Procedural generation is something that was once core to The Elder Scrolls series, but it isn’t anymore. What if The Elder Scrolls VI went back to this ancient technology? Hmm….

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The Elder Scrolls series is known for it’s lovingly hand-crafted worlds, but it’s important to note, that wasn’t always the series’ strength.

I’ve been working my way backwards through the series recently, and I just played Daggerfall for the first time. It greatly contrasts from the world of Morrowind and beyond in that it doesn’t feature a tightly-packed world developed by hand. It features a massive play-space unlike anything I’ve seen before.

The word “massive” doesn’t quite convey the scale of the game, but no one word does. Game worlds to the scale of Daggerfall simply don’t exist anymore.

Here’s the map of the game. It looks big, sure, but you don’t really have a scale for it. So let’s zoom in to one of these many kingdoms. Each dot you see is a named location. There’s towns, cities, dungeons, temples, everything you’d want in a fantasy world. But again, you lack perspective.

Let’s start walking. Here’s where I am on the map right now, I’m in this little square. We’ll check back in the map after a bit. In the meantime, I’ll talk about what makes an interesting world in a video game.

Worlds are the backdrop for everything else in a game. How you interact with the game’s mechanics and how you experience the game’s story, these are both influenced by the world they take place in. Let’s look at Morrowind to see how Bethesda handled the world design in that game.

Vvardenfell, the setting of Morrowind, feels authentic. When describing why, there’s the obvious things you could point to. Multiple factions all with interweaving relationships to each other, characters with motivation and goals, and an aesthetic that feels alien, yet fitting.

But there’s also the less obvious, yet just as important, aspects. Something I always look for in games like this are signs of a supply chain. It’s a subtle inclusion that, admittedly, doesn’t really mean a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it goes a REALLY long way to convincing me your world is authentic.

Morrowind does a pretty good job showing that off. There are multiple plantations and smaller farmhouses dedicating to supplying the rest of the island with materials. There aren’t carriages travelling to and from those locations to indicate anything is actually being exchanged, but it’s the thought that counts. Arvel Plantation features Corkbulb Root as one of it’s main crops. There’s a bit of information in the game you can learn that indicates Corkbulb Root is often used as wood in Vvardenfell, since trees don’t grow in the harsh environment.

All that Corkbulb might be used as bows, arrows, building supplies, whatever. The point is, you can track a source for those materials. There’s mines to account for the Ebony and Glass supply. And there’s ships to account for all the other stuff not produced by the island.

You get a sense that Bethesda really wanted this world to feel like a real one. Of course they didn’t go to the lengths of laying out absolutely every aspect of life on the island, but they thought out enough to cross the barrier of artificial into authentic.

Say, wasn’t I supposed to be talking about Daggerfall? Oh, yeah, I have this little thing going. Let’s check the map and see how far we’ve walked.

I traveled a single square.

And look at how many square there are. There’s just so much more space in this game than anyone knows what to do with. Bethesda said the game’s size was close to that of Great Britain. That’s 209,000 kilometers. Whether they’re slightly exaggerating or not is hard to tell, but even if they added an extra ten thousand or two in that comparison, the size is still magnitudes more than any Elder Scrolls game after it. Vvardenfell’s size is only 16 kilometers and Skyrim’s is 37. Not even in the same ballpark.

You might have noticed something about the footage of me walking. If you didn’t, here’s some travelling I did from here to here in real time, but sped up. Notice anything interesting? No? Well that, itself, is interesting if you ask me.

Daggerfall is known for having a massive, yet barren world. There’s no reason to walk anywhere because there’s practically nothing to see in between the named locations I showed off earlier.

All that earlier gushing about Morrowind serves as contrast for the barren world of Daggerfall. The towns look the same, the dungeons look the same, the areas between locations look the same. And there’s no real environmental design to be found.

A lot of the stuff in Daggerfall is randomly generated. Not all though. There’s a handful of uniquely written quests, but a lot of the quests are like the Radiant quests in Skyrim. Go to this random place, do this semi-random thing, and report back.

There’s 15,251 named locations in the game. Let that sink in for a moment. Fifteen thousand. Two hundred. And fifty one places to visit. Across 44 regions. Those are all set in stone. If you travel to this point on the map, you’ll always see this town with these buildings.

The people inhabiting the town will be different though. There’s only 60 unique NPCs in the game, mostly related to the main plot, so everyone else you see is randomly generated for your particular save file.

So sure, the world is BIG, but big doesn’t always mean good, right? People love Morrowind and that’s a small play-space, even by non-Daggerfall standards. That world is loved because of the thought and care put into everything.

Daggerfall is almost the polar opposite. Time was spent developing a system that will develop the world. If you’re aiming for a world the size of Daggerfall, it has to be generated by a computer. There’s no way that much play-space could be developed by hand.

All that time was spent in effort of a world where everything feels interchangeable. NPCs rarely have anything unique to say, dungeons look the same, and the wilderness is empty. Morrowind is an improvement in almost every way.

So why am I so fascinated with Daggerfall?

The game has so much going against it. But I feel this pull to it. There’s something about it that I can’t get out of my mind, yet I can’t quite put into words.

I think the life simulation aspect of the game plays a part in it. I like the idea of having all of Illiac Bay at my fingertips. I could choose one of the four thousand towns to settle down in and make home. The director of the game, Julian Lefay, wanted the game to be like a pen-and-paper RPG that you could return to for years playing the same character.

Maybe “years” is a bit too optimistic, but it’s not too far off predicting how people would play later Elder Scrolls games. People will put hundreds of hours into Skyrim on the same character. They get really attached to that character and the journey they go on. Their companions, the house they live in, the loot they’ve found, it’s all a part of their story as an inhabitant of that game’s world.

Daggerfall was going for a much similar thing. But the sheer scale of the world makes that playstyle much more interesting. No one player will ever see every location in the game. In fact, I even wonder if there’s one named location that’s never been visited by a player. It’s a possibility.

Every time I find myself pondering how amazing Daggerfall’s world size is, I keep coming back to the thought of “Yeah, but it’s meaningless.”

What good is a massive world if there’s such little variety? I guess when I think about how cool that part of the game is, I’m thinking about how cool it could be in a modern game. Daggerfall’s scope is obviously restricted by time it was made. So a modern interpretation of that, with a bunch of new features and systems to make the world much cooler to live in would be amazing.

But nobody’s even tried that. Hand-crafted environments are the standard for modern open world games. It’s both what the player and developer are used to, so it’s what we get nearly all the time.

But not all the time.

I did lie in the beginning of the video. I hate that I did, and I apologize, but I had to. They do make video games as big as Daggerfall. And we have Sean Murray to thank for that.

I don’t even know how to begin in contextualizing how much playable space is in No Man’s Sky. The human brain isn’t capable of understanding numbers that big. Let’s break it down real quick.

Planets are big. Not real life big, but video game big. It seems like it could take you dozens to maybe even a hundred hours, based off what I’ve seen people say online. And it’ll of course depend on the type of planet you choose, I’m sure you could find a smaller moon that you could walk around in a weekend. My point is, planets are big.

Above that, you have star systems. Each star system has 2 to 6 planets and moons, all varying in size.

Next up are regions. Each region contains anywhere from 122 to 580 star systems. Here’s where we start to get really nutty.

Can you guess how many regions are in each galaxy? Write your answer down because I want you to feel stupid when I tell you the real answer.

4.

point 2 BILLION.

4.2 billion regions per galaxy. Each with 122 to 580 star systems, each with 2 to 6 planets. Oh, and there’s 255 galaxies.

There was a number going around before release, stating that there was 18 quintillion planets in the game. I think that number actually references there’s 18 quintillion SEEDS for POSSIBLE planets. If you multiply the max range of the numbers I gave earlier, then there’s this many planets you can actually visit. So there’s a massive amount of potential planets that could be generated but won’t be due to size constraints.

Now here’s a big caveat. I just pulled that info from the No Man’s Sky wiki. There’s no source on it, they could be completely making it up. After a quick google search, it seems like there’s a lot of debate as to how many planets are actually in the game. I’m not a math guy, so I’m not about to try and calculate it myself.

All that being said, I don’t think it matters. Whether there’s 18 quintillion planets, 5 billion, or 30 million, it’s all the same to the player. There’s more than any one person could visit in their entire lifetime.

And with a scale like that, comes compromise.

When designing a procedurally generated world, you have to have little points of interest that can be placed around at the time of generation. No Man’s Sky has a ton of those, observatories, trading posts, knowledge stones, there’s a lot to keep you interested in your journey.

But seeing all these same things will get boring after a while, right?

Coming across your first observatory is cool and all, but what about the second time you see one? Or the fifth? Or the hundredth? You only get that sense of wonder and excitement the first half-dozen times. Past that, you know what to expect.

It becomes less special the more you can see through the illusion. Once you internalize that any observatory is the same as every other, the game loses you. It’s not a place where some one-of-a-kind alien set up shop to sell materials, it’s a game mechanic with a randomly generated NPC and randomly generated weapon to buy.

Daggerfall has the same problem. Except there’s a LOT less points of interest. While I did describe how one particular point of interest bored me in No Man’s Sky, there’s a lot of others to keep me distracted from that. Daggerfall has places inhabited by people and places inhabited by enemies. And that’s about it. There’s nothing that makes any one town unique from another outside of maybe size. And all the dungeons look the exact same.

But again, I’m fascinated with the idea of Daggerfall. I can look past repetitiveness if it offers intrigue in other areas. So let’s brainstorm.

What would a modern Daggerfall look like? What if Bethesda took inspiration from Daggerfall for The Elder Scrolls VI?

I’m gonna make a difficult choice here and say that the game should focus on breadth, not depth. People clown on Skyrim for removing so much from Oblivion and Morrowind, but I think what they have in terms of progression is FINE. Sure it should have depth, but I think the breadth of content should be focused on more.

Now this might be a little too hopeful of me, but I’d like to at least see what a fully procedurally generated Elder Scrolls game would look like with modern graphics. Do it like Daggerfall where the world is generated during development and everything is mostly the same for everyone. Most massive procedurally generated worlds in games I can think of are alien worlds, so I’m not sure if or how they could make a procedurally generated forest interesting.

I think making those areas interesting comes with adding more points of interest. I’m sure fast travel would be extremely helpful in a world 1,000 times larger than Skyrim, but exploring on your own should be exciting. There should be a ton of little handcrafted elements randomly placed throughout the world. Like maybe anytime a river is generated, there’s a small chance a big log will be placed going across it. Or occasionally generate a bag of loot behind a big tree.

I think this new hypothetical Elder Scrolls game could learn a lot from Minecraft.

Minecraft has such a fascinating world, it’s fun to just walk around in and loot structures. Of course, the technology that goes into generating a Minecraft world is different than the technology that Bethesda would use to generate the world for The Elder Scrolls VI, but I think it shows that people don’t hate randomly generated worlds.

Over the years, Minecraft has accumulated all these little points of interest that are generated throughout the world. Those are what make exploring so much fun. It’s exciting to come across a desert pyramid in Minecraft, because you know you’re gonna get some good loot. It’s a short time investment for the player to get a nice little reward. Having tiny little distractions across the massive world could go a long way into making long walks between towns engaging.

They could lean into Radiant quests even more. Skyrim had a fair amount, I say make some more templates for quests and throw them in the mix. The more quest types you have to be thrown at the player, the longer it’ll take for them to burn out.

Of course the game should have a main questline, but I wanna see what it would look like if Bethesda went ALL OUT on making a really intricate iteration of Radiant quests. Maybe add side goals to some of them? Like if some guy asks you to go take out a bandit camp, he might pay you more if you do it stealthily. I’ve learned from the recent Hitman games that adding little complications to something you’ve done over and over before can make it seem fresh again.

And I say fuck it, let me build a town. Minecraft and No Man’s Sky let you build little bases that are your own. You get to leave your mark on the land. It’s cool to have a place you can return to after a long journey and sort out your loot into the storage system you designed for yourself.

Allow me to recruit people to join my little town. Send them out on supply missions, make me do quests for them to improve our relationship and their performance. Get me attached to these random NPCs that I constantly see walking around. Just reference Fallout 4 and it’s settlement building stuff.

I think that would go a long way in achieving that “game you could return to for years” vibe that Daggerfall was striving for. Let me make a house that perfectly fits my needs and desires. Let me slowly put together town and choose people to recruit.

Let me live a life like I was in Tamriel. Give me all those hunger, thirst, and tiredness settings. Force me to either go find food myself or hire a hunter to bring back food for me. Or hire a farmer to grow some food. Or just pay some travelling carriages for some. Having options is key.

What I’ve described might sound terribly boring to some of you. Maybe it’d sound terribly boring to me if I were in a different mood. But right now, I’m craving a game I can just get lost in. It’s like Euro Truck Simulator. It’s effectively another job playing that game, but that’s the fun in it. Some people really like games that just emulate aspects of real life. This game could have options, in that it allows people to really hunker down and live a second life in Tamriel or it could be Skyrim 2 for people that just wanna explore dungeons.

I’ll just take off my wishful thinking hat here and get into the reality of a game like that.

First and foremost, I don’t think this is a game modern Bethesda would even make. They’ve really leaned into handcrafted worlds with set playstyles, and while they have dabbled a bit into building a home or town with Skyrim and Fallout 4, I can’t imagine them going even deeper into that in future games. I think they really wanna focus on worlds they can adjust to the smallest rock or tree stump.

More broadly, I don’t think this is a game any large developer would make. What I laid out sounds more like an indie game with ASCII graphics more than a AAA 3d RPG. No Man’s Sky is the only $60 game I can really think of that truly embraced procedural generation. And it’s not even really a AAA game, it’s basically an indie game that Sony treated like and got press coverage like a AAA game.

Games as a whole have just kinda shifted away from that development process once workflows allowed for the creation of a world big ENOUGH. After all, why spend the time developing a complex system that’ll generate a massive world that all feels kinda samey, when you could go all in and have your artists create the world themselves. Sure, Daggerfall is big. But Skyrim is big ENOUGH.

And the amount of time It’d take to come up with dozens or hundreds of points of interest so the player doesn’t get bored in the first couple hours, I just can’t imagine.

Though, if anyone could try and take on a game with this scope, it’d be Bethesda.

They could take some of my suggestions and drop most of them, but the main thing I wanna see them do is try an absolutely massive open world again. I kinda just laid out why I think they won’t, but I can’t help but imagine what it would play like.

Daggerfall isn’t quite unique in what it offers, as games like Minecraft and No Man’s Sky offer similar exploration, but I think Bethesda is in a unique position. They’re known for making these handcrafted RPGs that people will play for hundreds of hours. I’m just curious what would happen if they truly leaned into it. Designed intricate systems that generate interesting locations and environments to a scale a human could never match.

The interesting thing is that some people in the company wanted Elder Scrolls to go down that path. There was a split in the company during the development of Morrowind, where some wanted it to be a continuation of Daggerfall in terms of world design and others wanted to try a smaller scale game. One with a world where every item placed had a purpose.

In the end, we know which won out. But who knows what the future holds. Todd Howard stated during an interview a couple years ago that he’s working with procedural generation for their next engine. While that doesn’t necessarily guarantee a world like I’m hoping for, as procedural generation could be used to get a basic layout for a Skyrim-sized world and be tweaked by hand, it’s still interesting.

Todd, if you’re watching and wanna take my ideas for a new Elder Scrolls game, I give you permission. You don’t even gotta credit me, you can say you came up with them on your own.

Thank you Todd and good luck on Skyrim 2.