Pathway - turn-based strategy adventure from the developers of Halfway

[JarlFrank]

Indie games in general have been plagued by procedural generation in recent years (thanks to the whole roguelite genre popularity - heck, even Strafe, a game that wanted to hearken back to oldschool Doom and Quake style FPS, had procedural levels) and it's really getting old by now. I want to see some actual, well-made level design for once rather than the soulless procedural stuff we're seeing all the time.

Guess I just prefer having meaningful content over going through the same-but-slightly-different-thanks-to-an-algorithm content over and over again.

 

[Zombra]

The thing is, even procedural games have a nonzero amount of handcrafted content. For example, every enemy type (or its constituent elements) has to be handcrafted before it's thrown in the blender. If you only have one or two enemy types, then yes, procedural missions will get repetitive very quickly. If you have a hundred enemy types with synergistic abilities, and spawn them procedurally, they will appear in interesting new combinations all the time and you will have colossal replay value. If your map generator is sufficiently robust, your maps will be worth playing on, and so forth.

The synergy is a huge part of it. A major reason FTL is so fun is because of the many elements that make up your ship, and enemy ships, and how every combination makes gameplay slightly different, and these differences amplify each other into vastly divergent play experiences. If you randomly gain access to dual-firing missiles, you can leverage that to knock down enemy shields and apply your heavy single-shot laser, unless they hack your weapon systems, unless you use mind control etc. Remove or replace any of those elements and gameplay becomes new and different, always challenging you; and every new enemy ship is built with tiny differences you have to learn and adapt to.

I'm not saying that Pathway will brilliantly combine elements like this - it doesn't really look like elemental synergy is a core design principle - I'm just making a general argument that procedural doesn't automatically mean stale and empty.

 

[thesheeep]

Indie games in general have been plagued by procedural generation in recent years (thanks to the whole roguelite genre popularity - heck, even Strafe, a game that wanted to hearken back to oldschool Doom and Quake style FPS, had procedural levels) and it's really getting old by now. I want to see some actual, well-made level design for once rather than the soulless procedural stuff we're seeing all the time.

Guess I just prefer having meaningful content over going through the same-but-slightly-different-thanks-to-an-algorithm content over and over again.

Honestly, that sounds like you're just being some kind of hipster for the sake of being a hipster. Procedural generation is a trend right now and people like it, so you hate it.
If someone showed you some well-made procedurally generated level and told you it was hand-made, you'd probably love it.
And the other way around if someone showed you a hand-crafted level, telling you it was from an algorithm.

Your arguments always revolve around the same nonsensical "it's always the same!" routine, as if procedural generation could only create slight variations of a single formula and as if procgen would automatically result in the worst possible level/encounter/whatever.
With the same logic I could argue hand-crafted levels are always shit, because there certainly have been more than enough shitty hand-crafted levels.

That you truly think there's no soul in what some algorithms are able to deliver shows your incredible short-sightedness and narrow mind.
Creating an algorithm that can create good levels is something that can take months or years, certainly longer than any level designer will ever sit on a level, and also requires that person (or team) to understand a lot about level design (in addition to all the technology involved), or it will be shit.

 

[JarlFrank]

Indie games in general have been plagued by procedural generation in recent years (thanks to the whole roguelite genre popularity - heck, even Strafe, a game that wanted to hearken back to oldschool Doom and Quake style FPS, had procedural levels) and it's really getting old by now. I want to see some actual, well-made level design for once rather than the soulless procedural stuff we're seeing all the time.

Guess I just prefer having meaningful content over going through the same-but-slightly-different-thanks-to-an-algorithm content over and over again.

Honestly, that sounds like you're just being some kind of hipster for the sake of being a hipster. Procedural generation is a trend right now and people like it, so you hate it.
If someone showed you some well-made procedurally generated level and told you it was hand-made, you'd probably love it.
And the other way around if someone showed you a hand-crafted level, telling you it was from an algorithm.

Your arguments always revolve around the same nonsensical "it's always the same!" routine, as if procedural generation could only create slight variations of a single formula and as if procgen would automatically result in the worst possible level/encounter/whatever.
With the same logic I could argue hand-crafted levels are always shit, because there certainly have been more than enough shitty hand-crafted levels.

That you truly think there's no soul in what some algorithms are able to deliver shows your incredible short-sightedness and narrow mind.
Creating an algorithm that can create good levels is something that can take months or years, certainly longer than any level designer will ever sit on a level, and also requires that person (or team) to understand a lot about level design (in addition to all the technology involved), or it will be shit.

Thing is, most of the games brought forth by the procedural generation fad have been mediocre at best in the level design, in NO WAY comparable to great hand-placed encounters of Baldur's Gate 2, the intricately developed alien world of Morrowind, the great exploration experience of Gothic 2, the excellent community-made levels for Quake, Thief, Doom etc. No procedurally generated level has ever managed to reach that level of consistent quality, and personally I much prefer exploring an intricately designed and coherent world over having potentially hundreds of procedurally generated levels. Procedurally generated games lack the sense of permanence, of being a real place, that hand-made worlds like Gothic, Morrowind, BG2 have.

And sure, Pathway is a different kind of game. A strategy game about exploring dungeons and fighting enemies. I did enjoy FTL, I also enjoyed Renowned Explorers and Curious Expedition, all of them procedurally generated and endlessly replayable.
And yet those kinds of games are always "coffee break" games for me. I play one session for an hour or two, then forget about it for weeks or even months until I'm in the mood to play it again. They never really grab me the same way as hand-crafted experiences do.

If the mechanics are good, and the level design is excellent, I can re-play the same level over and over, each time with a different approach, without it getting boring. Some of the best Thief fan missions are like that. Or Quake maps. Or pretty much all the levels of Dishonored 2. Or the towns you assault in Jagged Alliance 2. Or the open world of Gothic 2.

Would a procedurally generated game draw me in as much as those games did? Probably not, because of the lack of permanence. It never feels like a coherent world where every element is designed to form the best possible whole, but like a much simpler game where the world is generated on the fly whenever you click "New Game".

Playing through a great hand-crafted experience is much more satisfying to me than playing through a game with endless procedural levels.

EDIT:
Also, the prevalence of procedural generation in modern indie games means that a lot of young game designers forget about the importance of good level design, and don't even bother to learn this craft, which is sad.

 

[Zombra]

Good post JarlFrank and it's impossible to disagree with anything you just said.

However, your original post

Procedurally generated content: grows stale very quickly because it's very formulaic. Generic instead of unique encounters and level architecture, no true variety because it's just variations of the same thing cobbled together by an algorithm with no creativity behind it, unlike hand-placed content made by a human.

Is still dumb and wrong.

 

[thesheeep]

hing is, most of the games brought forth by the procedural generation fad have been mediocre at best in the level design, in NO WAY comparable to great hand-placed encounters of Baldur's Gate 2, the intricately developed alien world of Morrowind, the great exploration experience of Gothic 2, the excellent community-made levels for Quake, Thief, Doom etc. No procedurally generated level has ever managed to reach that level of consistent quality, and personally I much prefer exploring an intricately designed and coherent world over having potentially hundreds of procedurally generated levels. Procedurally generated games lack the sense of permanence, of being a real place, that hand-made worlds like Gothic, Morrowind, BG2 have.

And sure, Pathway is a different kind of game. A strategy game about exploring dungeons and fighting enemies. I did enjoy FTL, I also enjoyed Renowned Explorers and Curious Expedition, all of them procedurally generated and endlessly replayable.
And yet those kinds of games are always "coffee break" games for me. I play one session for an hour or two, then forget about it for weeks or even months until I'm in the mood to play it again. They never really grab me the same way as hand-crafted experiences do.

If the mechanics are good, and the level design is excellent, I can re-play the same level over and over, each time with a different approach, without it getting boring. Some of the best Thief fan missions are like that. Or Quake maps. Or pretty much all the levels of Dishonored 2. Or the towns you assault in Jagged Alliance 2. Or the open world of Gothic 2.

Would a procedurally generated game draw me in as much as those games did? Probably not, because of the lack of permanence. It never feels like a coherent world where every element is designed to form the best possible whole, but like a much simpler game where the world is generated on the fly whenever you click "New Game".

Playing through a great hand-crafted experience is much more satisfying to me than playing through a game with endless procedural levels.

See, that sounds much more reasonable to me, and subjective where appropriate. Are you a writer or something?
Not much to say against it.

Obviously, procedurally generated content of any kind will never be for everyone. And I also think it might never reach level design quality such as Dishonored.
Though I do think Morrowind-levels of level design are mostly achievable, especially when you think about towns and some dungeons.

Also, the prevalence of procedural generation in modern indie games means that a lot of young game designers forget about the importance of good level design, and don't even bother to learn this craft, which is sad.

That is unfortunately true. Many fall into the technology trap instead of making their algorithm "think" like a level designer (which requires understanding level design).

 

[JarlFrank]

Are you a writer or something?

Yes.

That's why I usually prefer memey two-sentence generalizations over well-articulated arguments since I like to take a break from my day job on the Codex

 

[JarlFrank]

Though I do think Morrowind-levels of level design are mostly achievable, especially when you think about towns and some dungeons.

Ah yes, here's the thing.

I'm not entirely opposed to procedural generation when it's used as a limited assistance tool towards manual level design.

Especially large game worlds like Morrowind can benefit from it. Feed some geographical data into the generator and let it produce the general landscape of the game world. Spares your level designers the time of molding every single hill and valley on their own. Then, when the basics have been generated based on the geographical data fed to the algorithm, the level designers drop in and make it all look beautiful and add some content in there.

Then again, while this is also procedural generation in the broadest sense, it's a different kind of procedural generation than what we see in procedurally generated games. It's done during development, and not as part of the final product. It's based on specific data fed into the generator rather than a random seed. But in the end, it's based on the same technical programs and calculations.

 

[Zombra]

Did Morrowind even have a geographic design? I thought it was a bunch of wilderness, with some scattered towns and then lines that went between the towns called roads. And the towns had some buildings in them. Plus dungeons scattered around everywhere like cigarette butts behind a strip club, and every dungeon was a room and then some more rooms. Oh yeah, and there was also Vivec. Not exactly a shining endorsement of handcrafted design. Sure, you had a few standouts like the Telvanni towers and the infamous Dwemer ruins, but they were the exceptions to the rule of handcrafted mediocrity. Morrowind's environmental greatness was in its atmosphere, not its layout. That whole map could have been procedural as far as I care. Maybe I'm remembering wrong.

 

[JarlFrank]

The genius of Morrowind lies in its worldbuilding, how deeply the geographical world and the lore are connected, how everything makes sense from a societal standpoint. You have farms, temples, villages, larger towns and cities, located in logical places. Geographical features have names in the local tongue, the major ruins have a backstory to them.

Yeah, Morrowind isn't the best when it comes to gameplay. But its worldbuilding is one of the best ever made.

 

[thesheeep]

You have farms, temples, villages, larger towns and cities, located in logical places. Geographical features have names in the local tongue, the major ruins have a backstory to them.

All of which could be replicated with procedural generation, you know. You really underestimate what is possible, it's not just "create something that looks like X", especially if you allow the time to do things more teleological.
Even very basic rules (set or influenced by humans) for procedural generation can come up with more "realistic" (as in coherent within the setting) places than any Elder Scrolls from Oblivion on, though that is admittedly not that high of a bar

The biggest problem really isn't this. The biggest problem, when it comes to creating a landscape/levels that are believable but also look as good as they do for example in Dishonored, is this:
Time.
High-detail 3D models, walls with bricks sticking out, holes, objects lying around scattered, some broken, some not, cups in the shelves, etc as well as more abstract things like the flow of a level. Everything level designers can place by hand according to "common sense" or other rules, can be done by an algorithm of sufficient detail - though again, it might not be just as good, but close (close enough for most people, I'd wager). And it would probably be a thousand times faster than any human. Still, even if you'd guess optimistically, that would still take many minutes. For smaller levels.
Too long to do at runtime.

Which is why I took the Morrowind example. Early age 3D geometry is pretty simple. Way, way less details, less objects, less anything. Or maybe go back another step, to the Heretic & Hexen games (man, I love the art in those games), even simpler.
Now we're at a level of detail that I am convinced is possible to do for procedural generation at runtime, without having to wait for minutes all the time.

Admittedly, I don't think anyone has done that successfully yet. At least not in 3D. Only a matter of time, though, IMO.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Beowulf]

You have farms, temples, villages, larger towns and cities, located in logical places. Geographical features have names in the local tongue, the major ruins have a backstory to them.

All of which could be replicated with procedural generation, you know. You really underestimate what is possible, it's not just "create something that looks like X", especially if you allow the time to do things more teleological.
Even very basic rules (set or influenced by humans) for procedural generation can come up with more "realistic" (as in coherent within the setting) places than any Elder Scrolls from Oblivion on, though that is admittedly not that high of a bar

The biggest problem really isn't this. The biggest problem, when it comes to creating a landscape/levels that are believable but also look as good as they do for example in Dishonored, is this:
Time.
High-detail 3D models, walls with bricks sticking out, holes, objects lying around scattered, some broken, some not, cups in the shelves, etc as well as more abstract things like the flow of a level. Everything level designers can place by hand according to "common sense" or other rules, can be done by an algorithm of sufficient detail - though again, it might not be just as good, but close (close enough for most people, I'd wager). And it would probably be a thousand times faster than any human. Still, even if you'd guess optimistically, that would still take many minutes. For smaller levels.
Too long to do at runtime.

Which is why I took the Morrowind example. Early age 3D geometry is pretty simple. Way, way less details, less objects, less anything. Or maybe go back another step, to the Heretic & Hexen games (man, I love the art in those games), even simpler.
Now we're at a level of detail that I am convinced is possible to do for procedural generation at runtime, without having to wait for minutes all the time.

Admittedly, I don't think anyone has done that successfully yet. At least not in 3D. Only a matter of time, though, IMO.

On a side note of procedural level generation discussion - I'm curious to see how the city will look like in The Sinking City.

 

[Shaewaroz]

Looks good, but will not buy since it doesn't have time units. Too much to ask these days I guess.

 

[thesheeep]

Looks good, but will not buy since it doesn't have time units. Too much to ask these days I guess.

Yeah, every game that doesn't exactly replicate this one mechanic is just crap

 

[Shaewaroz]

Looks good, but will not buy since it doesn't have time units. Too much to ask these days I guess.

Yeah, every game that doesn't exactly replicate this one mechanic is just crap

Yeah, every game is too busy replicating nu-XCOMs retarded Two Action System instead. It's an abomination to call such system turn-based. It's a popamole consoletard system at it's finest.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[toro]

4 more days.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[PrettyDeadman]

REVIEW -> https://techraptor.net/content/pathway-review

 

[Infinitron]

Released:


https://af.gog.com/game/pathway?as=1649904300

 

[bataille]

It's Depth of Extinction all over again.

Spoiler

 

[toro]

It's Depth of Extinction all over again.

Spoiler

I agree. They fucked up the combat. They managed to do the impossible. Halfway was half-decent but this one is bad.

I love the animations, the humor, the story ... but the combat was streamlined to stupidity. Fuck.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

It's Depth of Extinction all over again.

Spoiler

I agree. They fucked up the combat. The managed to do the impossible. Halfway was half-decent but this one is bad.

I love the animations, the humor, the story ... but the combat was streamlined to stupidity. Fuck.

Ah.
Let me guess; cure for RNG is worse than the problem in the first place?