
Skyrim's Modular Level Design - GDC 2013 Transcript - cobrausn
http://blog.joelburgess.com/2013/04/skyrims-modular-level-design-gdc-2013.html
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enraged_camel
_Getting back to the topic at hand, we should also acknowledge the most self-
evident drawback of using modular art: the fact that resused art can become
repetitive. This leads to what we commonly refer to as “art fatigue”. The
median play time of Skyrim on Steam has peaked at well over 100 hours, which
is a huge compliment . With that kind of time spent, however, players are
bound to notice the same rock or farmhouse or tapestry used again and again.
And another two dozen times after. Art fatigue sets in where this repetition
becomes obvious and erodes the authenticity of the world._

It wasn't art fatigue that annoyed me. I don't care about seeing the same
tapestry or window over and over.

What annoyed me was that after playing for ~10 hours, I started to recognize
the entirety of sections (chunks) of levels that were reused. When you're in a
cave, and the cave takes a turn to the right and immediately descends down to
a rock bridge over a stream - _just like the ten caves before it_ \- it kills
replayability. For a game that is supposed to reward exploration, designing
levels in that manner seems like an odd design choice. It's probably why I
played for ~40 hours and then gave up before even finishing the game.

I understand the challenges of scope and the need to find an efficient system
to design the world and its levels. But they should have gone with a level
randomization similar to Diablo 2. That game also reused art assets, but
levels never became repetitive because, except for very specific parts, they
were truly random all the time.

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prawks
I don't think it's that simple.

Diablo was designed to be repetitive (at least it seemed to me, it's a hack-
and-slash game), and the levels are quite frankly bland in comparison to
Skyrim, not to mention it's played on third-person view-from-above tiles.

Is anyone aware of randomized level design in a first-person game? It seems
like a much more challenging task to get right. If you want to avoid
repetitiveness at the scale of Skyrim I'd guess you would need reusable assets
on the scale of pieces of a tapestry, and creating unique dungeon layouts
would be extremely difficult, as they need to be designed to hold the
attention of the player. I believe it's difficult to create artistically
interesting and attractive layouts randomly without reuse of large pieces of
dungeons (the main pain point in Bethesda's modular style).

~~~
whatshisface
I suppose the long-term solution to this problem will be to computer-generate
the layouts based on basic level design theory, and then have artists glance
at them to check for errors.

Minecraft can auto-generate some pretty interesting cave formations, maybe
with a real budget, a team and the advantages of pregeneration you could do a
lot better.

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gu
There is another story in this blog post:

"There are _90 people_ in the photograph below. With the exception of a small
number of outsourced assets, _you’re looking at the entirety of the dev team
across all disciplines_. We've resisted the temptation to grow into a multi-
studio team of hundreds, such as you often find behind games of similar scope
to those we make."

I find it most astounding that Skyrim was made by a team of less than 100
people. It seems that these days it's not unheard of that hundreds or even
more than 1,000 people work on a game. An example of the latter category is
Grand Theft Auto IV.

~~~
teamonkey
There weren't 1000 _developers_ working on GTA IV, certainly not full-time.
More like 1000 people who once had at least one small task related to the
development, sales or promotion of the title.

Having said that, 8 level designers making 300+ dungeons is extremely
impressive.

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dreamdu5t
Skyrim is a terrible example of good level design. We should be studying the
level designers of games like Dark Souls.

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JEVLON
It would be good if they addressed load speed. Will the 8Gb of RAM in the PS4
make their next game load new areas immediately now?

~~~
rje
Why would a talk about their creative process talk about the loading speed of
a console that isn't released yet?

~~~
JEVLON
The post discusses assets and creating asset modules for constructing their
virtual worlds. It would be interesting if they discussed hardware
constraints, and how lifting those constraints effects the creative process.
The release status of an unreleased console is inconsequential to the
information. It has been announced that the new playstation console has 8gb's
of ram. In my experience playing Bethesda's games on console and PC, consoles
take a significantly longer time to load. Even if a current-generation console
is more powerful than a PC, it will be much slower than a PC at loading
assets. This has nothing to do with hard-disk speed, as running the game off
of equally slow HDD's of a console and a PC, the PC will still significantly
quicker. Someone voted me down for my comment. I was not expecting them to
cover this in a post about an already-released game. I just said it would be
interesting (in future).

We all have to be really careful when commenting on the internet, especially
Hacker News, that we are clear. For that I apologise, even if I am quite a bit
annoyed, though I realise it is my fault. I have been toying with the idea of
building an online community, but I think I will pass on that idea as I don't
like excluding people. What did I offer this discussion? = nothing. What did
most other people? = nothing. Why are we even discussing this?

