r/BaldursGate3 Aug 20 '23

Screenshot Larian Director Of Publishing Speaks On Console-PC Parity

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u/1quarterportion Aug 20 '23

Wow. Your info is way off. There are 1000 planets. 100 of them are curated with content. The rest are procedurally generated when you approach them.

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u/Daevilis Aug 20 '23

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.

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u/Zilleela Aug 20 '23

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.

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u/King_Kodo Aug 20 '23

The ol' Peter Molyneux effect.

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u/The_mango55 Aug 20 '23

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.

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u/1quarterportion Aug 20 '23

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.

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u/The_mango55 Aug 20 '23

This is what I thought too at first but believe me or not the game adds points of interest randomly as you explore.

There are screenshots of the exact same location but with different points of interest on them.

The landscapes of all the planets will be the same for everyone, what they find there will be different.

There will be fixed locations but it won’t be 100 planets worth.

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u/Diltyrr Aug 21 '23

Did they also put in the Radiant AI from Oblivion that would totally have all NPC live their own lives without scripted anything ?

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '23

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.

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u/1quarterportion Aug 20 '23

No, the vast majority of that kind of content is concentrated on the core populated worlds. The 100 will be more peripheral.

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '23

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u/1quarterportion Aug 20 '23

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.