It's quite a tired engine at this stage but Bethesda have actually been rather tech forward in the past. Especially with MS acquisition, some kind of procedural cloud-assisted world would make a ton of sense.
However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players. You definitely need a little on the authored side. Heck, I think Bethesda copy/pastes too much now compared to something like New Vegas which has barely has any repetition.
> However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players.
Less immersive than an ostensibly grand city that only has a handful of named NPCs and a few guards? The best and worst city Bethesda have made thus far is still Vivec. Best because it has enough NPCs and redundant economy to feel like a plausible city. Worst, simply because the structure of the cantons is poorly conceived, and because the exterior is barren.
Vivec was probably magical at the time but I literally cannot navigate from memory. Every canton blurs together and traversal is time consuming. I think Whiterun or Megaton are quite well designed.
Deprecating authored settlements in Fallout 4 was quite disappointing but Boston is probably the most impressive technically, diamond city etc nestled amongst the sprawling and surprisingly explorable ruins of the city.
Boston itself was great, but Diamond City seemed undeserving of the name to me. It's just a handful of people. Also the setting of known size, the baseball diamond, throws off my suspension of disbelief that maybe distances and population sizes in Bethesda games are simply compressed. Cities like Whiterun and Balmora are the size of a small villages but are presented as a cities; I can accept that as some sort of distance compression. I can't do that with Diamond City because I know how big a baseball field is. That 'city' must really be 1:1 scale, or at least close to it.
Basically if I can't get lost, it doesn't feel like a city. I can get lost in Boston or Vivec, those feel like cities. The others require a lot of suspension of disbelief, but Diamond City particularly makes that hard.
I concede that Vivec is dated (although I first played Morrowind about 2 or 3 years ago and still enjoyed it.) I consider Witcher 3's Novigrad as an example of a modern game getting it right. There's not exactly a ton of named NPCs in Novigrad, but there are enough buildings, alleyways, etc to get lost when wandering around. Also there is redundancy in the town's economy; numerous smiths, taverns, etc.
I think all of those games are absolutely tiny when you take into account human scale. You can't traverse any real world city in the few minutes or so it would take for Geralt to circumnavigate the entirety of Novigrad. Agree that you should get lost in a big, redundant world. Bethesda have their work cut out for their next games.
DayZ (and it's ilk) is probably the only game that comes close to 1:1 but is not to most players tastes to take a human amount of time to walk across rows of empty fields. That game is absolutely enormous. It's a pretty niche game though.
> However, towns with 300 houses with different variations of the same vendors and assets would not be immersive to most modern players. You definitely need a little on the authored side.
Do you think that in the 2020s, we can't do better generators than what existed in the 1990s?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qyxSfUceE