I don't see how they managed. It's taken me forever to do one cave. Trying to make it look natural while covering all the holes, making sure no corners are sticking out, trying to avoid a tiled look. Then all the choices for effects and lighting. Artistically placed plants. And then tearing it all apart and redoing. Several times. In Oblivion they seemed to use a few templates and then customized each. Doing each cave from scratch in a mere 5 years seems an impossible task. They have my admiration.

Seven years, actually, counting the updates, and an average of one hundred devs. Still, I'm amazed too.

Bolded part is important.

Devs probably never tore anything down unless it was obvious that it wasn't working, or ordered to remove it by the suits. They're not going after "perfect", they're going after "good enough to please the majority". Remember: your harshest critic will be yourself. Nobody else will see the tiny flaws that are very obvious to you, nor see that no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't make it exactly like what you wanted in your head.

I'm sure that the 100 devs part helped with the internal criticsms.

"Hey, Bill! Does this look good to you?"

"Yep."

"Ya sure?"

"Yes, Dale. Now stop fiddling around with it and work on [Nameless cave in the middle of nowehere]!"

Skyrim have the most beautiful (big) environment even made. The game lever designers did a very good job. I liked every dungeon, every cave, etc. and the wilderness.

The thing wichi i liked less was Whiterun town.

On the OT: I spent 3 months to cover the perimeter of my Gray Cowl of Nocturnal mod (worldspace 32x32). This is wath I obtained:

http://static-4.nexusmods.com/15/images/110/3150929-1441229586.jpg

I'm pretty satisfied the most boring phase was to put rocks and other things around the big assets like arch pillars and walls.

we actually don't know how many people were working on building it.

(or do we? i don't.

maybe they had an army of builders and each of them had the 7y for his/her one dungeon

@ marss: i don't think they're primarily following a "just good enough to pass" approach.

the locations are stuffed with detail (even those nobody ever really enters, or have you ever been, like, inside solitude sawmill?), little stories and gags everywhere, most of which you don't even notice before your 3rd or 4th playthrough (or during modding), they could go with MUCH less.

also, many locations are highly experimental. they're not just running down their kits, they're abusing their assets in all ways imaginable themselves - and most of it all is flawless, when you build off the grid, you'll have like rock back ends sticking out at every corner and spend amazing amounts of time fixing these things, you hardly ever see anything of this in skyrim.

@ crossi: most of all, you get quicker with every next piece you make.

and a few other assumptions:

.) they'll make more use of stuff like object palettes etc than we do.

.) they'll never have to worry about incomplete kits, because they'll have the complete ones , and when they need a piece, i figure they'll just ask the modeler to make it. or make it themselves.

.) they'll never have to spend weeks to figure out what the hell the logic in solitude kit's naming convention is, because they named it themselves...

.) i could imagine every builder specializes on a kit. with a kit you know well, you don't need to think much about what piece to use, nor do you plan stuff that can't be made etc. saves lots of time.

.) seen the warehouse cells? my theory is this goes much further, like, on a "nordic rooms", "dwarven hallways" ... level

Plus they actually know what they're doing unlike most of us who struggles to get to grips with the basics. Or maybe thats just me. But at anyrate theres a video tutorial on YT where its clear the author is a Beth employee, he has to be he's so familiar with the way the CK works and what pre-existing scripts to add where and when he has to have been working with CK day in, day out for years. He knocks out a quest, or at least the first part of one in like 40 minutes or so.

Plus assembly-line specialization. Each person does a single job, like placing the tileset pieces in the worldspace. Someone else adds the clutter. Someone else builds the pieces. Another writes quests, but only in the sense of setting stages and writing QF code. If it needs a quest script, that's yet another.

The YT video was a well-rehearsed summary of multiple people's work done by a specialized presenter, who had a script of what they were going to do.

When I make a mod, I have to learn 20 different jobs, and be proficient in all of them before the mod works properly. 20 people could do that in parallel.

Yeah. There is so much to learn. I know Gimp just barely enough to change the color of textures and save it in the proper format. Still haven't figured out those pesky inhomogeneous textures that part of the texture goes on one piece of the nif and another part goes on another part. I know Nifscope just barely enough to change the texture and to make a nifskope mashup. I can turn nonstatics into statics using either the creation kit or nifskope. Can make SIMPLE scripts but not much past very basic things. Haven't even touched Blender though I've downloaded it and bought a book. Even the creation kit, I haven't actually figured out what all the settings actually do. It's all trial and error. Try something, if it works great if not try something else.

i find this hard to imagine, honestly. imagine seven years of cluttering farmhouse buildings. if they really did it like that, there'd be legions of ex-beth-employees gone insane all over the place )

Some of the bugs might be explained by that insanity. Certainly some of the choices in quest design could.

that's the quest choice maker's fault! ,-))

edit: ...but maybe they're using it as a disciplinary measure.

like, "really now, curt, mess up one more dungeon and it's 6 months cluttering farmhouses for you!" )

Look a bit closer at a lot of those interiors and you'll begin to realize most of it was cut/paste work with detailing done afterward. The assembly line process is probably more true than people realize. Plus they have little "warehouse" cells scattered in the data files that have lots of prebuilt things like weapon rack sets and bookshelves that cut the production time on those down to very little.

It didn't hurt that the bulk of the team jumped over from Fallout 3 after its 2008 release either, to join those who had already been plugging away since Oblivion had shipped. One can only hope they've further streamline this process, with better internal tools, for Fallout 4. By the time we get to TES VI, they should be purring like a well oiled Dwemer Centurion.

Quite, and I'd imagine that cluttering is the preferred job, as it's the one that's different every time. I forget where I read the list of people that worked on Skyrim, probably a booklet in the box, but it listed the many jobs they did, too. For example, the artists that make the meshes aren't the same ones that do the textures. Different tool, so different artist. And the animations were done by another team with yet another tool.

Yes, it is mostly assembly-line, because when you have a list of things you need to get done, you can't afford to spent a lot of time on a single thing.

You usually make a lot of things in a single pass, and then revisit your work later to polish them up.

I'd post the article of Bethesda's iterative level design, but I'm afraid I can't link it just yet

Just google "The Iterative Level Design Process of Bethesda Game Studios," and you'll find it

Someone must have an overall plan, a roadmap of where they're going to streamline the whole operation, a Bible so to speak of how the game is supposed to look and feel overall, surely. I'd love to take a look at that plan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxR30g-tr_A