DOS

The Elder Scrolls: Arena

How much of time it took, to create such a huge game world?

According to the all-knowing and ever trustworthy Wikipedia it was in 1992 that Bethesda decided to turn Arena into RPG. Previously it was just some gladiator game. And they were supposed to ship the game in Christmas 1993, but couldn't hit the deadline and so instead they released it in 1994 March.

So perhaps 1,5 years + the previous work on the gladiator game?

I don't think much of it was designed by hand (unlike Morrowind or Oblivion). It's too huge, very generic, and an almost endless repetition of the same patterns...

I read an interview with one of the developers once where they asked him if it was possible to just walk from one end of Tamriel to the other, and he said yes but he sounded as though he wasn't really sure, so I guess it was more about writing algorithms than designing a world.

With procedural era knocking at our front door, I can't clearly see the line that separates these two anymore.

You mean, like Rogue?

Well, yes. However I was speaking more of the future with games like Spore and Rage on the way.

Great hardware capabilities allows to put a lot of detail to everything which at some point becomes physically impossible for an artist, so procedurally generated content is a perfect solution for future games to include, say, 60 variations of a stone texture or 5-km long shoreline without a single cliff face that looks the same.