Is it even possible to have a game with moderately good graphics the size of Daggerfall?

World size? Yes, but the resources required are rather high. Game size? Daggerfall is small in comparison to other games.

Also, I think this belongs in General Discussion or in the Series forum.

Small? Daggerfall was roughly the size of Great Britain.

Of course. The problem is that it would probably have to be randomly generated, so you'd lose a lot of what makes games like Skyrim interesting.

Small as in game size, not world size.

Aye, was gonna say exactly what Alecto said.

Edit: I think the only way you could have a game that size again (geographically) is if random generated terrain underwent some significant advances. Right now they would produce some underwhelming scenery, but who knows what the future can hold. Having something the size of Daggerfall hand-made would be unrealistic though.

Well, if it's there, I'll explore it no matter the size.

Daggerfall is (so Bethesda says) around 487,000 square kilometers, and has over 15,000 places to visit. But most of that was randomly generated - I don't know if its possible to have a game this size without the random generation. Maybe after years and years and years and years of production...

as a daggerfall lover (i was there on first release) i can tell you it did not keep everything in memory the dungeon layouts were all random the positions of stuff was all set but generally it was all cookie cutter. i am sure i will be corrected on some of that as i am going on memories with no programming knowledge.

I wouldn't wont a game that big ><

A procedurally developed world of that size would likely require some sort of template system, rather than developing the world on a more detailed basis. (The problem with the latter is it would likely require too much disk space.) An alternative would be having worlds generated on your computer - some areas would no doubt be pre-rended and hand crafted, but for the rest you could have a minecraft-like system of world generation. Although if someone does a lot of exploration this could result in a tremendously large save file, so tesselating larger templates might still make more sense.

So is it possible? Yes. But like Daggerfall it wold still have a problem with the world being extremely same-y after a while.

FO3 and Skyrim were hand-built worlds because Oblivion's terrain generator wasn't up to the task, but Oblivion was far from the last word in procedural terrain. With more investment in that area they could procedurally generate landscape equal in quality to Skyrim's. Quest generation can also be pushed way beyond what we've seen from Radiant. The sticking point would be voices. Most dialog would have to be unvoiced or read by text-to-speech software.

Dwarf fortress.

If you had a good algorithm and enough resources you could avoid the same-y feeling. I think the current Beth team could do a game like this... In about a decade. But what a game would it be.

Yup, I have to agree that the problem becomes randomly generated content. SWG was absolutely GIGANTIC which is why I loved it after going from EverQuest Online Adventures to PC MMO gaming. So far i've yet to see any worlds as big as SWG and EQOA when dealing with content. Only thing that seems to come close to that world is FO3/FONV, but still they are relatively small.

I also have to echo what others are saying that it takes an immense amount of resources to sustain such a world. Playing FO3 I could see what was being done to give that "Seemless" effect which works 90% of the time. However, that other 10% of the time it just doesn't work too well as you zone in seeing corpses drop to the ground, etc... .

Hopefully in the future we will see seamless worlds where there is little to no loading screens.

After a whole hell of a lot longer than, say, Skyrim's world or Oblivion's world, or Morrowind's world. I guess most people don't have a problem with walking up 'large' mountains in a matter of 60 seconds and coming back down in a matter of 10, or walking from a village of 2 merchants to a city of... 5 in a matter of 3-4 minutes and perceiving the game world as 'huge'.

I greatly prefer the handcrafted worlds of Bethesda's later games. I wasn't even half way through the main quest of Daggerfall before I started using cheat codes to warp to the end of dungeons, and after a few jaunts around the less central provinces I gave up visiting them as well - every location felt the same.

I do realize that different people have different tastes, and for some the breadth of a world compensates, but for me it didn't take long before Daggerfall's world felt surprisingly small.

Technically, yes. However, as much as I enjoyed Daggerfall back then, I don't think I would bother with something as random


I'm not sure if i understand what you mean. Even if you had large templates that you tesselate dynamically when needed, you should have to save them once uncovered, shouldn't you?

Maybe if it was something story wise, like being in a daedric realm, where all the world would change each 24h...

I'm not going to disagree to the possibility of feeling that way, because it's highly probable. To me it isn't so much the execution of Daggerfall as it is the idea, heart, and attempt to cover as much ground as possible in terms of content and dynamics. But look at Diablo 2 for instance, if you ever played it a great deal online (and I guess you can look at Diablo 1 as well) you know that the ability to randomly generate aspects of the levels is the only thing that made the game playable over time. If they took Skyrim as it is, and added a random generator to populate cities, increase their buildings/size, and to insert randomly generated terrain between PoI, it would have made a game worth more than 2 weeks of my time.

Hand crafted content is a must, but it is just too limited. It's like ancient architecture: beautiful, strong, massive, detailed, few and far between, and highly unpractical. Blend in some random generation for depth, and to accentuate the PoIs by contrast.

Edit: For a linear story-telling, character building game, 100% handcrafted works. For a game that wants to be 'huge' and free roam, we need a compromise.

Minecraft does that already. Prior to their 1.8 patch, if you started heading in one direction, you'd travel 12,550 KM before hitting the end of the world. I believe 1.8 removed that barrier, so now it just keeps generating more terrain. In minecraft, you have a 3d guy that runs at roughly the same pace as your character in Skyrim, so traveling that distance, even if it were completely flat and you could lock autorun in place, would take a ridiculous amount of time. And that's just in one direction. And before you say "but that's not an rpg", there is a very cool mod out that can pretty much turn it into one. http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/227822-11-millenaire-npc-village-216-japanese-outpost-new-indian-lone-buildings-fixes/

I never played Daggerfall, someone above said it was 400,000 square miles or something like that. That's a big number to be sure, but what was the game scale?

I mean you can play strategy games that cover entire continents or the world, but the scale is tiny. So, if your character was walking in a strait line, how long would it take to cross one of those "game miles"?

I think I'd like to play a Daggerfall-like game which utilizes today's technology.

Random content is okay when supplementing a small gameworld, like Diablo, to make it feel like there's more content. But Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim are huge enough as it is, so I don't think they need any random locations.

A world like daggerfalls again is unrealistic in many aspects due to its size, to give you a little idea of this size, in Mw/Ob/Skyrim travel is measured in hours and you can generally fast travel to any city within less than a days time in hours, in Daggerfall travel time was measured in weeks/months. A world that extremely large is a waste imo BUT if anyone here has ever played Just Cause 2 and seen the massive yet amazing seamless world it has , then i would say it would be the PERFECT size for an RPG such as TES games, just driving/flying around that world for hours makes me crazy with jealousy for its world size.

errr no. Oblivion and Skyrim feel Extremely small and closed in just because of how close everything is and how packed the world is with locations that are in some cases literally right around the corner from each other, and this is coming from someone who NEVER fast traveled in either game. Add in fast travel and you just turned an ocean into an aquarium.