Todd Howard confirmed in an interview at Brighton Digital on November 2 that The Elder Scrolls 6’s map will be designed using procedural generation. The announcement has left some fans confused, with The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall also having used generated landscapes to create a map as large as Great Britain. However, the map of the upcoming Elder Scrolls game will not be randomly generated. Instead, procedural generation is one useful way to manage create huge areas of land in a game world, which will still be consistent across different playthroughs.
This has some huge implications for The Elder Scrolls 6. First, it implies that fans can expect a map far bigger than Skyrim’s. Not only that, but it has some big implications for how the rest of the game will need to be designed in order to bring that larger world to life.
While map of Skyrim is large as video games go, its dimensions are actually relatively small. Skyrim as a province covers only about 14 square miles in total. Instead of creating a huge game world to match the supposed size of Skyrim in the lore, Bethesda used a few tricks to make Skyrim feel far bigger using a smaller landscape.
First, paths tended to be winding to make journeys feels longer than they were. Second, large mountain rangers and differences in elevation were used between different areas of the map to make sure that players couldn’t too easily see all of it at once. Third, the rendering distance was limited when the game originally released in 2011, though it is now possible to see much of Skyrim’s map from high points like the Throat of the World on most PC set ups.
The news that The Elder Scrolls 6’s map will be created using procedural generation comes in tandem with another major change being made. The engine used for Skyrim and many other Bethesda games, the Creation Engine based on the older Gambryo engine, will finally be overhauled.
These two bits of news together imply that the map of The Elder Scrolls 6 could be significantly larger than Skyrim‘s. The series has also used procedural generation in the past, for example in Oblivion‘s Cyrodiil to create the countryside. However, the increased focus on it implies that the new game’s map is large enough that designing all of the land by hand would pose significant challenges despite the fact that The Elder Scrolls 6 will likely not release for several years and has a huge team working on it.
Howard also commented that cities would be significantly larger in upcoming Bethesda projects than they had been in previous games, with some Skyrim city populations numbering as low as 20 and towns like Riverwood with 200 houses in Arena rendered as small hamlets.
This will be very exciting news for many Elder Scrolls fans, and could be exactly the kind of decision to help The Elder Scrolls 6 live up to Skyrim and surpass its immense legacy. However, if The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to have a far larger game world than its predecessor, Bethesda will need to overcome some major challenges and avoid some temptations in order to make sure the game world feels as alive.
First, Bethesda will need to ensure that there are significant incentives and dynamic challenges to exploring this game world. Weather systems and basic survival mechanics are one way to do so, as in the popular Skyrim mod Frostfall, which made the world feel more dynamic by disincentivizing players from staying in the cold or rain for too long in Skyrim’s frozen landscape.
As well as major cities, The Elder Scrolls 6 will need to make sure its larger world is also populated by settlements with as much character. It’s one thing for landscapes to feel generated, but quite another if NPCs feel generated as well. Howard also commented in the interview that the engine upgrade will be used to develop more complex AI, but Bethesda should make sure that the world doesn’t feel like it’s running on auto-pilot. Different towns should have unique problems, unique characters, architectural influences, and different political powers at play from the Empire to the Aldmeri Dominion. In order to make The Elder Scrolls 6 truly Skyrim’s successor, it will need to expand upon both its breadth and its depth.
Another way Bethesda could make the world feel more dynamic is by having characters naturally travel between settlements for work and trade. A larger world could mean that The Elder Scrolls 6 has to adopt a longer day-night cycle in order to match the expected travel time between locations. The extent of this change will entirely depend on just how much bigger the next game’s map will be.
Starfield will also be using procedural generation, likely to help make some of the worlds that players will be able to visit in the space-set sci-fi game. This is good news for The Elder Scrolls 6. It gives Bethesda an opportunity to experiment with breathing life into procedurally generated landscapes and working to take what was made by computers and give it a necessary human touch.
The success and failures of Starfield, which is set to release before The Elder Scrolls 6, is a great opportunity to explore the challenges of a new engine and system of game design with a lower-stakes IP. Starfield is Bethesda’s first new IP outing in over 25 years, and the experimentation that may allow could be great news for The Elder Scrolls 6 if its successes are carried over.
Size isn’t everything, and in many ways, creating a far larger map presents as much of a challenge as it does an exciting opportunity. What the announcement of the use of procedural generation does mean, however, is that fans can likely expect quite a different game world than the one they explored in Skyrim back in 2011. Whether the changes will be enough to help The Elder Scrolls 6 forge its own legacy remains to be seen.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development.
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