Replayability has always been a concern for any game. You eventually run out of things to do, and even if you create new characters, you may always feel like "I've done this before". Now, I'm a person who played OB and Fallout3 with an eventual 5 characters for each game. Some characters I naturally grew more attached to and simply wished there was more content to explore.

In any world, things change...they evolve and keep growing. My question is, how would you approach this if you worked at Bethesda? Naturally, you would want to create a game that would stand the test of time. Do you add an evolving world that would change constantly when you finish the main quest? Does it change even when your not playing the game? MMO's change all the time because of updated content and support, but is there a way to bring that to a single player offline game, that wouldnt require post release support for the function? Would you support this immplementation, or are you happy with a content complete game?

EDIT: To settle slight confusion, an ever changing world doesnt mean just people acting differently in the temple district. Ever changing or evolving means drastic changes such as terrain deformation, changing town and village layouts concerning contruction and deconstruction, generations of people dying or growing ever older as the game progresses, foliage growth and overgrowth in untamed areas, and changing architecture. Simply put, what could someone do to implement this in a game, if it is even possible.

For PC users, mods? :shrug:

I'm not the best person when it comes to understanding how complex game-related technology works, much less how to explain it with the usual "blahblahscriptblahblahblah", but Bethesda has done similar things before, so I don't see why it wouldn't be included in future games. Morrowind had the strongholds, Oblivion did it with Cropsford, the Temple district, and I'm sure I'm missing a few examples, but still, they have done it in the past, and they can do it in the future.

apart from adding more guilds.. I dont think there needs much improvement, bethesda have pretty much got it.

when both MW/OB can take 200 hours per character, I dont think anyone can demand more replayability.

And for the roleplayer with imagination.. there is literally infinate replayability.

and yeah.. mods.

OB got me into roleplaying.. I roleplay pretty much every game I play now... Im now roleplaying MGS3:snake eater!

There's no doubt that TES games have lots of replay-value and lots of content. I think that the OP is referring to changes in the world based off of quests or holidays, but I may have misinterpreted it. And about that MS3 roleplaying confession...I do the same. :foodndrink: It could be any game: a FPS, an adventure game, or even a Burger King game, I've managed to do so thanks to Bethesda and my experiences playing their games.

With the exception of border wars, like in Sid Mier's Pirates or Mount and Blade, I can't think of any major changes to the world that wouldn't have to be pre-designed and scripted in.

So, changes, like the type offered by mods and DLC, are probably always going to be finite, in the near future, but they don't have to stop because the main quest is over.

Obviously, the first thing is that the world has to be malleable. I can't change the land with magic or development, I can't acquire followers if there's a small number of NPC's with very specific roles. I can kill all the egg miners in Morrowind or strip farms clean in Morrowind and won't have any impact on the economy or anything else. Just as important is AI. If the world is to "change", the AI has to be able to react with it, instead of hitting a wall and imploding. I think this is what they were trying to do but had to cancel with Radiant AI, and I'm hoping they've kept working on it behind the scenes instead of deciding to just stick with intelligence-mimicking schedules. If a house burns down, the AI needs to find a new place to live, rebuild, save up money, instead of just standing where it used to be all night. The more complex the AI behavior, the more ways I the player have to interact with them. A truly evolving/living world would of course require more complexity in just about all other areas, which I could (and have in the past more than once) go into long rambles about, but I think the AI is most important. If the world doesn't understand how to react to change, there won't be any change. Just me doing something and pretending it mattered.

well at current technological levels its not possible to make a fantasy game with a "matrix" like world that has its own rules and changes over time, it would be awesome but today's PCs just lack the power and memory to hold the amazing amount of data that will result from such a "smart" game. because the game will keep creating new things, new quests to solve, new monsters to kill, new items/spells/abilities to use, it would be the holy grail of replayabitity but as I said 1 gb after another of new "stuff" will eventually make the PC explode , and viruses are bound to come up as well.

I wish it would be possible now, but its not, until quantum processors are commercial we will be stuck with "limits"

but do not despair the future of PCs is great so cheer up and i hope we all live to see it.

haha, i kinda feel the same way. There are so many limits to content and games, but sometimes I'm not really sure what those limits are. An uncompressed version of RAGE was 1 terabyte in size. Compressed its likely going to be around 12-15 gb, so while I think its not possible atm, it certainly seems that this type of content is imminent...possibly next generation. A blue ray disc can hold 50 gb of data, so a game that would take this type of memory (and I'll only go into memory since other specifics are far more complicated) would likely be 5 terabytes of uncompressed data. Surely that could be compressed onto a blue ray disc, although that would take like 8 dvds. I think we are certainly on the verge of this happening within the next 10 years. Koreans can create a near android robot, so this is certainly plausible for next gen systems.

Also try to remember that compressing files gets easier after so many gegabytes (I think 20), so the more terabytes you get to compress, the amount of space it would take gets proportionatly smaller...pending of course your operating system and cpu/gpu efficiancy.

I'm one of those sad, firm believers that you can evolve a game series and extend the play of it without resorting to attrition. You CAN make great adventure without destroying half the known map. You CAN make content that people will anticipate by enriching the character biographies, and not resorting to killing them off to entice people to find out why. You CAN improve on any aspect of the gaming experience, given the time, talent, and opportunity to do so. Modders here have been doing it for years, the LGNPC team alone took simple, static items in the game that were nothing more that collectible windowdressing, and turned them into quests, stories, and adventures, by simply(well not by any means simply as it is rather complex) adding a few items, some extensive sensible dialogue, and several options.

Not everything must evolve drastically. Many times, you can achieve the same thing with a shift in perception. When I wrote my fanfic novel based simply on Emma's White Wolf of Lokken mod characters and the late Grumpy's characters, I used one simple incident that is miniscule in the regular game (the death of Bolvyn Venim and the grief/revenge from his lover) as a catalyst for an entire adventure. Throw in drafted references from the scuttlebut in the streets of Oblivion, and you have several adventures. Nearly all of it done purely from what is already in-game, but just expounded on because as we all know, certain causes can produce certain effects, and they are not always positive. Just takes the will to think it through.

I think there is more power than realized in today's hardware. What it takes is focused development time and talent. This is actually a matter of the other thread, procedurally created content. This means you can create unlimited detail and variety from codes that will take no disc space compared to actual image files.

This demo is an example of that:
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_cascades_home.html


There is a misconception regarding RAGE's megatexture. RAGE doesn't compress 1 terabytes of data into 15 GB exactly. The detail achieved in RAGE would take 1 terabytes of image files if it was done with current techniques. It is like photoshop which you can have many layers and each layer can be a 20 MB image file in their own which would make a 50 layers photoshop file exceed 1 GB. But when you flattened it, it will become a 20 MB image file. In MT, the whole level is one 64000x64000 file which is 11 GBs itself with jpeg style compressions(available to everyone) can be compressed to 2-3 GBs. It is not a compression algorithm in core. It is a streaming algorithm, there is a giant image file for covering every cell and it is streamed with ridiculously small memory usage with high quality projection.

In Morrowind/MGE we use a max of 8192x8192 file for whole Vvardenfel. It looks like [censored] even from high above. With upcoming Tamriel Rebuilt, Cyrodiil, Skyrim mods, a MEGATEXTURE like tech will be needed. Good luck for MGE devs with that.


I think some seasonal changes and procedural content will be nice but what's important is AI. It doesn't have to be some matrix like AI. It should be a system where everything change something.

If my PC walks around naked all NPCs know my situation and some react with dialog. Why stop there!

Take a look at the amazing greetings/dialog box of TES construction set:
http://www.morrowind-oblivion.com/cs_images/section2_dialog2.gif

You see the conditions and result boxes. You can make anything with them. They support many basic things about the game world and they can be expanded by scripts. I would make some of greetings unspoken which would make them thoughts!

And I would create all kinds of conditions and results. Totally random.

condition: if PC wears a red shirt
result: NPC wants to eat some cheese, disposition towards females increase by 10. Strength lowered by 5.

condition: if PC has no blunt weapon
result: NPC wants go to Arena, disposition toward faction fighters guild members increased by 10.

condition: if PC makes a terrible joke ten times
result: NPC decides to kill some guards. Intelligence lowered by 35.

:P

and some that makes sense:

condition: if PC is sick
condition: if PC NPC same faction
condition: if PC NPC same race
result: NPC cast heal spell on PC, other faction members around from rival races lower their disposition by 20 on healer and PC.

condition: if NPC caughts PC stealing for the third time
result: NPC decides to join fighters guild.

all with some randomness and luck.

How ridiculous it seems this is what AI is. Our subconsciouses reacting in unpredictable ways to our environment. This is why I want to bind this to NPC greetings. I think PC going around the world changing everything about NPCs would create a dynamic world. The system is there if utilized the game world will have a changing state created by player walking around. Every little bit will change some small thing creating a big picture constantly changing. After some play time the world would turn into a chaos state but I don't think it is a bad thing. Our games can gain its own consciousness.

I don't really see how current technology could create a game that can constantly change after release without either the developers or players actually creating new content for it, at least not if it is to maintain the same level of detail and variety as current Elder Scrolls titles have, or even improve on it, and to be honest, even if it could be done, I'm not sure I'd want it to, since I want Bethesda to focus on ensuring that the content actually present in the game upon release has good quality, not allowing that content to completely disappear from the game and be replaced with proceedurally generated content, which, ultimately, I just can't see being as good as well designed content made by designers can be. And really, if I can put 100 or 200 hours into one character in a game and will probably want to make more than one character, then as far as I'm concerned, I've already gotten a lot more than my money's worth, I don't really need the game to offer "new" content constantly. If I wanted new content, I'd just buy an expansion or download mods or something. And besides, in Morrowind and Oblivion, at least, you really wouldn't spend enough time on one character to see any significant changes in things like terrain or population outside of some big catastrophic event occurring. I mean, if you keep playing you might spend over a year or something of in-game time, but the terrain isn't going to change normally in the course of a year, and that's really not long enough for anyone to show any significant aging. Ultimately, programming such things into a game would be a waste of effort if players won't be playing long enough to notice them.

The type of game you're talking about isn't possible with current tech. The amount of power and memory it would take to make such a game is just phenomenal, and nothing short of a super computer could even come close to that. You'd have to have a server to run the game off. Not gonna happen anytime soon.

Would this be possible in TES, because I'm pretty sure it's been done in other games:

NPCs that age an reproduce over time. And counts and kings that dynamically name heirs, and enough rumors available to reflect the political changes.

So, like, if something kills the king, the prince takes his place. And the prince names an heir based on certain conditions.

Then factions can make alliances and go to war and trade in real time. There could be disputes over control of ruins and mines. Things like that.

What the OP is asking about is a lot more complex than the strongholds or cropsford. IN those cases, quest stages, timers, and the enable command are used to progressively build them up or add/remove features. What OP wants is for there to be a continual cycle of events which change the landscape, and that wouldn't be the easiest thing to do. It would require a lot more scripting so that the game knew when certain changes were appropriate, which changes complemented other changes, etc. If Beth were to implement this in some fashion, it would be best done by simply having repeatable actions causing the game to enable or disable certain assets. Example: killing a person causes their house to be put for sale or boarded up, or for guards to comb it for evidence. Killing everyone in town causes it to abandoned, and the buildings enter a dilapidated state. continually robbing merchants could cause them to close up shop, reducing trade in the region, increasing scarcity, and causing the game to switch the upper class furniture and misc objects with the lower or middle class ones. But then in order to repopulate, either time must heal all wounds or recovery methods must be implemented. (thus adding to the work) the problem with this method is that all potential assets need to be designed and added into the game, and then disabled, so essentially every city has twice or three times the number of assets needed to make it a in-game city, just with most of it disabled, combined with the complex scripting to enable and disable it. Far too impractical under the current framework.


To be honest, this isn't a feature that can be easily inserted into a game, and to be done well, it needs to be built in from the start. The best solution is to have the program be a first person rpg while simultaneously having a bot play the game like it was Sim city 4. (so the bot is given general goals, like avoid spending more than it takes in via taxes, grow population, don't consume resources too quickly, avoid unhappiness. To prevent the bot from reaching some perfect solution, goals can be changed on an irregular basis through the random number generator. So, at date A, the bot wants to take in more money than it spends, but on Date B, random number generator decides that the bot will no longer care about balanced budgets, causing it to spend lots of money to quickly reach other goals. Or it could want to reduce the population causing it conscript more npc's and send them off to war. Or it could not care about happiness, and spend money on whatever else it wants. The more goals the bot can have, the more possibilities for varied behavior.

Really interesting to see the responses.

To put my idea forward...AI could be scripted with X number of actions, X number of emotions, and X number of animations or desirres. Each one of those could be considered a different category, Put them in a lottery with each action specified to a certain number in each category. The cpu AI would select a random number from each category. These numbers would comibine for a random action which would be carried forward by the Radiant AI. Therefore we could assume that NPC X could possibly murder a town on Sunday. If Radiant AI could corrispond to this action, then NPC X would take appropriate measures for the action to which it had taken, and likewise so would other NPCs each with their own duty to perform. All of these actions would be programed ahead of time, but would simulate random awareness when the "lottery" is implemented.

Assume this to "graphical AI" that is presumably dependant on physics AI. Physics would be tied to the weather and environment. Assuming NPC X burnt down a home in which he was staying. This fire spread to X location in the area of X wildlife or other X locations. In accordance to "lottery" functions, this could affect areas in a way that has previously been established by a set number of functions.

Programming this data into a program takes up space anywhere from 100kb to 500mb for programming purposes script only. (depending on the number of scripts allowed by the associated AI and physics). Add this to graphical establishments that are capable of environmental change instead of staying static. Say that 1 building used 100 pixels (just for argument sake). That building could change slightley from time to time from 1-5 different types of change. The amount of pixels used could remain the same as not to change the cubic area of the building. Textures used would change from 1 regularized set to a potential 5 sets (for this argument) dependant on which "lottery" functions were used. Environment would be dependant on AI "lottery" functions and not purely cpu power or capabilities.

Fable 2 established a rudementary example with changine environs throughout the game. The amounts were predetermined (as this would be, of course), but changed drastically over time. Fables use of this used less that 1 GB of textures and environ AI for the entire game to accomplish this. Therefore we can assume a game the size of Oblivion with this added would be a meager 7 megabytes, with processing capabilities unaltered.

Great hidden things. Artifacts, easter eggs, hiddern caverns (that contain useful things), all completely unrelated to anything. I feel Morrowind got this great, and its one of the reasons I love it so much. I still haven't found 90% of the artifacts in the game... And I've never found an easter egg, other than M'aiq, if he counts.

Also, as something they seemed to be picking up, but decided to drop, I would like to see proper guild rivalries. I don't want to be able to do everything on one character.

I would love to see a game world that changed dynamically because of what you do, or just on it's own, reacting to other things. I actually think it would be easier to have more large scale changes, like on the city level, because smaller, more personal things involving individual NPCs would get very complicated, but things on the scale of a city could work a little like an RTS. It would be great if a city could expand by itself, or build up defenses against some trouble, there could be an economy and nearby resources. The only problem with this is quests would be difficult to handle, and a main quest or faction quests that are dependant on certain NPCs mgiht not work the same way. I suppose haveing randomly determined NPCs or locations, instead of specific ones, would add to the replay value, but would remove the handcrafted feel of the TES games. Now that I think of it, this wouldn't be great for a TES game, but I would like a diffrent game with this system.

Good day Race, I've not seen you around here before. I'm not sure that's the best way to handle it. Imagine it in modern terms.

"Good day black, I've not seen you around here before."
Or maybe "Good day asian, I've not seen you around here before."

You have to remember, though that addressing people by race is not uncommon in the TES universe.

They do it in Morrowind and Oblivion, and possibly Arena and Daggerfall, too.

Well, I'm white, and when I lived in North Phiadelphia, everyone addressed me by my race because North Philadelphia is filled with ignorant, terrible, racist people. In fact, I believe every small neighborhood, dominated by one race, in this country, is equally ignorant.

So, it depends where.

I find Tamriel's focus on race to be realistic. I would just expect people in Tamriel to be ignorant abut other cultures.

It would be fun to see NPC's age and die and be replaced -- there could be hundreds of NPC's hidden and waiting to be introduced into the game, introducing them in cycles at random. Just a case of making the cycle so vast that the chances of meeting them all on one playthrough would be minimal.

I'd love to see an apprentice system too, a way to raise an apprentice/heir to take over in your stead when your character dies -- some one you can then immediately start playing as once your main character does die -- or goes into retirement in which case your previous character would earn NPC status, his/her personality and behaviour would be effected by the choices you made for the character and the paths you took in quest lines throughout game play.

It's not impossible to do an evolving game world on a smaller scale -- fable II had the ability to father a child and watch he/she grow, that would be simular to an apprentive/squire system. Other games have included evolving environements too -- even if its just limited to vegetation.