telvanni caves, etc. They take the time to make the dungeons look like what they're supposed to be. Before Morrowind, the generic standard for RPG dungeons was to make everything a giant maze.

A giant maze works for catacombs under a very old castle, but not for a mine or an old stronghold or pretty much anything but ancient catacombs. I'm not even talking so much about the doodads and the textures, but just the layout.

Mainly it was the caves and forts in oblivion that bothered me. They all seemed the same. Ayleid ruins were fine.


When it comes down to it. We get generic/boring dungeons anyway, so why not make them randomly generated so the Devs can work on more important things.

Those few great ones are, well, great. Also, WHAT DO YOU MEAN MORE IMPORTANT?!?!?!?!?! Exploration is one of the most important things in modern Elder Scrolls games. The series known for bringing open-ended exploration and RPG gaming to the masses, post-Morrowind, suddenly losing the open-ended exploration wouldn't be a good thing. In fact, I must say that returning to the dungeons of Arena/Daggerfall(especially Daggerfall) would be the single greatest mistake Bethesda would have ever made with the series, in my very strong opinion. Again, imagine a combination of Oblivions' interesting tidbits and Morrowind's hand-placed loot, both combined and focused on to make the series even more saturated with fun dungeons to explore. This series, along with Bethesda's take on the Fallout series, is the only series that really allows this type of open-ended exploration. Why get rid of it? Actually, I think Fallout 3 does represent a combination of those two dungeon systems, and its dungeons are fantastic. We've got the lore/backstory tidbits as in Oblivion and the hand-placed loot as in Morrowind there, along with a greater saturation of interesting things in these dungeons, and the places really feel like the places they represent, to an even greater degree than in Morrowind/Oblivion. You would get rid of that? Bethesda's gotten better at it in the Morrowind/Oblivion - Fallout 3 jump, just as they have in the Arena/Daggerfall - Morrowind/Oblivion jump. Why stop?

I am indeed very passionate about this. This is the future of one of Bethesda's greatest modern achievements we're talking about.

Yes exploration is important. But Bethesda is only a 90+ team. I'm all for hand placed content if they had the time. So by "more important things" I meant balance, Gameplay, skills, Items, various systems(facegen, level perks) and these type of things.

You make a good point, however please don't overreact.

I overreact for everything.

Honestly, I don't mean to sound worked up, but when I got my first Bethesda game, I exited a certain Imperial sewer system, stared at the view for a moment, walked forward to the nearby Ayleid ruin, and knew I found the best gaming company ever after clearing that place out. That hand-crafted ruin and freedom is what separated that game from all others I had ever played previously. It wasn't long before I had to get Bethesda's other two most recent games, and I was equally impressed, if not moreso with Fallout 3's dungeons, but I like fantasy settings. I must see the ruins of a Nordic castle Fallout 3 style. [/fanatical, nostalgic moment]

As for the size of the development team, it was only about half that much for Oblivion. What does that say, other than I'm drooling over my keyboard right now? However, if they can pull off Fallout 3 style dungeons in TES V, there's nothing to worry about. The resources would be well spent. Seriously, Fallout 3 had so much variety and so many goodies packed into its dungeons that the gameworld truthfully felt like an interesting, real, adventurer's paradise to the greatest degree Bethesda's ever accomplished, in my opinion. If Bethesda can be that creative with an Elder Scrolls game, especially with their larger development team, I just might have to build a shrine to Todd Howard, Daedric Prince of awesomeness.

I wouldn't mind seeing randomized caverns, dungeons or even towns.

Having randomized content doesn't mean that EVERYTHING is random. You can have different algorithms for different types of environments (caves, catacombs, etc), and you can STILL have unique rooms in each of them... it's just that those rooms don't always need to be in the same place every single time.

Hand-craft specific rooms, randomize their locations and randomize the layout of the corridors, other openings/rooms and traps.

For towns, the layout could be randomized while still keeping the buildings the same.

As for quests, I'd rather have them hand-crafted but quest NPCs could also spawn at different locations.

One of the reasons I love the Diablo games is because you didn't know where everything was all the time. Granted, the dungeon layouts were more maze-like but idea still applies to the TES games. It's not THAT hard.

Also, if you guys take a look at Minecraft (or even dwarf fortress)... that game can generate some pretty awesome (and unique) environments.
http://defaultprime.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/minecraft-vista.png
http://defaultprime.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/minecraft-cave.png
http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/4826/minecraft1stendless.jpg
http://i50.tinypic.com/21k02hj.jpg
http://i46.tinypic.com/ri9t2x.jpg

Keep an open mind and you might be surprised.

hmmmm well I really like to see thousands of randomly/crafted enchanted items and interesting treasures for sure.

and maybe a few randomly generated dungeons would be nice (diablo style but think 3d), but over all the "upper world" and some other dungeons should not be random.

a combo between these would enhance the ES 5 experience I think, without drowning the world in chaos.

indeed.

and for all that is holy place good loot and items in treasure chests, not glass plate, 15 gold, silver spoon, iron dagger <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

It seems this is just another hole Bethesda have dug themselves into. I stand by that they shouldn't change the games so drastically. Things like this happen. Arena/Daggerfall fans want randomisation, Morrowind/Oblivion fans want everything handplaced, and only a handful see things either way. It's the same with many things. Fast travel, quest markers, voice acting, number of skills, etc.

http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/

Yeah, I really like Daggerfall's randomly generated stuff, but at the same time, it's it's primary weakness. I feel the artistic touches and thought put into the implementation of everything are the strong suits of a game like Morrowind - everywhere you go and everything you do has been designed by more than an algorithm, and it's for the best.

I wouldn't mind, though, if there were places where you could get randomly generated daggerfall-esque quests in addition to the others in a game like Morrowind or Oblivion.

Seti calls http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_WI0VI7aIw.

Really though, people should not be using Daggerfall as an example of why random generation is good, and especially not why it's bad. The game is old, and its random generators are extremely outdated. The same argument could be used to say that the next game should not have any outdoor areas, because in Daggerfall they're flat and empty. I still stand by the idea that we need a mix, instead of acting like a game needs to use just one element or being afraid of it without thinking of what it could do. The by-hand creation of areas means we're already going to have the tilesets and room designs and such in the game data, which can be used to piece together procedurally generated dungeons to supplement the handmade ones. While an entirely handmade world has a greater sense of exploration and discovery, the trade-off is that it can only give you this once. I would suggest hand-making much of the world and content, and using enough randomization to keep it fresh.

For example, there's a very large forest near a town. Wilderness areas, which are not man-made in real life either, could be more easily made by a generator than something like a town. Considering the landmass was made by computer, I would imagine that wilderness at least as plausible as Oblivion's could be procedurally generated. The forest is split into a large, invisible grid. It has, let's say, capacity for 5-7 areas of interest like dungeons. Maybe one or two are locations that are always in that forest, and the other 3-6 are randomly drawn from a list including both handmade and randomly generated dungeons. You now have a forest (which, for those afraid of RGC, could also theoretically be made up of all handmade tiles randomly organized, giving it just as much quality but also not always being the same for comparable effort) that can use procedural generation to be very large, large enough to actively explore, with a sense of not knowing what you'll find when you make a new character instead of knowing exactly where everything is. This need not hinder modding, as a grid area of the forest could be selected to always be a certain thing instead of being randomly generated, or a new dungeon can simply be added to the list of randomly-drawn options. Give it a 100% chance to appear if you want it to always be there but not in the same spot. Will a certain unique be found a second time in the forest? Maybe, or maybe it will appear in a different handmade dungeon elsewhere in the world. It doesn't even need to hinder directions. There would be no problem at all marking the map if an NPC knows where it is, otherwise it would be easy to make some of the forest grids into recognized landmarks. It would be easy to make NPC's understand basic directions like north/south/east/west. Example: go west from the town gate until you reach Fist Rock, then go north to Coolname Dungeon. It would be a simple matter to have the generator include landmark directions to some locations, but not all, giving you both areas people know about and unknown things for you to discover.

Factions could especially benefit from it too. Fight trolls in location X, gather Y number of dangerous animal parts, escort NPC from locations A to B. Such things could easily be stuck onto a job board at the Fighter's Guild, so that for the first time ever those NPC's wouldn't be lying when they tell you it's a good place for work, instead of a good place for a faction storyline whether you want it or not and then no work ever again. But, I'm rambling again so I'll cut myself short and just say we shouldn't abandon or be afraid of powerful tools just because they were wielded clumsily in the past.

This, well perhaps random guild quests (like daggerfall's guilds) as a little side distraction could mix things up a bit. There could be a board in the guilds that can have random quests to do (e.g. go to x, find y, give to z/go to x, cast y, return to guild to get reward e.t.c). These should only be side quests though. The main storylines for each guild should still be hand-placed. Other than that, most stuff should be hand-placed (as in, no non-existant creatures until Lvlx and anything below that will become extinct. That was very bad.).

I think it would be ok. Most quests would be the person-made ones, but perhaps some people could generate random errands. The game would just have 200 or so random errands with dialouge that people could ask the player to do.

Hand crafted with some randomization thrown in would be great, imo. Hand crafted cities and town, but some randomized NPCs to make it feel bigger (More important NPCs wouldn't be random, of course) Also randomizing some quests and dungeons would be great fillers too. IMO all hand crafted takes away from replayability, and all randomization makes it too repetitive, mix the two together though...

It's pretty interesting that you bring this up because I think Todd in some interview mentioned that Fall Out 3 was a randomly generated landscape that the dev team seriously tweaked allowing them to have time on other things.

A good game should be hand-placed, with set mainquests and etcetera, but guilds as possible employers should also have random quests, and set quests should sometimes lead to random caves/dungeons.

I could see a location in the game that led to constant randomly generated area. It could be a dungeon or cave that's backstory was "a portal to a dreamworld, hellscape, alternate dimension, cursed magic whatever". Make the place maze-like with traps and puzzles to unlock more areas, insert quests and what not.

One word: Mount and Blade.
Three words, whatever. Randomly generated battlefields, quests and politics. Not gonna say this is what TES should be, but, if those beautiful Turkish bastards went to D.C. and talked with Todd Howard, we would have one incredible game.

....via a Guild Guide. You can be sent to an area to tackle a mission, and the area could be mostly randomly generated content within any one of three or four pre-defined "templates". The devs can tweak the balance between random and pre-defined content based on the mission parameters; that way it isn't obvious that you're just replaying variations on the same 3 or 4 places over and over, yet it's not totally random and subject to all of the absurdities which that can create. Return would be by way of a scroll or potion that would return you to the Guide's location, or you could use a Recall spell.

I'm echoing the idea that a game that combined elements from Mount & Blade and Elder Scrolls would be great. However, I'd rather see a game with the grandieur and freedom of Mount & Blade and the continuity, graphical splendour and open world of TES. Imagine a game where you had an entirely rendered, somewhat randomly generated world where you were free to do what you wanted. It would not only be massively dynamic, it would also allow you to play way beyond the campaign.

I would go for all the way the reverse direction, i.e. we should have the base of procedurally generated content in an engine that allow developers place down guide lines for the direction of the flow in the procedurally generated content, and having a choice to make completely random or guided semi-random content, or even completely manually designed content as well.

The designers, could define if they want an area, dungeon, population, event, or quest to be randomly generated, via a guideline, loose or tight, then let the engine generate the desired content and then check if they like the end result.

So if it is acceptable, then let it be, which would result in a very small data, but they could change and tweak different aspect of that content, or wipe it clean and completely design that by hand, and so on...

This way, the designing procedure could be greatly accelerated, and would free some tame and resource for developers to use on places where it is more needed.


bingo, but it would not mean that the end result would have to be generic as you say, as we can have more sophisticated algorithms for generating procedural content, and also developers could tweak and alter the results as they like.


why not?

We already have random encounters, so why not have random events and quests on thetop of that as fillers between manually designed ones.

Or even randomly generated landscape in places that would warrant that like thick jungles, or caverns, or out of the way areas where the designers do not have time to spend on and players have no official need to go into, and so on...