Emergent storylines

[voidgenesis]

I am one of the many Skyrim players who have enjoyed spending hundreds of hours but have now grown bored.

 

While I have been giving it a rest I have been wondering if the current modding tools would ever allow the game to produce randomised emergent quests and storylines?

 

So.....random maps/towns/landscapes would be generated on each game start.

A fog of unknown territory would be on each map to begin so you had to explore.

(Ideally alchemy ingredient effects would also be randomised)

 

Random NPCs would be generated to populate the landscape.

NPCs would have a limited number of interactions with each other to build up status levels.

These random NPCs interact in the background to generate interactions between themselves to generate mini-factions.

 

Each NPC has a range of dialogue options (spoken dialogue may have to be abandoned)

 

Each NPC has a possible range of random quest types (help me do this, fetch this for me, kill this person/faction, etc) that are assigned semi-randomly (weighted by their factions/past random interactions).

 

Daedra could perhaps become more like dragons in randomly turning up to be a megaboss that harrasses your faction in their own special way.

 

This could turn the game into a process of incorporating yourself into a random faction at a random location and helping to further their goals/interests. So no main-quest type big theatric pre-scripted drama, but the randomness would give you a lot of replay potential.

 

Is this doable or does everything have to be pre-scripted by modders?

[Darksun45230]

Either impossible or requires massive overhaul of game.

[David Brasher]

This is not really doable on the Skyrim game engine. You would spend all your time fighting against the system trying to make it do things it is not meant to do. It is better to look at what the game engine can do and then come up with mod ideas that work within the system and do things that the game engine is good at. Things that can be built easily and rapidly. Edited March 1, 2012 by David Brasher

[jimhsu]

Certain parts of that are possible. Certainly not "generating towns" though.

 

Random NPCs - Yes, but no unique names or dialog.

Semi-random quests. Yes, look at the Thieves Guild quests for example.

Random factions .. hm...

 

One of the very-long term goals of the mod in my profile (Skyrim Trade Guild) is trying to randomly generate trade caravans, and to make raiding those caravans have tangible effects (i.e. making the price of iron ore spike up). This combined with a commodities system will give massively interesting market manipulation activities available to the player ... well, until you get some competition of your own. That idea will take a while though ... I don't envision my mod in any completed state this year.