Procedural worlds like in Minecraft are the newest feature on the gaming market!
Ever Quest Next and many other developers have noticed the huge potential in this type of worlddesign.
I’d suggest to add it as a Feature in the World Design category.
Isn’t this just a higher-tech interpretation of the Open World feature?
Lower tech, actually. I mean the earliest games relied on procedural content because of the lack of space to store game data. A classic example is Elite which originally had 8 million galaxies, until some marketing bod decided that nobody would believe that number as ordered that the game be cut down to just 8 galaxies.
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Either way, this is definitely the Open World feature.
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Random procedural content could be worthwhile as a world feature - logically it requires a world to be pretty open, but it’s a feature to enhance replayability.
As opposed to Elite, where the procedural generation did produce the same results every time - it could be seen as a form of compression, in some sense.
There is a great article on it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation
When i hear “Procedural Generation” I think of the 80s and Bethesda’s use of SpeedTree Tech which makes for pretty dull tree’s (until modded).
Its an idea to bear in mind, but as a branch of Open world.
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Wasn’t Rogue the first game to use Procedural Generation? That tech is OLD!
Plus, I find it is rather absurd to bundle it in under “open world” - Roguelikes, the Diablo series, Hellgate: London and so on use procedurally generated levels, but they’re hardly “open world”…
Roguelikes are open world in the sense that you can go anywhere you please… but a lot of such games you can’t go to the same level twice, so open world doesn’t make as much sense, you’re right.
EverQuest Next wants to put the procedural world mechanic to an entirely different scale.
I was watching their pressconferences lately and no matter if that game will be successfull or not, the idea they had is totally amazing, I would go so far to say that they don’t just have a procedural world engine, I would say they created an AI that generates game worlds.
It has an entirely different definition of things like LOD.
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Features in Game Dev Tycoon aren’t the be-all, end-all of what your game includes. Do you really think a modern AAA Action-RPG is going to NOT have a save game system? You can build it like that. You may feel pushed to do it that way if you have a killer Engine feature to include and you’re just under the line for engine time.
Let me just say, your game still has a save system. Once you’ve put save-game systems in half your games, you probably don’t release anything without save systems. What happens is that it stops being a development focus. You stop trying to be clever with your save system, you stop really thinking about it, you don’t give time and resources to making it clever or interesting. It’s a save system. It’s infrastructure.
The relationship between Procedural Generation and the Open World feature is like that. Once your gaming studio understands procedural generation and has started to employ it regularly, it’s being infrastructure rather than a feature as such. If you then make a game that generates new star systems on the fly for characters to explore, procedural generation (and the open world) is back to being a feature! Diablo uses procedural generation as infrastructure to hold up other features. Spore uses procedural generation to create a more open world than they ever could have otherwise.
Open World is a feature. Procedural Generation is a method which can produce that feature, not a feature itself. It’s not even the only method to produce Open World games. A gameworld can feel pretty open just by being designed to be large and freely traversible. Doing that by hand is usually prohibitive in expense, but certainly possible.