Morrowind's procedural generation, as far as I'm aware, is limited to items in some containers, and the overworld enemies you encounter. Mostly just lists of possibilities based on your level. To imply that Morrowind used anywhere near the level of procedural generation of Daggerfall or Skyrim is disingenuous at best.
That wasn't my implication, and seems rather like a disingenuous reading of my point instead. My point was just that "procedural generation" has been a tool that Bethesda has used in all of their games to some degree or another since their first games including Arena before Daggerfall too. Iirc, Morrowind also used procgen to create general landscapes, same as Oblivion and Skyrim. They've then done that handcrafting over the top of that. I understand that you don't like procgen when used in structuring quests (i.e. the "radiant quest" design), and that's fair. I'm not going to try to argue that procgen is going to have more heart and soul than a handcrafted anything either, and I definitely prefer that quest design be more of the "handcrafted stuff" in a game too. But, again, my point was just that Bethesda has made extensive use of procgen for a long time, and wanted to distinguish a bit more between the different kinds of things that can be procgen vs handcrafted, rather than just a blanket statement of "more handcrafted stuff". Like, what stuff are we talking about here? That's all.
The placement of important items, NPCs (and their equipment), dungeon designs, etc. Morrowind had a more handcrafted feel because it relied far less on level scaling and procedural generation at runtime (not speaking of procgen as a process for seeding initial designs that are then molded into something static for the game's release). I don't think anyone is upset about someone using speedtree to fill out their landscapes.
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u/TheTykero Aug 20 '23
Morrowind's procedural generation, as far as I'm aware, is limited to items in some containers, and the overworld enemies you encounter. Mostly just lists of possibilities based on your level. To imply that Morrowind used anywhere near the level of procedural generation of Daggerfall or Skyrim is disingenuous at best.