We will ever have a elder scrolls title that is the geography and size of Daggerfall but with better a better gameplay engine and graphics than Oblivion?

no.

:P its simply not possible due to engine and time restrains

Like 20 years from now.

A big obstacle is the amount of time it would take for human designers to put in all the detail. Automatic terrain generation can do the bare bones but the cities, dungeons, other places-of-interest, special purpose NPCs, fixed creature placement, all the quest-related stuff, dialogue, and all the tweaks to get rid of any auto-generated weirdness in the terrain - all that would need human input, and that adds up to a huge amount of man-hours. Maybe seven or eight times as much as Oblivion at least. With a big enough design team it could be done in a reasonable amount of time of course, but that raises costs.

Hell, if they made a TES that included every continent and made it all living and worthwhile I would gladly pay $300+ for it as "the final game" in the series maybe they will do that who knows... (20+ years)

I can just smell the price tag running up on the system requirements. There'd be cardboard tumors sticking out of the side panels for the extra ram. The graphics card would be like a rocket pack jutting out the back. We'd need something like a 6Ghz processor just to get a poor framerate. The disk space taken up on the hard drive would be astronomical! However, I'd still do it just because of how awesome it could be.

I'd never say it's impossible, but I doubt it. Unless once they made a game for every province they updated the textures and released all the land masses together. I still doubt it.

Its just a trade off for Bethesda. Daggerfall had 62000 square miles of area, but it was randomly generated and the graphics made my eyes hurt. Oblivion only had 16 which is only .00025% the size of dagerfall but the graphics are...,well i dunno the percentage but they are fantastic and the world is the same everytime. Without that trade off you end up with a supercomputer playing a $500 dollar game to pay the thousands of people to design it all.

Actually processing power wouldnt be the problem about a huge world as it still only has to visually calculate a small area. Remeber that you DO have a physical limit of how far you can see in an atmosphere, not just how far your eyes can actually see something but actually due to the planetary curve. Pretty much the maximum distance you can see on a VERY clear day is 280km which wouldn't even be the distance from one end to the other of most provinces. And usually due to atmospheric condition the max view distance is between 30 and 50km which CAN be simulated, for example in "FUEL" which has a game world of 120 x 120km.

So technology wise it really is no problem to do as it HAS been done.

I wouldn't go as far as to say it's not possible, it's hard to say with these things, but I doubt that it will happen any time soon, if everything was randomly generated, we'd end up with a very big world that is also pretty generic in boring in most parts like Daggerfall, if Bethesda did everything by hand, the development time and resources would probably be far too large for it to be worth doing, just look at the amount of time Oblivion took to finish and people still complain that it's not varied enough, now imagine what would happen if Bethesda did the same thing but on the scale of Daggerfall. It might be easy if Bethesda could just create the game world, but they also have to fill it with quests, characters, items and interesting locations to explore, otherwise, that massive world is all just a waste of space. It's not like any game needs to be that big anyway, as long as it's big enough that players won't constantly be reminded of how small the gameworld really is, it will do. A large by game standards but not realistically huge map which players will actually feel inclined to explore is better than a map whose massive size only becomes a disadvantage as it means it takes longer for players to actually get to something they want to be doing.

Actually, not attaking what you said, just makign a point, there IS a place for randomly generated environments, and no that's not the garbage .

Take for example, yu have a big world, of course the towns and settlemnts are hand place, the paths are preset, all dungeons have a fixed place, you get the point. Now in between you have a forest somewhere, you hand place the edges of the forest and a zone in between is randomly generated. So every time you enter the forest it just randomly generates it, this way the forest can be very large and doesn't need to be fully hand made. If there are ruins in there they become set islands in this randomyl generated lake.

Or take a desert, you can have the whole desert randomly generated with preset areas in there. This would actually make sense as deserts move. Or fields of grass and flowers, they'd oft course be set to follow a certain pattern so a field of lillies doesn't suddenly become a field of sun flowers.

The actually landscape does NOT need to change necessarily but the setting in there changes. This way it can save a lot of time for hand placing certain environments but generate them as you go.


The actualy problem there is most random generator engines don'T have enough to chose from to do anything good. You only have so many set pieces, that limits what you can make out of it. Plus the engine would have to be "trained" to make certain combinations while preventing conflicts like a cactus growing in the middle of a evergreen forest or two trees intersecting each other. However all this is possible but like everything good in games it needs actualy WORK to get it right.

The problem with random generation is that either everything needs to be gone over in detail afterward by a human to remove and correct the most blatantly obvious "stupidities", or else the generator has to be heavily restricted, leaving you with a relatively bland and boring landscape. A human developer will add a number of "unusual" features, wereas a random generator will randomly tend to cluster a bunch of those "unusual" features together into something "unreasonable". If you remove the ability of the generator to add the "unusual", then you've got nothing worth seeing.

The size of Oblivion and Morrowind was about the maximum that a moderate sized development team can create, debug, and "polish" over a couple years of work, even using a few automated tools to speed the process. I DON'T want to see a complete "Tamriel" map shrunken into a couple square miles of land, even worse that what Oblivion did with Cyrodiil. I also don't want to see a huge but mostly bland and repetitive landscape of "procedurally generated" garbage, with a few hand-placed features to try to make it playable. Something more "managable" than that in size is the only credible answer at this level of technology or within the forseeable future.

Given the obviously few and limited tilesets used over and over in Oblivion, compared to the wide variety of cultures, influences, and lifestyles throughout the entire continent of Tamriel, I can't picture Bethesda even vaguely trying to bite all of that off in one "gulp". We're talking about 5-6 times the amount of artwork, just to maintain the SAME level of graphics quality, whereas the industry typically demands higher detail and more lifelike imagery with each game "generation".

In short, "all of Tamriel" isn't happening anytime soon, and Daggerfall's enormous landmass was something that's not likely to be tried again until there's a major breakthrough at the "game engine" end of the business (which Bethesda would probably have to lease).

Actually, I've prophesied about just this thing:

And I saw a new engine and a new game, for the first engine and the first game were passed away, and there was no more level scaling.
And I, What?!, saw the Elder Scrolls, coming down from Bethesda out of Oblivion, like unto the first time your character stepped off the boat in Morrowind.
And I heard a great voice out of Oblivion saying, "Behold the ultimate game is with the fans, it will dwell on their hard drives, and they will be its players, and the game itself will be their addiction, and be their game.
And Bethesda will wipe the away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more trolling, neither flamebaiting, nor flaming, neither shall there be anymore waiting: for the former things are passed away."
And the devs that sat upon their rolly chairs said, "Behold, We make all things epic." And they said unto me, "Post: for this is clearly not speculation".
And they said unto me, "It is ready to be released. It is the Epic and the Win, the better and the best. We will give unto them that want expansions, many times.
He that waiteth will receive; and We will be his Devs, and he shall be our fan."

Well Diablo and Diablo 2 did randomly generated envoroments realy well. There were places that were the same every time you played, like under the well and tristram, but all other areas were completely random, and it made for fun exploring becuase you never knew what lurked around the next corner so to speak. Now I know that it was rather simple for the maps were only 2 dimensions, but theres no reason something like that cant be done for oblivion. Provided that they dont just make the terrain out of little squares that have different hights and look odd. And they could easily generate random terain hieght maps, thats very simple, after all thats what Oblivion was. They just need to do a little programing so that you dont end up with huge mountains u cant climb blocking your path to cities etc..

why not simply re engine Daggerfall then, like that mod project is doing. (DaggerXL?)

smothen things out and stuff.

Adapt that to today systems ........ ah that was funny joke there.
Is it going to happen maybe.......anytime soon no unless some aliens help us with TES the whole damn world.

I do not. I live with all my mistakes. ... oh wait.

I don't understand people who bash 'randomly' generated world. Random meaning that the process is following a series of rules. The real world is not hand crafted either. All it takes is an improved Speedtree (or such) techonolgy to make a world very realistic and just as huge as you want.

Personally, I would pay over $1,000 for all of Tamriel, competly lore accurate, and in full size, (The imperial city with a population ofat least 1,000,000 people, each with a house, a job, and involved with the game in one way or another besides to look good) I'd wait until 2050 for that.