this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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procedurally generated ain't all bad, but for this game it was not the move. As soon as I heard about "100+ planets" i kinda lost hope in the game. What they should've done instead was make A Solar System. 8 or so planets to land in, explore, and do quests in, and go absolutely ham on those 8 planets to make them as intesting and diverse from each other as possible. The rest would be moons or space stations you'd find exploring space. IDK, this could just be me, but i feel doing this alone would have improved the game significantly
Yeah that sounds fun af. Procedural generation has a place, but devs need to stop assuming every game should have it. Quality over quantity.
Or to steal an argument about AI writing “if you couldn’t be bothered to make the levels, why do you think it can hold my attention in an exploration game”
On one hand, I kinda understand why people in general, not just game devs, try and implement the "bigger is better" idea. It's easy, and all you really need to do is, theoretically, be "bigger" than the competition.
Problem here is that the closest competition to Starfeild is No Man's Sky, despite not being in the same genre (I've seen the same thing being asked in so many reviews: "What does Starfield do that NMS doesn't?" Like, even plotwise. I didn't even know NMS had a plot TBH). And Bethesda decided to (intentionally or otherwise) ape NMS, not realizing that procedural generation worked in NMS because for one, it's a survivalcraft at heart while Starfeild isn't, and because the five main compents of that game are...well, solidly made, and tie INTO the galaxy being procedurally generated (especially the survival and building aspect) instead of it being tacked on for the "wow factor". Nowadays, i mean. On release tho...gonna assume you could have easily made that argument.
Meanwhile, Starfield's galaxy is procedurally generated because....the player apparently needs a buffet of locations to explore to kill/rack up time rather than a handful of them with actually handcrafted touches and purpose divided into star systems (so they can get the space Odyssey vibe the game is trying to go with) or something, kinda like the way Mass Effect 2's map was.
It's a completely different game and genre, but that's exactly what made the space exploration Outer Wilds so great: One seamless solar system, fully handcrafted with literally zero filler content. Not even a single location. No matter what you find, it's always meaningful and connected to other things in the game.
Of course, that doesn't mean it's the only way, but it really highlights the limits of procedural generation.