Project Idea: Morrowind Rebuilt

[jayhova]

it seems to me that it would not be a huge technical challenge to simply expand the map size to include all of Tamriel. If one were to do a remake replacing the map in Daggerfall it would still not be big enough to include all of Morrowind. Let us assume for the moment that the only real technical challenges would be to represent Morrowind as someone who has completed playing Daggerfall would have expected it to look, perhaps even a person who has played Battlespire and Redguard would expect.

A bit of history for those who did not live it, the sequel to Daggerfall was supposed to start immediately after Daggerfall's very successful launch. It was eventually settled that this game would be Morrowind. Eventually, it was decided that just the island of Vvardenfell would be in the game. The Tamriel rebuilt project was started to recreate all of Morrowind and the rest of Tamriel. It was largely assumed this would be done much as the original developers did Daggerfall. Bear in mind that the game had not been released yet and it was assumed the game would be at a 1:1 scale and not the 1/100 scale it eventually was released as.

For me the question is 'what if the same team who created Daggerfall had created Morrowind?'. Clearly, the original team achieved the creation of procedurally created terrain, cities, dungeons, etc. Could that be done again to create other landmasses? How had would it be to create an active Dagoth Ur? How about glowing lava flows etc.? To start, you could certainly just plop down the major settlements from TES Arena and connect them with roads like in the original map.

[MrFlibble]

For me the question is 'what if the same team who created Daggerfall had created Morrowind?'. Clearly, the original team achieved the creation of procedurally created terrain, cities, dungeons, etc. Could that be done again to create other landmasses? How had would it be to create an active Dagoth Ur? How about glowing lava flows etc.? To start, you could certainly just plop down the major settlements from TES Arena and connect them with roads like in the original map.

This is a tricky question, in fact, because Daggerfall development clearly had problems which later games, including Battlespire and Redguard, attempted to address with various degrees of success.

The problem here is, what value would a Daggerfall-esque game set in Morrowind actually have, if it were created using the same methods of procedurally generating most locations? Daggerfall already has more than enough pseudo-variety, and the limitations of this approach were evidently understood by the developers at Bethesda. You can clearly see how they attempted to refine their design techniques using the XnGine in both Battlespire and Redguard, especially the latter when world-building is concerned. In fact, Redguard already contains the seminal features of Morrowind the game: a relatively compact island environment and an outsider/stranger protagonist around whom the story unfolds.

If you go back to Arena, with all due respect to that game, the provinces only have cosmetic differences for the most part: textures, tree sprites, NPCs' appearance, and the skyline. Even Daggerfall tried to do more variety, especially noticeable with temperate vs desert locations (and to some extent, mountain regions too, but their architecture is still for the most part simply retextured temperate architecture; but at least there are attempts to present more rough, mountainous terrain).

On the other hand, it is true that the Daggerfall -> Redguard -> Morrowind development path is not the only one possible. One could try to imagine what the developers could do if they, understanding Daggerfall's shortcomings, still wanted to continue on more or less the same track. I think there are many possibilities, some are being explored in certain DFU mods.

I would say that Daggerfall's more advanced engine was one of the factors that undermined its ambitious goals. It seems like using a more limited technology like that in Arena or Legends of Valour is better suited to create an illusion of a vast living world, simply for the fact that it leaves so much to the imagination. Daggerfall made more steps towards realism, yet paradoxically this made its non-real essence more evident. In short, the developers were still following Arena-era design mindset while using more advanced tools of a next-gen engine which demanded a completely different approach to many things. This is likely one of the reasons which prompted them to tone down the scale and focus on hand-crafted locations in later games, because otherwise they would not only underutilize the engine's capabilities, but also create less credible environments.

Concerning DFU, I've always thought that this is a very interesting venue to explore the potential of the Arena-style approach to world-building, but that would probably require to rebuild many things from the ground up. My personal dream is that perhaps a DFU-based community project -- not a DF mod but a completely new game, possibly unrelated to the TES series -- would create a comparable game that emphasizes the strengths of Daggerfall's game world while building up on it and amending the shortcomings of Bethesda's original work.

[jayhova]

This is a tricky question, in fact, because Daggerfall development clearly had problems which later games, including Battlespire and Redguard, attempted to address with various degrees of success.

The problem here is, what value would a Daggerfall-esque game set in Morrowind actually have, if it were created using the same methods of procedurally generating most locations? Daggerfall already has more than enough pseudo-variety, and the limitations of this approach were evidently understood by the developers at Bethesda. You can clearly see how they attempted to refine their design techniques using the XnGine in both Battlespire and Redguard, especially the latter when world-building is concerned. In fact, Redguard already contains the seminal features of Morrowind the game: a relatively compact island environment and an outsider/stranger protagonist around whom the story unfolds.

If you go back to Arena, with all due respect to that game, the provinces only have cosmetic differences for the most part: textures, tree sprites, NPCs' appearance, and the skyline. Even Daggerfall tried to do more variety, especially noticeable with temperate vs desert locations (and to some extent, mountain regions too, but their architecture is still for the most part simply retextured temperate architecture; but at least there are attempts to present more rough, mountainous terrain).

On the other hand, it is true that the Daggerfall -> Redguard -> Morrowind development path is not the only one possible. One could try to imagine what the developers could do if they, understanding Daggerfall's shortcomings, still wanted to continue on more or less the same track. I think there are many possibilities, some are being explored in certain DFU mods.

I would say that Daggerfall's more advanced engine was one of the factors that undermined its ambitious goals. It seems like using a more limited technology like that in Arena or Legends of Valour is better suited to create an illusion of a vast living world, simply for the fact that it leaves so much to the imagination. Daggerfall made more steps towards realism, yet paradoxically this made its non-real essence more evident. In short, the developers were still following Arena-era design mindset while using more advanced tools of a next-gen engine which demanded a completely different approach to many things. This is likely one of the reasons which prompted them to tone down the scale and focus on hand-crafted locations in later games, because otherwise they would not only underutilize the engine's capabilities, but also create less credible environments.

Concerning DFU, I've always thought that this is a very interesting venue to explore the potential of the Arena-style approach to world-building, but that would probably require to rebuild many things from the ground up. My personal dream is that perhaps a DFU-based community project -- not a DF mod but a completely new game, possibly unrelated to the TES series -- would create a comparable game that emphasizes the strengths of Daggerfall's game world while building up on it and amending the shortcomings of Bethesda's original work.

I believe the value in having a 1:1 world like Daggerfall is the immensity of it. Towns can be life-sized; countrysides can be filled with life and ecology and other things. When Morrowind came out, the feeling of scale was gone. Like a theme park there was no point in making a game the user could not explore all of. As human beings, in the real world, there are places we will never go and things we will never see but we know we could. I can go into Daggerfall and go a place I have never been in the game. I can't do that in Morrowind. To some extent the Tamreil rebuilt project addresses this but can never truly complete that vision because of the limits of the scale.

With DFU I feel sure all the things I think would be cool to see in the game will likely come to pass. Eventually, there will be real people in the cities walking places and having real simulated lives. One day there will be farms (much like in Arena) and farmers and commerce, roads, patrols, travelers, etc.

None of these things can be created for Morrowind because they are already baked in. Look how much has changed with Daggerfall. DFU is infinitely more accessible for these changes than Morrowind. This enormity of space makes it possible to do so much. If we created a blank slate what could be done with it? Morrowind is an N-scale model of a simulated world. It seems like most of the tools to create a full-sized version of that world exist.

The feeling you get with Daggerfall is like that of looking train from a distance while Morrowind and its successors is like looking at a model close up. You can imagine there is a big world that the model sits in and you can personally build all of those details but the scale will never feel there same.

[Werewolf]

For me the question is 'what if the same team who created Daggerfall had created Morrowind?'. Clearly, the original team achieved the creation of procedurally created terrain, cities, dungeons, etc. Could that be done again to create other landmasses? How had would it be to create an active Dagoth Ur? How about glowing lava flows etc.? To start, you could certainly just plop down the major settlements from TES Arena and connect them with roads like in the original map.

This is a tricky question, in fact, because Daggerfall development clearly had problems which later games, including Battlespire and Redguard, attempted to address with various degrees of success.

The problem here is, what value would a Daggerfall-esque game set in Morrowind actually have, if it were created using the same methods of procedurally generating most locations? Daggerfall already has more than enough pseudo-variety, and the limitations of this approach were evidently understood by the developers at Bethesda. You can clearly see how they attempted to refine their design techniques using the XnGine in both Battlespire and Redguard, especially the latter when world-building is concerned. In fact, Redguard already contains the seminal features of Morrowind the game: a relatively compact island environment and an outsider/stranger protagonist around whom the story unfolds.

If you go back to Arena, with all due respect to that game, the provinces only have cosmetic differences for the most part: textures, tree sprites, NPCs' appearance, and the skyline. Even Daggerfall tried to do more variety, especially noticeable with temperate vs desert locations (and to some extent, mountain regions too, but their architecture is still for the most part simply retextured temperate architecture; but at least there are attempts to present more rough, mountainous terrain).

On the other hand, it is true that the Daggerfall -> Redguard -> Morrowind development path is not the only one possible. One could try to imagine what the developers could do if they, understanding Daggerfall's shortcomings, still wanted to continue on more or less the same track. I think there are many possibilities, some are being explored in certain DFU mods.

I would say that Daggerfall's more advanced engine was one of the factors that undermined its ambitious goals. It seems like using a more limited technology like that in Arena or Legends of Valour is better suited to create an illusion of a vast living world, simply for the fact that it leaves so much to the imagination. Daggerfall made more steps towards realism, yet paradoxically this made its non-real essence more evident. In short, the developers were still following Arena-era design mindset while using more advanced tools of a next-gen engine which demanded a completely different approach to many things. This is likely one of the reasons which prompted them to tone down the scale and focus on hand-crafted locations in later games, because otherwise they would not only underutilize the engine's capabilities, but also create less credible environments.

Concerning DFU, I've always thought that this is a very interesting venue to explore the potential of the Arena-style approach to world-building, but that would probably require to rebuild many things from the ground up. My personal dream is that perhaps a DFU-based community project -- not a DF mod but a completely new game, possibly unrelated to the TES series -- would create a comparable game that emphasizes the strengths of Daggerfall's game world while building up on it and amending the shortcomings of Bethesda's original work.

I speculate that Daggerfall had a vastly inferior countryside, vastly inferior dungeons, and less immersive cities then Arena partly because the full 3D engine made the procedural generation much more difficult to code. Arena had so many kinds of dungeons, you had graveyards with unique textures (unlike Daggerfall’s which are just tiny dungeons,) mines, castles, caves, even an “outside” dungeon in the woods with Elden Grove. Daggerfall was so much deeper in mechanics and raw content but the procedural elements, while probably deeper technically, fell flat. Julian even said that he did code more complex terrain but it didn’t end up in the game, seems numerous things were developed but didn’t make it in with because of coding issues. Maybe if Daggerfall used a raycasting engine it would’ve been easier to implement those things

Someone needs to ask Julian about the dungeons and why Daggerfall’s were a massive step down from Arena in terms of variety and realism. Arena’s dungeons feel more like they were once actual places that once served a purpose whereas Daggerfall’s define the trope of “dungeons that exist to be dungeons.” With Daggerfall technically having a variety of dungeon “types” but all being exactly the same just with different enemies, I believe that originally it would’ve had many different types of dungeons with distinctive layouts and textures but limitations prevented that

[jayhova]

I speculate that Daggerfall had a vastly inferior countryside, vastly inferior dungeons, and less immersive cities then Arena partly because the full 3D engine made the procedural generation much more difficult to code. Arena had so many kinds of dungeons, you had graveyards with unique textures (unlike Daggerfall’s which are just tiny dungeons,) mines, castles, caves, even an “outside” dungeon in the woods with Elden Grove. Daggerfall was so much deeper in mechanics and raw content but the procedural elements, while probably deeper technically, fell flat. Julian even said that he did code more complex terrain but it didn’t end up in the game, seems numerous things were developed but didn’t make it in with because of coding issues. Maybe if Daggerfall used a raycasting engine it would’ve been easier to implement those things

Someone needs to ask Julian about the dungeons and why Daggerfall’s were a massive step down from Arena in terms of variety and realism. Arena’s dungeons feel more like they were once actual places that once served a purpose whereas Daggerfall’s define the trope of “dungeons that exist to be dungeons.” With Daggerfall technically having a variety of dungeon “types” but all being exactly the same just with different enemies, I believe that originally it would’ve had many different types of dungeons with distinctive layouts and textures but limitations prevented that

There was a definite shift in the dungeon type between the two games. Dungeons in Arena were flat. Often there would be a connecting sewer between rooms. The levels were set up much like D&D levels of the time. From a player's perspective, they operated much like Doom levels; you would find the way down to the next level and the game would transport you there. From a developer's perspective the new Daggerfall way of doing things opened up the dungeon to allow the player to move freely between levels.

It should be noted that expectations for development time between games was much shorter in the 90s. The cycle was 2 years to a complete, playable version. Given that everything would be done from scratch it is amazing what they came out with. Cities were about the same (reasonably large and explorable) with DF cities being of significantly higher resolution. The large change was the continuous world. Cities in Arena occupied there own virtual space with Daggerfall cities existing in a contiguous space with all other locations.

I imagine Daggerfall would have been a very different game had it had the budget and development time of Skyrim.

[Werewolf]

I speculate that Daggerfall had a vastly inferior countryside, vastly inferior dungeons, and less immersive cities then Arena partly because the full 3D engine made the procedural generation much more difficult to code. Arena had so many kinds of dungeons, you had graveyards with unique textures (unlike Daggerfall’s which are just tiny dungeons,) mines, castles, caves, even an “outside” dungeon in the woods with Elden Grove. Daggerfall was so much deeper in mechanics and raw content but the procedural elements, while probably deeper technically, fell flat. Julian even said that he did code more complex terrain but it didn’t end up in the game, seems numerous things were developed but didn’t make it in with because of coding issues. Maybe if Daggerfall used a raycasting engine it would’ve been easier to implement those things

Someone needs to ask Julian about the dungeons and why Daggerfall’s were a massive step down from Arena in terms of variety and realism. Arena’s dungeons feel more like they were once actual places that once served a purpose whereas Daggerfall’s define the trope of “dungeons that exist to be dungeons.” With Daggerfall technically having a variety of dungeon “types” but all being exactly the same just with different enemies, I believe that originally it would’ve had many different types of dungeons with distinctive layouts and textures but limitations prevented that

There was a definite shift in the dungeon type between the two games. Dungeons in Arena were flat. Often there would be a connecting sewer between rooms. The levels were set up much like D&D levels of the time. From a player's perspective, they operated much like Doom levels; you would find the way down to the next level and the game would transport you there. From a developer's perspective the new Daggerfall way of doing things opened up the dungeon to allow the player to move freely between levels.

It should be noted that expectations for development time between games was much shorter in the 90s. The cycle was 2 years to a complete, playable version. Given that everything would be done from scratch it is amazing what they came out with. Cities were about the same (reasonably large and explorable) with DF cities being of significantly higher resolution. The large change was the continuous world. Cities in Arena occupied there own virtual space with Daggerfall cities existing in a contiguous space with all other locations.

I imagine Daggerfall would have been a very different game had it had the budget and development time of Skyrim.

Yeah I believe Daggerfall’s dungeons had a good concept by allowing you to travel between floors, opening up new possibilities. But the execution was surreal, every dungeon is this maze of countless floors that make zero logical sense. I think the dungeons were hurt by the limitations, looks like they weren’t able to get the “move freely between floors” thing done properly. Thinking about it, Arena-like dungeons but where there are easy access to the floors sound amazing and an upgrade from Arena, making the dungeons more open-ended and sophisticated. Daggerfall’s dungeons were more open-ended at Leary but to this day are controversial to the point where Daggerfall Unity has an option to tone down the dungeons. Still doesn’t explain why all dungeon types are all exactly the same except with different enemies.

And a Daggerfall-like game with Skyrim’s budget would crush Skyrim. I have nothing against Todd Howard, he comes across as a nice guy, but he’s an average developer who’s able to make great games because he has a dream budget. More experimental and visionary developers with Todd’s budget probably could’ve made a game much bigger and more complex then Skyrim. Todd is, again, an average developer who seems content with making “good” games, and is able to with his budget. But he doesn’t think outside the box or try to advance RPGs, in fact he helped simplify the RPG. Todd’s idea of improving the game is to have random dragon encounters and making the character a chosen one with overpowered magical abilities, which is very different from Daggerfall adding countless features to deepen the RPG experience and give the feeling of a truly massive fantasy world far bigger then you are. He’s like if a corporate executive who wants to sell copies was a game dev. Maybe Todd’s lack of ambition but ability to sell copies is why he is where he is today and the creators of the Elder Scrolls, a series that originally set out to be an a RPG like no other, aren’t in the high place he is in. He’s mediocre, but he just so happens to have a talented team of artists and designers that are able to produce good games with cool lore and art design and atmosphere with his mediocre, almost pessimistic idea of an RPG.

[Werewolf]

There was a definite shift in the dungeon type between the two games. Dungeons in Arena were flat. Often there would be a connecting sewer between rooms. The levels were set up much like D&D levels of the time. From a player's perspective, they operated much like Doom levels; you would find the way down to the next level and the game would transport you there. From a developer's perspective the new Daggerfall way of doing things opened up the dungeon to allow the player to move freely between levels.

It should be noted that expectations for development time between games was much shorter in the 90s. The cycle was 2 years to a complete, playable version. Given that everything would be done from scratch it is amazing what they came out with. Cities were about the same (reasonably large and explorable) with DF cities being of significantly higher resolution. The large change was the continuous world. Cities in Arena occupied there own virtual space with Daggerfall cities existing in a contiguous space with all other locations.

I imagine Daggerfall would have been a very different game had it had the budget and development time of Skyrim.

Yeah I believe Daggerfall’s dungeons had a good concept by allowing you to travel between floors, opening up new possibilities. But the execution was surreal, every dungeon is this maze of countless floors that make zero logical sense. I think the dungeons were hurt by the limitations, looks like they weren’t able to get the “move freely between floors” thing done properly. Thinking about it, Arena-like dungeons but where there are easy access to the floors sound amazing and an upgrade from Arena, making the dungeons more open-ended and sophisticated. Daggerfall’s dungeons were more open-ended at least but to this day are controversial to the point where Daggerfall Unity has an option to tone down the dungeons. Still doesn’t explain why all dungeon types are all exactly the same except with different enemies.

And a Daggerfall-like game with Skyrim’s budget would crush Skyrim. I have nothing against Todd Howard, he comes across as a nice guy, but he’s an average developer who’s able to make great games because he has a dream budget. More experimental and visionary developers with Todd’s budget probably could’ve made a game much bigger and more complex then Skyrim. Todd is, again, an average developer who seems content with making “good” games, and is able to with his budget. But he doesn’t think outside the box or try to advance RPGs, in fact he helped simplify the RPG. Todd’s idea of improving the game is to have random dragon encounters and making the character a chosen one with overpowered magical abilities, which is very different from Daggerfall adding countless features to deepen the RPG experience and give the feeling of a truly massive fantasy world far bigger then you are. He’s like if a corporate executive who wants to sell copies was a game dev. Maybe Todd’s lack of ambition but ability to sell copies is why he is where he is today and the creators of the Elder Scrolls, a series that originally set out to be an a RPG like no other, aren’t in the high place he is in. He’s mediocre, but he just so happens to have a talented team of artists and designers that are able to produce good games with cool lore and art design and atmosphere with his mediocre, almost pessimistic idea of an RPG. Like, Starfield will have only 1000 planets. That’s still massive, but it’s small potatoes compared to 2016’s No Man’s Sky with 18 quintillion. Todd has a much bigger budget, a much bigger team, and much better hardware, then 2016’s No Man’s Sky, but he still manages to bring only 1000 planets compared to 18,000,000,000,000,000,000.

[jayhova]

Yeah, I believe Daggerfall’s dungeons had a good concept by allowing you to travel between floors, opening up new possibilities. But the execution was surreal, every dungeon is this maze of countless floors that make zero logical sense. I think the dungeons were hurt by the limitations, looks like they weren’t able to get the “move freely between floors” thing done properly. Thinking about it, Arena-like dungeons but where there are easy access to the floors sound amazing and an upgrade from Arena, making the dungeons more open-ended and sophisticated. Daggerfall’s dungeons were more open-ended at Leary but to this day are controversial to the point where Daggerfall Unity has an option to tone down the dungeons. Still doesn’t explain why all dungeon types are all exactly the same except with different enemies.

And a Daggerfall-like game with Skyrim’s budget would crush Skyrim. I have nothing against Todd Howard, he comes across as a nice guy, but he’s an average developer who’s able to make great games because he has a dream budget. More experimental and visionary developers with Todd’s budget probably could’ve made a game much bigger and more complex then Skyrim. Todd is, again, an average developer who seems content with making “good” games, and is able to with his budget. But he doesn’t think outside the box or try to advance RPGs, in fact he helped simplify the RPG. Todd’s idea of improving the game is to have random dragon encounters and making the character a chosen one with overpowered magical abilities, which is very different from Daggerfall adding countless features to deepen the RPG experience and give the feeling of a truly massive fantasy world far bigger then you are. He’s like if a corporate executive who wants to sell copies was a game dev. Maybe Todd’s lack of ambition but ability to sell copies is why he is where he is today and the creators of the Elder Scrolls, a series that originally set out to be an a RPG like no other, aren’t in the high place he is in. He’s mediocre, but he just so happens to have a talented team of artists and designers that are able to produce good games with cool lore and art design and atmosphere with his mediocre, almost pessimistic idea of an RPG.

I think you are right. When Julian developed the ability to make monolithic dungeons they took the idea too far. They wound up doing more than they should because they could. Mind you, mines are very much like this. They follow the ore veins. However, not every underground dwelling would have been a hollowed-out mine. Many would have been oubliettes and dungeons and vast underground storage and training areas for castles. There simply was not the kind of variety we should expect to see. However, compared to Arena it was amazing. I certainly would like to see better dungeons in Daggerfall with more variety, etc. I would also like to see some variety in lighting sources, not just the ever-burning torches and lanterns. There were some very obviously magical light sources in Arena. I'd like more variety in dungeons and a bit of import from TES games of the era.

[Werewolf]

Yeah, I believe Daggerfall’s dungeons had a good concept by allowing you to travel between floors, opening up new possibilities. But the execution was surreal, every dungeon is this maze of countless floors that make zero logical sense. I think the dungeons were hurt by the limitations, looks like they weren’t able to get the “move freely between floors” thing done properly. Thinking about it, Arena-like dungeons but where there are easy access to the floors sound amazing and an upgrade from Arena, making the dungeons more open-ended and sophisticated. Daggerfall’s dungeons were more open-ended at Leary but to this day are controversial to the point where Daggerfall Unity has an option to tone down the dungeons. Still doesn’t explain why all dungeon types are all exactly the same except with different enemies.

And a Daggerfall-like game with Skyrim’s budget would crush Skyrim. I have nothing against Todd Howard, he comes across as a nice guy, but he’s an average developer who’s able to make great games because he has a dream budget. More experimental and visionary developers with Todd’s budget probably could’ve made a game much bigger and more complex then Skyrim. Todd is, again, an average developer who seems content with making “good” games, and is able to with his budget. But he doesn’t think outside the box or try to advance RPGs, in fact he helped simplify the RPG. Todd’s idea of improving the game is to have random dragon encounters and making the character a chosen one with overpowered magical abilities, which is very different from Daggerfall adding countless features to deepen the RPG experience and give the feeling of a truly massive fantasy world far bigger then you are. He’s like if a corporate executive who wants to sell copies was a game dev. Maybe Todd’s lack of ambition but ability to sell copies is why he is where he is today and the creators of the Elder Scrolls, a series that originally set out to be an a RPG like no other, aren’t in the high place he is in. He’s mediocre, but he just so happens to have a talented team of artists and designers that are able to produce good games with cool lore and art design and atmosphere with his mediocre, almost pessimistic idea of an RPG.

I think you are right. When Julian developed the ability to make monolithic dungeons they took the idea too far. They wound up doing more than they should because they could. Mind you, mines are very much like this. They follow the ore veins. However, not every underground dwelling would have been a hollowed-out mine. Many would have been oubliettes and dungeons and vast underground storage and training areas for castles. There simply was not the kind of variety we should expect to see. However, compared to Arena it was amazing. I certainly would like to see better dungeons in Daggerfall with more variety, etc. I would also like to see some variety in lighting sources, not just the ever-burning torches and lanterns. There were some very obviously magical light sources in Arena. I'd like more variety in dungeons and a bit of import from TES games of the era.

The current dungeons in Daggerfall have their place but I want new dungeon types. I want a Volcanic Cave to actually be a cave with lava streams and not the same as any other dungeon. Someone would have to make entirely new blocks that are themed appropriately and replace some of the current dungeons with them or maybe even place the new dungeons into the game world

[MrFlibble]

I believe the value in having a 1:1 world like Daggerfall is the immensity of it. Towns can be life-sized; countrysides can be filled with life and ecology and other things. When Morrowind came out, the feeling of scale was gone. Like a theme park there was no point in making a game the user could not explore all of. As human beings, in the real world, there are places we will never go and things we will never see but we know we could. I can go into Daggerfall and go a place I have never been in the game. I can't do that in Morrowind.

What I meant to say is that if one created a Morrowind world using exactly the same random generation methods as in the original Daggerfall, wouldn't this result in a very similar samey world with all towns and cities pretty much looking like one another?

Surely, the design methods must be improved somehow for this purported Morrowind-world game to have any value of its own. I can only speculate, but the key would either lie in making more hand-crafted content, or to devise sophisticated AI algorithms that would generate more natural-looking locations which would have variety.

The latter seems like an interesting possibility, if the AI were able to create different town and city types based on terrain, climate and possible political relations between settlements. Doesn't Dwarf Fortress do something of this kind already, even without stuff like deep learning AI, just by using algorithms?

The feeling you get with Daggerfall is like that of looking train from a distance while Morrowind and its successors is like looking at a model close up. You can imagine there is a big world that the model sits in and you can personally build all of those details but the scale will never feel there same.

That's a very interesting analogy, I've never thought about game worlds from this point of view before, but it seems very productive. Thanks for sharing this idea!

I think you are right. When Julian developed the ability to make monolithic dungeons they took the idea too far. They wound up doing more than they should because they could. Mind you, mines are very much like this. They follow the ore veins. However, not every underground dwelling would have been a hollowed-out mine. Many would have been oubliettes and dungeons and vast underground storage and training areas for castles. There simply was not the kind of variety we should expect to see. However, compared to Arena it was amazing. I certainly would like to see better dungeons in Daggerfall with more variety, etc.

I will speak in the defence of DF dungeons. You're totally right that Arena dungeons often feel more like actual places, because they were designed that way, and again, the more simple game engine facilitated this illusion. You can find the same if you compare Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom. Doom has infinitely more complex level architecture, but Wolf3D uses simple clues like decoration sprites to convey the idea of where you are. You can easily tell a kitchen from a storeroom or a mess hall or a prison cell in Wolf3D, while in Doom it's all mazes that don't really resemble any particular place at all.

However, it is not true that DF dungeons do not have variety. They certainly do, and the developers clearly tried to make "places" out of individual rooms and dungeon blocks. The problem is that when this is thrown together by a random generator, the sense of place is gone, you get locations that look like building interiors and real underground dungeons, caves and crypts, and sometimes even areas that look like they belong outdoors (like a courtyard with towers and sometimes, catapults, or a cattle pen with a cow in it) all mixed together without any sense or rhyme. This is exacerbated by the fact that dungeons layouts are seemingly random assigned to dungeon "types", so you can arrive at what is called a "castle" to only find a mound for an entrance and a maze of caverns inside, and so on.

That, and also don't forget that the devs were clearly only learning the potential of XnGine's true 3D environments. This is clearly underutilized, and as a result, many rooms look empty and incomplete, contributing to the feel that nothing makes sense in DF dungeons. I think it is very obvious that with some more experience and direction, some very impressive and more consistent dungeon locations could be created, including believable castle or fort interiors, underground passages, crypts and so on.

As for my defence of the dungeons as they are, it's very simple. They're enjoyable on their own, at least for me, because they effectively provide a roguelike-esque experience, and are fun to explore, even though they make little sense as realistic locations.

Also guys, could you please not quote entire posts? it just clutters the thread, making it more difficult to navigate.