Games with impressive procedurally generated content

[Aemar]

Decided to create this thread after watching some Shadows of Doubt videos, the detective game. Obviously, this kind of generated content is most of the time trash, but I think SoD is really good at what it does in terms of procedurally created stuff.

Any other games worth mentioning on this list that do more than just generating random enviroments?

 

[Bester]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/351700/UnReal_World/

In development since the dawn of time. Generates everything, you can probably find yourself in there somewhere.

 

[Aemar]

Ah yes, the Iron Age Perkele Simulator. Great game.

 

[NecroLord]

Daggerfall and its nightmarish and gargantuan dungeons.

 

[ADL]

Starfield

 

[Aemar]

Daggerfall's dungeons and the towns were pre-generated/hard-coded during development. The only randomly generated areas are the wilderness areas I think. Loot and side quests are also randomly generated. Extremely impressive for 1996, but everything gets stale after a while.

 

[Alter Sack]

Rimworld

 

[Riddler]

Minecraft

 

[zapotec]

simlife!

 

[hajro]

real life

 

[potatojohn]

Always liked the infinite map in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

There are a few, but the KING is of course: https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

When this baby is done (in 2,000 years), it will be like real world almost.

Honorable mention: https://store.steampowered.com/app/341390/Vulture_for_NetHack/

 

[ind33d]

Shadow of Mordor?

 

[Nutmeg]

Daggerfall's dungeons and the towns were pre-generated/hard-coded during development. The only randomly generated areas are the wilderness areas I think. Loot and side quests are also randomly generated. Extremely impressive for 1996, but everything gets stale after a while.

It's fine if you like Daggerfall's basic gameplay (which IMO is atrociously uninteresting) and ignore the fact that IIRC quests sometimes don't match the content and are unwinnable e.g. you get some quest to destroy a vampire lord but the vampire lord got put in a room that doesn't connect to anything so you can only win by using nocli- I mean the intended interaction between some walls and the levitate spell.

But anyway I don't know if I ever considered procedural content impressive, but it's part of many good rogue-likes and diablo-likes, 4X (e.g. Civ series), RTS (e.g. "Age of" series), and other TBS (from HoMM to X-Com).

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

no mention for no man's sky? the game is laughable, but the amount of randomly generated crap is staggering.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Procedural generation is an amazing thing, after all, if you think about it, the real world is created using procedural generation. But to get something good out of it, it needs to be of a certain depth, ie enough procedural systems interacting with each other to create interesting shit. Successful games using it, e.g. Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld, understand that, while games like No Man's Sky and Daggerfall don't, and just have a few shallow procedural systems creating boring repetitive crap.

 

[Vic]

the absolute best is Dwarf Fortress, they pretty much spent their whole life making it

 

[Late Bloomer]

The games that come to mind that haven't been mentioned, that I have experience playing are

Tales of Maj'Eyal - A very fun roguelike game that uses procgen
7 days to die - It's actually fairly impressive procgen, when you understand the scope of what the map creation does.
Salt 2 - Cozy game that uses procgen for the islands and caves.
Wildermyth - Uses procgen for it's storytelling. It's...odd but intriguing in it's own clumsy way.
Warsim The Realm of Asiona - Text based adventure with procgen everything. Massive scale. I found it super interesting.

 

[v1c70r14]

a few shallow procedural systems creating boring repetitive crap

But Porky, that's every procgen game ever, Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress included.

 

[Gostak]

• Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King
  https://bitbucket.org/rmtew/incursion-roguelike/src/master/
  https://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Incursion http://incursion.wikidot.com/manual-intro

Items and monsters can draw from a number of templates customizing their behaviour.
I always say gotta love a "blessed holy dwarven warhammer +1" and that's just a starter kit weapon.

• Unexplored
  Yeah, I know you said not just random environments but the dungeons here are special:
  They often have a Zelda/Metroid like stages thing to them where certain items open up new pathways
  and they also come with decent/ fun puzzles.
  
  
• Space Station 13
  If the procedures are allowed to involve/ be carried out by other humans during the game.
  It did not get better than this.

• Using an ANN/LLM as a dungeon master
  As cringe and annoying/ awkward it is to attempt to do so with stock big LLMs oncegood datasets and finetunes
  are done and some clever hidden pre-prompt parts get devised and used or even custom model setups
  specifically for this use-case designed, we might really get a computer replacement for bad dungeon master "John Doe" in real life ...
  I have not tried the following but maybe these people made some progress, e.g.: https://www.fables.gg/ (Basically a more modern AI Dungeon service, discord based ...
  I will not touch that).

Again this one just environment but damn those are beautiful and put a puny human and his earth into perspective:

There is (was?) an older free version from when it also was just a 32 Bits application in case you would like to sort of check it/ something similar out for free.

 

[Gostak]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/351700/UnReal_World/

In development since the dawn of time. Generates everything, you can probably find yourself in there somewhere.

Gotta use the PlantMod for new flora once you figured out the vanilla plants.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Late Bloomer Wildermyth is a good game, and it has procedurally generated stories... sort of.

All of the text is written manually. There are a finite number of stories and side quests. Every time your party enters a new area, the game checks which party members are there and which history, character attributes, and story hooks they have. Then the game picks a story encounter for that combination of characters, histories, traits, and hooks.

 

[baturinsky]

Daggerfall's dungeons and the towns were pre-generated/hard-coded during development. The only randomly generated areas are the wilderness areas I think. Loot and side quests are also randomly generated. Extremely impressive for 1996, but everything gets stale after a while.

It's fine if you like Daggerfall's basic gameplay (which IMO is atrociously uninteresting) and ignore the fact that IIRC quests sometimes don't match the content and are unwinnable e.g. you get some quest to destroy a vampire lord but the vampire lord got put in a room that doesn't connect to anything so you can only win by using nocli- I mean the intended interaction between some walls and the levitate spell.

But anyway I don't know if I ever considered procedural content impressive, but it's part of many good rogue-likes and diablo-likes, 4X (e.g. Civ series), RTS (e.g. "Age of" series), and other TBS (from HoMM to X-Com).

Daggerfall dungeon maps are impressive, but not really fun. I prefer TES:Arena dungeons.

 

[Hag]

Minecraft

The best one I have ever seen. Somehow managed to give me "wow" moments until the end of the hundred of hours I played it.
Dwarf fortress one with its continent and cells levels is also very good.
Noctis IV for the best space content.

 

[Ash]

Spelunky 2's level design. Best procedurally generated level design I've stumbled across. Especially with mods that expand upon the proc gen even further.
That said, it is 2D and grid-based, so quite easy to piece together interesting modules in infinitely unique ways.

Usually I am not a fan of the concept, I maintain that the best level design is hand-crafted across the board, though I have warmed to it a little lately and this game was the biggest reason why.