In Starfield, there will be procedurally generated content, but there will be manually created areas. So, I understand this as: “Outlaws will be smaller scale, but we are trying to spin it in marketing speech”.
That’s a fair enough point to highlight, I think.
You’re making an open world game in space, launching around the same time as an open world game in space from a developer thats famous for “quantity over quality” worlds. Unless starfield totally flops, then odds are everything similar will be compared to it for years to come, the same way open world fantasy games were compared to Skyrim and Oblivion before it.
Making a point of highlighting how your game is different from starfield is not bad move, especially in a time where people are becoming more and more jaded with big open world games.
Absolutely. Imagine how hard can it be to make a whole city fun and full of content. Now apply that to a whole freaking planet!. There’s absolutely now way that manual work can beat procedural + manual work… I mean, by definition it’s just LESS stuff.
Spaceballs - the overwritten comment
sounds great but they’re talking about having multiple hand-crafted areas that are larger than entire regions in recent assassins creed games which means at least one of a few things
- this game isn’t coming out for years
- the amount of crunch needed to get this game out the door is going to be horrendous
- the game will be huge but also insanely empty
Also there’s no way they aren’t procedurally generating large portions of maps before building it out by hand. It’s just part of a reasonable workflow now.
yep, this is also 100% on the money.
the game will be huge but also insanely emptyMost likely, especially since this is ubisoft after all, but I don’t see why this naturally follows having a hand crafted world in your line of arguments. On the contrary procedurally created worlds are usually the ones which are most prone to be huge but empty (or bloated with similar copy pasted content).
my thought process was essentially: without enormous amounts of crunch (or slave labor) to fill in these spaces, they will wind up with hand crafted-but-empty spaces if they want to launch the game on any reasonable timetable
I think there was an elder scrolls game that used procedural generation for a lot of the map but all the important areas were hand made. There’s no way they can hand make a galaxy full of planets without sacrificing something important somewhere. Why can’t they just procedurally generate some of it? Is the no procedural generation supposed to be a selling point?
in the post-no man’s sky era, “procgen” kind of has a bit of a bad rap unfortunately. as wary as i am of starfield (i don’t think it will be good), their method of using procgen for the broader world and handcrafting specific zones seems like the way to go
You’re thinking of daggerfall
For Oblivion they touted the use of procedural generation to create the ‘realistic’ outdoor environments, not to generate content on the fly.
At the time Oblivion was great - I remember spending heaps of time just collecting plants because the outdoor environment and the music were beautiful. And then getting mauled by a bear.
Thank goodness. I always find precedural generations so devoid of character. And if a star wars game should have anything at all, it should have unique environments that feel like they belong in universe.
Developer Massive Entertainment - with publisher Ubisoft - proudly claimed the game was the “first ever open-world Star Wars game”
Did they forget about Star Wars Galaxies?
publisher ubisoft
😞
