With Starfield, Bethesda Game Studios produced its first science fiction IP and decided to make a game with over a thousand explorable planets (100 of which with life on them) to sell the idea of a proper space adventure.
To do so, the developers of Starfield had to extensively employ procedural generation, which Bethesda had used in some capacity ever since Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. That game featured over fifteen thousand cities, villages, towns, and dungeons, with a playable area estimated at around 161 thousand square kilometers (real-life Great Britain is 209K square kilometers).
Some of the developers behind Daggerfall are now making a spiritual successor called The Wayward Realms, currently on a Kickstarter campaign for funding ahead of an early access debut slated in 2025. In a recent interview with Wccftech, the developers at OnceLost Games shared their belief that Starfield would have benefited from sticking more closely to the Daggerfall procedural generation formula, especially for dungeons.
Starfield was enjoyable but took a different approach to procedural generation from ours. We feel it would have benefited from having some Daggerfall-esque “dungeon” generation instead of reusing premade dungeons.
In the Q&A, the developers of The Wayward Realms also explained how they plan to advance procedural generation in their game, which will not feature a traditional main quest.
We feel that there are plenty of ways to advance the procedural generation and integrate more memorable interactions and encounters within it.
We are also taking advantage of procedural generation in order to be able to change things within the world, such as a town being burned down to the ground as a result of the political struggle.
The VGM is meant to work like a real life tabletop game master would, tailoring the game around the player, who/what they are playing as, and what they enjoy doing. For instance, a player who collects books may be offered more quests with books as a reward to entice them. Meanwhile, a melee-focused player may be offered more challenges based on their melee skills. The idea is to track what the player is doing and avoid offering more of what the player is not doing.
The VGM is also in charge of creating new quests for players, taking into account recent events, NPCs that the player has interacted with, and what factions the player is allied with and against in order to fill in the variables in potential quests. This helps make the game more relevant to the player in each playthrough.
There is no main quest, but we do have major World Events that occur throughout a playthrough. They act as sort of an overarching narrative. There are also questlines for each of the major factions. With both of these there will be a sort of finality to a narrative for players, but they can continue to play one beyond them, and the VGM will continue to create new adventures for the player to experience.
Do you agree with OnceLost that Starfield should have stuck to the Daggerfall formula when making procedurally generated dungeons? Let us know below.
