SajuukKhar said:
Procedural content does the exact opposite of that, it increases repetition, compared to a hand-crafted world, through the use of terrain/dungeon patterns. That is how procedural content works, it follows a system of patterns when designing areas/terrain in order to quickly make lots of it.
More variation within the pattern decreases repetition. Cave, camp, mine, ruin, cave, camp, mine, ruin is more repetitious than Cave, camp, mine, ruin, hut, giant camp, grove, animal den.
And what your asking for is "more dead space between locations", which isn't good. The more dead space you add between actual locations, the less people will want to walk it, and the more repetitive locations you make, the less people want to play it, because its stuff they have already seen before. Both large negatives of procedural content.
That's one of biggest complaints people have with Skyrim. Once you have been through a few caves they all start to feel the same. Putting space and content that is more varied between the caves cuts down on that feeling.
So what your saying is that detailed NPCs are meaningless in a RPG? I guess every RPG ever has been doing it wrong huh?
Did I say that? No, I didn't say that. There is a guy in Whiterun who's only job in the game is to chop wood. He doesn't give any quests. He doesn't give any useful information. He is pure background fluff. Giving him dialog and a daily routine is a complete waste of developer time because the vast majority of people will barely recognize that he exists. Giving the Jarl of Whiterun dialog, a background and a daily routine is perfectly acceptable.
"saving space" in the game in exchange for quality is a poor tradeoff. Its already stupid enough that third era books wind up in Draugr dungeons, but now your asking for pretty much anything to appear anywhere just to shave off a few mbs.
Wrong. Take those books for example. With procedural generation, a simple code could stop those 3rd era books from spawning in any Drauger dungeon. The fact that they show up there now is because someone put them there when hand crafting the dungeon.
1. Mincecraft's world is also infinitely more repeating and lacking in diversity then Skyrim's world, a major step down from the current system. Its small size is nothing more then a sign of its repetitive nature.
Minecraft's world is more repeating because the game is only 60mb. If it took up nearly 6gb like Skyrim does, you would probably never run into the same thing twice.
2. Borderlands 2 gun system is also highly criticized for making 90% of its weapons entirely useless due to the randomly generated nature of said items, and Diablo's iron daggers dong different damage makes no sense, because they are all iron daggers, and would thus logically be the same. The system you would propose would allow for iron daggers to be better then elven, which is nonsensical with lore.
If I go into my kitchen and look at the knives I have in there I see a lot of variation. Some have wooden handles, some have plastic. Some are serrated, some are straight edged. Some are older than others, some are duller than others. Some are large, some are small. Not every knife is created equally.
And why can't an iron dagger be better than a dagger made by elves? Is an elven blacksmith who just started an apprenticeship better than a human blacksmith who has been honing his craft for over 50 years? Just because one dagger is made with moonstone doesn't mean it's quality automatically surpasses all daggers made with iron.
3. You are aware Skyrim does this already with bandits and Draugr?
Skyrim does not do this. If I go into a cave, kill the bandits inside and look at their character models, then start a new game, do the same thing and compare the character models the my other game, they will be the same. In Left 4 Dead, if I kill a zombie in a red shirt, then start a new game and go back to that same spot, there's a very good chance that the zombie with the red shirt won't be there.
4. So Draugr moving into a cave for no reason except to make the cave different the next time you play it? How does ignoring lore so that it can throw things anywhere, just for the sake of making a cave, that you have no reason to go to more then once, "different", in the event you do decide to go back there, make it a good system?
Again, proper coding can prevent things from showing up where they logically shouldn't. But if I make my way through some Dwemer ruins destroying all of the contraptions inside and have to leave some loot behind because it weighs too much, it wouldn't make much sense if I returned to find all of the contraptions working again. It wouldn't make sense to kill all of the bandits in a cave only to return later to find more bandits that look like, act like and have the same equipment as the bandits I killed before.
5. Actually, the only thing skyrim's system does is pick from one of a pre-made list of locations, it does nothing to alter the objectives/enemies you face. And the locations in said pre-made lists are in the list because they are all "bandit strongholds" or "animal caves" depending on the list, making the location picked consistent with all other locations that can be picked. What you are asking for is allowing a quest that tasks you to retrieve something stolen by the forsworn, to assign you to an animal cave, despite that not making any sense.
So it doesn't make sense that the forsworn would, having stolen something, hide in a cave from any possible pursuers?
Actually, everything you have posted shows exactly why its NOT a good idea. It's essentially "more for the sake of more" type game design. The, IMO, worst kind of gameplay design one can ever take.
Try, "more for the sake of greater variation." In any game, whether it's done in enemy design, items, locations, whatever; more variation equals more possibilities. More possibilities equals more fun. Less variation equals more repetition, more repetition equals boredom.
(EDIT: hit enter before I was done. Sorry.)
