Bethesda says most of Starfield's 1000+ planets are dull on purpose because 'when the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there' but 'they certainly weren't bored'(www.pcgamer.com)

And thats exactly why Bethesda doesnt put the effort in. cause they make the game, then the modders make it good for free… Or it used to be that, now they want to charge for mods and take a cut of the profits for shit they didnt make.

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Otome-chan@kbin.social

4 points

1 year ago

At a scale of 1k planets you’re going to have to rely on reused assets and procedural generation. At which point people not into procedural generation say that it’s “repetitive”. Especially if you only gen once for everyone and not each run lol.

AI generation of assets and code will theoretically eventually resolve this, but that’s quite a ways off. They’re not even usable for such with human assistance yet. And if you have ai generating the content, it’s not really a human team making that stuff lol.

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SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world

4 points

1 year ago

I knew one of the planet designers. His favourite part was coastlines.

He was particularly fond of some fjords he made on the coast of Norway, I think he won an award for them.

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conciselyverbose@kbin.social

4 points

1 year ago

Slartibartfast?

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Dubious_Fart@lemmy.ml

37 points

1 year ago

They could at least make the random PoI’s interesting if there was some…randomness to them.

Like, I walk into a PoI, I already know where the chests are, the locked doors, are, where the stupid fucking corpse in the shower is, etc etc. cause I’ve ran through this PoI 20 times.

I dont know why at least the locations of chests and locked doors cant be randomized. Make things at least marginally interesting, instead of cookie cuttered to extreme.

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abraxas@lemmy.ml

4 points

1 year ago

While I agree, I’ve been saying that about NMS for years. Not that we want to be comparing Starfield to NMS, of course.

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Otome-chan@kbin.social

-9 points

1 year ago

You can, but randomizing chests+locked doors is kinda complicated, and the more “interesting” your generations the harder it is to code and the more dev time it takes. And for a AAA game release you can’t really do that.

Key+Lock randomization is something that has been solved, and has been used most notably in procedurally generated zeldalikes. But that’s still niche indie territory, and not used for major game releases.

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zalgotext@sh.itjust.works

9 points

1 year ago

Hasn’t this game been in development for like 5 years? And they built it on an existing engine that they have tons of experience with. You could have said “they were limited on how much they could randomize POIs because of the old engine” and I would have believed you because that sounds way more plausible than “it’s hard to code, so AAA games can’t do it”. Like what?

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Otome-chan@kbin.social

-2 points

1 year ago

The issue with procedural generation is the game has to be built for it from the ground up and in a modular way. AAAs try to make themselves appealing by using novel new high quality assets that aren’t modular.

I haven’t played starfield so idk what they ended up doing, but from the sound of it they have pre-made assets/areas that they then place onto pre-generated worlds in a randomized way.

To make one of these “areas” procedural in itself, they’d then have to code a whole system for that. With AAA/3D the hard part is making modular environments without it looking repetitive or ugly.

My point isn’t so much that it can’t be done in a AAA game. But rather that it’s risky to do (not all players like it), and you have to structure your development around it. Lots can go wrong, there’s stuff you gotta sacrifice to make it work, etc.

If starfield is on the old bethesda engine then that’s even more of a reason. You can’t just plug and play an entire procedural generation thing in there without some fairly large overhauls or just gluing on an unrelated system.

In practice, bethesda probably took the lazy route: using their existing engine without major changes, then just making new assets for it, throwing stuff about a bit randomly, and calling it a day.

That’s the thing about procedural generation is: it’s a lot of effort and sucks up a huge part of the game’s development and comes at some pretty strict costs (repetitive looking environments/gameplay, reduced novelty, larger programming dev time to make it work). It can be done, but for a cost-cutting AAA studio they’re not gonna bother.

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XenoStare@lemmy.world

8 points

1 year ago

They already have once though. Many of Morrowind’s dungeons were procedurally generated in development then edited a bit after, that was the same engine. Same with Daggerfall altho that was a diff engine.

Very different game but Amnesia: the Bunker has plenty of procedural generation as well.

It’s not at all impossible for one of the largest game development studios to have some procedurally generated, essentially dungeon content. Doing a bit more than the exact same place copied and pasted would be a huge undertaking yes, but if they wanted to they could have. There are plenty of 3D rogue-likes out now as well. Returnal is AAA and haa procedurally generated levels, far more complicated than neccesary for Bethesda to do in order to populate planets in their game about planet exploration.

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Otome-chan@kbin.social

-3 points

1 year ago

I didn’t say it’s impossible. Just that it’s harder, takes deliberate effort, etc. For AAA games they don’t bother with that kind of thing because it’s larger expense and larger risk.

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Malta Soron@sopuli.xyz

7 points

1 year ago

Couldn’t they just have copied the locations a few times and changed up the doors and chests by hand? Seems like an easy fix.

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Otome-chan@kbin.social

1 point

1 year ago

yes. I haven’t played the game so idk the details of what’s up. but at 1k+ planet-sized spaces it’s hard to have a team go over that by hand. Planets are large. But I have no doubt that bethesda team was probably super lazy as well.

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