The random loot didn't bother me, in fact, Morrowind had random loot in some containers and on random enemy spawns too, and I was fine with that, what bothered me was the lack of non-random loot.

I'm fine with random loot in games, and even random enemy spawns, what I DON'T want is randomly generated environments, items, and ESPECIALLY not randomly generated quests.

I'm fine with randomly generated terrain as long as they touch it up.

But if they've been working on it for two years, I hardly see why they'd be at the point of thinking of "should we use randomly generated content or not?"

Every cave should have a story, every ruin should have a tale, even if it's only an implied one. It's just annoying to run through a ruin of an ancient evil race (I'm talking to you, Ayleids. Burning children alive and mutilating people for sport and entertainment is not cool) and run into a dead end without thinking "That's what must have happened here!" or "What an interesting place."

I loved the cave with a ruin inside of it where it described a "child of Meridia" ravened the place, and you find the dead scholar and think immediately "I have to get out of here!"

I would go so far [and I did :blush2: ] maybe it was because I was going up against people with names in Morrowind instead of "generic bandit #2" :shrug:
If there is one thing I despise it's that. But I totally have a double standard because I don't mind seeing "guard" or "ordinator" and it makes sense for bandits because you wouldn't know there name or take the time to learn it.... But I still hate it.

All the TES games have had some procedurally generated content so I've no hard and fast objection to it, its just a matter of which bits should be totally handcrafted, which should be procedurally generated and then touched up by a developer, and which elements can be left to be entirely procedurally generated.

I'm a little confused. I'm seeing people talking about 2 different definitions of 'procedurally generated' in this thread.

1. Content is procedurally/randomly (that's not the same thing, is it?) generated as you play the game. Random quests, random NPCs... Every game is different.
2. Bethesda uses a random landscape/dungeon generator to create their world with to save time instead of handcrafting everything, and then tweaks it to their liking. Every game is exactly the same.

That's because there is no theoretical difference in those approaches. If you take your game version 1 and restart it with exactly the same parameters ("seed value"), they will generate exactly the same content - just like the game version 2. If the game designers put a predefined "seed" into the game (which you don't have to use, mind you ...), it's even exactly like game version 2 for all players and all installs of the game. The seed together with the procedural (or random) generation algorithm then basically turns into an extremely efficient data compression format - possibly even going so far as compressing several gigabytes of game data into a few kilobytes of data to distribute. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger, which manages to pack a whole modern FPS into 96 kilobytes of game code and data.

As for difference between random generation and procedural generation:

A random generation algorithm generates the end state of the game world directly.This is only really good for low-frequency, low-amplitude details (say, the position, length and orientation of every individual grass blade in a game of a scope such as Oblivion), or as a starting point for further tweaking.

A procedural generation algorithm takes a starting state (which can be blank, randomly generated, hand-crafted or anything inbetween) and applies its methods to it over and over until some end state has been reached. Examples for the end state conditions are:
* Enough "time" has passed (though they can work in "reverse" too and generate a history backwards for any given end-state).
* The situation has "stabilised", whichever variables we want stable (for example the relative wildlife populations).
* A specific set of boundary conditions / goals has been reached (this is the case when we want to seamlessly blend procedurally generated with hand-crafted content, for example landscapes with towns and the roads between them).
* Generally, a "fitness function" for the data reaches an, ideally global, maximum value.

Sorry, but what I hate about Morrowind's dungeons is that they either had an Uber artifact or they are just horribly generic.

Terrain creation isn't too much of a burden on time and money when we have a Morrowind/Oblivion scale game (Which, we most likely are).

If we stick with the Art example again, a randomly generated game is like a photograph. Sure, it looks nice, but you can just tell the perfection makes it quite generic and unimpressive.

A painting, on the other hand, may have design flaws from human error, but we earn to appreciate them. There's no need to stick to certain basic princibles and the artist is free to create what they want, where they want. We can see the imagination of the artist and the closer to being realistic it is, the greater awe we get from the painting, for some reason. Also vice versa. (Van Gough's stuff, for example)


My point is, a computer generated game will be just that. Computer generated. It might look nice and realistic, but it fails to have the flair of human imagination and inginuity. For example, in Morrowind, in Arilles Tradehouse, there are two fireplaces, one on top of the other, upside down. It gives us a feel of an inperfection in the design. It's a very simple technique that I quite appreciate. A computer would never think of that.

The game world is one of the most important parts of the game to a lot of people. We want it to have the care and attention it deserves. Humans will always be more creative and imaginative than computers for quite some time now.

Not to say that I'm completely against randomly generated content. Just in world design. I want to have random encounters with random NPC's in the wilderness. I want to be able to get random quests from the Fighter's Guild ala Daggerfall. I want to find random quests in inns and on the streets. Randomisation can be a good thing. (Though poorly implemented in Oblivion)


And, as a final note, just to eliminate flaming I often see due to lack of this phrase: imo.

I'm all for generated content that breathes life in a dynamic living world. However, it has to be in a way that makes sense. The world itself (terrains, landscapes, towns, dungeons, caves, etc.) should change very little if at all. The only thing that makes sense to change at the world level is climate (random weather and cyclical seasonal) change and anything tied to major quests (Kvatch in Oblivion for example).

I do not like randomly generated dungeons/landscapes because I want to be able to visit these locations again and know what to expect. One of the hallmarks of RPGs is they try to recreate another world, but that world has to make sense. Just as it doesn't match reality for your classrooms to be randomly located every time you went to school, it likewise doesn't make sense for a dungeon or landscape to be randomly generated either. I know it may seemingly increase replay, but I for one prefer believability over replay (and I find myself returning more to believable games anyway).

Randomly-generated loot must make sense as well; it must match with reality according to what I would find believable. Common mass-produced items would be acceptable as random loot; just like how finding a penny is nothing unusual and quite common (and seemingly random). Unique items should NEVER be randomly generated. If the item is special and uniquely named then it makes sense for it to be found only in known locations. I want the unique "uber sword of mass pwnage" to be found only and always in one location.

It does make sense for certain side quests, especially from situations/positions held in perpetuity, to be randomly generated. I can see this most with the Fighter's Guild. However, there is a great danger here that I will present in my final point:

Randomly-generated content only makes sense as long as the player is not perceiving the random generation. The gaping vulnerability of random content generation is that eventually the patterns employed are realized by the player, which subsequently kills the immersion of a believable world. Once the cookie-cutter is revealed, the excitement and replay-value disappears rapidly. If random-generation is to be employed, it must be done so in a way that matches with reality and makes sense. I want to feel like, when playing the game, that I've been transported into another world.

Procedural doesn't mean "random", it's actually the opposite of random.

By designing certain rules, it's possible to generate an endless variety of results without using randomization tables, it's all in the math.

Example: Instead of designing 1000 different trees and place the either randomly or manually on a map, you let a computer emulate the growth of a forest.
That way, every tree will be an unique object and it's placement would make sense as everything is created from an array of rules just like nature.

Off course, it would require tremendous calculating power so it cannot be done properly in real time any time soon, but a company could develop software that could speed up the design of lush and realistic worlds by a thousandfold.

Still better than Oblivions super-extremely-horribly generic dungeons.

Not better.
Equally stupid.
I cannot defend Oblivion's dungeons, fun as they where.

:goodjob:

You have grasped what I was struggling to say, because English is not my first language and I had a really hard time trying to solidify those ideas into sentences, but I'm glad there are people who would grasp the meaning behind those mumbling, to the core.

As our friend has said, generating game content procedurally and using random seed in the process, does not mean we want to actually make a random world, but it can be used as an extremely efficient data compression format, and help us making games with the area size of daggerfall, and with the surface detail of morrowind and oblivion, that fits in a DVD or two.

But it means that we can have random content as well, or real time change to the landscape, as seasonal effects, or changes to the landscape after a war, or harvest and so on...

Believe me, if we embrace the procedural content generation to the heart, and use it for landscapes, dungeons, towns, buildings, populations, events, quests, voices, and eventually even models and textures, we can have whole planets, full of distinct details, full of life, and full of semi-unique events and probably quests, in relatively minimal data storage, like a few DVDs.

I do not say that we should migrate fully to that era and even use those generated textures right away, but I say that we will end up there, in not too far a future, and it will open up a whole, unlimited world of opportunities for us.

But for now, procedurally generated landscape and it's content, would let us cover really big surfaces with acceptable detail, if we can develop some intelligent, cooperative, and adaptive landscape generators, (I have an idea how we can do exactly that), and if we can make intelligent local and global event generators, like what I have described in some of my previous threads, we can make procedurally generated simple and complex events and fill those expansive lands with life.

And we can a quest system over that event management system that could let us have procedurally generated quests with their distinct stories and rewards, (again I want to write about those methods, but my threads somehow get locked away).

In all those phases from land to quests, from body to soul, the designers can control the elements to the last detail and make those aspects of the game as unique as they want, so that we can have a main land that is manually designed to the last detail, and also main quests, and main stories of the guilds, and so on...

But we can leave the lands outside of the main story to the engine and let that produce the land and event, but warn the players that they are straying from the main plot.

OK, enough of that and I do not have more time to continue, so I let people go on for now.

They are no way equal. I'd choose morrowind's dungeons over Oblivion's any day. Morrowind hardly had generic dungeons, and the few that were still made some sense.

Procedural generation is a very useful development tool, but the generated data needs to be checked or "tweaked" by a living, breathing human being to insure that the program didn't do anything monumentally stupid, or glaringly awkward. Knowing how "anything that can go wrong, will", a random routine will INEVITABLY produce the worst possible combination of available elements, and tend to do so in the most obvious and important places. In other words, it makes a good starting point for a "hand placed" world, where 3/4 of the "routine" work is already done for you, so you can spend more time and energy on making it "better", instead of just making it in the first place.

The only alternatives are to either:
(A) simplfy the available choices so that nothing can go wrong, with the inevitable side effect that it "looks" procedurally generated, primitive, and "fake", as was done in DF.
(B) live with having occasional glaringly bad combinations of juxtaposed elements in inappropriate places, which also looks "fake".

Bethesda spends less time landscaping and more time on mechanics and gameplay.

Dark Cloud 2 anyone.

Replay value times infinity.