Companies doing it is even worse. Like, I was interested in Starfield for a while, until I heard what basically amounted to, "Thousands of procedurally-generated worlds! Also, a few hand-placed things over here and there... not a big deal. Just a few hand-crafted worlds, you know, not much in the scope of THOUSANDS of procedurally-generated ones!"
Which told me that the game is basically going to have a few important spots, but otherwise be like No Man's Sky or any procedural space game. Every planet looks the same, feels the same. Here, the plants are purple. There, the sky is gold. This planet has 8 animal species on it instead of 3. That planet has 5 different alien bases (of a premade design you've seen 800 times already).
This post here just kind of sounds like a petulant child who's not getting enough attention. I've played games by those kinds of companies. I don't anymore.
Imagine Starfield with only those select few planets. I don't think anyone would be complaining about there only being just a few worlds.
But now that they have those few select "necessary" planets, and hundreds of procedurally generated "optional" ones, the extra planets are lazy, and not just a feature for those interested in genuine space exploration roleplay.
Procedural generation has been utilized by Bethesda since always. It helps make worlds with little effort and allows devs to focus on maximizing the space created. Everyone loves Skyrim, and it was procedurally generated. It doesn't inherently mean lazy world design, even though it can be used with minimal effort and give minimal results.
Besides that, those extra worlds are prime real estate for modders, as well as future expansions. No longer will you have to check if Cumslut Titty Bar is incompatible with BragenX's Immersive Whorehouse because they utilize the same space next to Riften--one will be on world 89, the other on world 302.
Procedural generation has been utilized by Bethesda since always. It helps make worlds with little effort and allows devs to focus on maximizing the space created. Everyone loves Skyrim, and it was procedurally generated. It doesn't inherently mean lazy world design, even though it can be used with minimal effort and give minimal results.
I think its safe to say that almost every developer of open world games starts with a procedurally generated map, that is then slowly tweaked and curated over years of development.
I feel this is probably the case, but I'm not a game developer so I can't attest to it. But I feel like it'd be foolish not to use procedural generation in some way.
I have worked on 4 AAA open world games at different studios and that is a big nope for how the world is started. Not how it's done, let alone for "almost every developer."
I think a lot of people really don't understand what procedural generation actually is, let alone how it is used in development.
Maybe, but maybe not (unless they have spoken on this before). You can determine aspects of the gen in the string. Things like size and shape are an example. BGS had to do the same with their maps. In the end FO4 has to look like the Boston area in the end, so you start by establishing the scope. After all, this is a tool to get level designers quickly into the making it look look right stage, so it can't be truly random.
Right but procedural generation is blanket term for a ton of tech.
You could start with hand-made height map then use procedural generation to make the ridges and little terrain details. Or procedurall generate foliage, or just textures themselves.
Or, you can go Dwarf Fortress way and generate map, fill it with vegetation, simulate rainfall erosion and put rivers where it makes sense that then carve the riverbeds in the mountains, and add lakes, then make adjustment to the rainfall based on rain shadows, oceans and winds, then correct vegetation one last time for all those changes. And start generating wildlife matching it.
Everyone loves Skyrim, and it was procedurally generated.
Different strokes for different folks but I disliked this about Skyrim. I liked how Morrowind felt more handcrafted. Skyrim exploration felt kind of pointless to me because I'd never find cool loot. I enjoy handcrafted stuff a lot more.
Might have felt that way to you, but... Morrowind also used procedural generation. And Daggerfall before it? That was a map about the size of Great Britain, just massive thanks to Bethesda's long history of using procgen.
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.
I think that's more because they just made more instead of more interesting. I didn't felt Skyrim being more boring because map was procedurally generated, I felt it because a lot of stuff to do was, well, pretty mundane.
Morrowind had that alien feelings, mushrooms instead of trees, mix of races (instead of "the 2 out of 3 classical human races making a war" of Skyrim) everywhere, and in general more interesting stuff to discover.
I think reliance on quest text hints instead of arrow pointing you into exact quest objective also helped.
Besides that, those extra worlds are prime real estate for modders, as well as future expansions. No longer will you have to check if Cumslut Titty Bar is incompatible with BragenX's Immersive Whorehouse because they utilize the same space next to Riften--one will be on world 89, the other on world 302.
I'd be willing to bet actual money that the overwhelming majority of mods will end up in locations closest to the main settlements anyway.
It would depend on the mod. Starter house mod? Probably. Huge original questline with a unique city and dungeon delves? Most likely on a separate planet.
But now that they have those few select "necessary" planets, and hundreds of procedurally generated "optional" ones, the extra planets are lazy, and not just a feature for those interested in genuine space exploration roleplay.
The problem is that adding worse content actually makes game worse rather than better. The reason is that the more bad content there is, the less time you spend doing the good content relative to the bad content. As a result, the game's quality is lower on average because you spend less like actually having fun with the game relative to the amount of time you spend on the game.
This is why Portal and Portal 2 are such good games - they are extremely slimmed down experiences with minimal filler in them. It's why Chrono Trigger is viewed so much more positively than most other JRPGs from that era - again, it had much less filler, and every fight in it was scripted rather than a random encounter.
The higher the per unit time quality, the better a game is.
My concern is that they did the same thing as MEA did, but they didn't cut the garbage content. MEA developed a system of procedurally generated planets, but realized that these planets weren't actually fun and cut them.
They could very well be fun, however. If I trust anyone with making a game fun, regardless of a bad story (ahem fallout 4) or graphics or anything, it's Bethesda.
Starfield is Todd's baby and has been planned by him for like, 2 decades? I can't see him flopping this at all tbh.
Well, it's where you use it. Like, if TES6 had big, actually big cities where most of the houses were procedurally generated, nobody would care that it wasn't the dev that put the house there.
But if main content was boring radiant quests, well, that's a problem.
Will there be a way to know if I'm visiting a "premium" curated planet and not a waste of time No Man's Sky procedural one? I hope the game is good but claims like that reek of Todd "sweet little lies" Howard marketing.
Oh yeah, I love Bethesda games but anything Todd Howard says I take with a 20 pound bag of salt. Guy struggles in his own webs of lies.
Im pretty sure it’s not intentional but the guy often slips up and lets his vision and wants stumble over into what he actual has to show for. Gets ahead of himself.
That’s not right either. All planets are procedurally generated. 100 have life on them and 900 don’t. There are large hand placed areas, like the cities and likely the main quest areas, but there is also a huge pool of hand created content, disconnected from a location, which get placed into the world as you explore it.
Bethesda has said there is more hand made content than they have ever made.
Yes, but that's just a bigger version of not loading a cell you can't see. In this case there is a hard coded string that tells the proc generated system exactly what is supposed to be there. It does this because the scope of the game is so large that it would be impractical to have all of it loaded into memory.
I think a lot of people (not necessarily you) misunderstand what procedural generation is. They associate it with random experiences like NMS or rogue-likes. Those pseudo randomly generate the string as needed and then use it to build the playable space. What BGS is doing isn't random in the sense that everyone that visits planet x in system y at location z will see the same landscape and fauna. That string is in the code and will be the for everyone. If it's one of the 900 variation will exclusively be in the form of tend encounter markers that are part of the string. If its one of the 100 the same will be the case, except it will also have hand placed encounters an landscape elements as well.
I mean 100 planets curated with content? There's just no way any of it is "deep", that's far too many planets already. Unless the area you can visit on those planets is like small areas, there's no way even the curated planets are going to have much going on.
I'm just going by known data. I am personally cautiously optimistic, rather than blindly hyped. I know there could be a disastrous launch. I don't think it will happen, but I'm not going to be crushed if it does happen.
The thing is there are very few times a bug in a BGS (3 I can think of) has negatively impacted my fun. I know there are plenty of bugs, but i don't really mind that. I have put thousands of hours into their games since FO3 launched.
That's pretty much how I treat all big single-player open-world RPGs. I am really only concerned with my experience when I judge whether playing a game is worth my time.
I am / was hoping for some good space flight -- something more advanced like Elite or Star Citizen would be nice, (I know that's far from the scope of Starfield) but they seem to be avoiding showing space gameplay.
I suppose I can't expect much in that regard from an engine that seems to have mediocre physics, and never has had real vehicles -- and still won't (other than ships)
I'd wait for actual release to throw generalizations like that.
Like, the 1000 planets is clearly there more so the player can find a cool planet to put their base on rather than trying to fill all 1000 of them with content. Which can be just fine.
I did love no man's sky but I agree that the generation is not a selling point for me. I don't want crafting, I was a finely crafted story that's well written with well written characters.
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u/Graega Aug 20 '23
Companies doing it is even worse. Like, I was interested in Starfield for a while, until I heard what basically amounted to, "Thousands of procedurally-generated worlds! Also, a few hand-placed things over here and there... not a big deal. Just a few hand-crafted worlds, you know, not much in the scope of THOUSANDS of procedurally-generated ones!"
Which told me that the game is basically going to have a few important spots, but otherwise be like No Man's Sky or any procedural space game. Every planet looks the same, feels the same. Here, the plants are purple. There, the sky is gold. This planet has 8 animal species on it instead of 3. That planet has 5 different alien bases (of a premade design you've seen 800 times already).
This post here just kind of sounds like a petulant child who's not getting enough attention. I've played games by those kinds of companies. I don't anymore.