Open-world, sandbox, procedurally generated games or when content overload backfires

[Vanth]

What happened with the games we used to love (and still do) that were concise, composed, talented, graceful and elegant? Now all we have is digital vomit splattered all over without the humility or artistry, vision or meaning. The current direction games are taking of open worlds, sandboxes and procedurally generated environments is the end of games as we knew them. Anything that seeks to substitute corporeal existence with a digital, fantastical world enters in a domain that is of an entire different order altogether.

We've seen the very early stages of game-making automation. The so called procedurally generated environments is the early sign of the lifelessness and the removal of human agency from the game making process. As the game making process becomes automated via intelligent computers, we will enter a domain where computer games cease to have meaning or relevancy, because at this point games will be pumped out by the billions every day. This form of unrestrained games will eventually backfire, like all things which lack modesty, gracefulness and meaning. Everything that becomes routine is bound to fail. Substituting machines for the spark of the human emotion, intellect, and creativity in game making means that games become soulless, rudimentary facsimiles.

What is your take on open-worlds, sandboxes and procedural generation in games? Is it bound to stay with us in the foreseeable future or is it just a blip in computer game history? How are games which require greater time sacrifice out of our lives more satisfying than games that have a specific vision and message with a high-quality narrative?

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/this-eerie-game-was-made-by-artificial-intelligence
http://www.polygon.com/2014/1/12/5295980/how-ai-game-developer-angelina-could-change-the-industry
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328554.900-ai-designs-its-own-video-game.html
http://indiestatik.com/2013/12/08/procedural-generation/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRpDn5qPp3s

 

[mizzou]

I can't imagine Minecraft without the procedurally generated world. It's fascinating....but completely lifeless and sterile.

Go to a Minecraft world with a hand-made cityscape built into a procedurally generated world...it's fantastic.

I would like to see a game like GTA-IV or V style, but with more "permanence" when it comes to AI. That might just mean more scripting or more playing with AI variables.

I don't like how in a open world game like that, you turn around and the AI disapears and can be completely different.

"Emergent AI" Has been hype at this point...any game that developed with it in mind completely stripped it or nerfed it because it was too chaotic. (Ultima Online/Stalker/Far Cry3?/Oblivion)
Re: Oblivion "In some cases, we the developers have had to consciously tone down the types of behavior they carry out. Again, why? Because sometimes, the AI is so goddamned smart and determined it screws up our quests! Seriously, sometimes it's gotten so weird it's like dealing with a holodeck that's gone sentient. Imagine playing The Sims, and your Sims have a penchant for murder and theft. So a lot of the time this stuff is funny, and amazing, and emergent, and it's awesome when it happens. Other times, it's so unexpected, it breaks stuff. Designers need a certain amount of control over the scenarios they create, and things can go haywire when NPCs have a mind of their own." http://venturebeat.com/2010/12/17/dimming-the-radiant-ai-in-oblivion/

 

[shortylickens]

Elder Scrolls 3 was about as big as I can handle, it just needed more stuff in it.

Elder Scrolls 5 felt a bit small but was plenty full of cool things. I was also happy with the Dragonborn expansion.

Baldurs Gate 2 was perfect. I wish we had more sequels with the Infinity Engine.


So basically, I like big closed worlds with actual stuff to do. It seems to provide a more entertaining experience.

 

[mizzou]

So basically, I like big closed worlds with actual stuff to do. It seems to provide a more entertaining experience.

same here.

A world with life is better then one with none. Shit...if you could completely generate a square 1/2 mile of my neighborhood, you would have probably more interesting things to do exploring wise then if you procedurally generated a sterile State or entire Nation.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

was this procedurally generated? was it made with "humility or artistry, vision or meaning"?

no. it was made by hand. the hands of men. men that should have known better.

how about this?

there ya go. everyone experiences exactly what the creative artists (and committees and review panels and marketing departments) intended.

to be honest, your post is fraught with an emotional exaggeration that makes me think you are personally threatened by procedural generation - literally a neo-luddite.

the irony is you are arguing against the removal of the human element in video games, while video games are in their 5th decade of removing humans from human interaction with ever-increasing efficiency.

you, yourself, have stated video games' raison d'etre:

Anything that seeks to substitute corporeal existence with a digital, fantastical world enters in a domain that is of an entire different order altogether.

i could not have said it better.

 

[ImpulsE69]

I started playing Quake Live the other day..omg I can't believe how much I miss arena shooters. SOOOO much better than this fricking COD and Battlefield crap.

 

[futurefields]

GTA V is the most impressive game ever made IMO...

 

[akahoovy]

Good procedurally generated environments will let smaller teams make more expansive games. It's hard for a small team of artists to create a lot of assets and place them if you want to have a lot of environments with clutter. It totally depends on the art director as to how good it looks, but procedural clutter, mapping, and generating assets is not a bad thing.

 

[BoberFett]

Terrible thread based on a faulty premise.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

As games get more complex it becomes harder to hand craft all the detail in the world, you have to invent new tools to make the content creation process easier, procedural generation is becoming a bigger part of that.

The trick like with all tools is to use it in places where it's most suitable and then touch up the result by hand, where possible. Given a game with a fixed budget there's plenty of things I'd happily see done in a procedural way to free up the developers time to put more effort into other things, for example if you have a large roaming world like Skyrim, if you can procedurally texture the landscape of the entire map based on some simple rules like height of the landscape, angle of the ground, nearby objects, coordinates in the map, etc...but then you can free up some texture artists to spend 5x longer on textures for the main NPCs, that would be a good trade off IMO.

Automation is a great thing, it's working smart instead of hard, but obviously you have to pick your battles and use the technology in the smartest way.

 

[BSim500]

One thing I liked about Neverwinter Nights & Dragon Age: Origins was that they were technically "closed" and "static", but you could do most areas in any order, even go back & forward between them and they still had that sense of freedom without being sandboxed (or the sense of "what now?" that sandboxing often gives). I've always felt that middle ground between open world & railroad was the sweet spot between tight story-telling and non-claustrophobic gameplay.

As for procedurally generated games, some work well (Diablo 2, Torchlight, etc). They tend to be "plot lite" games that are more about gameplay than narrative and pretty well done map randomization that doesn't feel contrived. Other old games were done out of necessity for the hardware of its time (anyone remember Elite's galaxy?). Daggerfall's map was the size of Great Britain. Literally 10,000x larger than Morrowind. Pretty much the game's "soul" was about its sheer scale and the sense of being humbled due to it. If you changed it, it wouldn't be the same game. Obviously though, it's far more visually bland than Oblivion or Skyrim.

Procedurally generated games certainly can be more boring, but then again - static map design done badly (ie, Dragon Age 2's copy & paste identikit dungeons, Morrowind's boring caves, etc), is no real better. The awesome NWN Aurora toolset had a sort of random terrain generation that made many great mods doable with half the effort. It worked very well for that game - but obviously it depends on the "quality of the seeding" (ie, whether it just chucks things around or has intelligent constraints that make sense of the randomness). A lot of what makes open-world games work or not (both procedurally generated & static) is ultimately down to attention to detail tweaking. Oblivion's Unique Landscapes came to mind. Same goes for RTS's random maps - games like Rise of Nations, Age of Mythology, Age of Empires, etc, simply wouldn't work without random seeding.

 

[imaheadcase]

To be fair you find many games with large open worlds with not much to do. MMO with content patches do this a lot. Most people don't go to certain areas for whatever reasons.

FPS its easy to make a nice level vs casual games because you don't really stop and smell the roses as much as you do say with Skyrim and such.

 

[JamesV]

I don't get it OP... which games are you talking about? There isn't a procedurally generated game in existence; just procedural levels or terrain, and many games have shown it to work great - FTL, Diablo 2, Minecraft, and many more.

Short story-driven games with every piece hand crafted usually suck in my opinion. The Walking Dead games everyone loves are horrible to me; as is Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, and Metro Last Light. Too short, too linear, too casual, and bad writing as usual for games.

Open World games don't fare better. Far Cry 3 stunk with everything clearly labeled as where it was; where is the exploration value if you know where everything is and what you have to do there? I always remember old GTA games where you'd find a four-wheeler in the middle of nowhere that started a checkpoint mission... nothing like that in open world games (including GTA) anymore.

No, games are not getting worse because of procedurally generated content. Games are getting worse from - too much DLC and not putting out a 'complete' game, short large budget set piece games, and everything being dumbed down for consoles and casual players.

 

[pmv]

Surely the real world is procedurally-generated?

Nobody seriously believes its hand-crafted, do they?

 

[cbrunny]

Personally not a fan of the concept of procedural generation. I tend to avoid games that offer it. I'd prefer a carefully crafted level. But, I do see that it does make sense for some games, like Minecraft.

 

[shortylickens]

Surely the real world is procedurally-generated?

Nobody seriously believes its hand-crafted, do they?

When someone makes a game with the depth of our real world, I'll be impressed.

 

[Vanth]

Most of you have clearly misinterpreted and/or misunderstood the original post. What I am essentially saying is that there is certain, irrefutable, and inherent beauty and harmony in creations that are borne out of limitation and which reside in limitation. When one attempts to create worlds of infinity, there immediately rise elements of confusion, despair, disorientation, and a general suspension of vision, artistry and meaning.

Analogy:
If you've seen a painting on a canvas recently, the painting does not extend outside on an infinite surface of canvas. The painting is constricted to the dimensions of a defined, limited canvas and that is where the beauty of it all lies.

 

[BrightCandle]

I don't know that I agree that limitation itself is what makes hand crafted worlds different to procedurally generated ones. It really is the difference between an intelligence putting objects somewhere to mimic the real world verses a simplistic algorithm doing the same thing with no understanding of the natural world. Its this lack of knowledge that makes the algorithms look OK but always produce a generic and repetitive landscape.

Minecraft is interesting because while its got all its biomes and the different procedural generation ultimately the world on every generation feels the same. Its not a fundamentally different game, you don't find a challenge in one you didn't in the other and even as you cross the different biomes they basically feel the same even though they are probably statistically very different seed to seed. I think its the random nature which is what causes that, there is no overall vision for how to build a part of the world, no choice about key features. Its the one thing that concerns me most about Beyond the sky, what can you do in such sterile environments that is fun? Minecraft has a survival and building game that are compelling in their own right, but I do not find exploration in minecraft fun at all.

 

[flexy]

>>
What is your take on open-worlds, sandboxes and procedural generation in games?
>>

I don't know about procedural generation, but I entirely disagree with you. I think that ONLY open-world games and "sand boxes" have a future and not scripted games.

When I look back, almost ALL of those games which I liked best and played longest are "open world", to some extent or the other. Best example would be the GTA series or Far Cry 3.

"Open world" for me also means less rules, the "rules" of the game and thus flexibility of what you can do in such a virtual world come automatically with an open world.

>>
It seems to provide a more entertaining experience.
>>

The "experience" has nothing to do with the size of a world but with the flexibility/freedom how you can interact with a world. A "closed" system is normally also one where things are scripted and behaviour, goals etc. in the game are "pre-set", what you call a high quality narrative, or plot...that must be followed to "play" the game. However I don't see this having a future AT ALL, and the success of games like GTA IMHO is proof for that.

Example: Let's take a typical shooter game with several maps. The size, objects etc. in A MAP are of course pre-set, simply because there are technical limitation which require (still) that a map must be finite.

But people can PLAY in such an environment and have freedom to do what they like (as long as the map allows), there are no pre-set rules as such since the play (say in a multiplayer deathmatch) comes automatically from HOW players/people interact on the map. EXAMPLE...One could decide to hide in a tower and play a sniper...even tho the concept of being a sniper and hiding in a building might not even have been planned prior..it's merely a result of WHAT the map (virtual world) can offer in terms of freedom of what you can do in it. (Another person may not choose to play a sniper, this person might maybe just grab a knife and then walk through the map trying to find people who are hiding, things like that)

 

[Revolution 11]

>>
I don't know about procedural generation, but I entirely disagree with you. I think that ONLY open-world games and "sand boxes" have a future and not scripted games.

Your argument almost makes sense. Except for the fact that not everyone plays a game to be in a open-world experience.

It may be true that gamers spend significantly more time in a open-world game, I don't know that but let's take your word for the moment. That does not mean that the same gamer will value that time equally to time spent in a closed-world, non-procedural game.

I would argue that a game like the Witcher 2, a closed-world, linear, story-based game, gives far more enjoyment per hour played compared to GTA games where hours can fly back in pointless driving, massacres, and robbing, only to be punctuated by moments of crazy stunts, events, or accomplishments. You can look back at the Witcher 2 and recall a great story, hard bosses, and funny conversations, you look back at GTA and recall a few great missions, the one time you landed a helicopter on a bus, and a few great lines. Most of the memorable fun in GTA is from the scripted portions (the dialogue , the missions, the characters), and only a few rare moments are from the helicopter on the bus, though this is important for GTA's flavor as a game.

Ignoring that scripted games are far more dense in fun per minute, gamers enjoy games also for quests, characters, and plot. You can have strong characters in open-world games, though it is harder without the aid of strong plot. I have not seen a single good plot from a purely open-world game yet. I have also never seen a good quest from such a game.

So yes, I consider open-world games to be valuable parts of the ecosystem, I don't think they are without meaning, I consider them to allow endless new experiences. But I also don't think those experiences are as high quality as offered in closed custom-designed games. And open-world games completely miss on the holy trinity synergy of quests, characters, and plot. They are not the sole future, unless the tastes of gamers radically changes and customers, who want plot/characters/quests to work together, completely disappear.

I doubt this will happen.