if they didnt waste all that time on radiant shiet that didnt get used...they could have built an awesomer game, its all about priorities. graphics or size?
it was cool idea to have radiant "redoable" quests but they wasted half the dev cycle for something that didnt pan out. they could have made tamriel in that wasted time frame.
The whole point in the Radiant quest system was that it would make creating trivial quests far faster and make them more varied at the same time. The people who made the system (the programmers) were not the same people who make the quests and content (the content designers) and thus the work that went into the radiant system wouldn't have detracted from the amount of content the designers could put out, only how much the programmers could work on making the game stable and adding more interaction types.
I don't know... MMO worlds can be pretty bloody big and detailed. Have you played Lord of the Rings Online. Its world was huge even at launch and it was chock full of detail. You can even climb to the top of Weathertop, where the ruins of Amon Sul can be found, and see the symbold Gandalf scrawled on the rock there.
And Bree, a town with hundreds of houses has a total of 9 interior spaces. That game is actually extremely devoid of detail compared to TES games with sparse or non existent interior decorating etc.
Worldbuilding is not a technological issue as much as it is a time and work issue. This has more or less been true since Morrowind. You could have a new Elder Scrolls covering all of Tamriel, but don't expect individual regions to have nearly as much depth, detail and content. We have the horsepower to handle it, but it requires an unrealistic amount of work to fully realize it.
LISTEN TO THIS PERSON! THIS IS THE TRUTH!
But, yes the world area has nothing to do with graphics or storage space, only with how long it takes and how much costs Bethesda to create content to fill that area to a degree that they like.
Does the author understand that what takes up most disk space is cutscenes, not gameworld, not quests, nor monsters, but animations? TES isn't exactly an innovator in cutscenes nor animation, if the developers wanted to, sure, they could build the entire world on one 360 game disk. But they are not going to, because a project of that size has a lot of ambition and it is not a good idea to try that in one game, because they will inevitably fall short and compromise on that ambition. Get realistic OP
Yeah.
sure xobox users will need 5 dvd's but the point is we could have a world...not a slice of one. but i guess hoping for tamriel while skyrim is drowning in bugs is reaching a little too high.
What takes most room on disk is actually not worldspace but the different textures, models and voice acting (mostly this) necessary to fill a worldspace with content. And Bethesda is already reusing objects frequently meaning that Skyrim could easily have 400 more dungeons or 12 more square miles of terrain, provided they were made from the same tilesets as the old ones.
The biggest cost in quests is the voice-acting, other than that it's just code that takes up barely any room.
Why?
The only thing that would change is that between games, or in this case, mega-expansions, Bethesda would not have to reinvent the bloody wheel, and the forward-going content would retain consistancy. The less they would need to recode from the ground up, the more gameplay content they can create. And the more often they can release content.
With each content release, the larger the world would become. Even if they were to render an entire Tamriel continental worldspace heightmap, they can still chunk it and keep players within the designated chunks, like how we cannot travel beyond Skyrim's borders now.
Generating an entire world's geography is easy. Filling that world with content is the long and difficult part. It would take easily four times the amount of time it took Skyrim to be developed, and thus four times Skyrim's budget. Ah, but if they created the heightmap for the whole of Tamriel, pick a territory that is logical for the next chapter and flesh it out with the same level of content Skyrim had, then they could add to the world with each DLC, extending into other provinces. If they could mesh Skyrim and Cyrodiil's geography and Architecture into it, then the ability to travel to places we have become familiar with throughout the series would be possible. But only as the plot requires. I don't want to revisit Anvil in Cyrodiil, unless there is a reason. I would have included Vvardenfell in that, but when red Mountain erupted, pretty much the whole island got obliterated. I suppose there could be efforts to rebuild, Places like "New Vivec" and "New Ebonhart" could rise from the literal ashes... But I digress...
I think it is safe to say that The Elder Scrolls alone could sustain Bethesda indefinately with on-going regularly released purchasable content.
I think Bethesda to some degree
wants to reinvent the wheel with each iteration. They
want to create a new game not just churn out more dungeons and cities and quests for the same game. Because honestly, once you've played with the same mechanics for a thousand hours doing more content with the same mechanics is going to be boring no matter what you do.
» Sun Jun 24, 2012 10:09 am 
