Why don't open-world games use procedural generation much anymore?

immersion. when you can see le ancient lost dungeon ruins from town its kinda gay. double gay when games have multiple forms of fast/instant travel so "wasting the players time" is no excuse

what would be the gameplay value of having to spend 5 minutes on horseback to go from a regional capital to villageA? or 15 minutes to even leave the region, triple that amount if you don't have a horse

fast-travel

if you fast travel everywhere (which is the only sane way such a game could be played to begin with), you wouldn't be able to notice or comprehend the scale of the map to begin with
wouldn't that defeat the entire purpose of bothering with procgen to spawn a large map?

I guarantee you they already use procedural generation to do stuff like trees.
Maps are small not because of dev time but because the belief is players don't want to spend a long time walking to the next objective.

Are you really going to compare physically exploring actual forests and wilderness to pressing W to scroll through randomly generated jpegs? Video games need design to be interesting specifically because they lack the visceral feeling of interacting with the real world and need to compensate for that with good design that focuses on evoking certain feelings in the player.

Yes this. I was kind of bummed when I learned how smushed together scrolls games actually are. It takes away the magic.

Seeing an endless copy paste of the same generic landscape for multiple minutes is what kills immersion.

AI will make this a reality.

That's why you have no fast travel, and design the game with the understanding that the player will not be doubling back to previously visited areas very often. The game is an adventure so you are constantly making forward progress. The fellowship of the ring didn't turn around to return 15 boar asses to Rivendell, neither should you have to.

As for the traversal, all you have to do is make the movement mechanics somewhat engaging and the terrain not just rolling hills you press W on.

Riding your horse through a barren landscape to the next boss-fight was plenty interesting in Shadow of the Colossus. In a game with fast travel it's not a bad thing to let the player feel the scale of the map the first time they want to get somewhere.

We don't need AI to make procedurally generated worlds, you stinking jeet

retarded pajeet

I don't think proc gen necessarily implies repetition. Im sure there are more complex ways of implementing it.

He's not talking about procedural generation. He's talking about AI. Actually Indians.

Why don't open-world games use procedural generation much anymore?

It's not like it would detract from the experience since people fast-travel everywhere anyways.

Isn't that just what Starfield is?

duuuude it took me 69 REAL days to go to one end of a province to another in daggerfall on horse

sounds lame and gay now kys

shadow of the colossus is like the size of my morning dog walk. it would be shit if you had to go from Pittsburgh to Detroit for every fight.

If TES 3-5 take place on that tiny island, how have they not been conquered? What's going on on those massive continents? Surely there are far larger empires on them

European scale would be sufficient. Twenty to half an hour of wilderness before you reach the next village on a horse would already make the point.

Riding your horse through a barren landscape to the next boss-fight was plenty interesting in Shadow of the Colossus.

And none of it was randomly generated, it was all designed by hand, so what's your point? What does this have to do with my hatred of procedural generation?

because gamers hate it

Because it's boring and awful. Daggerfall is a terrible game.

The point is procedural generation can do that.
Minecraft creates tons of interesting environments.

I never played starfield but i heard the ship can only land at pre-determined points and you cant fly across the planet's surface?
That would be like if your horse was a fast-travel device that could only go to cities and you had to walk everywhere else.

minecraft would be 99% as good if the map was ~ 12k blocks by 12k blocks

It can't. All procedural generation is soulless slop. It can be fun for a bit, but it never lasts. Minecraft gets old fast, I have no clue how people play it for as long as they do.

I think we need to separate these two points. Would it bother you to have a 30 minute ride to the next village if the procedureally generated environment looked interesting? What if it was handcrafted?

Or do you think that kind of scale would still be too much even if it looked interesting because you don't want to spend 30 minutes riding through interesting landscapes that aren't particularly interactive otherwise like in SotC?

Seeing an endless copy paste of the same generic landscape for multiple minutes is what kills immersion

You say that like games that don't use proc gen don't suffer from this

If you had any history playing TTRPGs, you would know that procedurally generated content was the engine of every DMG.

Games aren't about holding w and looking at "interesting" landscapes, 30 minutes of nothing is always a shit idea, how is that so hard to grasp?

How about you "procedurally generate" some better taste.

All procedural generation is soulless slop.

I think handcrafted + procedural is actually fine. If you need to fill a hill with some woodwork you can let the engine do its thing and then fix it manually if it looks like shit. I don't need developers to hand place every rock on the ground if it means that it allows them to increase the scale of these kind of environments a little bit. In the real world these kind of things aren't hand placed either. It would actually kind of take me out of the experience if I had the impression that this was all manually crafted by a human. If procedural generation is able to generate these environments as if it simulated an actual living forest with a history, it would probably end up doing a better job than a human. Any finer details in terms of actual "content", like cave exploration with loot or some hidden shack in the forest can still be manually added afterwards.

To some people 30 minutes of looking at landscapes isn't "nothing." There is literally people out there that do that shit intentionally, fast-travel options notwithstanding, in games like RDR2

If they put interesting content in those spaces then no, they don't.

I don't care what normalfags think.

No, procedural generation is absolutely a necessity in games like Path of Exile. It would get boring to run identical maps thousands of times but with even a bit of variation in each type of area, each campaign playthrough and the endgame mapping never gets old.

handcrafting a world map of that size would take more money, which is why it will never happen
procedurally generating a world map of that size, then manually fixing shit inbetween would still take too many man hours and money
you'd end up with copy-pasted landmarks, dungeons, towns, etc, that offer nothing interesting, just repeatable quests that send you to sleep, like the ones in shitrim
bethtards need to focus on increasing the size and scale of cities, so we dont end up with another embarassing shitrim situation with no fucking urbex

I'll never dispute it being boring but I do love it.
it speaks to the imagination much as looking out on the world when driving far away on holiday.
whenever some bit of generated lore or history makes a bit of sense it triggers the same simple joy as in those other fools for seeing a water bottle flipped etc.

Would it bother you to have a 30 minute ride to the next village if the procedureally generated environment looked interesting?

The problem with procedural generation is that there's no intent behind it. A person designs paths, points of interest, enemy placements, etc, all in ways that are interesting to other people. Procedural generation just follows some algorithm to randomly spit out some shit. Your question is badly formed because it's like saying, "Would you be fine with eating a turd of shit if it had the smell, taste, appearance, consistency, and nutritional value of a Snickers bar?" Like... yeah, I guess I would? Because it's a turd in name, but you've functionally just made it a Snickers bar for the sake of the question, so it's not really fair. In my opinion, procedural generation is just fundamentally incapable of putting together a truly compelling world to explore because of that missing human element.

As for the 30 minutes, that does seem excessive if you have to do it every single time you want to get from one place to another. I'd be fine with a world where you COULD travel that far if you WANTED to, or if there was some special place that took so long to get to and required tons of planning for the trek, but I would not be fine if every single city was 30 or more real-world minutes apart from each other. There's a place for empty space and exploration and travel that takes time, but it can be taken overboard easily.

I'd want there to be things to do between areas that isn't also procedurally generated.

Proc gen is fucking dog shit and Daggerfall trannies that keep pretending it's better than Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim have godawful taste or are complete contrarians.

And don't even start with that dog shit arguement that Morroboomers and Witcher fags also parrot about how having empty space and unenterable houses is a good thing becuase it adds to scale.

Minecraft gets old fast

I have no clue how people play it for as long as they do.

minecraft is one of the most played video games of all time, sounds like it's a personality issue of yours that you are thrusting upon everyone else

Why don't open-world games use procedural generation much anymore?

They do. Who told you they don't?

What's stopping the next elder-scrolls from using procedural generation?

It does.

Fuck all of you fags i just want to be a knight errant riding out into the wilderness. I want to get lost in a great primordial forest the size of the taiga

You are the normalfag in this situation, dumbass

I meant so that it's titanically large. With big mountain ranges and forests and great swamps that aren't 3 ponds in a wood the size of my back yard.

These people shouldn't be allowed to influence decisions, rdr2 is a bad game mostly because of its padding, not the other way around

Procedural generation means it's generated during play. It's not about using a randomization algorithm when placing rocks on a path, it's about building an algorithm that makes the game generate entire maps from nothing.

You know your shit. What game are you working on?

It also didn't help that the few "cities" are tiny and the points of interests are incredibly boring and often repeated

Why don't open-world games use procedural generation much anymore?

It's not like it would detract from the experience since people fast-travel everywhere anyways.

It wouldn't take away from the content, it could have the same amount as any other open world, just spread out more.

Have you actually played Arena and Daggerfall? Because I don't think you'd ask this question if you had.

neandaggerthals be like WOAH LOOK AT THIS OPEN WORLD YOU JELLY?

What i would really like is a voxel based game similar to Minecraft that has the Role-Playing depth of Daggerfall.
Y'know character creation with stats and attributes, different skills, lots of proc-genned dungeons full of loot and towns with named NPCs.

All I see is soul.

I do feel like pro prog-gen people have a habit of going into overdrive when proclaiming their love for big shit.
a half hour trek can be an eight minute trek and convey vastness well enough unless you are some second monitor gamer in which case why bother at all.

neandaggerthals never goad people into jealousy the game and the unity repackaging are both TRVLYFREE

They literally just did with Starfield. All you faggots pretending to like it here cried about it there.

Why don't open-world games use procedural generation much anymore?

because it only works for small scale games
all it does it rearrange modular blocks, and once the player is aware of the individual blocks and patterns start repeating, it immediately becomes dull, modular design sucks

dude I fucking LOVE spending hours walking in a empty field

just like daggerfall

Didn't seem to be a problem for Skyrim lovers.

You're basically never more than 60 seconds away from a point of interest in Skyrim.

Why don't open-world games use procedural generation much anymore?

They do, actually. There's very few games that have been made without procedural tools. Nobody wants to hand place rocks, trees, grass and other clutter everywhere, so usually that shit just gets generated in, like they did with Skyrim.

That'd be cool, but a game that ambitious is inevitably going to end up having worse proc gen than Minecraft and worse RPG elements than your favorite RPG.
The more difficult things you mix together, the shallower each of them have to be

point of interest.

Some fucking farm with nothing for a reward.

Some generic as dungeon with no interesting loot and same old monsters (spiders, bandits, undead...)

In the wilderness and some later game dungeons you might encounter some giants, yetis or whatever, dryads and some other dangerous beasts.

Its tiresome only thing making Skyrim feel dangerous are the random dragon encounters.

Ah, yes, I can see how all of those things are so much less interesting than giant empty fields of literally nothing to do.

Funny, just as I finished submitting my post I somehow knew your response would be

Ermm, why are you calling them a "POINT OF INTEREST" if they're not actually LE INTERESTING XD OWNED I WIN

I like the redesign for Khajiit and Argonians. In TEV 6 they need to make them even sexier to draw in more furries. And add full nide models with spikey cat dick, 6 breasts for the cats and cloacas and hemipenes for the lizards.

TES Arena was going to have sex content that got dropped for mass appeal, but baldur's gate 3 prooved the coomers will cum. Add porn to TES 6 and it will be played more than any of the others.

Anon Babble when procedurally generated

Ooooh *clap* *clap* clap*

Anon Babble when AI generated

AHhhhh

make thread about proc gen in open world games

use pic of daggerfall because it uses proc gen

everyone seems to think thread is about how cool i think daggerfall is

Why don't open-world games use procedural generation much anymore?

AI would be superior to procgen now. Yes, even for creating terrain, it would basically just be a smarter procgen. Procgen has to follow mathematical aglorithms, which are never realistic, while AI would net you realistic terrain placement for your assets.

Are people afraid of a little solitude in the wilderness? Does a pack of 3 wolves need to show up every 5 minutes to be engaging?

Yes they are. And 5 minutes with nothing happening is probably too long already for ADHD brains littered with holes.

Your game developer sucks if he doesn't make me care about some random ass mill he put there, dude, I'm a warrior slaying beasts or a sorcerer looking to upgrade my arsenal of spells, make me care about it or your writing is shit.

But but muh immersion..

kek.

Man people really need to stop hyping up Daggerfall, I like it but you only ever need to go to like 3 provinces and only 5 locations in each of them

Just to prove a point I'm going to mainquest Skyrim on normal.

As the other guy pointed it this is a rather ironic attitude coming from someone advocating for procedurally generated worlds that require hours of walking through empty landscapes to reach anything.

faggot with Dunning-Kruger doesn't know about noise-based generation

there is a bethesda game like that already and its called starfield. if you already hate it well you are shit outta luck

I was making a sarcastic comment about Skyrim being an empty field of nothing because that's what it feels like when you play through it. Nothing else nothing more, now you could make a good proc-gen world using an idea known as a hexcrawl with dungeons but you zoomers wouldn't know what good was because you don't have a clue.

That looks epic and fun

starfield is just like an elder scrolls game if it used procedural generation to enlarge it's map to lore size

Somehow I don't think this is true

It's being rebraned as 'AI' (it's the exact same thing)

can I climb that mountain?

You could have listed some examples if you wanted people to talk about them but I genuinely don't know any procgen games besides Arena, Daggerfall, Dworfort, Minecraft, and Bloodborne Chalice Dungeons and all of them make me hate proc gen

Why don't open-world games use procedural generation much anymore?

They do, how do you think nearly all the maps in Bethesda games are made. They generate a map as a "base" and do several passes over it to make the map feel more hand-crafted. It's like the one area they got consistently better at over time (outside something like Starfield where they stretched the approach to its blatantly noticeable limit)

Post-Daggerfall maps are just significantly smaller to make the post-gen touch up process more feasible, which is something Daggerfall itself had very little of.