It wasn’t until they ported about 70% of Skyrim Together’s revered code to the Starfield project, though, that they bumped into a problem: “This game is fucking trash.”
“I didn’t realize this until after I actually started playing the damn game a week after launch,” they say. “The game is boring, bland, and the main draw of Bethesda games, exploration in a lively and handcrafted world, was completely gone.
The modder started working on it before playing the game. It’s kind of funny in a way, but also cool that they wanted to give people multiplayer ASAP.
Thing is Skyrim wasn’t particularly handcrafted or lively either, the models for things like dungeons were repeated all the time and the NPC liveliness was lacklustre compared to eurojank games like Gothic.
That’s turning things on their head though. Daggerfall created some hype in its heyday because it was procedurally generated and so huge. But it turned out to be a gimmick and nowadays it’s just a cult classic for some people due to its Elder Scrolls pedigree and a landmark in gaming history because of the procedural generation.
hey we never know what the future holds, starfield may be something like the first big game to take advantage of procedural generation for future games that do it better with even more powerful tech. or its like daggerfall again lol
The problem is that daggerfall was impressive at the time, but now that everyone else learned how to do its one trick and modify it, its become less impressive in hindsight.
Starfield didnt do anything impressive. Nothing its done is new. Even its praise is just “well its fallout in space.” So without breaking ground and boundaries, it cant play the same tune daggerfall did.
Not sure why this is downvoted, radiant quests were a big feature in Skyrim, and were technically kinda impressive, but still repetitive. Likewise, quests for the College of Bards were mostly just a dungeon fetch quests and things.
It’s still a great game, but it was great for the bits that were handcrafted.
But give it 5-10 years and I’d be very interested to see another pass at procedural generation using machine learning, especially dialogue, could open the doors to more creativity than would be possible when doing it all by hand!
The modder started working on it before playing the game. It’s kind of funny in a way, but also cool that they wanted to give people multiplayer ASAP.
Thing is Skyrim wasn’t particularly handcrafted or lively either, the models for things like dungeons were repeated all the time and the NPC liveliness was lacklustre compared to eurojank games like Gothic.
Nothing in any of these games has been particularly hand crafted. They were a big early user of procedural generation.
people love daggerfall yet its like 99% procedural generation. maybe 100%
That’s turning things on their head though. Daggerfall created some hype in its heyday because it was procedurally generated and so huge. But it turned out to be a gimmick and nowadays it’s just a cult classic for some people due to its Elder Scrolls pedigree and a landmark in gaming history because of the procedural generation.
hey we never know what the future holds, starfield may be something like the first big game to take advantage of procedural generation for future games that do it better with even more powerful tech. or its like daggerfall again lol
The problem is that daggerfall was impressive at the time, but now that everyone else learned how to do its one trick and modify it, its become less impressive in hindsight.
Starfield didnt do anything impressive. Nothing its done is new. Even its praise is just “well its fallout in space.” So without breaking ground and boundaries, it cant play the same tune daggerfall did.
Not sure why this is downvoted, radiant quests were a big feature in Skyrim, and were technically kinda impressive, but still repetitive. Likewise, quests for the College of Bards were mostly just a dungeon fetch quests and things.
It’s still a great game, but it was great for the bits that were handcrafted.
But give it 5-10 years and I’d be very interested to see another pass at procedural generation using machine learning, especially dialogue, could open the doors to more creativity than would be possible when doing it all by hand!