Admentus Wrote:Sorry, but I am against procedural generation. Filling the world with random content isn't that interesting when compared to a world that is handcrafted with an eye for detail. Having a lot to do is awesome, but it should be fun foremost. I don't think procedural generation will ever beat a handcrafted world. Sure, the technology for procedural generation will improve, but so will crafting a world manually. I hate random generated dungeons for a fact, most of the time they are just flat stuffed with some chests and monsters, no fun diversions at all *glares at Persona 4*.
I think you guys seriously underestimate where the technology will be in the future. I get that you're basing your opinions on what techniques are currently available to us, but down the road, we're going to come up with new methods that make current procedural generation look like crap.
Reminds me of the debate during the 5th Generation where people argued whether 3D games were worth it. At the time, you had so called "low-poly" games coming from Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, and even then sometimes at super low resolutions (240p on N64 for example). I don't think anyone ever dreamed that we'd get the kind of HD graphics we have now. It's like, when Toy Story came out that's what people thought 3D should look like, only it took supercomputers to render everything over the course of dozens of hours. Now our phones can run better looking things in real-time. I don't think gamers of the 90s (certainly not me) expected we'd be where we are graphically speaking in 2018. Nowadays we don't even question whether 3D games can look nice or are visually worthwhile because we've come so far.
I honestly believe we'll see a push like that for procedural generation to make open-world games almost limitless. Come 2038, games like No Man's Sky will probably be primitive bare-bones examples of the technology (and certainly a guide on what to avoid). Imagine for a moment that each game might have it's own AI dynamically rendering new parts of the world, crafting unique sections on the fly. It's not farfetched to consider computer science will evolve enough to point where gamers can't distinguish what's man-made versus machine generated. We live in a world where most every modern person basically carries a hyper-connected supercomputer in their pocket; that was the realm of science fiction in the 70s, but a common-place reality today. So I don't really understand the doubt when given enough time, technology can prove itself beyond our own imaginations.
I see a lot of arguments that procedural generated content will look "boring" or "monotonous" but that's the limitations imposed today. Free your mind for a second and contemplate that in the future we could blow past all of that nonsense. What's impossible now, might be trivial tomorrow. And at any rate, we won't get better procedural generated content if no one bothers to improve the methodology behind it. Not with that attitude
