EPTOn June 16 2015 08:15 TheYango wrote:
Once upon a time, there was a game called TES2: Daggerfall.
All told, the game was pretty mediocre, but it tried a lot of really amazing things. The game world was one of the largest that's ever been in a game, and while core dungeons and landmarks were hand-crafted, a lot of towns and side-dungeons were procedurally-generated. To give you an example of the scale, world generation creates a world that has ~15,000 towns and ~750,000 NPCs, and that's 10,000x the land area of Morrowind, Skyrim or Oblivion. Of course, the technology of 1996 was nowhere near good enough to make that kind of dynamic world have any real depth. But there was ambition there that made you think "in 10 years, if they make another game like this, it's going to be fucking awesome".
Then Morrowind came out. The world was tiny, none of the massive expanse of Daggerfall, none of the procedural generation stuff. They hand-crafted everything, though, and there was a remarkable attention to detail. It wasn't as ambitious as Daggerfall, but it got all the little things right, so on the whole it was a more fun game to play than Daggerfall was.
Then Oblivion came out, and it was a piece of shit. It had none of the ambition of Daggerfall, nor the attention to detail and meticulousness that went into Morrowind. And I went "what the fuck?" But maybe it was a fluke. NOPE. They got the license to Fallout 3, and not only did they prove that their prior butchery of their own franchise was indeed not a fluke, but they also butchered a second IP that wasn't theirs to begin with in the process.
Now we're almost 20 years later, and despite the advances in technology, I still don't have my damn modern sequel to Daggerfall because Bethesda's too interested in voice acting everything and letting you play with your face like it's made of clay.
To be fair, he didn't really "miss" it because the console games that came out in that same era were some of the greatest of all time as well, especially 2D and 3D platformers.
Once upon a time, there was a game called TES2: Daggerfall.
All told, the game was pretty mediocre, but it tried a lot of really amazing things. The game world was one of the largest that's ever been in a game, and while core dungeons and landmarks were hand-crafted, a lot of towns and side-dungeons were procedurally-generated. To give you an example of the scale, world generation creates a world that has ~15,000 towns and ~750,000 NPCs, and that's 10,000x the land area of Morrowind, Skyrim or Oblivion. Of course, the technology of 1996 was nowhere near good enough to make that kind of dynamic world have any real depth. But there was ambition there that made you think "in 10 years, if they make another game like this, it's going to be fucking awesome".
Then Morrowind came out. The world was tiny, none of the massive expanse of Daggerfall, none of the procedural generation stuff. They hand-crafted everything, though, and there was a remarkable attention to detail. It wasn't as ambitious as Daggerfall, but it got all the little things right, so on the whole it was a more fun game to play than Daggerfall was.
Then Oblivion came out, and it was a piece of shit. It had none of the ambition of Daggerfall, nor the attention to detail and meticulousness that went into Morrowind. And I went "what the fuck?" But maybe it was a fluke. NOPE. They got the license to Fallout 3, and not only did they prove that their prior butchery of their own franchise was indeed not a fluke, but they also butchered a second IP that wasn't theirs to begin with in the process.
Now we're almost 20 years later, and despite the advances in technology, I still don't have my damn modern sequel to Daggerfall because Bethesda's too interested in voice acting everything and letting you play with your face like it's made of clay.
To be fair, he didn't really "miss" it because the console games that came out in that same era were some of the greatest of all time as well, especially 2D and 3D platformers.
This reminds me of a game I once downloaded that was just a few kilobytes but managed to cram a whole 3d FPS into it using the magic of procedural generation. The game itself wasn't too special but the fact that it could exist made me think. I'm still not sure I've seen a game which uses procedural generation to its truly impressive potential, although the eternally-in-development Overgrowth does some cool animation blending and environment stuff.
