Sounds cool, but I personally prefer quest driven content and the ability to craft/enchant my own weapons with specific attributes, like my bow http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/8012/solarflarey.png.

Also, isn't some of the content in TES4 already generated randomly?

Many, if not most, of the dungeons in OB were procedurally generated, then hand-tweaked to remove the more blatant absurdities. That's why the OB dungeon layouts often make no sense from a "livable" standpoint: they weren't designed for a purpose, but are just semi-random blocks of room and hall elements stitched together in bizarre ways. Some of that is good at times, and I suspect that it would work fairly well for initially placing trees, or for rows of houses in poorer or "working class" neighborhoods, but it would still need a fair amount of hand tweaking and checking afterwards to keep it from looking "awkward" and repetitive. At any rate, I thought a lot of those dungeon layouts were poorly done in OB, especially the Ayleid ruins.

Designing a game to randomly place stuff on the fly, without the ability of the developer to check and correct it afterwards, would be a very bad thing. Daggerfall's random and senseless placements and repetitive semi-random quests were the reusult of such unrestrained use of the random number generator as a design team member. It would be far worse with the higher level of detail in the more modern games.

Can you tell me how exactly the dungeons in OB are randomly generated? I've never come across any function in the CS to do anything of that sort. I mean they used a tileset, but I'm still under the impression that they were hand placed.

The only thing I know for a fact that was procedurally generated was the wilderness.

Whatever tools were used to generate some of the dungeons apparently weren't included in the released CS. The CS as released is apparently not what the developers used to create the game; from what I've read, it was put together after the game itself was done, mostly derived from the various seperate tools that were actually used, but edited and collected into one coherent package for easier use by "the masses". I don't know what proportion of the dungeons were procedurally generated and how many were hand-crafted, but some of them have odd kinks and twists that make no sense, which is "characteristic" of almost all randomly derived designs. It's even harder to judge than it first appears, since many or all of them were hand-tweaked afterwards, otherwise they'd be far worse. These are the "best" of the layouts; we didn't get to see the dregs.

I suppose that's something I won't claim to know about, but I was pretty sure that they used the CS. You can still go back and see the wilderness generation tools (region generation) that they used, and the data that was typed in (it doesn't need to stay in there after generation I believe). So it appears to me that the CS was used for wilderness generation.

But you could be right, I'm not exactly sure what they used and their methods. It still seems odd though that they would go through all of that just for dungeons, especially if they are just going to keep generating until they find a "good" one and then fix them up anyways. Seems like it would take just as long as building it from scratch.

Let's just say that if dungeons were randomly created level designers would have a bit less of a job, they might have randomly generated some of the overall environments but that doesn't mean they didn't create it. Actually, for those of you that bought the special edition when the game came out. In the making of dvd it actually shows how they put the level design together.

It actually could be added to the game in a way that just makes the game better... you could use it to open up your world more as far as encounters during fast travel, but not so much as terrain but even that could be added a bit like so you dont "have you have gone as far in that direction as possible please turn around" type of messages...possibly cool encounters with people who will show up in other areas again as say merchants or tradesmen or their kin so it would have impact on the game at large. that sort of thing so yes i think personally it could be cool to have it even in a somewhat vanilla form if you just thru in chances to actuality events or special charecters with special weapons that dont always happen to appear...like what if umbra was a very rare occurrence roll on that instead of a somewhat static character ?

I find element randomization to be a far better notion than full on content randomizing. Only because you still get the finely crafted game... but it's never played through fully the same twice.

Randomize dungeon areas, randomize peoples reactions to you (All the guards in Kvatch decide to attack you, instead of staring blankly as you pass by them, or perhaps they join you to fend off the Daedra), etc.

The possibilities their are endless.

I like the IDEA of randomized quests, but very rarely has it been implemented well.

Todd specifically said at E3 2005 that Oblivion's dungeons were all hand-crafted. Bethesda hasn't randomly generated dungeons since 1996.

I remember some of the dungeons from daggerfall.... twisted beyond belief, with hidden doors in some that were almost impossible to find, with magic doors you might or might not be able to go back thru, talk about a game you needed multiple saves for... dont remember the save system for that game but I dont think I ever finished the main quest in it...it was just too much, but god did i love it and play it over and over...I am not sure that the dungeons were randomly generated but I think some were... but my point is that with randomness in a dungeon crawl not sure even today you could do that well and make it interesting enough to keep it from feeling vanilla as all get out or the games idea of a dungeon as big as the game itself you might get trapped or lost and have to drop yourself back to a prior save as with daggerfall.

Ummmm ? Couldn t be so wrong.
1 rst hand crafted doesn t mean perfection nor unrepetitiveness. Oblivion has a LOT of repetitive dungeons, not the tiles but the format. Handcraft require time. Randomic dungeon would save time so they can spare assets to the main quest and all that is related to the main quest which where weak IMHO, and to strenghten other parts of the game.

Hand crafted also remove the surprose factor over replay. Randomic placement would hold this factor alive longer.
This was and is the main sucess behind diablo series.

Even then doing it right is not easy. But bethesda like to be inovative, see the randomic chit chat leading to uterly stupidly irritating dialogues. All random. And yet people like it.
Ramdom dungeon can lead to abuse of loot and all it can lead.

But, If they are able to harness randomness of dungeons and content it will be a great addition, IMHO.
I have to confess i liked it a lot in daggerfall.

I loved Daggerfall and I think that maybe Randomly generated quests are okay, as long as there's enough variety to keep the player's interest, as well as the right kind of quests. Sometimes you'd get quests in Daggerfall that would ask you to go kill a bear in some guy's house and then you'd get quests that put you on an errand one or two Kingdoms away(Like telling you to travel from Wayrest to a town in the Dragonclaw Mountains, for example). I didn't get many dungeon diving quests so I'd like to see more of those, given that they keep using their "Piece by piece" dungeon system, I think they should at least add a little more variety into the types of pieces that are there. I'm just rambling now, though.

At least Morrowind and Oblivion's dungeons still had the chance of finding something interesting and had logical designs. Daggerfall's were giant labyrinths going in all directions with absolutely nothing of note in any random ones.

Crypts in Daggerfall were generally easier to navigate than larger dungeons like Dirrenni Tower. One would need to be a wise dungeon diver and would need to know how to take note of where specific things are. Even then you could get lost for a while and you'd probably end up quitting in frustration or you'd be playing through that dungeon for a few playing sessions. That being said, Random dungeons are okay, but I'd like something a little easier to navigate if that's what is done.