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>I believe that the people who avoid that temptation and create undiluted games with procedurally generated content will be the ones whose games are played for
by spiralganglion 16y ago
>I believe that the people who avoid that temptation and create undiluted games with procedurally generated content will be the ones whose games are played for decades to come.
That'd be wonderful. The "empty" feeling of dilution, and the absence of real content, are issues our team are tackling head-on, with full awareness of such pitfalls. As an example, I was raised on the early Final Fantasy games. A huge, huge part of their appeal was the music — beautiful themes with expert execution by a masterful composer (Nobuo Uematsu). Even now, 20 years later, I have friends who grew up playing the same games who still remember the music. We can hum the themes to one-another, and reminisce about our youth beguiling away many an afternoon absorbed in the stories of these virtual worlds.
But if the stories were procedurally generated, or the music, or any other "hook" that will be remembered by the player, the shared experience is suddenly lost. People may play the same "title", but they haven't played the same game. This is a big, big challenge — how do you leverage the power of dynamically generated content, without breaking the consistency of experience within your game and the commonality of experience between players. How do you create shared memories?
It's easy enough to take a game like Diablo, where the maps are random, or Boarderlands, where the weapons are random, and discuss the game with someone else, arriving at a shared impression and similar memories of play. But if the maps, weapons, quests, characters, sounds, music, rendering style, dialogue, plot, gameplay rules, setting, and even game genre are in some way "generated"... how can you still have a shared experience?
Whoever comes out with a solution to that will be doing some fascinating work.
Also, from what I've heard, the next Elder Scrolls (Morrowind, Oblivion) game is going to have some aspect of procedurally determined quests. I'm excited to see how they do that, as it's not so often that a big studio like Bethesda takes on such an unproven concept.
- Natsu 16y agoBecause of your reminder, I'm listening to the FF6 opera right now in my mind, even though I haven't heard it for years. (Celes: "Oh my hero, so far away now, will I ever see your smile? Like night into day, you're so far away, it's just a fading dream."), so I understand what you mean very well about shared experiences and the like. It sounds like you understand the weak points of procedural generation quite well, so I think you'll be able to use it to full effect and create a great game. Good luck! :)
- Natsu 16y ago> But if the maps, weapons, quests, characters, sounds, music, rendering style, dialogue, plot, gameplay rules, setting, and even game genre are in some way "generated"... how can you still have a shared experience? Well, you can do static generation. You use a known seed and a PRNG to generate stuff that's the same for everyone. Usually, you do that for background stuff, but some people do it and create big, empty worlds that they then try to fill with other stuff. But often, it's for background stuff like trees and clouds, where it really doesn't really create a shared experience one way or another. There's also the sort of hybrid approach from Dwarf Fortress, where people can share seeds/worldgen info, but I think you already know about that. So people can all share that broken embark with the adamantium space elevator, but their fortresses will likely be totally different and have totally different stories. Maybe one will have their last dwarf go axe crazy while on fire, while another will drop 300+ goblins from the highest z-level all the way down into hell (literally...), or use those crazy weaponized bathtubs they're talking about now. I think there may be some sweet spots in there with handcrafted stories layered atop procedurally generated worlds, but you're right that more work needs to be done on it.
- jokermatt999 16y agoFYI, Elder Scrolls actually did procedural content a while ago, in Daggerfall. I haven't played it, but I've heard very mixed things. Then again, it can be a polarizing series...