Quote Originally Posted by kukurumei View Post
Otherwise commonly termed "LoD" (level of detail). You swap around low resolution textures with high resolution textures in a streaming data flow.

None of it has anything realistically to do with copy and paste terrain(Lod is strictly a memory saving trick, and works with anything. Look at Drake's fortune for instance), unless they have a problem with HDD space.

Copy and paste terrain...is copy and paste. What else did anyone expect?. Nothing is going to solve it without good old grease work, or other wise known as paying your graphics artists.

Sure there are tons of work on procedural generation (otherwise known as random dungeon effect), but realistically, it's very hard to have a computer trick the human mind. It's easier and sometimes cheaper to have a human trick other humans.

They probably didn't want to pay the bill, so ended up copy and pasting. Either that or you had very stupid QC people that got tricked by their employees...given the horsebird incident I'm not willing to rule it out.
Well it's also an issue of how much data can be loaded in between loading screens as much as it is an issue of constructing the data. Given that the zones aren't seamless, it's safe to assume that the content is loaded in whenever you 'zone' into a new area. Having too many unique objects cannot be realised with the current game engine (Crystal Tools) which doesn't feature game-world streaming technology. They would have to compromise on the size of the zones if they were to make the zones more unique.

... or fix their engine.