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>It is infeasible from a monetary perspective (development costs) and a practical standpoint to have interesting, custom-built content to fill years of gameplay

>It is infeasible from a monetary perspective (development costs) and a practical standpoint to have interesting, custom-built content to fill years of gameplay. Huh. Autogenerated MMORPG content seems... remotely plausible. Or at least, some of it could be autogenerated. The terrain, at least, and names. Maybe some of the quests. I haven't seen anyone trying this though, I guess it's hard to make autogenerated content pleasant.

DarkShikari 17y ago
EVE Online did autogenerated content for most of the base universe: the devs even noted that the random seed they used for the universe was "42". Of course, quests and such were hand-crafted later, this was just for the names, star systems, connections between them, NPC-controlled space stations, planets, moons, asteroid belts, resources, etc. The real problem IMO is that autogenerated content can't be any more inherently interesting than the algorithm that created it. In EVE, this wasn't a problem, because the autogenerated content was merely intended as a "playing field" on which other events happened, but if the autogenerated content is the content itself, I think you'll have serious problems making it non-repetitive.
alex_c 17y ago
The compelling part of a RPG is the process of discovery - discovering the world, the story, monsters, powers, etc. If the content is hand-crafted, there's always something new around the corner, which keeps the game fresh. The problem with autogenerated content is that the process of discovery changes to discovering the algorithms used to generate the content. Once the player has discovered those algorithms, it's impossible to continue having a fresh experience. So "autogenerated" is, at best, taking hand-crafted content, repeating it a few times, and changing some details in the hope that the player won't notice the repetition right away. This is, of course, only in the context of traditional RPGs - more sandbox-style games, like Dwarf Fortress, or Love (or, hell, at the other extreme of auto-generated content, Tetris) can do just fine.
- warfangle 17y ago
  One of the problems with auto-generated content is that the setting is typically extremely static. If you could build a properly robust dynamic environment, the auto-generated content would depend hugely on how players actually interact with the (dynamic) gameworld. I'm sure some would figure out the algorithms involved in such a game, but if you add enough fuzzy logic in, it could potentially keep the wool over most of the players' eyes..
- Tichy 17y ago
  Nethack seems to succeed with generating interesting automated content. It is even fun to just read the "elevation stories", each of them is different.

DarkShikari 17y ago

EVE Online did autogenerated content for most of the base universe: the devs even noted that the random seed they used for the universe was "42". Of course, quests and such were hand-crafted later, this was just for the names, star systems, connections between them, NPC-controlled space stations, planets, moons, asteroid belts, resources, etc. The real problem IMO is that autogenerated content can't be any more inherently interesting than the algorithm that created it. In EVE, this wasn't a problem, because the autogenerated content was merely intended as a "playing field" on which other events happened, but if the autogenerated content is the content itself, I think you'll have serious problems making it non-repetitive.

alex_c 17y ago

The compelling part of a RPG is the process of discovery - discovering the world, the story, monsters, powers, etc. If the content is hand-crafted, there's always something new around the corner, which keeps the game fresh. The problem with autogenerated content is that the process of discovery changes to discovering the algorithms used to generate the content. Once the player has discovered those algorithms, it's impossible to continue having a fresh experience. So "autogenerated" is, at best, taking hand-crafted content, repeating it a few times, and changing some details in the hope that the player won't notice the repetition right away. This is, of course, only in the context of traditional RPGs - more sandbox-style games, like Dwarf Fortress, or Love (or, hell, at the other extreme of auto-generated content, Tetris) can do just fine.

warfangle 17y ago
One of the problems with auto-generated content is that the setting is typically extremely static. If you could build a properly robust dynamic environment, the auto-generated content would depend hugely on how players actually interact with the (dynamic) gameworld. I'm sure some would figure out the algorithms involved in such a game, but if you add enough fuzzy logic in, it could potentially keep the wool over most of the players' eyes..
Tichy 17y ago
Nethack seems to succeed with generating interesting automated content. It is even fun to just read the "elevation stories", each of them is different.