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by nlawalker
3605 days ago
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The ability to explore a huge, living world/universe in a game sounds great on paper, but I find that it almost invariably leads to shallow games - the real world is also big and sparse, and so the "alternate life" you end up living in the game ends up being as dull and routine as real life can be. Density is where the fun is at. The world doesn't need to be big, it needs to be intricate: packed with interesting characters, interactions and stuff to do. Big spaces are good for battlefields and pretty vistas, but don't make for fun "live another life" games. The first Deus Ex figured this out, Human Revolution refined it and it sounds like Mankind Divided has distilled it even further. |
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Indeed. Massive, procedurally generated worlds have been tried over and over again before – Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall contained a 1:1 scale map of Britain; Frontier: Elite II contained 513 million "unique" star systems, and so on, and so forth, but no matter how fancy your generation algorithm is, meaningful variation is always constrained, and there's only so much excitement you can get out of an empty world you can barely interact with in any meaningful way.
Borderlands also figured it out: Sure, all weapons are procedurally generated, and there's billions of possible combinations… but it's just one aspect of games with 40+ hours worth of story content.
(Disclaimer: Haven't played NMS yet, so I cannot comment on how/whether they addressed this. They need to, however, if they don't want everyone to toss out the game and forget about it in a year.)