“Procedurally Generated” comes with a lot of baggage (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, November 22, 2017, 14:54 (2354 days ago) @ Harmanimus

And I am pretty sure that Bungie definitely wants to avoid a lot of the associations while also ensuring that people understand what to expect from the content itself. If they were to refer to the content as procedurally generated certain assumptions will come up in the player base/holiday consumers which likely would not allign with the final structure of the gameworld.

The baggage is silly and misplaced based on the mistaken belief that for a game to contain "procedurally generated" content, the designers literally have no hand in designing that content at all. Not only did designers make the procedures in the first place, but often (and seemingly in this case), they hand build the building blocks and the procedure simply puts them together.

For example, if you're building a bunch of rooms that can be connected in a straight line, the number of possible permutations is the number of rooms, factorial. So if you have 6 rooms, then you have 6! (or 6x5x4x3x2x1=720) possible combinations of those six rooms. Sure, a designer could do that by hand, but *why*? Computers are great at permutations. And what if you make a 7th room in a later patch? Now you have 7!=5,040 permutations. That's an insane amount of work to do by hand when the computer can be told to just figure it out on the fly (procedural generation) and presto: You've got it.

Of note: prison of elders is already an example of procedural generation within destiny, albeit with a very limited number of rooms.

Anyway, I firmly believe that procedural generation can be wonderful, and that people who are scared off by the term are being silly.

Did you know that Public Events are procedurally generated?

During D1, the list of Xur's wares was procedurally generated (which is why it was predictable). Unknown if D2 is the same.

And countless other things within the game use procedures to generate their outcomes. It is not, nor should it be, a dirty word.