» Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:34 pm
I have to admit, I was pretty impressed with (if not the design implementation of it) the surprisingly sane outputs of Oblivion’s Region Editor. Procedural generation is a really neat feature/methodology in general for a lot of things, especially as the file size of games get larger and larger considering what the difference is in what they deliver. I believe that I heard that Duty Calls, that supposedly 5-minute parody advergame put out to hype Bulletstorm, consumes a whopping 8 gigabytes when installed. I’m not quite sure of how much of that is true, and how much is necessary engine overhead vs. assets vs. uncompressed rendered video, but it sounds plain wasteful for something that can’t really encompass all that many meshes. It’s not the greatest example in the world, but it’s a recent one, and brings up a point I’ve always wondered: is it that developers are purely leveraging more in terms of increasingly available disk space and memory, or is it that some of these resources are getting taken for granted and that not much of an attempt is being made these days in the realm of compression?
Even more generally speaking, just seeing what well-implemented “randomness generators” output is fascinating, cool, and just plays to the sort of fulfillment one gets alongside the joy of discovery. Look at something as “simple’ as Minecraft’s terrain generation and the way one tends to respond to it and explore in this respect. That said, I don’t think us Elder Scrolls vets should get our hopes up overly about this so-called “Radiant Story”. Besides the fact that it shares a name with Radiant AI, an infamously hyped feature that proved to be largely a tease when it came to how it actually worked, Radiant Story’s treatment in the previews leads one to believe that it does little more novel than provide the facility to randomize the assignment of quest locations to a certain set of hidden generic map markers and make specifying fallback conditions for killed/terminally upset quest givers either a little easier or a little less reliant on creating a separate script for nearly every little thing, as has been largely necessary in these past Construction Set games. If anything, this would just make the job of doing a UESP writeup on a quest a lot more complicated. What it will probably (but not hopefully!) also do is to do the same sort of thing other games (Just Cause, Fable, WoW, RDR/GTA, etc.) have been doing for years in terms of spewing random Point A to Point B, Kill X Enemy A, Harvest Y Placeable P side quests, in order to make the game interminable a better value. Even these sort of formulaic-to-the-extreme quests once in a while, perhaps with random loot and such (in the normal quests, rewards should ideally err on the side of uniques) should be fine if executed unobtrusively, rather than relied upon. Not that I’d expect an Elder Scrolls game ever to routinely stoop to that level.
In any case, the question should be asked:
Wouldn’t this Radiant Story approach necessarily entail making quests so enabled just the slightest bit more generic?
This would be of especial concern in terms of dialogue assets – or, at least one would hope they’re not going to waste precious development time and VO work covering more eventualities, and thus possibly precluding plans for other quests. Hopefully though, it’s all just a cover for internal work to speed the workflow of making quests and dialogue trees in the editing tools, a process which has long seemed unnecessarily counterintuitive and even workaround-like in some respects. That way we can make less of a big deal about a feature that we may well only want to change a few things about any particular quest and get back to fighting over harmless things like spears, crossbows, and glass throwing stars. Or lamenting the possible loss of “spreadsheety” spellmaking, enchanting, and alchemy. All of which are things that are awesome, don’t get me wrong.
