A while back one of the teams on Star Citizen was talking about an interesting idea they had for quest design where you would create distinct “chunks” of quests that the game would then be able to assemble on the fly. So, for example, it might start with “go to X, fetch Y”, then add “Dropoff point gets changed during the mission” and “Enemies try to intercept on the way.” But another time you might get “The dropoff was an ambush” or “The cargo is dangerous” (or both of those at the same time). Create enough building blocks, and you can start to disguise the machinery under the hood a little. Computationally this is very cheap because the computer is just doing the equivalent of rolling a handful of dice (I literally have tabletop RPG books that use this idea, with actual tables and dice).
I think some of this has even made it into the game. There were some quests they did with branching paths, that sort of thing. It’s an interesting idea that I’d like to see pushed further.
This is all I can ever think of when games brag about so much procedural generation.
I mean what else would you do with it? Everything else would be waaay to expansive and likely get problems with CPU power of players at some point.
It’s a fair question.
A while back one of the teams on Star Citizen was talking about an interesting idea they had for quest design where you would create distinct “chunks” of quests that the game would then be able to assemble on the fly. So, for example, it might start with “go to X, fetch Y”, then add “Dropoff point gets changed during the mission” and “Enemies try to intercept on the way.” But another time you might get “The dropoff was an ambush” or “The cargo is dangerous” (or both of those at the same time). Create enough building blocks, and you can start to disguise the machinery under the hood a little. Computationally this is very cheap because the computer is just doing the equivalent of rolling a handful of dice (I literally have tabletop RPG books that use this idea, with actual tables and dice).
I think some of this has even made it into the game. There were some quests they did with branching paths, that sort of thing. It’s an interesting idea that I’d like to see pushed further.