So, was Daggerfall the last major game created through procedural generation of the main map?
With how much No Man's Sky is pulling off with this method, I'm really hoping we'll see these ideas bleed into other types of game. Imagine if the next Elder Scrolls was built this way, so you could actually explore a continent-sized world filled with thousands of different types of monsters and an endless variety of dungeons. Sure, they could still put down a hand-crafted main quest inside it (like Daggerfall), but the scope and replayability outside of that...
I need this game to succeed. Not just for how awesome it could be on its own merits, but for what it could do for gaming as a whole.
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
So, was Daggerfall the last major game created through procedural generation of the main map?
With how much No Man's Sky is pulling off with this method, I'm really hoping we'll see these ideas bleed into other types of game. Imagine if the next Elder Scrolls was built this way, so you could actually explore a continent-sized world filled with thousands of different types of monsters and an endless variety of dungeons. Sure, they could still put down a hand-crafted main quest inside it (like Daggerfall), but the scope and replayability outside of that...
I need this game to succeed. Not just for how awesome it could be on its own merits, but for what it could do for gaming as a whole.
Right. In its own way, No Man's Sky has the potential to change games like Minecraft did. Whereas Minecraft put all the creative powers in the hands of the player base, No Man's Sky seems to promise a system of design where it becomes possible for a relatively small team of developers to deliver something on that level for the player base to experience. If it delivers, Hello Games could shatter the brute-force approach to major studio development that has been killing off developers, publishers, and franchises for the last decade or so.
So, was Daggerfall the last major game created through procedural generation of the main map?
I highly doubt it. I don't know how much information we have on how other games have been made but I would wager that most open world games aren't fully, explicitly designed by hand. Most probably begin with a generated landscape that's then adjusted as necessary, with foliage and rock placement generated based on density maps, etc.
Usually there isn't one algorithm that is simply allowed to run and that makes the whole game for you, it's a process that requires developer intervention at multiple stages along the way. Sort of a procedural helper.
There was a lot of hype around Spore's procedural approach before it launched, but I'm not sure that it would've revolutionised anything had it been more successful. I think that, yes, for a game of this unimaginable scale then it's, well 'necessary' doesn't convey the meaning, the game literally wouldn't exist if you couldn't generate it like this. But for smaller games, even ones as wide-ranging as an Elder Scrolls or whatever, I feel like developers will still want to take as much control over its design as possible. I've just been cycling around Los Santos in GTA V, stopping to poke my nose into any interesting corners that I find. That's an incredibly huge, intricate, detailed environment that has clearly had a huge amount of attention and care poured into every scrap of litter stuck in every crevice. I don't believe it'd be half as believable if it were generated by an algorithm, at least not the kind we'll be capable of writing for many, many years yet.
Right. In its own way, No Man's Sky has the potential to change games like Minecraft did. Whereas Minecraft put all the creative powers in the hands of the player base, No Man's Sky seems to promise a system of design where it becomes possible for a relatively small team of developers to deliver something on that level for the player base to experience. If it delivers, Hello Games could shatter the brute-force approach to major studio development that has been killing off developers, publishers, and franchises for the last decade or so.
I'm not sure what you mean. Trying to follow what your post says, Minecraft put creative powers in the hands of the player base, but NMS keeps most of those creative powers away from its players. So what upside are you saying it brings to light? The developers deliver something on what level for the players to experience?
What's the brute force approach? Designing every rock and tree instead of generating them? Like I said, I think a lot of open worlds are already generated.
Right. In its own way, No Man's Sky has the potential to change games like Minecraft did. Whereas Minecraft put all the creative powers in the hands of the player base, No Man's Sky seems to promise a system of design where it becomes possible for a relatively small team of developers to deliver something on that level for the player base to experience. If it delivers, Hello Games could shatter the brute-force approach to major studio development that has been killing off developers, publishers, and franchises for the last decade or so.
I'm not sure what you mean. Trying to follow what your post says, Minecraft put creative powers in the hands of the player base, but NMS keeps most of those creative powers away from its players. So what upside are you saying it brings to light? The developers deliver something on what level for the players to experience?
What's the brute force approach? Designing every rock and tree instead of generating them? Like I said, I think a lot of open worlds are already generated.
Apologies.
In a lot of ways, Minecraft was the last big 'thing' in gaming, showing something that had simply never been done before on that level. A relentless lego kit of player-based customization.
When I look at No Man's Sky, I see what appears to be a very large, open world game made by a small number of developers, its scale managed by procedural generation and (presumably) shrewd design choices.
I bring this up in contrast to major publishers, who increasingly turn to the idea of building multiple development teams for a single project, with a headcount rivaling that of a small town and a budget rivaling, well, the cost of many many years of running a small town.
The implication in my mind is the possibility of being able to make so-called 'large' games without the escalating production costs that have been killing development houses and so on.
So, was Daggerfall the last major game created through procedural generation of the main map?
With how much No Man's Sky is pulling off with this method, I'm really hoping we'll see these ideas bleed into other types of game. Imagine if the next Elder Scrolls was built this way, so you could actually explore a continent-sized world filled with thousands of different types of monsters and an endless variety of dungeons. Sure, they could still put down a hand-crafted main quest inside it (like Daggerfall), but the scope and replayability outside of that...
I need this game to succeed. Not just for how awesome it could be on its own merits, but for what it could do for gaming as a whole.
Exploring a vast universe of little depth is very different from procedurally-generating quests and NPCs. Without the human touch, it'd be just like Daggerfall: soulless and empty. Daggerfall, if anything makes the case against procedural content, given how much better every ES game has been since they moved to making as much by hand as possible.
It's my understanding that many of the side quests in Skyrim are procedurally done. Go here, so this thing, go there for reward. It's super simple stuff but it adds to the hands created stuff.
It's my understanding that many of the side quests in Skyrim are procedurally done. Go here, so this thing, go there for reward. It's super simple stuff but it adds to the hands created stuff.
No, not most of them. The only ones I can recall that are procedural are the thieves' guild stealing quests after you finish all the other quests. Those quests basically choose a house somewhere in the world out of a subset, one not important to the story or anything, and then insert an item there for you to steal.
Almost every other quest is fully designed and voice acted.
Much of the landscape was probably generated, though. And then "massaged" in order to be more interesting with big cliffs and mountain paths and such.
I'm pretty sure that Skyrim did have some sort of.. well while maybe not 'procedural' quests, they did talk about having some kind of algorithm that would adjust objectives and locations of some side-quests to send you to places you hadn't been before. Not everything was hand-designed, there were ones like that that were more constructed out of quest Lego, I suppose.
Oh, radiant quests, yeah. Other stuff like finding a book for a guy, where the game randomly picks a dungeon and puts it in the boss chest at the end.
The quests aren't generated whole cloth, the framework was still fully designed and IIRC voice acted. Still, those do not make up the majority of Skyrim quests, they are just little side excursions to make your playthrough unique.
DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
The real trick is creating gameplay systems that use your procedural generation in meaningful ways. And then having proper feedback, so when players do something they feel like they had an effect. It's hard to do, especially that last part, especially in a game like No Man's Sky where you don't have the same agency you do in Minecraft. Personally, I'm not expecting Dwarf Fortress levels of emergence but I'd be really happy with some Brogue level stuff. Things like, "Oh that's a weird floating thing that's getting too close to me while I'm doing SCIENCE-THING. I'm gonna hafta murder it." The thing pops under my assault and floods the area with an invisible, explosive gas. My activities ignite the gas causing an explosion. The explosion destroys the floor beneath me and I fall into a deep, dark cavern...
If they can pull off similar reactivity like that they could really be on to something. Even if the box of mechanics isn't as large as the galaxy that they are within, if you can create spontaneous situations like that I think the game will have an audience. Like I could see variations on that scenario playing out over many different planets, and if the planets are truly different then I'll encounter different circumstances every time. Brogue is really good at that sort of thing and it all comes from a few simple elements like what kind of dungeon level it is, what populates it, which items, traps and tricks are seeded across the location.
So, was Daggerfall the last major game created through procedural generation of the main map?
With how much No Man's Sky is pulling off with this method, I'm really hoping we'll see these ideas bleed into other types of game. Imagine if the next Elder Scrolls was built this way, so you could actually explore a continent-sized world filled with thousands of different types of monsters and an endless variety of dungeons. Sure, they could still put down a hand-crafted main quest inside it (like Daggerfall), but the scope and replayability outside of that...
I need this game to succeed. Not just for how awesome it could be on its own merits, but for what it could do for gaming as a whole.
Exploring a vast universe of little depth is very different from procedurally-generating quests and NPCs. Without the human touch, it'd be just like Daggerfall: soulless and empty. Daggerfall, if anything makes the case against procedural content, given how much better every ES game has been since they moved to making as much by hand as possible.
This has been the argument for a long time, and I've bought it for a long time. But we're twenty years past 1995 now. I'd like to see more experimentation done here, and NMS is the most outlandishly bold version of that I can imagine. If it succeeds, why not bring that into something like Elder Scrolls?
Say what you will about Daggerfall (it certainly had its flaws), but there were things I could do in that game that I haven't been able to do in any of the sequels since. I like to roll up lots of different characters and play the game using different combinations of abilities and options. In the modern ES games, doing this while wanting to use magic left you with two awful choices: gimp yourself (or at least make it rather difficult to get appropriate spells) or replay the exact same intro quest sequences of the Mage's Guild. Something that was only decent at best the first time becomes unbearable the third or fourth time.
And having actual countries with proper amounts of cities, villages, and so forth was wonderful, especially for playing as a rogue. Once again, if you play a modern ES game you basically have to join the Thieves' Guild to be able to sell stolen goods or get rid of bounties that can literally block access to the few cities that even exist in the game. In Daggerfall you can just go to another city or country if things get too hot. No requirement to replay the exact same story quests & cutscenes every time you want to make a character with a few lawbreaking elements.
The good news is that someone like Bethesda could still afford to employ the same number of hand content creators, putting tons of interesting hand-crafted content into the massive world. If that's what you're after then you could just play those portions and forget about the procedural parts of the countryside. But on the other hand...
Even if nothing else, the procedurally modified creatures and sounds from NMS would add tons of diversity to an ES game. Instead of 20 enemies there could be 20,000. Sure, most are variations on a theme, but that's enough to keep things unpredictable and eminently replayable.
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
This has been the argument for a long time, and I've bought it for a long time. But we're twenty years past 1995 now. I'd like to see more experimentation done here, and NMS is the most outlandishly bold version of that I can imagine. If it succeeds, why not bring that into something like Elder Scrolls?
It had been a while since I played Skyrim so I forgot a lot about the radiant quest system, but it's coming back. It was usually fairly obvious that you were on a radiant quest instead of a more tightly designed one. If they weren't about fetching, they were about delivering. Honestly it was pretty close to the guild quests of Daggerfall which were all "radiant," if you want to use the buzzword...which just means the game generates a destination for your goal, and you go there and back again.
Daggerfall's dungeons were all static and defined within the game data, but they were initially randomly generated, and there were so many hundreds of them that they might as well have been randomly generated on the spot for every quest! The way it worked was, there were a number of "quest locations" set in every dungeon, and the object or enemy that was the goal of the quest was placed at one of those locations. The dungeons were so massive that in Daggerfall's final update, they added cheats that let you teleport instantly to all the quest locations in sequence, just to be able to get in and get back out without getting lost for hours.
Essentially, outside of the main quest and scant few designed sidequests, the game was like:
roll ~1-20 on the list of quests for this guild
roll ~1-100 on the list of dungeons for this country
roll ~1-10 on the list of quest locations in this dungeon
place item to retrieve or monster to kill
(Or depending on the quest, roll ~1-100 on the list of other towns for your goal to be in, and/or ~1-20 on the list of generic houses in the town for your goal to be in)
In practice I kept turning down the quests offered until the quest text made it obvious that this was one of the easy ones in the same town, or even the same guildhall ("guard the mage's guild for the next 3 hours"). I hated being sent to a dungeon. Watch a video like this to see why. :P Those guys only don't go crazy because they have each other to talk to.
Skyrim's radiant quest system is just a much smaller version of the same thing. Roll 1-5 on the type of thieves' guild quest, roll 1-30 on which house or business you're sent to, roll 1-7 on the item generated within the house to steal. It got quite boring after a few go-rounds.
As far as scale goes, a massive generated map with hundreds of locations, it's fun to think about but in practice you fast traveled literally everywhere. There was no reason to engage with the scale. It was simply there to be "realistic," but it wasn't fun. I don't think new technology would make that same scale any more fun. After a certain point, you simply know that this town was generated like all the rest and there's nothing remarkable about it. You don't expect a cool surprise around every corner because after a dozen towns, you've seen it all.
I mean, think about it. There are 9 major cities in Skyrim. Let's say for a sense of scale they duplicated those cities' styles 10 more times each, so there are about 100 cities. 10 more in the dark wood style of Riften, 10 more in the stone-and-thatch style of Whiterun, 10 more in the stone-and-stairs style of Markarth. Any quests there are just radiant ones, and none of the NPCs have written back stories, no old warrior caring for an orphan little girl, no rich widow enforcing her will on the populace. Just generic generated people wandering around. Would this really have been that much more engaging?
Say what you will about Daggerfall (it certainly had its flaws), but there were things I could do in that game that I haven't been able to do in any of the sequels since. I like to roll up lots of different characters and play the game using different combinations of abilities and options. In the modern ES games, doing this while wanting to use magic left you with two awful choices: gimp yourself (or at least make it rather difficult to get appropriate spells) or replay the exact same intro quest sequences of the Mage's Guild. Something that was only decent at best the first time becomes unbearable the third or fourth time.
And having actual countries with proper amounts of cities, villages, and so forth was wonderful, especially for playing as a rogue. Once again, if you play a modern ES game you basically have to join the Thieves' Guild to be able to sell stolen goods or get rid of bounties that can literally block access to the few cities that even exist in the game. In Daggerfall you can just go to another city or country if things get too hot. No requirement to replay the exact same story quests & cutscenes every time you want to make a character with a few lawbreaking elements.
But you trade playing the exact same interesting quests for endless boring variations on the same theme. Again, this is already in Skyrim to an extent. There might even already be a mod that lets you go on those radiant burglary quests without doing story quests at the beginning. Would you really start a new game, beeline to the thieves' guild, and do those quests over and over? This time you have to steal an item from the house down the street from the last one, and it's a locket instead of a ring! How fun...
Even if nothing else, the procedurally modified creatures and sounds from NMS would add tons of diversity to an ES game. Instead of 20 enemies there could be 20,000. Sure, most are variations on a theme, but that's enough to keep things unpredictable and eminently replayable.
I just can't recognize that as something that grants replayability.
Let's say Skyrim had that diversity. I meet a dragon that's pink and has a third wing growing out of its back, but it generally behaves about the same as the dragons I fought before. I come across a troll that is covered in red moss which would poison me if I touched it, and I kill it with an arrow like I normally kill trolls. A blue horker uses a spell to become nearly invisible and comes up and attacks me like they usually do.
I dunno, it doesn't sound terribly exciting. It sounds kind of ecologically unrealistic, actually. I don't mind seeing the same enemies over and over if they're indigenous to that world. I don't walk home and see 10 different colors of squirrels, each with slightly different powers.
DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
I've never played Daggerfall but that sort of quest generation system is ok by me, if the world generated is an interesting place. The same sort of thing works well for me in Elite because I buy into their universe and I like exploring it. There are Elite players who see nothing to interact with there and so they pursue other activities. I think that will change as the game gets better with communicating feedback to the player and as the simulation gets deeper. Sure I pass on a lot of missions that don't fit my needs but then that just adds to the experience for me when I find a cool smuggling mission or I see lucrative contract for stolen goods and I know just the place. And as I take these jobs on the million other things going on in the game can have knock on effects. It's not perfect or where it needs to be to really shine but I can see a clear path there.
And that's something I think is going to be true for NMS too. I think a trend we are going to see with these kinds of Skyscraper projects, to use Hello Games own term, is that these games are going to be ongoing developments, and in some cases it will get messy at times. Perhaps they may not meet every players needs early on but they show potential for some real cool player driven universes down the road. Remember, EvE Online wasn't built in a day.
While I don't go crazy for the quest stuff being procedural, I think the idea of building say, a couple dozen different monsters with distinct behavior, and then turning that into hundreds or thousands of monsters with variations or combinations of behavior and powers is pretty awesome. I'd be 100% behind that.
It had been a while since I played Skyrim so I forgot a lot about the radiant quest system, but it's coming back. It was usually fairly obvious that you were on a radiant quest instead of a more tightly designed one. If they weren't about fetching, they were about delivering. Honestly it was pretty close to the guild quests of Daggerfall which were all "radiant," if you want to use the buzzword...which just means the game generates a destination for your goal, and you go there and back again.
Daggerfall's dungeons were all static and defined within the game data, but they were initially randomly generated, and there were so many hundreds of them that they might as well have been randomly generated on the spot for every quest! The way it worked was, there were a number of "quest locations" set in every dungeon, and the object or enemy that was the goal of the quest was placed at one of those locations. The dungeons were so massive that in Daggerfall's final update, they added cheats that let you teleport instantly to all the quest locations in sequence, just to be able to get in and get back out without getting lost for hours.
...
In practice I kept turning down the quests offered until the quest text made it obvious that this was one of the easy ones in the same town, or even the same guildhall ("guard the mage's guild for the next 3 hours"). I hated being sent to a dungeon. Watch a video like this to see why. :P Those guys only don't go crazy because they have each other to talk to.
Skyrim's radiant quest system is just a much smaller version of the same thing. Roll 1-5 on the type of thieves' guild quest, roll 1-30 on which house or business you're sent to, roll 1-7 on the item generated within the house to steal. It got quite boring after a few go-rounds.
Agreed, I basically did the same thing in Daggerfall. And I completely ignored Skyrim's radiant quests. However, these weren't inherent issues with procedural systems; rather they were problems with the specific implementation.
Daggerfall's misc quest dungeons were far too big, especially given that they gave the same ultimate quest rewards as much simpler, shorter, safer alternatives. This is a tuning issue. The game could have reserved these kinds of quests & dungeons for specific circumstances (like the final quest to rank up in a given organization), made the dungeons much smaller, or made the ultimate reward for completing a dungeon much better. They also didn't have enough dungeon "pieces" that they used to make the random dungeons, so you were going through the same rooms and hallways far too often.
Similarly, Skyrim's radiant quests were utterly pointless; they would typically grant a tiny sum of money, less than what you'd get for defeating a single humanoid enemy and selling its stuff. It was faster and more economically efficient to just go straight to a random dungeon, clear it, and go to town to sell than to go out of your way to obtain and turn in a radiant quest.
There was also, rather plainly, very little effort put into Skyrim's radiant quests. There was very little diversity and ingenuity employed in the design. This is where a triumphant delivery from No Man's Sky will make the difference. If it's engaging and varied despite being procedural, they'll show both that it can be done and offer an example of how it can be done.
As far as scale goes, a massive generated map with hundreds of locations, it's fun to think about but in practice you fast traveled literally everywhere. There was no reason to engage with the scale. It was simply there to be "realistic," but it wasn't fun. I don't think new technology would make that same scale any more fun. After a certain point, you simply know that this town was generated like all the rest and there's nothing remarkable about it. You don't expect a cool surprise around every corner because after a dozen towns, you've seen it all.
Well, again, that's why I prefaced all of this with: if No Man's Sky delivers on its promise, this will no longer be a problem. It will have been solved.
Supposedly, simply by adjusting parameters, the game has created a lot of relatively friendly "Earth-like" planets in the starting outer regions of the galaxy, with things getting more and more weird / different as you progress toward the center. If they pull that off, there's little reason another game couldn't do something pretty similar.
Sure, you'll still fast travel when you're trying to go to specific places. But you could also fast travel to a random location, explore the countryside, and see something you've almost certainly never seen before in the game. And you could do this over and over and over again. For years. Even when you are following main quest lines, there will still be a proper sense of scope as you travel through the world.
Fast travel can be fun, too! Star Trail's system was just excellent. But, proper scale is essential.
I mean, think about it. There are 9 major cities in Skyrim. Let's say for a sense of scale they duplicated those cities' styles 10 more times each, so there are about 100 cities. 10 more in the dark wood style of Riften, 10 more in the stone-and-thatch style of Whiterun, 10 more in the stone-and-stairs style of Markarth. Any quests there are just radiant ones, and none of the NPCs have written back stories, no old warrior caring for an orphan little girl, no rich widow enforcing her will on the populace. Just generic generated people wandering around. Would this really have been that much more engaging?
Yes! The absolute worst thing is rolling up your second character, going to a town you went to in your first character, and there's the exact same people moaning about the exact same circumstsances. Seeing the exact same beheading every time you walk into that city over there. It's immersion-breaking; every time I see one of these scenes or hear one of these conversations again, I'm reminded that I'm in a video game with a limited amount of stuff in it.
And every time I walk around a "city" that has a grand total of 40 people living in it, or pull up the map of an entire nation and see just a few cities and towns in total, or see the capital city from just about everywhere I stand in Oblivion, or walk on foot and discover 7 dungeons and 2 villages in the span of a single in-game afternoon in the countryside, I'm reminded that I'm in a very, very fake place. No beautiful vistas or hand-crafted waterfalls will prevent this.
But you trade playing the exact same interesting quests for endless boring variations on the same theme. Again, this is already in Skyrim to an extent. There might even already be a mod that lets you go on those radiant burglary quests without doing story quests at the beginning. Would you really start a new game, beeline to the thieves' guild, and do those quests over and over? This time you have to steal an item from the house down the street from the last one, and it's a locket instead of a ring! How fun...
Yes! Absolutely yes! I've actually looked for mods that let you change up the intro sequences of the guilds, but I haven't found any. I did mod out the entire game intro in favor of quick starts at various points around the world, allowing me to skip the main quest for as long as I wish. I tried to find mods that changed up the main quest, too, so I could get Shout access without having to replay the same damn cutscenes and dungeons, but no luck.
Besides, Elder Scrolls games aren't known for their gripping dialogue. The overwhelming majority of the quests, including the main quests of the recent two games and almost every guild quest since Morrowind (excluding Oblivion's Assassin Guild) has been, frankly, terrible. The dialogue isn't worth anything, the characters aren't gripping or interesting (because they're in-and-out and you can't truly interact with them), the cutscenes are incredibly dull (thanks to bad animations and the lack of camera angles & time control for drama). And you can't skip half of it once it starts!
I'd trade all that for repetitive randomness just to make them shut the hell up and let me get on with it.
I just can't recognize that as something that grants replayability.
Let's say Skyrim had that diversity. I meet a dragon that's pink and has a third wing growing out of its back, but it generally behaves about the same as the dragons I fought before. I come across a troll that is covered in red moss which would poison me if I touched it, and I kill it with an arrow like I normally kill trolls. A blue horker uses a spell to become nearly invisible and comes up and attacks me like they usually do.
I dunno, it doesn't sound terribly exciting. It sounds kind of ecologically unrealistic, actually. I don't mind seeing the same enemies over and over if they're indigenous to that world. I don't walk home and see 10 different colors of squirrels, each with slightly different powers.
Consider a more practical application of the technique.
No Man's Sky varies traits like aggression along with other traits like size (and how bizarre / deformed the resulting creature is). It's not really a combat-focused game, so there's probably not much else they can tweak. But Elder Scrolls has stats (or at least skills), combat behavior AI, spells... Every time the game generates a new "class" of creature, it would generate a set of behaviors & abilities to go along with it.
To keep the ecology from being utter nonsense, the game would limit how many creatures it would actually generate for a given playthrough. So out of those 20k possibilities, you might only see 80 varieties in a single play-through (20 total creatures at 4 difficulty tiers each). But then when you play the game again, you get a slightly altered set of monsters. Of course you'd have the hand-designed ones that are important to the main quests and manually-created dungeons; these would be the random fodder out in the game world.
Very rarely you might run into a one-of-a-kind variety as well, something like a boss or miniboss encounter in a dungeon. Some bizarre, twisted undead made by a necromancer, or a troll mutated and warped by <something>. These would keep the game fresh, establishing a "what's-around-that-corner" curiosity within a procedural world.
Basically, if No Man's Sky can do it, then anything could. If they make it so that you really are interested in seeing what the next planet has to offer, then other games (with almost certainly smaller scales) should be able to do the same within their respective environments.
Fleur de Alys on
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
Similarly, Skyrim's radiant quests were utterly pointless; they would typically grant a tiny sum of money, less than what you'd get for defeating a single humanoid enemy and selling its stuff. It was faster and more economically efficient to just go straight to a random dungeon, clear it, and go to town to sell than to go out of your way to obtain and turn in a radiant quest.
Would you really start a new game, beeline to the thieves' guild, and do those quests over and over? This time you have to steal an item from the house down the street from the last one, and it's a locket instead of a ring! How fun...
Yes! Absolutely yes!
These don't seem to jibe with each other. :P
Yes! The absolute worst thing is rolling up your second character, going to a town you went to in your first character, and there's the exact same people moaning about the exact same circumstsances. Seeing the exact same beheading every time you walk into that city over there. It's immersion-breaking; every time I see one of these scenes or hear one of these conversations again, I'm reminded that I'm in a video game with a limited amount of stuff in it.
I dunno, I don't turn on Sonic the Hedgehog and feel disgust that all the rings are where they were the last time I played. I would never describe that as immersion breaking. I just play the game and enjoy it!
And every time I walk around a "city" that has a grand total of 40 people living in it, or pull up the map of an entire nation and see just a few cities and towns in total, or see the capital city from just about everywhere I stand in Oblivion, or walk on foot and discover 7 dungeons and 2 villages in the span of a single in-game afternoon in the countryside, I'm reminded that I'm in a very, very fake place. No beautiful vistas or hand-crafted waterfalls will prevent this.
Well yeah! That's what's awesome about it. You're in a more fun place than the real world, where it takes hours to walk to the next town and there are no magic items or dragons. Instead we don't have to have our time wasted, or skip over huge swaths of landscape just to get anywhere. Well, actually we still do the skipping, even in the relatively small areas in Elder Scrolls games. If I jump a mile of uninteresting landscape or 100 miles, what does it matter?
Besides, Elder Scrolls games aren't known for their gripping dialogue. The overwhelming majority of the quests, including the main quests of the recent two games and almost every guild quest since Morrowind (excluding Oblivion's Assassin Guild) has been, frankly, terrible. The dialogue isn't worth anything, the characters aren't gripping or interesting (because they're in-and-out and you can't truly interact with them), the cutscenes are incredibly dull (thanks to bad animations and the lack of camera angles & time control for drama). And you can't skip half of it once it starts!
I'd trade all that for repetitive randomness just to make them shut the hell up and let me get on with it.
I disagree with all of this. I wouldn't play the games if I didn't enjoy all of that stuff, the writing, the questing. I've got better things to do with my time than go on terrible quests, that's why I play the Elder Scrolls games instead of other options.
To keep the ecology from being utter nonsense, the game would limit how many creatures it would actually generate for a given playthrough. So out of those 20k possibilities, you might only see 80 varieties in a single play-through (20 total creatures at 4 difficulty tiers each). But then when you play the game again, you get a slightly altered set of monsters. Of course you'd have the hand-designed ones that are important to the main quests and manually-created dungeons; these would be the random fodder out in the game world.
Very rarely you might run into a one-of-a-kind variety as well, something like a boss or miniboss encounter in a dungeon. Some bizarre, twisted undead made by a necromancer, or a troll mutated and warped by <something>. These would keep the game fresh, establishing a "what's-around-that-corner" curiosity within a procedural world.
That's still not really replayability to me. I would never think to myself, I think I'll play that game again, just to see what the monsters are like this time.
I guess to me, many games are replayable for the same reasons books are rereadable or movies are rewatchable. The remainder of them are replayable because of emergent situations.
I will play Nethack over and over because I might find myself in a wide open cave, having just been blinded by a potion thrown by an angry dwarf...or I might find myself with no weapon but a rusty spear, trapped in a corridor between a poisoned cockatrice and pack of wild dogs. I won't play it to see how many limbs the dogs have this time around, or if they are very slightly more aggressive than last time.
Basically, if No Man's Sky can do it, then anything could. If they make it so that you really are interested in seeing what the next planet has to offer, then other games (with almost certainly smaller scales) should be able to do the same within their respective environments.
Well, I've expressed my doubts before that they'll be able to pull that off.
I'm sure people who mostly want to go sightseeing will be satisfied, seeing the variety that can happen when you randomize the variables over and over. I need more of a creative outlet. I want to be able to build a massive tower/elevator from one planet to the next, and have other people come along and see what I'm doing and help me, as we gradually create a huge spiderweb in the galaxy. I want to cover the entire surface of a planet with a huge city, and have people come from all over the world to visit and see what I built. That sort of thing.
Similarly, Skyrim's radiant quests were utterly pointless; they would typically grant a tiny sum of money, less than what you'd get for defeating a single humanoid enemy and selling its stuff. It was faster and more economically efficient to just go straight to a random dungeon, clear it, and go to town to sell than to go out of your way to obtain and turn in a radiant quest.
Would you really start a new game, beeline to the thieves' guild, and do those quests over and over? This time you have to steal an item from the house down the street from the last one, and it's a locket instead of a ring! How fun...
Yes! Absolutely yes!
These don't seem to jibe with each other. :P
Yes! The absolute worst thing is rolling up your second character, going to a town you went to in your first character, and there's the exact same people moaning about the exact same circumstsances. Seeing the exact same beheading every time you walk into that city over there. It's immersion-breaking; every time I see one of these scenes or hear one of these conversations again, I'm reminded that I'm in a video game with a limited amount of stuff in it.
I dunno, I don't turn on Sonic the Hedgehog and feel disgust that all the rings are where they were the last time I played. I would never describe that as immersion breaking. I just play the game and enjoy it!
And every time I walk around a "city" that has a grand total of 40 people living in it, or pull up the map of an entire nation and see just a few cities and towns in total, or see the capital city from just about everywhere I stand in Oblivion, or walk on foot and discover 7 dungeons and 2 villages in the span of a single in-game afternoon in the countryside, I'm reminded that I'm in a very, very fake place. No beautiful vistas or hand-crafted waterfalls will prevent this.
Well yeah! That's what's awesome about it. You're in a more fun place than the real world, where it takes hours to walk to the next town and there are no magic items or dragons. Instead we don't have to have our time wasted, or skip over huge swaths of landscape just to get anywhere. Well, actually we still do the skipping, even in the relatively small areas in Elder Scrolls games. If I jump a mile of uninteresting landscape or 100 miles, what does it matter?
Besides, Elder Scrolls games aren't known for their gripping dialogue. The overwhelming majority of the quests, including the main quests of the recent two games and almost every guild quest since Morrowind (excluding Oblivion's Assassin Guild) has been, frankly, terrible. The dialogue isn't worth anything, the characters aren't gripping or interesting (because they're in-and-out and you can't truly interact with them), the cutscenes are incredibly dull (thanks to bad animations and the lack of camera angles & time control for drama). And you can't skip half of it once it starts!
I'd trade all that for repetitive randomness just to make them shut the hell up and let me get on with it.
I disagree with all of this. I wouldn't play the games if I didn't enjoy all of that stuff, the writing, the questing. I've got better things to do with my time than go on terrible quests, that's why I play the Elder Scrolls games instead of other options.
To keep the ecology from being utter nonsense, the game would limit how many creatures it would actually generate for a given playthrough. So out of those 20k possibilities, you might only see 80 varieties in a single play-through (20 total creatures at 4 difficulty tiers each). But then when you play the game again, you get a slightly altered set of monsters. Of course you'd have the hand-designed ones that are important to the main quests and manually-created dungeons; these would be the random fodder out in the game world.
Very rarely you might run into a one-of-a-kind variety as well, something like a boss or miniboss encounter in a dungeon. Some bizarre, twisted undead made by a necromancer, or a troll mutated and warped by <something>. These would keep the game fresh, establishing a "what's-around-that-corner" curiosity within a procedural world.
That's still not really replayability to me. I would never think to myself, I think I'll play that game again, just to see what the monsters are like this time.
I guess to me, many games are replayable for the same reasons books are rereadable or movies are rewatchable. The remainder of them are replayable because of emergent situations.
I will play Nethack over and over because I might find myself in a wide open cave, having just been blinded by a potion thrown by an angry dwarf...or I might find myself with no weapon but a rusty spear, trapped in a corridor between a poisoned cockatrice and pack of wild dogs. I won't play it to see how many limbs the dogs have this time around, or if they are very slightly more aggressive than last time.
Basically, if No Man's Sky can do it, then anything could. If they make it so that you really are interested in seeing what the next planet has to offer, then other games (with almost certainly smaller scales) should be able to do the same within their respective environments.
Well, I've expressed my doubts before that they'll be able to pull that off.
I'm sure people who mostly want to go sightseeing will be satisfied, seeing the variety that can happen when you randomize the variables over and over. I need more of a creative outlet. I want to be able to build a massive tower/elevator from one planet to the next, and have other people come along and see what I'm doing and help me, as we gradually create a huge spiderweb in the galaxy. I want to cover the entire surface of a planet with a huge city, and have people come from all over the world to visit and see what I built. That sort of thing.
What you want is not what this game is or ever has suggested it would be. Wanting it is all well and good, but what you want is a completely different game that doesn't exist.
What you want is not what this game is or ever has suggested it would be. Wanting it is all well and good, but what you want is a completely different game that doesn't exist.
Right, I was explaining why I don't think the game will satisfy me on that front (specifically if you want to talk about reasons for replayability). Like I said, people who want to go sightseeing might be satisfied, but I don't expect the game to provide much more than that, nor do I see it as a revelation that will open the doors for generation of quests and stories.
Essentially this exchange you had above, distilled:
So, was Daggerfall the last major game created through procedural generation of the main map?
With how much No Man's Sky is pulling off with this method, I'm really hoping we'll see these ideas bleed into other types of game. Imagine if the next Elder Scrolls was built this way, so you could actually explore a continent-sized world filled with thousands of different types of monsters and an endless variety of dungeons. Sure, they could still put down a hand-crafted main quest inside it (like Daggerfall), but the scope and replayability outside of that...
I need this game to succeed. Not just for how awesome it could be on its own merits, but for what it could do for gaming as a whole.
Exploring a vast universe of little depth is very different from procedurally-generating quests and NPCs. Without the human touch, it'd be just like Daggerfall: soulless and empty. Daggerfall, if anything makes the case against procedural content, given how much better every ES game has been since they moved to making as much by hand as possible.
What I was trying to explain was that the rewards and variety were both too low. That's an implementation problem, not something that's a core issue with any procedural content. Multiply the cash rewards by 5-10 or so and they're worth doing.
I dunno, I don't turn on Sonic the Hedgehog and feel disgust that all the rings are where they were the last time I played. I would never describe that as immersion breaking. I just play the game and enjoy it!
Sonic the Hedgehog is not an open-world game about exploration, discovery, and playing it your way.
Replaying lots of games is much like rewatching a movie -- you're going to have basically the same experience, but you like and want that experience, so you're happy to go back and do it all again.
For other games, replaying them is about having a new experience in a familiar environment. When reviewers discuss how replayable a game is, this is usually what they're talking about. When I start a new game of Civilization as a different civ on a newly-generated map with some tweaks to the map generation parameters, with a new assortment of opponents, etc... I'm going to have a very different experience than with my prior game. It's still Civilization, and there's a core 4x experience I'm getting out of it that doesn't change, but everything built around it is brand-new.
People tend to put hundreds and hundreds of hours into games like Civilization (and Elder Scrolls) specifically because of this. NMS can enhance these elements drastically.
Well yeah! That's what's awesome about it. You're in a more fun place than the real world, where it takes hours to walk to the next town and there are no magic items or dragons. Instead we don't have to have our time wasted, or skip over huge swaths of landscape just to get anywhere. Well, actually we still do the skipping, even in the relatively small areas in Elder Scrolls games. If I jump a mile of uninteresting landscape or 100 miles, what does it matter?
Because it feels fake within a game that is very interested in making me feel like I'm in an authentic place. Bethesda didn't spend hundreds of man-hours implementing Radiant AI for Oblivion and later titles because having people walk around with a semblance of a real life is entertaining. They did it because it makes the world seem more authentic than when people are just roaming randomly or standing still in one spot forever.
Additionally, there's little joy in discovering anything in an Elder Scrolls game because there's something notable absolutely everywhere you go. Within ten seconds of roaming around you've picked up several nearby dungeon locations that you can jump right into. As a result, there's no sense of wonder or achievement in finding any particular dungeon; it's just about whether or not you feel like going into one at a given point in time. Further, the dungeons are all incredibly similar, filled with essentially the same leveled monsters and appropriate treasures. There's nothing interesting to discover in any given one.
Implementing breadth and variety using techniques lifted from NMS would improve both of these aspects.
I disagree with all of this. I wouldn't play the games if I didn't enjoy all of that stuff, the writing, the questing. I've got better things to do with my time than go on terrible quests, that's why I play the Elder Scrolls games instead of other options.
I respect your opinion, but it's literally the first time I've ever heard it applied to an Elder Scrolls game. They're pretty legendary for having some of the worst quests and writing in (single-player) RPGs overall, and I'm very surprised that you select those games for this reason.
That's still not really replayability to me. I would never think to myself, I think I'll play that game again, just to see what the monsters are like this time.
To each their own. I see that you've expressed serious doubts that No Man's Sky is going to work for you, which of course would carry over into implementing these techniques into any other game. That's a pretty core difference of opinion that makes any higher-level discussion fairly meaningless, I think.
If you're right, and NMS is received as being generally repetitive and plain, then it's not going to have any impact in gaming at large.
I'm hoping for a different outcome. I'm hoping for a game that continually surprises me, that offers a constant stream of new experiences (built atop a familiar gaming backbone) as I progress through the galaxy. And I'm hoping it's triumphant enough to usher in a small gaming revolution so we can enjoy this with different game backbones, settings, and aesthetics.
EDIT: I get the feeling I might be unintentionally being a bit caustic here? I actually really enjoy conversations about stuff like this, which is why I get so lengthy and into it. Sorry if I'm coming across as irritated or an ass in general! Also I really love Elder Scrolls games, which is why I get so invested in talking about improvements / refinement.
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EDIT: I get the feeling I might be unintentionally being a bit caustic here? I actually really enjoy conversations about stuff like this, which is why I get so lengthy and into it. Sorry if I'm coming across as irritated or an ass in general! Also I really love Elder Scrolls games, which is why I get so invested in talking about improvements / refinement.
No, not at all, you're fine! I'm glad to talk about it. Neither of us is calling each other names or trying to shut down the conversation. I'm fine with disagreeing. I hope it's not too far afield of NMS to talk about randomly generated games in a more general sense.
Sonic the Hedgehog is not an open-world game about exploration, discovery, and playing it your way.
True, I guess I was just trying to say that I don't have a problem being immersed in whatever world I'm presented with. Elder Scrolls tends to have close towns with few citizens, and so do almost all video games...I think if I had a problem with that I wouldn't be able to get immersed in anything.
I respect your opinion, but it's literally the first time I've ever heard it applied to an Elder Scrolls game. They're pretty legendary for having some of the worst quests and writing in (single-player) RPGs overall, and I'm very surprised that you select those games for this reason.
Well like I said, I don't know why I would bother playing it if I didn't enjoy it. I can't imagine spending hundreds of hours playing a terrible game. :P
For other games, replaying them is about having a new experience in a familiar environment. When reviewers discuss how replayable a game is, this is usually what they're talking about. When I start a new game of Civilization as a different civ on a newly-generated map with some tweaks to the map generation parameters, with a new assortment of opponents, etc... I'm going to have a very different experience than with my prior game. It's still Civilization, and there's a core 4x experience I'm getting out of it that doesn't change, but everything built around it is brand-new.
People tend to put hundreds and hundreds of hours into games like Civilization (and Elder Scrolls) specifically because of this. NMS can enhance these elements drastically.
Randomness can definitely add replayability, but I wouldn't necessarily advocate using it for everything. I think there's a balance to be struck, making things more random doesn't always make the game more replayable or interesting.
One of the things I enjoy in replaying Civ is how the more designed elements are remixed with the randomness. For example, "haha, look at Ghandi, he's been stuck on a 5 tile island the whole game and has nothing. He's usually so aggressive but he really hasn't been able to do anything, here I am surrounding him with advanced warships." But a lot of the reason it's interesting is because of the way those set-in-stone elements have been altered. Ghandi was a real person and is notoriously aggressive in Civ, a randomly generated warlord with random AI patterns would be less funny to see in that situation. At least for me. I can ask for the game to let me play a random warlord, but that warlord is going to have set powers and special units, and I'm ok with that. I like getting used to well-designed elements and dealing with them using the other designed elements (historical units) I have on hand.
I know you're probably not advocating for everything to be random either, it just goes along with my doubt that we can expect a breakthrough in fully radiant quests/characters that are as engaging as the designed ones.
On that note I've actually sought out more randomness and larger worlds recently just to see what it's like. Thinking about NMS got me on a kick here. I searched for procedurally generated games, found this article which led to this game which is just dreadful and demonstrates how not to wield procedural generation as a tool. From there I went to Daggerfall, which was vastly more fun, and then Morrowind where I am now.
Really, you read an article like that and get excited from the possibility it promises, and then you see what it's like in practice and it's quite deflating.
I suppose that for me, randomness for the sake of randomness doesn't really improve anything or encourage me to play again. Seeing this town is now over there on the map, or that this quest item is now that quest item, well either way it's still much the same thing. The appeal of something like Minecraft isn't the randomness of the world, it's the tools that it gives you to interact with it. You've got all these little systems to play with that you control when you place and activate, but there comes a point where it gets beyond your control. If NMS can give you the feeling that chaos could emerge from the available interactions, then they'll be on a good path to a hit.
We're definitely not going to see procedural generation outright tell us interesting stories or create believable characters to converse with. We're a long way away from that.
More applicable would be the emergent stories that happen as a result of the game's mechanics coming together in an interesting manner with the player. We all have crazy stories of things that happened in an Elder Scrolls game that were not written or scripted to occur by Bethesda devs.
Moreso than this we have it in strategy games, particularly something like Crusader Kings II. Those characters even feel like people sometimes because of the things they get up to, the way they're generally driven by their assigned traits and ability to act within the game's environment. They only feel like people because we don't have to actually talk to them, of course, but the stories that are created are constant and lively. The CK2 thread on these boards has more storytelling in it than pretty much any other game thread I've seen (excepting Page-'s excellent Dark Souls LPs), despite the fact that the game itself has basically zero actual story contained within.
And though the map and starting situations are static in a CK2 game (because it's based on history), everything that happens after you unpause a new game is fully procedural. Every child born has procedurally-assigned traits; every character acts in a procedurally-determined fashion.
Historically this sort of thing has been easier to achieve in strategy games versus something like RPGs (or really anything first-person) due to fidelity. You need more detail, thus you need a human hand. But where does that human hand really need to start? How much can we offload to more powerful, modern procedural algorithms? And how can we use this to expand what sort of games we're able to make and experience now?
You can only afford to add so many people to a development team. But algorithms will keep getting better, and stronger computers will be able to do more and more with them. The thought of bringing just a hint of CK2's procedural emergent magic into a first-person exploration game has me giddy with excitement. I'm actually looking forward to NMS more than Fallout 4 at this point. The more they reveal (these IGN specials have been fantastic) the more confident I get that they've really nailed this.
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As much as I am interested in NMS, I am more interested to see the ideas it is implementing being used in some fashion in future games. What I would love to see is the game be well received for what it is and have these concepts be further fleshed out in new and interesting ways in future games.
A good example of this is the concept of Voxels. While it' snot a "new" concept really, it is one that really took off with Minecraft. This inspired many other developers to start playing with the concept and we are starting to see the fruits of that in game that are just on the horizon. They are taking the concept of Voxels and using them in new and interesting ways to flesh out games that are vastly different to Minecraft.
So in that respect I am very excited for NMS. I want them to show that you can use procedural concepts like this in an interesting way that inspires others to use it in then even MORE interesting ways.
But of course it has to be successful for that.
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DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
edited July 2015
See and here I like Malevolence and think it's an interesting proof of concept. I'm looking forward to the game's systems getting implemented. They are internally testing them now and the next release will see the game move beyond the simple tactical dungeon crawler it is now. I'm particularly interested in seeing their multiplayer features, which sound pretty innovative. Almost all of this new content is player driven, revolving around a custom magic system that's tightly integrated with a crafting system.
As far as Malevolence's look and feel goes how else would you expect a memory of a dead reality to manifest? The world of the game is a memory of a reality turned graveyard populated by lost souls that exists only in the mind of an apocalyptic god-weapon. You play as an avatar of this weapon. It's pretty fvcking kvlt. It's also a good example of a developer working with his limitations.
Malevolence is also pretty much a straight up roguelike and is being made for that fanbase. If you aren't part of that fanbase then I wouldn't be surprised to find you dislike the game. So I'm not even sure why it'd come up in this conversation except that yeah it uses a lot of procedural generation too. But in pretty much a completely different genre and on a completely different scale of development with almost completely different goals. I'd say it really doesn't have much relevance to NMS' use of procedural generation.
Wow, I'm shocked that someone else has played that game! I looked up its history and it seems like one of those that has just been ages in development, that may never quite get out of beta, and didn't quite take off.
I love both roguelikes like Nethack and classic first person RPGs along the lines of Might and Magic or Wizardry. Theoretically it touches on everything I like. My main problems are the classic procedural complaints...it's inches deep. IIRC there are 7 enemy types total (goblin, minotaur etc.) and they always scale to your level, along with everything else in the game. You can never get ahead of the curve. Aggressive scaling isn't a good solution for being able to go anywhere you like, some areas need to be easy and some need to be hard. All quests are randomly generated like Daggerfall quests, but often manage to be even less interesting. "Go to this dungeon and kill this specific monster, and come back."
I think when we're talking about what can be accomplished with procedural generation, it's fairly relevant. It shows up pretty easily for me in google searches on the subject. It's true that it doesn't have the same goals as NMS, the look of the world isn't randomized at all, all towns look the same etc. But at the same time, the idea is, if you don't like the area you're in you can just walk somewhere else, as far as you want. Towns and dungeons as far as the eye can see. You're just not trying to gradually make your way to the center dungeon of the world or anything.
DrakeEdgelord TrashBelow the ecliptic plane.Registered Userregular
edited July 2015
You are holding up an unfinished proof of concept as an example of failure. The game is far from finished. There are many player driven systems that will integrate with a kind of massively singleplayer multiplayer. It's completely barebones so I feel like it's unfair to hold it up as something terrible. Different regions have different levels of scaling, so some regions are easier than others. Once the procedural items and magic show up with the new crafting and magic system monsters and traps will get a whole lot more interesting. There is also talk of an interdimensional banking/trading system and quests to retrieve fallen players epic hand made gear as your own fat loot. Sounds potentially amazing for a dungeon crawling roguelike.
What you are doing is like taking Ultima Ratio Regum, holding it up and saying there is nothing to do in this game, it's terrible. And that wouldn't have anything to do with NMS either, even though that game probably has a lot more relevance in this conversation.
I dunno, I feel like when a game is sold for money, even Early Access, it's open for criticism. I don't think I've misrepresented the current state of the game. I would never wish failure on an indie dev (or a big dev for that matter) and people should never stop experimenting with new ways to develop their games and worlds.
The point is, the reason I discovered it at all was that I went looking for procedural generation, became excited at the prospect of what it offered, and in practice I found it less fun to play than I thought. That's all.
More cool stuff, just a fun look at someone working with their favorite band.
On a side note, I actually first heard of 65daysofstatic when I randomly decided to check out their performance at a music festival... 6? 7? years ago. Immediately went and got a CD autographed afterwards.
I'm not sure I followed that fully... to my understanding, the music in NMS will be partially procedural in terms of how it pulls from various parts of the 65DoS-composed soundtrack to make music that basically goes on forever? And then the band will release the "full" / "song" versions of the works as their next album, which will also be called No Man's Sky?
That about right?
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Without watching that video yet, that kind of sounds about like how you'd have to do it. I've seen a couple of 65DoS pictures of their writing process for the music, and it looked like a more complicated process than traditional songwritin'.
I'm not sure I followed that fully... to my understanding, the music in NMS will be partially procedural in terms of how it pulls from various parts of the 65DoS-composed soundtrack to make music that basically goes on forever? And then the band will release the "full" / "song" versions of the works as their next album, which will also be called No Man's Sky?
I'm not sure I followed that fully... to my understanding, the music in NMS will be partially procedural in terms of how it pulls from various parts of the 65DoS-composed soundtrack to make music that basically goes on forever? And then the band will release the "full" / "song" versions of the works as their next album, which will also be called No Man's Sky?
That about right?
I think it will work similar to the creature appearance/voice generation. Bits and pieces of music get selected and mixed together based on whatever criteria they're using.
I also think Sean meant the "album" was going to be the game No Man's Sky, but I wouldn't be surprised and would also be pleased if they released an album of some of their favorite results.
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With how much No Man's Sky is pulling off with this method, I'm really hoping we'll see these ideas bleed into other types of game. Imagine if the next Elder Scrolls was built this way, so you could actually explore a continent-sized world filled with thousands of different types of monsters and an endless variety of dungeons. Sure, they could still put down a hand-crafted main quest inside it (like Daggerfall), but the scope and replayability outside of that...
I need this game to succeed. Not just for how awesome it could be on its own merits, but for what it could do for gaming as a whole.
Right. In its own way, No Man's Sky has the potential to change games like Minecraft did. Whereas Minecraft put all the creative powers in the hands of the player base, No Man's Sky seems to promise a system of design where it becomes possible for a relatively small team of developers to deliver something on that level for the player base to experience. If it delivers, Hello Games could shatter the brute-force approach to major studio development that has been killing off developers, publishers, and franchises for the last decade or so.
I highly doubt it. I don't know how much information we have on how other games have been made but I would wager that most open world games aren't fully, explicitly designed by hand. Most probably begin with a generated landscape that's then adjusted as necessary, with foliage and rock placement generated based on density maps, etc.
http://www.darkcreations.org/hoddminir/region-generation-part-i-landscape-textures
http://www.darkcreations.org/hoddminir/region-generation-part-ii-objects
http://www.darkcreations.org/hoddminir/region-generation-part-iii-hoddminirs-regions
http://www.darkcreations.org/hoddminir/weekly-update-1-march-2015-making-a-region
Usually there isn't one algorithm that is simply allowed to run and that makes the whole game for you, it's a process that requires developer intervention at multiple stages along the way. Sort of a procedural helper.
I'm not sure what you mean. Trying to follow what your post says, Minecraft put creative powers in the hands of the player base, but NMS keeps most of those creative powers away from its players. So what upside are you saying it brings to light? The developers deliver something on what level for the players to experience?
What's the brute force approach? Designing every rock and tree instead of generating them? Like I said, I think a lot of open worlds are already generated.
Apologies.
In a lot of ways, Minecraft was the last big 'thing' in gaming, showing something that had simply never been done before on that level. A relentless lego kit of player-based customization.
When I look at No Man's Sky, I see what appears to be a very large, open world game made by a small number of developers, its scale managed by procedural generation and (presumably) shrewd design choices.
I bring this up in contrast to major publishers, who increasingly turn to the idea of building multiple development teams for a single project, with a headcount rivaling that of a small town and a budget rivaling, well, the cost of many many years of running a small town.
The implication in my mind is the possibility of being able to make so-called 'large' games without the escalating production costs that have been killing development houses and so on.
Exploring a vast universe of little depth is very different from procedurally-generating quests and NPCs. Without the human touch, it'd be just like Daggerfall: soulless and empty. Daggerfall, if anything makes the case against procedural content, given how much better every ES game has been since they moved to making as much by hand as possible.
No, not most of them. The only ones I can recall that are procedural are the thieves' guild stealing quests after you finish all the other quests. Those quests basically choose a house somewhere in the world out of a subset, one not important to the story or anything, and then insert an item there for you to steal.
Almost every other quest is fully designed and voice acted.
Much of the landscape was probably generated, though. And then "massaged" in order to be more interesting with big cliffs and mountain paths and such.
The quests aren't generated whole cloth, the framework was still fully designed and IIRC voice acted. Still, those do not make up the majority of Skyrim quests, they are just little side excursions to make your playthrough unique.
If they can pull off similar reactivity like that they could really be on to something. Even if the box of mechanics isn't as large as the galaxy that they are within, if you can create spontaneous situations like that I think the game will have an audience. Like I could see variations on that scenario playing out over many different planets, and if the planets are truly different then I'll encounter different circumstances every time. Brogue is really good at that sort of thing and it all comes from a few simple elements like what kind of dungeon level it is, what populates it, which items, traps and tricks are seeded across the location.
Say what you will about Daggerfall (it certainly had its flaws), but there were things I could do in that game that I haven't been able to do in any of the sequels since. I like to roll up lots of different characters and play the game using different combinations of abilities and options. In the modern ES games, doing this while wanting to use magic left you with two awful choices: gimp yourself (or at least make it rather difficult to get appropriate spells) or replay the exact same intro quest sequences of the Mage's Guild. Something that was only decent at best the first time becomes unbearable the third or fourth time.
And having actual countries with proper amounts of cities, villages, and so forth was wonderful, especially for playing as a rogue. Once again, if you play a modern ES game you basically have to join the Thieves' Guild to be able to sell stolen goods or get rid of bounties that can literally block access to the few cities that even exist in the game. In Daggerfall you can just go to another city or country if things get too hot. No requirement to replay the exact same story quests & cutscenes every time you want to make a character with a few lawbreaking elements.
The good news is that someone like Bethesda could still afford to employ the same number of hand content creators, putting tons of interesting hand-crafted content into the massive world. If that's what you're after then you could just play those portions and forget about the procedural parts of the countryside. But on the other hand...
Even if nothing else, the procedurally modified creatures and sounds from NMS would add tons of diversity to an ES game. Instead of 20 enemies there could be 20,000. Sure, most are variations on a theme, but that's enough to keep things unpredictable and eminently replayable.
It had been a while since I played Skyrim so I forgot a lot about the radiant quest system, but it's coming back. It was usually fairly obvious that you were on a radiant quest instead of a more tightly designed one. If they weren't about fetching, they were about delivering. Honestly it was pretty close to the guild quests of Daggerfall which were all "radiant," if you want to use the buzzword...which just means the game generates a destination for your goal, and you go there and back again.
Daggerfall's dungeons were all static and defined within the game data, but they were initially randomly generated, and there were so many hundreds of them that they might as well have been randomly generated on the spot for every quest! The way it worked was, there were a number of "quest locations" set in every dungeon, and the object or enemy that was the goal of the quest was placed at one of those locations. The dungeons were so massive that in Daggerfall's final update, they added cheats that let you teleport instantly to all the quest locations in sequence, just to be able to get in and get back out without getting lost for hours.
Essentially, outside of the main quest and scant few designed sidequests, the game was like:
roll ~1-20 on the list of quests for this guild
roll ~1-100 on the list of dungeons for this country
roll ~1-10 on the list of quest locations in this dungeon
place item to retrieve or monster to kill
(Or depending on the quest, roll ~1-100 on the list of other towns for your goal to be in, and/or ~1-20 on the list of generic houses in the town for your goal to be in)
In practice I kept turning down the quests offered until the quest text made it obvious that this was one of the easy ones in the same town, or even the same guildhall ("guard the mage's guild for the next 3 hours"). I hated being sent to a dungeon. Watch a video like this to see why. :P Those guys only don't go crazy because they have each other to talk to.
Skyrim's radiant quest system is just a much smaller version of the same thing. Roll 1-5 on the type of thieves' guild quest, roll 1-30 on which house or business you're sent to, roll 1-7 on the item generated within the house to steal. It got quite boring after a few go-rounds.
As far as scale goes, a massive generated map with hundreds of locations, it's fun to think about but in practice you fast traveled literally everywhere. There was no reason to engage with the scale. It was simply there to be "realistic," but it wasn't fun. I don't think new technology would make that same scale any more fun. After a certain point, you simply know that this town was generated like all the rest and there's nothing remarkable about it. You don't expect a cool surprise around every corner because after a dozen towns, you've seen it all.
I mean, think about it. There are 9 major cities in Skyrim. Let's say for a sense of scale they duplicated those cities' styles 10 more times each, so there are about 100 cities. 10 more in the dark wood style of Riften, 10 more in the stone-and-thatch style of Whiterun, 10 more in the stone-and-stairs style of Markarth. Any quests there are just radiant ones, and none of the NPCs have written back stories, no old warrior caring for an orphan little girl, no rich widow enforcing her will on the populace. Just generic generated people wandering around. Would this really have been that much more engaging?
But you trade playing the exact same interesting quests for endless boring variations on the same theme. Again, this is already in Skyrim to an extent. There might even already be a mod that lets you go on those radiant burglary quests without doing story quests at the beginning. Would you really start a new game, beeline to the thieves' guild, and do those quests over and over? This time you have to steal an item from the house down the street from the last one, and it's a locket instead of a ring! How fun...
I just can't recognize that as something that grants replayability.
Let's say Skyrim had that diversity. I meet a dragon that's pink and has a third wing growing out of its back, but it generally behaves about the same as the dragons I fought before. I come across a troll that is covered in red moss which would poison me if I touched it, and I kill it with an arrow like I normally kill trolls. A blue horker uses a spell to become nearly invisible and comes up and attacks me like they usually do.
I dunno, it doesn't sound terribly exciting. It sounds kind of ecologically unrealistic, actually. I don't mind seeing the same enemies over and over if they're indigenous to that world. I don't walk home and see 10 different colors of squirrels, each with slightly different powers.
And that's something I think is going to be true for NMS too. I think a trend we are going to see with these kinds of Skyscraper projects, to use Hello Games own term, is that these games are going to be ongoing developments, and in some cases it will get messy at times. Perhaps they may not meet every players needs early on but they show potential for some real cool player driven universes down the road. Remember, EvE Online wasn't built in a day.
Minecraft & Spore?
Though those were randomly generated.
Daggerfall's misc quest dungeons were far too big, especially given that they gave the same ultimate quest rewards as much simpler, shorter, safer alternatives. This is a tuning issue. The game could have reserved these kinds of quests & dungeons for specific circumstances (like the final quest to rank up in a given organization), made the dungeons much smaller, or made the ultimate reward for completing a dungeon much better. They also didn't have enough dungeon "pieces" that they used to make the random dungeons, so you were going through the same rooms and hallways far too often.
Similarly, Skyrim's radiant quests were utterly pointless; they would typically grant a tiny sum of money, less than what you'd get for defeating a single humanoid enemy and selling its stuff. It was faster and more economically efficient to just go straight to a random dungeon, clear it, and go to town to sell than to go out of your way to obtain and turn in a radiant quest.
There was also, rather plainly, very little effort put into Skyrim's radiant quests. There was very little diversity and ingenuity employed in the design. This is where a triumphant delivery from No Man's Sky will make the difference. If it's engaging and varied despite being procedural, they'll show both that it can be done and offer an example of how it can be done.
Well, again, that's why I prefaced all of this with: if No Man's Sky delivers on its promise, this will no longer be a problem. It will have been solved.
Supposedly, simply by adjusting parameters, the game has created a lot of relatively friendly "Earth-like" planets in the starting outer regions of the galaxy, with things getting more and more weird / different as you progress toward the center. If they pull that off, there's little reason another game couldn't do something pretty similar.
Sure, you'll still fast travel when you're trying to go to specific places. But you could also fast travel to a random location, explore the countryside, and see something you've almost certainly never seen before in the game. And you could do this over and over and over again. For years. Even when you are following main quest lines, there will still be a proper sense of scope as you travel through the world.
Fast travel can be fun, too! Star Trail's system was just excellent. But, proper scale is essential.
Yes! The absolute worst thing is rolling up your second character, going to a town you went to in your first character, and there's the exact same people moaning about the exact same circumstsances. Seeing the exact same beheading every time you walk into that city over there. It's immersion-breaking; every time I see one of these scenes or hear one of these conversations again, I'm reminded that I'm in a video game with a limited amount of stuff in it.
And every time I walk around a "city" that has a grand total of 40 people living in it, or pull up the map of an entire nation and see just a few cities and towns in total, or see the capital city from just about everywhere I stand in Oblivion, or walk on foot and discover 7 dungeons and 2 villages in the span of a single in-game afternoon in the countryside, I'm reminded that I'm in a very, very fake place. No beautiful vistas or hand-crafted waterfalls will prevent this.
Yes! Absolutely yes! I've actually looked for mods that let you change up the intro sequences of the guilds, but I haven't found any. I did mod out the entire game intro in favor of quick starts at various points around the world, allowing me to skip the main quest for as long as I wish. I tried to find mods that changed up the main quest, too, so I could get Shout access without having to replay the same damn cutscenes and dungeons, but no luck.
Besides, Elder Scrolls games aren't known for their gripping dialogue. The overwhelming majority of the quests, including the main quests of the recent two games and almost every guild quest since Morrowind (excluding Oblivion's Assassin Guild) has been, frankly, terrible. The dialogue isn't worth anything, the characters aren't gripping or interesting (because they're in-and-out and you can't truly interact with them), the cutscenes are incredibly dull (thanks to bad animations and the lack of camera angles & time control for drama). And you can't skip half of it once it starts!
I'd trade all that for repetitive randomness just to make them shut the hell up and let me get on with it.
Consider a more practical application of the technique.
No Man's Sky varies traits like aggression along with other traits like size (and how bizarre / deformed the resulting creature is). It's not really a combat-focused game, so there's probably not much else they can tweak. But Elder Scrolls has stats (or at least skills), combat behavior AI, spells... Every time the game generates a new "class" of creature, it would generate a set of behaviors & abilities to go along with it.
To keep the ecology from being utter nonsense, the game would limit how many creatures it would actually generate for a given playthrough. So out of those 20k possibilities, you might only see 80 varieties in a single play-through (20 total creatures at 4 difficulty tiers each). But then when you play the game again, you get a slightly altered set of monsters. Of course you'd have the hand-designed ones that are important to the main quests and manually-created dungeons; these would be the random fodder out in the game world.
Very rarely you might run into a one-of-a-kind variety as well, something like a boss or miniboss encounter in a dungeon. Some bizarre, twisted undead made by a necromancer, or a troll mutated and warped by <something>. These would keep the game fresh, establishing a "what's-around-that-corner" curiosity within a procedural world.
Basically, if No Man's Sky can do it, then anything could. If they make it so that you really are interested in seeing what the next planet has to offer, then other games (with almost certainly smaller scales) should be able to do the same within their respective environments.
These don't seem to jibe with each other. :P
I dunno, I don't turn on Sonic the Hedgehog and feel disgust that all the rings are where they were the last time I played. I would never describe that as immersion breaking. I just play the game and enjoy it!
Well yeah! That's what's awesome about it. You're in a more fun place than the real world, where it takes hours to walk to the next town and there are no magic items or dragons. Instead we don't have to have our time wasted, or skip over huge swaths of landscape just to get anywhere. Well, actually we still do the skipping, even in the relatively small areas in Elder Scrolls games. If I jump a mile of uninteresting landscape or 100 miles, what does it matter?
I disagree with all of this. I wouldn't play the games if I didn't enjoy all of that stuff, the writing, the questing. I've got better things to do with my time than go on terrible quests, that's why I play the Elder Scrolls games instead of other options.
That's still not really replayability to me. I would never think to myself, I think I'll play that game again, just to see what the monsters are like this time.
I guess to me, many games are replayable for the same reasons books are rereadable or movies are rewatchable. The remainder of them are replayable because of emergent situations.
I will play Nethack over and over because I might find myself in a wide open cave, having just been blinded by a potion thrown by an angry dwarf...or I might find myself with no weapon but a rusty spear, trapped in a corridor between a poisoned cockatrice and pack of wild dogs. I won't play it to see how many limbs the dogs have this time around, or if they are very slightly more aggressive than last time.
Well, I've expressed my doubts before that they'll be able to pull that off.
I'm sure people who mostly want to go sightseeing will be satisfied, seeing the variety that can happen when you randomize the variables over and over. I need more of a creative outlet. I want to be able to build a massive tower/elevator from one planet to the next, and have other people come along and see what I'm doing and help me, as we gradually create a huge spiderweb in the galaxy. I want to cover the entire surface of a planet with a huge city, and have people come from all over the world to visit and see what I built. That sort of thing.
What you want is not what this game is or ever has suggested it would be. Wanting it is all well and good, but what you want is a completely different game that doesn't exist.
Right, I was explaining why I don't think the game will satisfy me on that front (specifically if you want to talk about reasons for replayability). Like I said, people who want to go sightseeing might be satisfied, but I don't expect the game to provide much more than that, nor do I see it as a revelation that will open the doors for generation of quests and stories.
Essentially this exchange you had above, distilled:
Sonic the Hedgehog is not an open-world game about exploration, discovery, and playing it your way.
Replaying lots of games is much like rewatching a movie -- you're going to have basically the same experience, but you like and want that experience, so you're happy to go back and do it all again.
For other games, replaying them is about having a new experience in a familiar environment. When reviewers discuss how replayable a game is, this is usually what they're talking about. When I start a new game of Civilization as a different civ on a newly-generated map with some tweaks to the map generation parameters, with a new assortment of opponents, etc... I'm going to have a very different experience than with my prior game. It's still Civilization, and there's a core 4x experience I'm getting out of it that doesn't change, but everything built around it is brand-new.
People tend to put hundreds and hundreds of hours into games like Civilization (and Elder Scrolls) specifically because of this. NMS can enhance these elements drastically.
Because it feels fake within a game that is very interested in making me feel like I'm in an authentic place. Bethesda didn't spend hundreds of man-hours implementing Radiant AI for Oblivion and later titles because having people walk around with a semblance of a real life is entertaining. They did it because it makes the world seem more authentic than when people are just roaming randomly or standing still in one spot forever.
Additionally, there's little joy in discovering anything in an Elder Scrolls game because there's something notable absolutely everywhere you go. Within ten seconds of roaming around you've picked up several nearby dungeon locations that you can jump right into. As a result, there's no sense of wonder or achievement in finding any particular dungeon; it's just about whether or not you feel like going into one at a given point in time. Further, the dungeons are all incredibly similar, filled with essentially the same leveled monsters and appropriate treasures. There's nothing interesting to discover in any given one.
Implementing breadth and variety using techniques lifted from NMS would improve both of these aspects.
I respect your opinion, but it's literally the first time I've ever heard it applied to an Elder Scrolls game. They're pretty legendary for having some of the worst quests and writing in (single-player) RPGs overall, and I'm very surprised that you select those games for this reason.
To each their own. I see that you've expressed serious doubts that No Man's Sky is going to work for you, which of course would carry over into implementing these techniques into any other game. That's a pretty core difference of opinion that makes any higher-level discussion fairly meaningless, I think.
If you're right, and NMS is received as being generally repetitive and plain, then it's not going to have any impact in gaming at large.
I'm hoping for a different outcome. I'm hoping for a game that continually surprises me, that offers a constant stream of new experiences (built atop a familiar gaming backbone) as I progress through the galaxy. And I'm hoping it's triumphant enough to usher in a small gaming revolution so we can enjoy this with different game backbones, settings, and aesthetics.
EDIT: I get the feeling I might be unintentionally being a bit caustic here? I actually really enjoy conversations about stuff like this, which is why I get so lengthy and into it. Sorry if I'm coming across as irritated or an ass in general! Also I really love Elder Scrolls games, which is why I get so invested in talking about improvements / refinement.
No, not at all, you're fine! I'm glad to talk about it. Neither of us is calling each other names or trying to shut down the conversation.
True, I guess I was just trying to say that I don't have a problem being immersed in whatever world I'm presented with. Elder Scrolls tends to have close towns with few citizens, and so do almost all video games...I think if I had a problem with that I wouldn't be able to get immersed in anything.
Well like I said, I don't know why I would bother playing it if I didn't enjoy it. I can't imagine spending hundreds of hours playing a terrible game. :P
Randomness can definitely add replayability, but I wouldn't necessarily advocate using it for everything. I think there's a balance to be struck, making things more random doesn't always make the game more replayable or interesting.
One of the things I enjoy in replaying Civ is how the more designed elements are remixed with the randomness. For example, "haha, look at Ghandi, he's been stuck on a 5 tile island the whole game and has nothing. He's usually so aggressive but he really hasn't been able to do anything, here I am surrounding him with advanced warships." But a lot of the reason it's interesting is because of the way those set-in-stone elements have been altered. Ghandi was a real person and is notoriously aggressive in Civ, a randomly generated warlord with random AI patterns would be less funny to see in that situation. At least for me. I can ask for the game to let me play a random warlord, but that warlord is going to have set powers and special units, and I'm ok with that. I like getting used to well-designed elements and dealing with them using the other designed elements (historical units) I have on hand.
I know you're probably not advocating for everything to be random either, it just goes along with my doubt that we can expect a breakthrough in fully radiant quests/characters that are as engaging as the designed ones.
On that note I've actually sought out more randomness and larger worlds recently just to see what it's like. Thinking about NMS got me on a kick here. I searched for procedurally generated games, found this article which led to this game which is just dreadful and demonstrates how not to wield procedural generation as a tool. From there I went to Daggerfall, which was vastly more fun, and then Morrowind where I am now.
Really, you read an article like that and get excited from the possibility it promises, and then you see what it's like in practice and it's quite deflating.
More applicable would be the emergent stories that happen as a result of the game's mechanics coming together in an interesting manner with the player. We all have crazy stories of things that happened in an Elder Scrolls game that were not written or scripted to occur by Bethesda devs.
Moreso than this we have it in strategy games, particularly something like Crusader Kings II. Those characters even feel like people sometimes because of the things they get up to, the way they're generally driven by their assigned traits and ability to act within the game's environment. They only feel like people because we don't have to actually talk to them, of course, but the stories that are created are constant and lively. The CK2 thread on these boards has more storytelling in it than pretty much any other game thread I've seen (excepting Page-'s excellent Dark Souls LPs), despite the fact that the game itself has basically zero actual story contained within.
And though the map and starting situations are static in a CK2 game (because it's based on history), everything that happens after you unpause a new game is fully procedural. Every child born has procedurally-assigned traits; every character acts in a procedurally-determined fashion.
Historically this sort of thing has been easier to achieve in strategy games versus something like RPGs (or really anything first-person) due to fidelity. You need more detail, thus you need a human hand. But where does that human hand really need to start? How much can we offload to more powerful, modern procedural algorithms? And how can we use this to expand what sort of games we're able to make and experience now?
You can only afford to add so many people to a development team. But algorithms will keep getting better, and stronger computers will be able to do more and more with them. The thought of bringing just a hint of CK2's procedural emergent magic into a first-person exploration game has me giddy with excitement. I'm actually looking forward to NMS more than Fallout 4 at this point. The more they reveal (these IGN specials have been fantastic) the more confident I get that they've really nailed this.
A good example of this is the concept of Voxels. While it' snot a "new" concept really, it is one that really took off with Minecraft. This inspired many other developers to start playing with the concept and we are starting to see the fruits of that in game that are just on the horizon. They are taking the concept of Voxels and using them in new and interesting ways to flesh out games that are vastly different to Minecraft.
So in that respect I am very excited for NMS. I want them to show that you can use procedural concepts like this in an interesting way that inspires others to use it in then even MORE interesting ways.
But of course it has to be successful for that.
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As far as Malevolence's look and feel goes how else would you expect a memory of a dead reality to manifest? The world of the game is a memory of a reality turned graveyard populated by lost souls that exists only in the mind of an apocalyptic god-weapon. You play as an avatar of this weapon. It's pretty fvcking kvlt. It's also a good example of a developer working with his limitations.
Malevolence is also pretty much a straight up roguelike and is being made for that fanbase. If you aren't part of that fanbase then I wouldn't be surprised to find you dislike the game. So I'm not even sure why it'd come up in this conversation except that yeah it uses a lot of procedural generation too. But in pretty much a completely different genre and on a completely different scale of development with almost completely different goals. I'd say it really doesn't have much relevance to NMS' use of procedural generation.
I love both roguelikes like Nethack and classic first person RPGs along the lines of Might and Magic or Wizardry. Theoretically it touches on everything I like. My main problems are the classic procedural complaints...it's inches deep. IIRC there are 7 enemy types total (goblin, minotaur etc.) and they always scale to your level, along with everything else in the game. You can never get ahead of the curve. Aggressive scaling isn't a good solution for being able to go anywhere you like, some areas need to be easy and some need to be hard. All quests are randomly generated like Daggerfall quests, but often manage to be even less interesting. "Go to this dungeon and kill this specific monster, and come back."
I think when we're talking about what can be accomplished with procedural generation, it's fairly relevant. It shows up pretty easily for me in google searches on the subject. It's true that it doesn't have the same goals as NMS, the look of the world isn't randomized at all, all towns look the same etc. But at the same time, the idea is, if you don't like the area you're in you can just walk somewhere else, as far as you want. Towns and dungeons as far as the eye can see. You're just not trying to gradually make your way to the center dungeon of the world or anything.
What you are doing is like taking Ultima Ratio Regum, holding it up and saying there is nothing to do in this game, it's terrible. And that wouldn't have anything to do with NMS either, even though that game probably has a lot more relevance in this conversation.
The point is, the reason I discovered it at all was that I went looking for procedural generation, became excited at the prospect of what it offered, and in practice I found it less fun to play than I thought. That's all.
More cool stuff, just a fun look at someone working with their favorite band.
On a side note, I actually first heard of 65daysofstatic when I randomly decided to check out their performance at a music festival... 6? 7? years ago. Immediately went and got a CD autographed afterwards.
I just watched this video and oh my god he's so adorable
Holy great moley that's fan-fucking-tastic news.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
That about right?
Well when you put it like that...
I need a change of underwear.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
I also think Sean meant the "album" was going to be the game No Man's Sky, but I wouldn't be surprised and would also be pleased if they released an album of some of their favorite results.
Minecraft is procedurally generated. Meaning that on X map with Y seed it will always generate the same mountain in the same place.