Starfield Would Have Benefited from Daggerfall-Like Proc-Gen for Dungeons Instead of Reusing Premade Ones, Says OnceLost Dev

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).

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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