Anyone who's playd Red Dead Redemption or GTAIV will be familiar with the concept. You walk up to the front door of a bowling alley or a saloon, push it open and there you are, standing inside. No loading screens, no fade, no separate cell for interiors - the inside of buildings are a part of the exterior world, just like in reality. As well as being more realistic and saving time, this has the added bonus of being able to look out the windows or doors and actually see the outside world, with people going by and the weather beating against the glass. The question is, will it be possible for TESV? The Rockstar games have very few accessible interiors when compared to TES series, where every door can be opened. Would it be possible to have Rockstar style interiors, on a TES scale?

I think there’s a simple answer to this. It’s technically possible, but difficult, and unlikely.

They will be using an updated version of their current engine. It would likely take an entire overhaul, or new engine to make this possible.

Saying that, I would love to see it anyway, it would increase immersion hugely.

have you ever seen the rain in Oblivion, that is why there are separate interior and exteriors, also it is really hard to set up someone house like that, you could mess up the AI very easily and have them sleeping in someone else's bed. However bethesda has been trying to get rid of them as much as possible, in Fallout if you go through a door that you have already gone through before there is no loading screen. Also I am not sure if you have noticed or not, because it is a little hard to tell, the interiors are way bigger than the exteriors. One more problem with it is Oblivion doesn't have a very good shadow system so if you go in a house like that it will look exactly like the weather outside, instead it should be darker. And I learned a lot of things from loading screens, for half the game I ddin't know about the pipboy light. Sorry if I just shot down your idea.

GTA IV doesn't have any scheduled AI for large numbers of NPCs (new NPCs walking around just spawn as you enter an area) and the interiors are very simple. There's no way for this to work in a TES game.

GTA IV is a huge number of buildings that cannot be entered, a huge number of NPCs that cannot be interacted with, and a huge number of items that are forever bolted to the tables and impossible to put into your inventory.

I'd like to see the ability to walk into a city and not have to suffer a loading screen, like in Morrowind. But will dungeons and houses not have loading screens? I think it's unlikely.

This.

Remember, other large games use a lot of static items in order to create a single map. In TES, we have the ability to pick up/move almost everything outside of furniture and containers and EVERY one of those items has to be rendered AND have physics applied to it. They could make TESV have no loading screens, but very few PCs and no consoles would have the raw processing power to even start the game.

It is certainly possible, but it would be much more difficult, for the very reason the OP pointed out - TES games have LOTS of interiors, which are (at least, typically) more complex than their relatively sparse outdoors counterparts.

However, to say this is impossible is ridiculous - the technical leap from divided indoors/outdoors to a seamless world is paltry in comparison just to the technical leap from Morrowind to Oblivion, not to mention the 15 year span from Wolfenstein 3D to Crysis. I think the people talking about how this is IMPOSSIBLE due to AI paths/pathfinding and weather are stuck in the mindset that the new TES game would be built with the Oblivion engine. Not bloody likey!

I wouldn't be surprised if Bethesda went for the seamless approach, but I consider the status quo more likely.

The thing i would love to see is open cities that connect to the world without loading screens, you just have your city walls in front of you, you click or press button on the entrance door and the magic sound of them opening without no loading screen bestows upon you. Thats the only thing i would like to see in TESV in that matter.

Maybe Bethesda could make loading periods faster and hide the loading screens. Then, when you enter into an interior, the game shows a black screen for a few seconds and then you can move around.

Less loading screens the better. Also, could we just please have an option to knock on the door and have someone answer it? It feels weird to bust into someone's home and demand that they give me good advice and tell me what rumors they've heard lately.

Ok everyone. Think about how cutting edge the technology that went into Morrowind was at the time of its release. High. Same with Oblivion too right? Oblivion was one of the nicest looking games of its time probably only second to Gears of War.
This leads me to believe that Bethesda will most likely be doing the same for TES V, using cutting edge technology.

Now if you think of the interiors in Red Dead logically, they are really just part of the exterior. All there is is an animated swinging door that separates it. That's all.
So would it not be possible to do the same even with physics running the way it does in the latest BGS games? I think that if we are expecting a release in 2011/12 the technology will be satisfactory at least for this type of thing.


Tell me what you guys think.


EDIT:

I do like the Oblivion loading screens though. They were entertaining and I only finished reading all of them about a year ago.

Gothic series never had interior cells. First game was out 2001. So I think it's pretty much possible today...

New Community Patch for G3 came out a while ago. Anyone who hasn't tried the game yet, go do it. You'll love the outdoors and cave design, and the quest structure which lets you experiment.

It's certainly possible to background-load interior cells as you get close; it's just a matter of performance, really. I'm all for having an option for this that can partially or fully load interior cells with a nearby entrance in the background when the nearest entrance is within half the distance that exterior cells are loaded; for example if they keep with the 5x5 grid for loading exterior cells, then interior cells with entrances that are in a 3x3 grid (meaning one cell in any direction, plus the current cell) will be silently loaded in the background in preparation for you to enter them. If it were me I'd set this up with three options: off (always use loading screens), partial load (loads some items preemptively, but doesn't populate containers or some world objects until you enter the cell and avoids loading screens, or at least reduces their duration), or full (loads everything in nearby interior cells when you get within 1 cell of the entrance).

Good idea but if bethesda adds this tes v will be released two years later than it will be if they don't add that feature.

I remember a mod for Morrowind that had a seamless interior to exterior and vice versa never seen it again but the pictures looked really good. But yes if they did a seamless into and out of interiors it'd make the games momentum to continue during quest and the like.

The only exception to this would be caves in the wilderness, if they are huge maybe a small loading screen....I want them to be big and I mean big caves!

Gothic 1&2 had interiors, but not in high number only when you strolled to another part of the word or entered a big mine.

Don't forget about Umbra. That middleware can ensure your computer doesn't draw anything that the player can't see. So if you're looking at a city full of houses, each one modelled in the exterior world and full of as much interactive clutter as we're used to in TES games, the house walls will stop your computer from drawing all of those objects.

On Oblivion's engine we'd have no such luck. Probably an instant CTD upon entering an open city with open houses. But with Umbra, an overhauled engine, and today's PC hardware and technology, I really don't see this as being a problem for TES:V. Seems perfectly achievable to me. The question is whether low to mid end PCs and consoles can also handle the job, and that's why I'm still doubtful as to whether it'll happen. Not every company builds their games like Creative Assembly's Total War series, overhauling their engines with every new game to push even the most advanced PCs (seriously, Shogun 2 Total War is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yFuYTC9jXc).

The silver lining though is that IF Beth use Umbra, then Open Cities should be built into the game, and seen on consoles as well as PCs. Modders should then be able to create Open Buildings mods for more advanced PCs, the same way we have Open Cities mods for Oblivion.

Hes got it right.

I don't mind loading screens, but I appreciated Morrowind's approach much better, at least you still felt like you were in the game.

And this could be off topic or on topic, but they REALLY need an animation for opening doors into new cells. I'm sick of touching a door, just to teleport to the other side. It isn't hard at all, and they've done it in other games. (Zelda games, off the top of my head)

Stalker: Call of Pripyat does this very well. They have large numbers of NPCs on their own schedules, and numerous interiors/caves/etc with no loading screen. I'm not sure how possible it will be with their current engine, but technically its possible

If you want either;

Vastly bland worlds with hardly any detail or content

or

HUGE FPS hits with phenominal initial loading times (20 minutes?)

Then we can lose loading screens. Otherwise, they're here to stay. Games that have no loading screen are always far less detailed than TES. You have to remember what TES is about. Huge open detailed sandbox RPG's. This stuff is incredibly hard to load without a screen. though, I would like to see Morrowind's system back. I didn't like being taken out of the world every time I opened a door. Pretty immersion breaking. Nothing to hate a game over, though.

The biggest flaw of your argument, OP, is comparing GTA to The Elder Scrolls. Two completely different games, different mechanics, different AI, and TONS more interactable items in cells than GTA.
Could it be done? Sure, but they'd have to downgrade a lot of things to make that possible, something I'm not willing to part with.

That's a bit simplistic. The method I described above would allow for the game to ditch loading screens (aside from the initial loading screen) without sacrificing the quality of the game. You can walk around forever outdoors in Oblivion, without entering a city, and never encounter a loading screen. Does that mean it's a "vastly bland world with hardly any detail or content"? Of course not. Do we see "HUGE FPS hits with phenomenal initial loading times (20 minutes?)"? I sure don't. That's because Oblivion already uses a simplified version of the background loading system I laid out; my system would just be more dynamic, in that when, in the course of filling in the new cells in the 5x5 grid, as the player moves around the world, it would note any entrances into an interior; if that entrance comes into the 3x3 grid, the game silently loads some or all of that interior; and when the player moves away from that entrance, that cell data is purged just as the exterior cells are purged.

I remember hearing of a mod like that. But I can't remember its name for the life of me.