I agree with most of this - graphics have never been the main focus of these games.

But looking at that clip ... so the water looks better ... meanwhile the flora and monsters look like their from 2002 themselves. The animations are wooden and I'd bet that like a bioware game most things cannot be interacted with. So keep the water if I gotta put up with all that.

And saying that no modern game should be outshined by a game from 2002 ... uhhh MGE last had an update when? That is not from 2002. So other than water and shadows (both of which are injected into morrowind via modern utilities) what about modded Morrowind blows Skyrim away?

Modded Skyrim will outshine modded Morrowind and Oblivion and likely Fallout as well. That is unless they bork the CK with too much STEAM.

I must be seeing a clip from Risen in some other universe because that water looked horrible.

It doesn't.

Unless we're talking modded Morrowind. Which is a fail comparison, really. Wait till Skyrim gets its CK and then we'll talk about which MODDED water looks better.

Following all of this, can someone please tell me how Daggerfall was made into such an epic? Not graphically, but content-wise? And why can't 2011 Bethesda keep up with 1996 Bethesda in that department? Graphics aside, is an Xbox 360 too "SUPERIOR" to run Daggerfall's content?

Alas, just as everybody has mentioned, a game can have its graphics completely overhauled in time. If that's the case, why not focus on content and gameplay first and foremost? Too many things have been changed and hardcoded to allow Skyrim to ever play like Daggerfall... even after years of modding... unless Bethesda decided to leave everything changeable, which I find unlikely.

I read an article in ... I think Game Informer or something ... where the author asks "do the kids of today get as caught up in the story of games as he did when he was younger (late 80s early 90s). His conclusions was that they do and that like him their minds filled in all the blanks that the game didn't fill in and that they get as wrapped up in the sweep of the game - even though to him they games look spoon fed and dumber plot wise. Certainly there is something to be said for games where you have to read to move onward. Your brain will fill in more bits and pieces because reading is a proactive experience. You don't get past one sentence without some effort, while you can soak up the televisual endlessly.

I'm in my mid 40s - been playing video games since there were video games. I recall getting swept up in the story of early Ultima games. I recall getting really engrossed in the game system shock. Several others that escape my mind right now, but these games bite by today's standards. No way does http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VH3iuuiyuo look at all appealing to my brain. Even if the plot is appealing.

I guess what I'm getting at is that we all have games that are such novel experiences in our history - that change us to a degree. That we then get hooked into seeing the evolution of games and think "oh they added that finally" ... now perhaps more jaded.

I feel this way about music. There hasn't been any new music to move me in the past 10 years or more. Rock n roll is pretty much as dead as most other forms of music. I don't feel this way about video games. Onward and upward.

Because a large majority of Daggerfall was completely randomly generated.

Therein lies the problem and why I'm so bitterly disappointed with the Vanilla game. The PC market was badly short changed with this game. Beth had the opportunity here to release a visually spectacular Skyrim on the PC that would have blown away just about any game that's come out this year whilst developing a seperate version for the console market. Yes, Skryim is a good game insofar as game play and certainly it's learned lessons from Oblivion but visually it's a donkey's backside to look at compared to other PC specific titles. Does this mean Skyrim when modded can't be beautiful? Of course not, Skyrim will probably be the best looking game out there in twelve month's time, thanks to the modding community but the point as I see the OP making is it shouldn't have been released as a console port in the first place and should have had PC specific development enabling it to not have to appease a 6 year old machine.

I mod morrowind and I make 2k refs interior and exterior cells that run perfectly. This is also like the limit for the ongoing Province mods. We add a lot of content and detail, and it is as immersive and maybe even more free than Skyrim (not so liniar as you can fly).

You're not the only one. Especially the streams and waterfalls look great. More than great actually, I've never seen anything like that in games so far.

Just FYI, but you're all posting in a troll thread

REAL fluid simulations? See http://physbam.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/. No, I don't expect any of this to be doable in realtime now. Not even close.

That was a texture pack

I agree. The graphics look atrocious. But that's what I mean. Graphics aside, Daggerfall had the content. Why could Skyrim not have the size or scope that Daggerfall had? Let Bethesda's visuals department worry about graphics. When it comes to actual gameplay and level design (not graphical), is there a reason why Skyrim could NOT play out like a Daggerfall?

Ps. I don't mean "dice rolls" for combat necessarily, I'm speaking more of vast variety of skills, factions, etc.



Yes, but what is so bad about random generation? If done properly, it will open the possibility for ENDLESS replayability WITHOUT loss of gamplay quality or immersion. It all comes down to the number of possibilities added into the generator. And mixing hand-crafted portions with random generation would still make sense.

Again, to stay somewhat on topic, graphics are icing on the cake. They can be fixed later. Gameplay mechanics (for a large part) cannot.

The answer to this is very simple. Nobody is able to do random generated content of similar quality to hand-crafted one. Just nobody. Radiant story in Skyrim is one of the better ways to mix very simple random quests with already huge amount of manually created content. Without the latter part, those quest will bring nothing more than boredom. That's where gamedev is atm.

The problem - randomly generated content will eventually all end up looking alike, unless your algorithm is sufficiently complicated enough, in which case you should have invested that time into creating real content anyways.

I think I had a post somewhere about this .. let me find it.

Here's something: http://www.lostgarden.com/2007/02/content-is-bad.html . I commented on it as well last year.

In actually, Skyrim IS far more procedurally (randomly) generated - experience wise, not necessarily content asset wise - than most other immersive RPGs on the market, which try to craft a perfectly tailored, linear experience for the player, possibly with an artificial good/evil system of no real consequence (read: all of Bioware's games Bioware's recent releases - I still have a fondness for NWN and before). It's just that you want the assets to be procedurally generated too, which is quite a difficult problem to say the least.

In addition, procedurally generated quests are bad at understanding human motivation (yes, Radient AI is susceptible to this as well). Humans have evolutionarily evolved to see patterns, even in things that don't have them -- hence any experience generated with a fixed number of parameters has by definition a pattern, and is thus limited.

We could talk about this stuff all day, but unfortunately I have work to do.

Another article about procedural content in Oblivion: http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/OblivionProcedural.htm . This reinforces dorrino's point rather well - it's the interaction between procedural content and carefully hand-placed content that made the TES series what it is today.

Yes, manually-created content is key, but just plug that into the random generation engine. I still don't understand what makes it so complicated. Yes, the content would have to be tailored to fit into random generation, but that doesn't mean you can't have a VAST amount of variety even if it is randomly generated. Build that random world around "fixed" points that are the central locations to the plot.



Indeed, the topic seems deserving of its own discussion thread. And those were very interesting reads, thank you.

To me, the problem with randomly generated terrain or dungeons in particular is that there isn't enough variety of "pieces" to plug into the puzzle. That and also the limitation of puzzle sizes. Dungeons should have the possibility to be made of just one piece or a thousand pieces.

That's why I like the idea of the "procedurally" generated content. It CAN allow infinite replayability. The only reason someone could get burnt out is if there aren't enough pieces or enough sizes of puzzles. A hand-crafted game has no way to prevent burn-out. It will ALWAYS be the same.

Theoretically, any given hand-crafted location can be achieved with random generation if there are enough factors and variables implemented in the generation engine. If that weren't the case, I don't know how many people still believe in the "Big Bang" theory. But that's a whole other topic

The universe is infinite in size. Divide the universe into sectors, call each sector a configuration.
Since the universe is infinite, every possible configuration will eventually come to be.
Since the universe is infinite, a given configuration may be repeated.
=> There is another Earth, in another part of spacetime, in which you are reading this post.

I don't think that proceedural approach provides infinite replay or even believable world. Especially since every component that can be placed was hand generated. It takes very little effort to see the cracks and that is why Oblivion got as much criticism as it did. Things like Ai schedules and scaled enemies became quickly apparent. The human mind is more advanced than out best computers - it can grasp patterns generated by the machines of lazier minds.

And no need getting all mystical about it or any other hologram ... the universe is only as infinite as we get lazy measuring it. Saying that every possibility can happen doesn't make it happen.

The theory of cosmic expansion suggests an infinite universe. There are many facts that support the theory, but a theory is never "proven." If it were proven it would be a law.
However, IF the universe is infinite, there is an infinite number of you throughout spacetime. My argument above had the hidden assumption of validity on the theory of cosmic expansion. An assumption that a lot of theoretical physics relies on.

Yes well I could also say that my theory relies on an idea so don't doubt me. Saying the word physics is just putting 10s on it.

Whether the universe is infinite (which big bang theory does not support) or it is strings strung together on a holographic bubble - the main thing to remember is that the word infinite is a convenience for things beyond the end of our measuring stick.

We could be strapped to chairs in a cave staring at shadows or living on the bottom of a fish tank thinking 'this is the entire world'. A prophet comes and says no there is more it is infinite. But to him infinite is being free of the bonds or swimming past the glass wall. to me it may mean less than that.

There is less proof for infinite than finite.

The expansion of the universe is accelerating. It was verified in the 90's (1998, I think.) and is in line with many other discoveries. It is actually the same cosmological constant that Einstein regretted so much. So, the universe is expanding and is of infinite size. Hate to reference wiki, but it's a good summation of the past events. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_expansion_of_the_cosmos

And I wasn't just throwing physics in there for the fun of it. It's and interesting topic, I'm a mathematician and we like interesting topics.

Its a troll thread so no big deal to me - kinda hard to stay on topic with that.

if something has a beginning then by this very definition it is not infinite.

Infinity is a great thing to conceptualize and is considered the very essence of spiritual pursuit - to attain the bornless, perfect, to forge a soul. Great for human discovery and fits well with philosophy and psychology - because it is a human invention. A great exercise like in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jnana.

But in physics (and to borrow a phrase from Nick Cave) all things move toward their end. The universe may be expanding but the most astro-physicists accept that there will come a point where it will peter out and then gravity will take hold and will have a universe of black holes that lasts far longer than the age of the stars.

I like the current off-topic being discussed compared to the original topic, so please continue. Interesting arguments around the table here.

In other words, are hand-crafted locations an example of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity? Does Searle's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room argument give insight into whether procedural content can in fact be generated by an algorithm that truly "understands", and is an algorithm that merely duplicates all the processes that designers use to hand-craft content truly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computationalism?

There, some more reading material. I hope this thread can slow the gradual decline in IQ on these boards in general (since Skyrim release).

Very true, but that doesn't mean that if properly implemented and given enough variety, you could not create a very large amount of finite possibilities without being too easy to pickup the repetition.

Take music on an 88-key piano for instance. You only have 88 individual notes (or pieces) to work with. But you can create an incredible variety of unique melodies (or sequences). Yes, many notes do not sound proper if placed adjacently (creating a "crack"). But that can be solved by creating rules to avoid those combinations. Now take into consideration you can also add variety by adjusting the volume, length, and tempo of each note. Then add the ability to play multiple notes simultaneously. You can literally listen to "seemingly" infinite melodies before ever hearing a repeating one. And if done properly, there will be no "cracks" in any of them.

Even still, let's say that ALL of those possible melodies don't add enough variety. Then let's add a violin to the mix. It adds a completely different sound (or atmosphere), even if it is the same exact melody. Add a harp. Add percussion.

It's only when you start putting limitations on your "instrument(s)" that you will find problems. If you only have 3 keys instead of 88. If you only allow melodies to be 10 notes or less. If you only have a single drum and nothing else.

Basically, a game that is hand-crafted is like giving a man a fish. A game that has random generation is like teaching the man how to fish. The amount of possibilities you put into that random generation is like the environments you teach the man to fish in. If you only teach him how to fish in a lake with a cheap fishing pole and chewing gum as bait, it will do him no good in a river or the ocean. Variety is important.