- Joined
- Mar 25, 2012
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- 2,285
AFAIK Bethesda only does this for the overworld terrain (and there is a tool for generating terrains) but they don't actually make everything like that and their world isn't procedural - after they generate it, they save it on disk as if it was made manually.
When i was at CDPR during Witcher 3 this is also what the designers did - though instead of being some editor tool, the terrain was made using an external tool (IIRC it was World Machine). The terrain was imported to the editor and the "painted on" with the terrain materials and placed everything else by hand (there was also some manual terrain modifications of course). I'd expect Bethesda's approach to be pretty much the same, judging from the tools they have released and their presentations over the years. I think the biggest difference would be that the artists at the time didn't make as modular 3D assets as those Bethesda's designers did (though IIRC there was a lot of texture reuse).
But none of that is what i have in mind - what i think is really way closer to Daggerfall than any later game Bethesda made. However it isn't exactly Daggerfall either because there is some high level manual design (e.g. where cities would be, how biomes would be set up, how dangerous areas would be, etc). Of course it is possible to just save everything on disk since despite being procedural it is also a static world in practice, but it'd probably take too much space to be practical even with decade old art asset quality. AFAIK even in Far Cry 4 with its at the time state of the art asset quality they used procedural generation for the terrain details alone instead of storing it on disk (this was referenced in passing in a presentation about Far Cry 4's use of virtual texturing so i'm not sure about the details). Pretty much everything i've described has been done in part in one game or another, it is just that i can't think of a game that combines them like the one i described in my original post a couple of days ago.
