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Procedural Generation in RPGs

How do you feel about games that use procedurally generated content (dungeons, items, etc)?

  • I won't play games with procedural generation.

    Votes: 17 25.0%
  • I prefer handcrafted dungeons, but I'm willing to play games with generated content.

    Votes: 40 58.8%
  • I love procedural generation in RPGs.

    Votes: 11 16.2%

  • Total voters
    68

Jigby

Augur
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May 9, 2009
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Well there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to create a generator making wacky content. There are plenty of randomizers created for games without even having the source code. Dark Souls where you fight Ornstein at the start because randomness! Deus Ex where Hell's Kitchen exit leads to Area51 because randomness! But wacky randomization gets old really fast, people just play it for the novelty factor.

For every interesting tactical setpiece variation there are probably hundreds of uninteresting variations. Developers obviously try to minimize the chance of uninteresting setpieces being created. Now what's interesting is obviously in the eye of the beholder as evidenced by you considering ToEE nongeneric, or the fight with Lareth interesting. I'm waiting for the day the handcrafted infinity engine guys will make dragons fly instead of giving them spell shield. That would surprise me!

Creativity is overrated. Of the whole spectrum, maybe only 10% of creativity is interesting. 5 year old kids are creative. They make wacky trash. Modern art is creative. Proc gen shouldn't have infinite variance.
 

Takamori

Learned
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Depends on the rpg honestly.

ARPG procedural generation for sure but there are some exceptions like Battle Brothers that take advantages from procedural generation. Now if you have a focused story rpg, you don't want procedural generation on most of your game since the scenario will tell your game story if you are a competent designer but nothing prevents you to throw a PG gauntlet if you got a decent gameplay system going.
 

V_K

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I'm explaining why "procedural generation" is bound to generic repeating templates that never push out any real surprises but stay fully within expected territory.

Full randomness would lead to wacky bullshit, but the template-based prodcedural generation just leads to generic, boring and repetitive crap.
But this is simply a false dichotomy. There are numerous algorithmic approaches to generating data that are neither fully random, nor rely on pre-made patterns and templates: cellular automata, formal grammars, fractals, Markov chains etc. As long as you have enough underlying systems of sufficient complexity that interact with each other, you can easily generate encounters and levels that are indistinguishable from handmade - seriously, play Unexplored and see for yourself.
The reason we don't normally see it in video games - and the reason proc.gen is still a red flag for me - is that it actually takes a lot more work than quickly whipping some handmade levels. And most devs go for proc.gen not because of any creative reasons but because they're lazy fucks.
 

JarlFrank

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And most devs go for proc.gen not because of any creative reasons but because they're lazy fucks.

That's the big issue. In 99.9% of cases proc gen means "We were too lazy to do level design, so take this random crap instead".
 

Twiglard

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What's your opinion on roguelikes and RPGs with procedurally generated content?

In my very humble opinion, a poll must include a kingcomrade option.

Also there'd be a complete mess of grassland, desert, and snow right next to each other, and a dungeon spawning right next to a village.

This is because most procgen games devolve into room layout based on BSP, and cellular-automaton-based cave layouts. You can already do nice procedural land with biomes dependent on humidity and temperature, with randomness within acceptable range. You can similarly do branching rivers and erosion, or city districts delimited by roads based on a Voronoi pattern.
 

ProphetSword

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When I see CRPGs that aren't roguelikes that claim that a lot of their content is procedurally generated, my first thought is always that they took the lazy way out on the content creation. Whenever this happens, you will always end up with a inferior experience. I can't think of a single case where this isn't true.
 

Drowed

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Procedural generation cannot replace proper level and encounter design in any genre, let alone RPGs.

I cannot see Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Terraria/Minecraft, or even Spelunky 2 working without procedural generation. You could argue that if all the maps created for Spelunky 2 were created by a (good) designer they would have a much more interesting design - which is no lie. However, Spelunky is only Spelunky because you literally have no idea whether on the next map, the fact that you used your last bomb on the previous map will force you to reset the game. Unless you had a group of 20,000 designers creating hundreds of thousands of maps, the game would definitely not work the same way. 400 or 500 maps are nowhere near enough. It would probably be enough for the casual gamer who will play 10-20 hours, true, but not for those who love the game and play it for 600+ hours. It is only playable for so long because of the "non-randomness-procedurality" of its maps. In a way, it is the inconsistency and absurdities of the maps that make them interesting.

The same thing is Minecraft. You can hate the game, as 99% of the Codex do, but what makes Minecraft what it is, is its worlds. Which, yeah, are just variations of the same blocks in different arrangements following an algorithm, but it is that algorithm that allows you to interact with the world differently. (Even more so for the game's speedrunners.) Even for a "normal" player, the fact that your spawn was on the side of a mountain makes you decide to create a huge mine this time, while on another map you start in a forest and it makes you think of a city in the trees. Nothing technically prevents you from reversing what you did in one map and doing it on the other, but it is precisely the procedural generation that makes you interact with the world as it appears. The 50 best maps ever created by humans hands pale in comparison to the basic generation of Minecraft maps when it comes to replayability.

I think, however, that in certain genres, procedural generation has more effect than in others. RPGs, without a doubt, benefit the least from it. I don't know of a scenario where an RPG was made better by using procedural generation instead of hand-placed items/weapons/enemies/buildings/etc. Random loot is only really "interesting" in the sense that it activates the reward area of your brain, like gambling. The best rogue-likes or rouguelites (which if I remember correctly is a genre you don't like) are usually really interesting when there is some permanence between runs. Dead Cells for example is much more interesting due to the fact that you can gradually accumulate more skills and attributes in each run.
 
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Drowed

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Instead of spelunky play Lemmings.

I did play both, although they are completely different genres. It is almost like saying "instead of Super Mario, try Populous". Lemmings is great, but the point of Lemmings is that it is a great puzzle game - until you get the levels, then you forever know how to beat it without having to think. I mean, that's basically the essence of the puzzles, really, you will never experience the same puzzle twice. Maybe in a few years when the signs of Alzheimer's appear, who knows? No matter how ingenious a puzzle is, once solved it is a 'shopping list' - but this is not a flaw of the game, it is the essence of the genre.
 

gurugeorge

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I think it depends on the size of the world you want to simulate. A game with a huge virtual world definitely has to have a bit of both, otherwise it would never get made; but the gameplay in a handcrafted area has to be appropriate to handcrafted content, and the gameplay in a procedurally generated area has to be appropriate to procedurally generated content.

In general, procedurally generated countryside is just fine. For example, if you have a game where there's hunting, you could quite safely procedurally generate vast acres of countryside and animals. That would be just fine. But as soon as our hero ventures into anywhere where there's society and people, or were at one time (e.g. a dungeon), it has to be handcrafted.

Ironically, it would be the other way round for a primitive person suddenly exposed to gameplay - for them, the country would be full of signs and they would find procedurally generated countryside plasticky, whereas for us, who are raised in civilization and used to it, for whom civilization is full of readable signs and for whom nature is an undreadable mess, procedurally generated human stuff seems plasticky, and procedurally generated countryside seems ok.

So it's all about the degree to which an environment is normally full of signs, therefore about the degree of intricate and readable complexity the mind expects to find.
 

buffalo bill

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Infra Arcana > any of the proc gen games mentioned ITT

Also, Caves of Qud and Doomrl are good implementations of proc gen content (though I admit that Caves of Qud's proc gen lore is tedious, and that both games use a mix of hand-placed and proc gen content—but the proc gen dungeons in both are often good)

If you're going to have a conversation about the merits/drawbacks of using proc gen, at least talk about the best examples. Using crap examples of proc gen to say that games with proc gen content are bad is like saying that isometric RPGs are bad because Pillars of Eternity is bad.
 

someone else

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Could someone please give an example of an RPG with procedural generation that wasn't absolute shit?
Unexplored is the only procgen game I know that generates levels that have an innate logic to them (sometimes even spanning multiple floors), like a really good human designer would do. But the result is so good that it shits on most handcrafted RPG levels. It plays much more like Ultima Underworld than your typical roguelike.
More roguelike devs should learn from it, especially given that Unexplored dev is very open about the approaches he used to achieve this quality.
Check out my Unexplored LP in my sig, it is a module inspired by LOTR's Moria.
I love Unexplored dungeons, you get fun interactions with enviroment eg. throwing a poison gas potion into a room then closing the door to poison mobs.
 

Serious_Business

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I'm favourable to it, but as was mentionned, it's still a technology that needs to be worked upon. Otherwise, the duality of procedural and hand-crafted is probably not a good way to see things, as there can be a dialectic between the two (fucking hell). If anything, I'm quite bored with purely hand-crafted content. What procedural can add is an element of randomness that can actually make the design go beyond a planned construct - I say this to counter JarlFrank's boring goodboy argument. However, this doesn't mean that I'm for absolute procedural procedures, if only because they have to include hand-crafted content anyway. Essentially it's a technique that will be pertinent depending on the structure of your game, and depending on if you use it in a "lazy" way or not. There's something to be said about craft in design here. Generating procedural functions is a kind of craft, but it can produce something that will look thoughtless for the player. However the reverse is certainly true as well ; scripted content is easy to make and in the end forces a kind of primitive experience, especially in crpgs. A scripted game is a game that exists only by the player's involvement. This goes hand to hand with the "chosen one" trope that was so denounced in crpg narratives ; it's produced by linear, planned content. A lot of modern crpgs put a lot of efforts in telling a meticulous story, but they can feel lazy too in the end (even though it gives a lot of work to animators, voice actors and such, the designers themselves don't do much). The story is a crutch that justifies scripted content. Scripts are easy to make, obviously. From a technical standpoint almost anyone can do them, compared to more complex things.
 

whydoibother

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I don't mind it in games without a story/plot, like Darkest Dungeon, Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, etc. In games with some narrative, it can be used where it won't influence narrative (like in loot from most enemies, but NOT from key enemies or containers).
In general, mixing the two seems to be fine. Hand craft the main path through the game, and slap procedural generation on all the "filler content" that is added to give more meaning to the good stuff. I don't like boss run type games, I do like potatoes with my meat, and procedurally generated potatoes are good enough.
 

copebot

Learned
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Dec 27, 2020
Messages
387
Procedural generation when done well can be great at creating natural biomes. For a lot of things like trees and geological formations even a lot of assets in handcrafted games use procedural techniques. A lot of times hand designed natural environments look a lot worse than procedurally generated ones. The techniques tend to not work all that well when they are used to create architectural features or human-made environments in general unless tons of effort have been put into making things look nice or the procedural generation is just semi-random arrangement of prebuilt map assets. For example, even though it isn't generated every time the game loads, procedural generation is integral to the creation of any of the AssCreedlikes made by Ubisoft. Procedural generation is used on a global scale in the latest iteration of MS Flight Simulator translating map data to game terrain.

Dungeon generation for roguelikes and even PnP style adventure areas tends to work fine because we do not expect them to look like real places. However, a lot of hand-designed video game maps don't look like real places either. Prey 2016 and the Thief games have maps looking like believable locations, but most maps in most games do not hold up to that kind of scrutiny anyway even when they are hand-designed.

I think procedural generation on the fly should be used for the things that the technology is good at. For things that do not get a good result, hand designed assets are better. I think it should also be used more as something to build the gameplay around. There are too many "story based" games which are combinations of bad games, bad movies, and bad novels. There are plenty of acceptable movies from an over century long back catalog and hundreds of thousands of novels going back centuries. We really don't need more shitty ones with interactive elements.

The issue with procedural generation in RPGs tends to come from lazy use of it. I think also a lot of games shy away from simulation elements that would make the procedural world a little more logical than it would be otherwise. Strategy games like the Civilization series have been able to script AI around dynamically placed resources and locations for decades now. That sort of AI logic can make for more interesting RPG world than having to listen to interminable hours of dialogue trees. A lot of game plots are so bad that they could have been generated by a computer anyway. "Collect four Macguffins" / "You are the chosen one" / "Ally with the four MacGuffin tribes to defeat the Dark Lord" / "The Dark Lord is your cousin / brother / dad and you have to defeat him."
 

Storyfag

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In a procedural game a quest giver sends you to find a #123 necklace of king's nephew. You refuse the quest - I don't have time for this shit. The quest giver responds - don't have time? Fuck you bitch!
So you chop the guy's head off. And some guards enter the room so you chop their heads off as well. And you raise an army of skeletons and you raze the city to the ground.

Would play.
 

Calthaer

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Game designers have done great things when it comes to randomly creating the backdrop for a world - the hills, the caves, the trees, etc.

They haven't yet done a great job of doing procedural generation of the script that fuels the stories of those worlds. The motivations, emotions, driving forces enacting change on the world...the non-player actors who are striving for dominance, and are otherwise equally matched if not for the intervention of the player(s). The conflicts that only the player can resolve.

The only stories in Minecraft or Terraria or Valheim or any procedurally generated game (Dead Cells, Death Road to Canada, FTL, Risk of Rain, Spelunky, etc.) are the ones you as the player bring to it. Usually the developer has a few hand-crafted "points of interest" to spice up an otherwise bland world, but there is no real story...no dark forces working against you, responding "intelligently" to your actions to thwart the specific thing you're trying to accomplish. Not the way it happens in a hand-crafted story.

Once someone solves this gaming will enter a new Age of Incline. MMOs will become responsive to the players and change rather than being a cookie-cutter amusement park with rides and cotton candy (aka loot). Xardon the evil NPC Wizard can grow slowly from a minor threat into a major force to be reckoned with, if the players leave him alone long enough to plunder the corpses from five battlefields and raise an army of undead (maybe because his loot wasn't worth their time when he was a bit player, or maybe because he picked a zone off the beaten path where he could stay unnoticed for a while). Single-player games will have the AI write dialogue, maybe.

My assumption is that people would first take advantage of this to satisfy strange and deviant fetishes, though, so scratch what I said about it being a new Age of Incline.
 

laclongquan

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Creativity is overrated.
Heresy!
:imperialscum:

Creativity has maybe one role: it aweing some journos into writing good things about your game. Your usual gamers dont like creativity very much, even if they speak otherwise.

Fallout use some of the most creative thing in gaming at that period: timer main quest. Thus the most often raised issue is how to prolong timer.

After ten years, Mask of Betrayer tried that again with hunger meter to limit free rest and free travel. Again, how to remove hunger meter is the most often raised question even if there's method to easily dealt with the demand.
 

Drowed

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The only stories in Minecraft or Terraria or Valheim or any procedurally generated game (Dead Cells, Death Road to Canada, FTL, Risk of Rain, Spelunky, etc.) are the ones you as the player bring to it. Usually the developer has a few hand-crafted "points of interest" to spice up an otherwise bland world, but there is no real story...no dark forces working against you, responding "intelligently" to your actions to thwart the specific thing you're trying to accomplish. Not the way it happens in a hand-crafted story.

The thing is, you are not wrong, but you are not right either. I wouldn't call the reactions of enemies in a pre-created story as "intelligent" - intelligence assumes an agent, intent, someone capable of making decisions and reacting to what you are doing. All game stories, no matter how well written, are static. Even the ones with C&C. There is a specific, immutable shape that the story will follow, no matter how many details you change in the world as long as it is not triggering one of the variables in the game. Your conversation with the Master in Fallout will take very specific directions depending on what information you have about him. There is no scenario where you can, say, bring an entire city to attack the Los Angeles Vault. There are no events that arise emergently, from the interaction between the entities themselves within the game world.

On the other hand, Rimworld does not have a "real" story. But you can capture and enslave all humans who pass through your region and all surrounding villages, creating a gigantic slave army and becoming the "dictator" of an entire hemisphere. (And who knows, maybe even massacring several of the slaves in a large revolt that took place in one of their concentration camps). This is never "told" to you, the game does not inform you that this is a decision, a part of the world's history, but you literally see it happening. Your motivations only exist in your mind, that's true, but the effects in the world are practical and measurable. There is a story there, even if the intentions behind it are debatable. But hey, isn't this true even for stories in the real world? The reaction of the world around you may not be technically intelligent, at least not in the sense of an intelligence comparable to that of another human being, but from a certain point of view it is infinitely more intelligent than the events of a static story.
 
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Procedural Generation in games can only be as good as its limitations from the engine and the designers input. Creating a whole world through procedural generation is not ideal but having a mixture of handcrafted and proc-gen environments would be best. Nature is chaotic and changes with time through seasons, weather, and random occurrences like a storm causing a river to flood or a lightning strike so in lands not maintained by man should be subject to proc-gen that takes the aforementioned changes into account to create a believable world. But in the lands dominated by civilization even nature is controlled or cultivated, through farms, parks, dams, mines, hunting, fishing, arboretums, etc. So a care should be made when creating civilized lands. In regards to dungeons, caves, etc. You must determine the mindset of the builders if created by beings, or the factors that created it if it was naturally made. I think that is the greatest distinction on where proc-gen is appropriate that can be applied when developing a game and determining things like 'balance'.
 

Calthaer

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The thing is, you are not wrong, but you are not right either. I wouldn't call the reactions of enemies in a pre-created story as "intelligent" - intelligence assumes an agent, intent, someone capable of making decisions and reacting to what you are doing. All game stories, no matter how well written, are static.

You are correct - today, this is definitely true. All game stories are static. I was trying to communicate (maybe unsuccessfully) that the day when that is not the case - when stories arise out of NPC agency / intent, heuristically or algorithmically generated by the computer - will be great. Maybe. Except for the bit about the furries.
 

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