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Procedurally generated cities? Yes please!
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Can everyone shut up about Shadow of the Colossus? It wasn't even that good a game!
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Bravo sir, you have taken my weapon and turned it upon me. I agree to disagree with your opinion...
No wait, I never played SotC, so you may be right.
WAIT! Smith verses Neo or the final fight in advent children, chucking buildings at one another and flying through them.
But a superhero game with a destroyable city would really be something else. Even in a game with a relatively low-powered superhero like Spider-Man, there would be a lot of potential. Not to mention something like a Hulk game where a missile blast could knock you into a building which collapses on top of you. And somebody already mentioned Prototype, which would be a great testbed for something like this. Instead of the the city just gradually being consumed by the infection, it could also become progressively more and more devastated in a persistent manner as your powers increase and the scale of conflicts grows larger and larger. The best part is that with procedurally generated cities, we won't have to tolerate bullshit loudmouth groups whining about the game being a terrorist simulator since the cities could all be random and fictional.
I'd say it might be nice in a multiplayer game, but that last thing I want is a random map in one of those.
But I've never enjoyed sandbox-style games to begin with.
For virtual city tours and stuff, though, this seems ideal. Just not in games.
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It seems like several people are under the impression that a game designer would seriously consider plunging a player in the middle of a city with no clues as to how to accomplish his or her objective. Seems unlikely to me!
If you don't have to go into every building, then why have them all there? You could add extra shit, stuff to find or random encounters, but that's just more padding and lazy design. And if you don't put extras in them then that's even worse: If there's absolutely no reason to go into 75% of the environment then why bother with it in the first place? It's just going to get in the way.
You can bring up the zombies scenario, but even then I'd rather have a well crafted and interesting environment to navigate most of the time.
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Anyways this is the most interesting gaming subject to me overall. GTA is my favorite game simply because it's always in a large city, TES being my second. Unfortunately Oblivion suffered from horrible city design even though it was not procedural, it probably would have been better if it was.
The easiest explanation is that it would just flesh out the world. Most of the individual streets in GTA are pointless and are there for padding. Certainly most of the people are, as well. The same goes for any open world game. They throw in houses/people/trees/etc that aren't actually necessary and that any one player might not ever interact with or even see because it helps complete the illusion of a world.
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This padding phenomenon you feel disdain for is one we all see in the locked door tool. We are tired of running down a street in half life or sandbox games. I mean, you don't need to have an entire PG city. Look at the original fallout games. You could along the wasteland and have random battles at a cliffside, open desert, or a shanty town. That is what this demo gives us. Yeah, F3 is fun but I miss that chaos that the isometric games gave me. Yeah, the Bethesda games after morrowind were fundue to static envirments that you explored but a bit of chaos keeps things interesting. What I really want to see is a fps that gives me those random battles and fights (you find a group of bootleggers fighting remnents of the master's army) that made the original fallout games interesting and something that is sorely missed.
Look at it as chicken. A whole chicken with Godzilla stuffing and SotC seasonings is good, but an oblivion salad topped chicken is also good. The fact is we need to see this concept applied to varying degrees before we can make an accurate judgement.
Edit:page, think about sandbox games as a full roasted chicken seasoned with procedurally generated parmesan cheese, it tastes good but I don't eat that on a regular basis, I.e. not if I had a choice. What else can you put parmesan cheese on and enjoy it? What other game could you enjoy a procedurally generated city to make it better? Remember to consider scale, you don't need to drown a meal in parmesan to make it delicious (unless you're my brother).
not much of it is in a city, but the dragonball z game that was a wii launch title let you do all of that but the wielding girders/buildings part. (probably other dbz games too, but I've only played that one)
hell, a few characters had nuke-like ultimate abilities that turned the entire planet you were fighting on into a smoldering cinder
Random encounters are so different, though. And for the record, I hated Fallout 3 and haven't been able to stomach anything Bathesda has made. And though I was bored by the blandness of TES games and the open world of Fallout 3, it was the weak gameplay that really killed them for me.
I don't quite understand the rest of your points, unless you just mean that you're tired of city environments in general, which is fine.
But random encounters are just too hard to fine tune, it seems, outside of JRPGs -- and even then they're something most people want to do away with. I have fond memories of Fallout 1 and 2 as well, but it was not because of the random encounters. There was very little chaos there, only the chance of getting one of the lucky special ones. The others were just, at the start of the game, a way to get some xp and maybe some ammo, and by the end of the game a constant annoyance because nothing could hurt you. But that was a design flaw across the board, because both those games had stupid difficulty curves. The concept of having to fight random mooks everywhere I go in an fps is not a turn on because most of the encounters will play out the same, even if they have very, very strong AI, and I seriously doubt that I'll still be interested in fighting the same 5-10 random donks AGAIN 5 hours into a game. I would prefer new set pieces and properly planned, and appropriately challenging enemy encounters.
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And nobody here is saying that PG is across-the-board great for everything. Would I have preferred a new Capital Wasteland for every new game of Fallout 3? Hell yes; half the fun is poking around to see what's over the next hill. On the other hand, something like the Halo FPS games, which are basically a series of designed fights, probably wouldn't benefit much.
Hell, think about the Hitman series. Blood Money was great, but I just have no desire to play it any more because I pretty know everything there is to do in those very tightly designed levels. Now take the Hitman series and apply it to an entire city; with PG, the devs don't have to worry about perfectly designing each level and can instead focus on AI behavior inside the city. Instead of a mission where you must kill a guy in his home, you can track and dispatch him at your leisure in all sorts of ways: follow him to work, plant a bomb in his car, and so on.
Sure, devs could stick to the boring, resource-intensive, and inflexible style of designing only exactly what the player will see and how everything will play out. On the other hand, they could innovate and make a whole slew of games enormously better by developing techniques which truly make every new game started and entirely brand-new world and potentially even save money by taking that route.
I suppose I could be optimistic and imagine that devs will take all the time they used to put into creating the environment and use it to improve everything else about the games. But I'm not stupid. They'll use these tools as a means to pump games out faster and cheaper. And if you thought shit was generic and interchangeable withing the shooter genre now, do you think this will help?
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And if PG is that horribly offensive to anyone, then they can just not play games that use it just like they can choose not to play games they don't think are fun. I rather detest JRPGs, but it doesn't mean I tell people that the entire genre should be wiped out because I think they're almost universally poor games.
This bit of argument is actually rather pointless since game development will objectively be improved by the use of procedural generation for use as either a development tool or gameplay element. Just because someone doesn't like the genres it would be used for doesn't make it a bad idea. It definitely wouldn't be the downfall of the FPS genre or somehow let developers do away with good controls. To me, this argument sounds like someone from 20 years ago trying to suggest that having 3D games would be a bad idea because nobody would know how to make them right. Will it be perfect right out the gate? Hardly. Will it be a benefit to developers and a lot of games? Definitely.
But whatever, I figured some discussion would be generated and I was interested enough to voice a different opinion. I've got no need to be confrontational, but I do have something to say on the matter.
I do enjoy procedurally generated parts of other games. Warning Forever and it's ilk, various rougelikes -- though they may be more on the just random side. It's not all bad.
Besides, I can't be the only one who doesn't like sandbox games and thinks procedurally generated environments are pretty boring. Hell, I still think ragdoll physics are really stupid. I am firmly stuck in 1999.
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Earlier: This is going to be a shitty addition to games, I don't want to do A and B that this does
Now: I don't like these games, I wouldn't be playing them anyways
Glad to know somebody that doesn't like sandbox games doesn't want his sandbox games to become more like a sandbox.
On an unrelated note, this brings us one step closer to full-featured, 3d rougelikes. I have only good things to say for this technology(except that it will eventually kill my desired profession of 3d art, but whatever, 3D ROUGELIKES!)
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Are you kidding? Maybe it depends on how powerful your computer is, but I didn't see any buildings stay up longer than I thought they should have in Red Faction. Most of the time they collapsed before I thought they would have eye arr ell, which normally led to my dude falling over constantly while being crushed by the ceiling/walls because I was still inside, hammering away at the walls.
I found the actual shooting pretty weak as well, which was why I stopped playing it. There's a lot of refinement to the Point, Shoot, Kill formula that you need to do to get a FPS that feels "right."
Which is really sad, because when it comes to games, DRM and coding Shamus Young is a really interesting read.
Then why are you here? Ok, you're superior because you hate sandbox games, yay, you're special! Now go play some not-sandbox games in your tower of gold and leave us alone.
I, personally, don't see why being a Christian automatically makes you a bad person. And describing him as right-wing seems a little odd, considering some of the stuff on his blog:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=399
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=122
Its not that you have to go into every building and you don't have to have them all there. What it is, is that making cities in 3D is very time consuming when you do it by hand. Its even more so if things are destructible. As well, cities are pretty generic, and specific design choices don't really matter. Its like designing a forest, unless there is something specific that you're going for you're going to produce a more realistic forest by randomly placing the trees than by designing it.
This is why procedural generation is such a big deal, because it saves you a lot of time designing areas. I mean, lets say you have a generic office building combat area that starts in the stairs to the level. Instead of creating and designing the entire thing, you generate a building, lock all the doors in the stairs and then add the company logos where you want them. The whole thing would be done in minutes or an hour rather than days.
I want a procedurally generated fully destructible city to level.
Hell i dont care if my only tools are a jetpack and a sledgehammer... im so totally up for that. ( Jetpacks and Sledgehammers are my two favorite video game items... period ).
Then you are illiterate?
If anyone didn't see, on the Procedural City website, they have a video where they take a real map and populate it with buildings with red roofs. After a few moments it zooms in and you realize they took modern day satellite imagery and filled it with buildings of a roman city. Very cool. For a moment, I tried to imagine playing a Caesar game, but I am not sure how they could work together.
Assassin's Creed could use the tech to generate the city.
Although a new style of a GTA game set in the Roman times seems incredibly interesting to me.
Also, loving the X-COM/Abomination - Nemesis Project in-randomly-generated-city ideas
Back on topic, I think using PG for cities will be a lot like...what is something that people can use in games but not everyone does....oh yeah, turn based gameplay. For some games and some genres, it will work well, but otherwise will be a passing fad that just won't be that good.
NBA Street, why bother?
Star Trek: Voyager: The game; nice try, good concept, weak gameplay
Mirror's Edge, Godzilla edition, FUCK YEAH!
Ya know what? I am just going toss out game ideas to see what sinks and what floats for the rest of this thread.
For a confused moment I thought you meant a parkour game featuring Minya.
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I thought he meant a Godzilla game with Faith as the big G.