However, the more you played Daggerfall, the more you started to notice how uninteresting the world was. Certainly, there was no shortage of dungeons to use as destinations. It wasn’t just the locations that were procedurally generated, either the game’s sidequests were generated on the fly. I used to just roam, encountering small town after small town and dungeon after dungeon. I remember being astounded, and a little intimidated, by how massive the game was.
Naturally, the program used to create them would have rules to ensure the dungeons “worked,” and hey presto – thousands of non-story dungeons.Īnd for a while, that worked.
They then made that Daggerfall’s default, so that everyone got the same massive map.īut hang on… How do you procedurally generate dungeons? Well, you chunk your dungeons into specific room types and then let the computer mix and match those locations. What Bethesda did with Daggerfall was procedurally generate the bulk of the world’s map – not in-game, but back at Bethesda HQ. Skyrim, by contrast, has around 200 dungeons, and even a few of those look a little samey. But Daggerfall really was something else, sporting over 15,000 locations and over 4,000 dungeons. If you’ve played any of Ubisoft’s recent open-world titles, you might think you know what I’m talking about – vast worlds filled with busywork and not an awful lot else. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has its dragons, but Daggerfall’s tale was more politically charged, ultimately revolving around an invention that could alter the balance of power.įinally, and most importantly, Daggerfall proved that bigger isn’t always better, particularly when procedural generation is involved, and it’s this lesson that Bethesda needs to bear in mind when crafting The Elder Scrolls VI. Secondly, it proved you didn’t need some vast world-ending threat for a story to be gripping. Firstly, it proved that The Elder Scrolls: Arena wasn’t a fluke and that Bethesda had the chops to deliver a challenging but engaging open-world RPG. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, a major accomplishment by most standards, proved several things.
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