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Nintendo president: “Game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated”
(mynintendonews.com)
this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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I agree that generally the two are linked, but to nitpick, there are some roguelikes -- games that I would call roguelikes, at any rate -- where the world is to greater or lesser degree hand-crafted.
ToME 2, as I recall, did have a procedurally-generated underworld, but a more-or-less hand-crafted overworld. Been a long time since I've played it, though.
Caves of Qud has a most of the underworld being procedurally-generated, and has many individual overworld maps being procedurally-generated, but the overworld map tiles and many individual overworld maps and some underworld maps are static.
But my point is more just that I don't think that it's right to say something like "procedural generation of worlds doesn't work". I mean, there are games where I think that procedural generation of worlds works, and works well. It's just that we haven't hit that Holy Grail where humans don't have to handcraft worlds for games that rely on handcrafted worlds any more, where the procedural generation engine can just make as much handcrafted-like world as one wants for no cost.
I think that for roguelikes, what makes it work is that rely on creating different, well, tactical scenarios via randomization. Like, you have to play differently based on the environment you're in, and so random generation gives you a stream of unknown environments so that each session is mixed up.
For many traditional games, where the point is exploration or story...we don't have procedural generation that can make interesting plot and characters yet. Maybe we could make aesthetically-pretty procedural worlds, but we don't have software that can generate stories with characters and plot events that we emotionally care about even remotely as well as humans can. Maybe LLMs or something are a tool that can help us get there, but we're not there in 2024.
I don't know what exactly makes procedural generation work for Minecraft. I guess it affects how one plays. It's more-or-less irrelevant from a tactical standpoint, the combat doesn't change up much, but it affects what resources one has, what problems present themselves, what constraints are imposed on how one has to build and act. Maybe games like Dwarf Fortress and Oxygen Not Included and to some extent Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, all games with procedurally-generated worlds, would fall into that camp. Starbound. Terraria.
Funny you should bring up Caves of Qud. That game is pushing the envelope in terms of procedural generation. They want to do a ton of the world building and background stories with procedural generation while leaving the main plot hand-crafted. They also do a really fun procedural detective story with one of the quests, so the clues and evidence you find when investigating the crime are different every time.
I think a lot of the fun of that game is with exploring the procedurally generated environments and doing the random quests. There just needs to be more research into generating branching plots and simulating events, with chains of causality. Dwarf Fortress does a lot of this in its world generation, for example.
I think what works for Minecraft is the spatial nature of the game. Procedural generation gives the player a new environment in which they can role play as an architect and engineer. While nothing stops you from building exactly the same structure every time — block for block — it’s more fun to design your structures into the landscape itself, like a real architect would! The same goes for Daarf Fortress and the like. It scratches an engineering/managerial itch.
Starfield got a lot of flak for using procedural generation which was technically impressive but...it's a game that doesn't really benefit a lot from it. Like, the player doesn't need to do much to adapt their gameplay to the procedurally-generated environments. It mostly just provides aesthetic variety.
I wonder...like, roguelikes have tactics that rely on the environment. If someone were to go and mod Starfield such that the tactics in the game relied on the environment a lot more, that might be interesting from the game's shooter side. Like, say someone got the ability to morph into something that could slide through pipes, or there were enemies that could walk up magnetic surfaces, or water had a meaningful role (it did in Fallout, with the Aqua Boy perk). Maybe have vehicles or enemies that can only travel on certain types of terrain. Get the ability to lock doors. Right now, the procedural environments are just outdoors, but if it included indoors, maybe stuff like the ability to leverage with electrical systems or lighting. As it stands, the only things that really affect tactics is the availability of cover and the ability to climb on something so that some melee-only enemies cannot reach someone. The environments are basically just eye candy, don't really create different gameplay problems for the player.
Or from the base-building aspect. If, for a given outpost, the resources became a lot-more significant, so that a base really had to be designed around the limitations imposed by the environment. Like, I don't know. Temperature of a given piece of equipment, taking shade into account. Being able to make use of hydropower off waterfalls. Some machines having outputs that create more issues that the player has to deal with, kinda Oxygen Not Included. Designing a defensible base being more-important.
As it stands, the layout of a given base is virtually irrelevant aside from choosing a base location that has a circle that contains a given amount of easy-to-build-on flat ground and as many different types of resource as possible. Like, Bethesda built this whole fancy landscape-generation engine, can create a huge variety of realistic-looking environments, but didn't really do much with it in terms of gameplay.