Thing is Skyrim wasn’t particularly handcrafted or lively either, the models for things like dungeons were repeated all the time and the NPC liveliness was lacklustre compared to eurojank games like Gothic.
After playing elden ring I’m done with Bethesda. Haven’t even tried starfeelz
I played star field, wasn’t convinced on the prologued. Moved on on the first few quests c dropped it. It feels too bland, generic and uninspired
Not sure why this is downvoted, radiant quests were a big feature in Skyrim, and were technically kinda impressive, but still repetitive. Likewise, quests for the College of Bards were mostly just a dungeon fetch quests and things.
It’s still a great game, but it was great for the bits that were handcrafted.
But give it 5-10 years and I’d be very interested to see another pass at procedural generation using machine learning, especially dialogue, could open the doors to more creativity than would be possible when doing it all by hand!
Nothing in any of these games has been particularly hand crafted. They were a big early user of procedural generation.
people love daggerfall yet its like 99% procedural generation. maybe 100%
