This, which is also the reason I sometimes have trouble getting back into DF

What I hated about recent TES games is the fact that joining a faction and completing quests felt exactly like going through a campaign mode in an action game. The Daggerfall way felt more natural, you were doing menial tasks to build your reputation and slowly gain money. It encouraged the player to find more creative ways to make something of themselves rather than spending time 'completing a guild' ( ) and thus gaining more money than one could ever dream of spending. What would be better is if Bethesda added interesting pre-designed quests within the random generation to spice things up, along with quests handed out by residents. Also, random generation for most of the wilderness while cities remain static. Bonus points if exploring the wilderness is challenging this time.

Bigger bonus points if the wilderness is more challenging than travelling on the roads.....

D?bbel post sry

I loved Daniel's 1st post. Sounds like a good mixture of random/fixed content. The thing about TES2 compared to later games is that surely the all-random stuff gets old, but much slower than the hand-placed stuff. Only the 1st playthrough in TES3 and 4 offer anything new: the next time you already KNOW what you find where, and what quests anyone gives and in which order. That's terrible imo.

Also, what is a square mile or two compared to a REAL SIZE world? What is a 'province' of 1000 citizens compared to an area (Iliac Bay) with REAL AMOUNT of inhabitants?

Grandness gives immersion, since the real world isn't a hand crafed tiny sandbox with masses of toys crammed in it.

Also, the terrain is not random if it's generated with a program, even if it's different each time you play. That program simulates erosion, while a hand crafted world simulates something a god might have build, which is not the case.

Agreed that a mixture of random and fixed content beats one or the other. TES3 had some random elements, but the majority was hand-placed; after nearly 8 years, the game is STILL being played regularly by a LOT of people. The bigger problem was that much of that "hand-placed" content had entirely "hand-placed" guards, so after the first time you knew not only that it was there, but exactly how to get it. A mix of static and random, or occasional surprises such as a few items being "switched" (but not total randomization) would have been better. TES4 had a better "mix" in some respects, but the blatantly excessive levelling and scaling obsured that, and the guaranteed rapid respawn of purely random "junk" all set to your level made it easier to "farm" a few locations over and over than to "adventure".

To quote one source I can't recall: "Quantity has a quality all its own." Grandness certainly helps, although it doesn't entirely replace quality, and a bunch of "OK" toys can probably provide more total entertainment than one lone "quality" toy, or piles of junky ones.

Hand-crafted terrain need not simulate "something a god might have built", but perhaps something an intelligent civilization made, which for much of it IS the case.

With the exception of the MQ I found DF's quests very lacklustre. Once you've been to a persons house and killed a giant spider it doesn't feel like a whole new quest to be sent to a house to kill a harpy. Infinite mediocrity is not infinite replayability.

The same goes for the huge size of DF. None of the towns or people had any character. It wasn't grand, just bland.

actually, what it means is that the biggest cities in Tamriel are the size of small villages and have like 100 inhabitants. Random content is a MUST, but it should be mixed with hand created content by the developers.




yeah, but you are talking about a 90s game. You should think about a 2010-2011 random content possibilities! EVEN if all of Daggerfall had been hand created, it would still be quite bland and without caracther, with the engine back then. I am quite sure that with today tech and possibities, you CAN make interesting cities that are grand AND WITH CARACTHER! Of course, I am against TOTALLY random content. As I said, there should be SOME random content. For example, a city can have its map HAND CREATED. Important structures and houses can be hand created. Developers can set different types of structures to different areas of the city (kind like Sim City). Then, they let their random content generator kick in, creating the rest of the city. And THOUSANDS of random caracthers.

The objective of random content is IMMERSION. That is... to have realistic places, distances, etc.

And like I said, I don't care. I want EVERYTHING to be hand crafted like in Morrowind, nothing should be randomly generated IMO. Random content is far from being a must.

Well...As I've suggested before, the game's province could be divided up into different cells based on the geographical regions. The wilderness areas can each be randomly generated landscape, (save for maybe a few landmarks?), while the important civil or urban regions and surrounding counties can be permanently set. That way, there's something large and new for exploration while still maintaining the importance of stable location.

I agree with this.

Was anything in Oblivion randomly generated?

IIRC the items found in containers in dungeons were randomly generated based on your level.

I hate the entire level-scaling system. Bethesda should get rid of that as well. Morrowind's containers had their items placed in them by the developers? Was literally everything in Morrowind hand-crafted?

I'm not sure. :shrug:

No. Certain creature and NPC appearances were actually generated depending on your skill level, though by no means to the extreme that was presented in TES:IV.

ok, but some people care. Some people want to replay the game without it being exactly the same as last time. There are plenty of hand crafted games. Very few random generated games. Daggerfall was one of these. Why are you handcrafted fans taking away from us random-generated-stuff fans the only RPG series that gave us what we wanted???

Only 1 game in the series had that format so nobodys taking the series away from you. Very few games are handcrafted to the degree that MW was and even that had some random elements.

Oblivion still looks handcrafted... and its a small and cramped world.

Another worry Id have about randomly generated terrain DF-style is the constraints it would place on modmaking. How would house and quest mods be fitted into the world?

By marking that part of the terrain as "hand-crafted" in the mod, then changing the randomly generated default to suit your needs. The random generator would then not touch this part of the terrain, and generate a transition area around it to have a seamless link to the randomly-generated part.

quoted for the win.

Randomly-generated landscape sounds, to be honest, horrible. It does make sense what so ever that I walk through a forest, enter a town and do some questing, and then return the way I came only to find a completely different forest. Erosion doesn't work like that.

Neither does any randomly generated game landscape work like what you describe.

You got it all wrong, we could have new generated landscape with everytime you start a new game only.

Oblivion land got boring, how many people did just avoid the Vilverin ruin when stepping out of the sewer exit. Oblivion had too many handplaced ruins, dungeons and cities that you just endend avoiding 50% of all of them.

Both MW and OB used a mix of random and hand-placed elements.

MW's spawned "creatures" and un-named guards, and at least 75% of the loot, were generated from levelled lists, but the "world" was hand-made. The named NPCs were all hand-placed (MOST were named, including bandits and other "baddies"). The random loot lists often had a slim chance of a "higher" grade item showing up, so you could occasionally find something "decent" that wasn't hand-placed, but almost "seemed" to be. A lot of care was taken in placing clutter to provide a "living" look to the world, even though the NPCs didn't actually "do" anything except stand there or pace back and forth. Aside from the thousand or so little "issues" fixed by the various patches (official and unofficial), it made you feel "there".

OB's dungeons were often "procedurally generated" from a relatively small set of elements (the lack of variety showed), and then "hand-cleaned" to get rid of some of the most "stupid" anomalies. Once created, they were "permanent" and identical for every game. Its spawns and loot were almost all, if not ALL, randomly generated in each game from levelled lists, with many of those NPCs and items further "scaled" to your level. The amount of "care" in placement varied from one site to another, and the "rationality" of the overall layouts ran the full length of the spectrum from sensible to absurd, with some getting a nice "lived in" look and others being quite "sterile" and bland, in spite of the "scheduled" NPCs. Hand placed, often yes; "intelligently" placed, I've got occasional doubts. I found such awkward little things as the row of books perpetually "falling over" in the one IC weapons shop to be "immersion-denting", but not as bad as the lack of unique voices, the lack of dialog options, and the overall lack of "variety" in the game: smaller selections of armor types, weapons, apparatus, and everything else, especially when the "better" items didn't exist in the game world at all at low levels. Even the things that were hand-placed didn't always "feel" it, and the 100% guaranteed respawning aspect made it too obvious that there were levelled lists being used.

FO3 seems to have "backed off" on the levelling and scaling to some small degree, and it was a better game for it, but the guaranteed respawns quickly made it rather obvious what was "random" and what was "fixed". There were other issues that I won't go into here, but the attention to details and definite use of some "intelligent" item placements certainly helped. Let's hope that the developers manage a good balance between random generation and hand placement, and that they BOTH get proper review and adjustment where necessary to make them "work" well in-game.