Should there be a quest/ magical portal that will randomly generate a cave/ dungeon/ area with random monsters and loot?
The area wouldn't be affected by the cap that gets placed on areas that you've already been to.

Randomized Boss Monster,
Random loot,
Random monsters,
Additional replay value.

Sound good?

Yeah, its called radiant al, you must not have heard.

Even if you mean Radiant Story, you're still wrong.


Radiant story just creates variables within a quest, which is still hand-crafted. Though, a lot of the "Errand" class quests are more "Radiant" (random" than the deeper quests.


Anyway, generally I support any new feature as long as it doesn't detract from another, but for personal interests, because good quests are made by good writers, I have to put my foot down and say no. One Hand-crafted Quest can have the impact of a thousand random ones, by coming off as a meaningful experience.

Random generators are evil. No thank you.

No, that isn't what I'm speaking of.

I'm speaking of a random area, that generates it's contents.

I'm not speaking about generating a quest for any of the 120 dungeons.

Oh, it seem's im the one who 'hasn't heard' then, so radiant story is just the set side quest's that are more tailor made for your charter's style?

Random areas/generators can never be as unique and intimate as hand crafted ones, so my answer stands. No.

I see. That's lame.

Not random generated quests... That would be stupid. How about jobs? or tasks? even if its escort this person or protect this trade wagon? or even lower jobs just to raise a bit of money. Because on oblivion you struggled with the idea of buying those amazing weapons and armour because they cost too much.

Bad choice of name there, bud. Also a lot of people seem to not read the OP.

I wouldn't mind this. After I've explored all the dungeons, it would be nice to be able to go into a completely fresh one, even if it isn't as well-put together and unique as the others. I dunno about having a portal, but yes, randomized dungeons would be a plus.

I like random placement of creatures and loot, and even random placement of non-random caves and dungeons. I would also enjoy a randomly-generated dungeon (or a few), but it is up to the developers to decide whether or not it should be done.


I know that Radiant Story will be used to tailor aspects of some non-random quests to our characters. I do not know how much is planned in the way of randomly-created quests.

Radiant Story is just the name of the tool they use to control certain aspects of a given quest. Todd is trying not to really sell it like they tried on Radiant AI, because, as it already has, it'll create a lot of false expectations.

The vast majority of quests are run through Radiant Story. Some may have only one "Radiant" Variable dictated by the tool, some may have several, but each quest is still actually hand-written.


A Radiant Story Variable might be the location of the dungeon you're sent to, or the actual person you obtain the quest from, but the actual scenario, and it's objectives remain the same. How I understand it, is, a Quest Writer comes up with an idea for a quest, the popular example is, rescuing a child who's being held for ransom. The writer then decides what aspects will be set as "Radiant". The Person who gives the quest, the location, and the reward in this case.

Radiant Story is set to favor NPC's with high disposition towards the player who already have a child. So, the quest initiates from someone who holds you in high regard. Radiant Story is set to make this a Challenging quest, so it puts the objective in an unexplored higher-level dungeon(hopefully a dungeon in proper context, for example, if the kid is being held for ransom, it doesn't make sense to be occupied by daedra or wolves), and the reward is set to be something the player can use, which, say your highest skill is Archery, it might be a new bow, or perhaps a quiver of arrows.

But the Overall story remains the same, Kid is abducted, need to rescue. That's just a blatantly generalized example to clearly illistrate what's going on with Radiant story.

I would like to add one point to this. It's not that the majority of quests are run through Radiant Story, all of them are because Radiant Story is the quest engine itself so all of the functionality is inherent in the system and flags toggle that functionality on and off. The majority of quests will not have any of the dynamic flags toggled.

I can tell that this idea is pretty popular, so I'm going to go ahead and formally request its addition into Skyrim.

Well i'm sure there are arguments for and against, but i wouldn't implement it into skyrim or until you are quite far into the story at least.

Actually, most of the quests will have at least one dynamic flag toggled. The Most common is the quest giver, to get around the "Essential" NPC spam we saw in Oblivion.

I don't see a any need for this sort of thing.

There will be plenty of content in the game already with variation from one play through to the other addressed with having different races and classes which will hopefully provide meaningful differences in game play on top of the Radiant Story system which is also supposed to help address the repetitive experience issues that some people complained about regarding previous games.

The Radiant AI is also supposed to have been improved so we'll see more of what they originally wanted us to see in Oblivion.

I look forward to seeing what they have in store for us in Skyrim and I hope that their plans for it are realized... and more besides.

Peace, +Petrose

Good point. This also looks to me as though they may have taken a look at how the modding community would use the quest engine as a way of actually adding functionality to the game through scripting. So rather than having huge scripts pumping game data through the quest engine to achieve a halfassed goal, they decided they could harness that power at a much lower resource cost by channeling all of the game's data through that part of the engine by default. Just a theory but it holds water I believe, especially in light of the tremendous amount of changes they have made based directly on the modding community. Gives me great hope that we will see some neat changes to the CE & CK specifically for us modders.

I'll probably visit each dungeon several times since I'm planning on playing the game at least 3 times. I think it would be awesome if the final reward for finishing the mages' guild (or it's anologue) quests was a portal to a randomly generated dungeon. It would help the replayability a lot if it's possible.

No one ever does. If it is a poll then they won't even read the choices half the time. I agree with what you are saying about post-game continuation though.

Bethesda can't create an infinite number of creative quests (at least in our lifetime). Raise your hand if you have spend countless hours in either Oblivion or Morrowind finishing every single last quest, finding every single unique item, and end up with nothing to do. Random quests would not be a good idea, true, but random tasks would be a major benefit to the game. Defend this town, help this guy kill this other guy, help this man track down his slave. I'm sure it's not as easy as it sounds, but it is certainly possible and gives us endless gameplay. Slaughtering every soul on the planet is fun, but then there is nothing left to do.

I think I can speak for most of us when I say we want to play in a living environment. The Dark Brotherhood quests in Oblivion were fun to me personally. Could you imagine if they could continue endlessly? One NPC dies, another moves in from another province (i.e. created). Generic boring NPC's come back with their random AI packages and you could continue your work. There would of course be those amazing, well thought out quests that take your breath away, but similar to how the Thieve's guild fence worked you could maybe be told to complete 3 randomly generated contracts before you take on a big job.

Most of us should agree that this is not a bad idea; it must just be done in the right way. I would rather have new content each time I play the game then to know exactly what's going to happen next. Morrowind was as pre-created as they come. It was nice, but prior knowledge lessened the enjoyment. Oblivion was the complete opposite in terms of the loot, and we all know how that turned out.

I believe Bethesda is getting it perfect this time around. We all know the dragons aren't scripted. If they can make amazing dragons without cutscenes or rail fighting then I trust them to make stunning quests and a way to keep the adventure flowing in Skyrim for the next 5-10 years that I'll be playing their game.

I would use a random quest generator in a heartbeat!

Having the options of completely different quest lines each time I fire up the game? Bring it on! lol

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