Okay, I'll bite... (Gaming)

by slycrel , Sunday, July 31, 2016, 17:59 (3041 days ago) @ Cody Miller

To write it off completely as a bad idea really misses the mark in terms of game development, and the hows and whys of what games can and do provide in terms of entertainment. One person's favorite game is another person's junk. Just because you don't like the concept doesn't mean it's not valuable or fun for others.

I expect No Man's Sky to have some great procedural generation tech. I'm taking a wait and see approach on if it's actually a fun game to play. For the players who like exploration and discovery types of games, this will be a hit. For those obsessed about gameplay mechanics this may be a miss.

Nobody has done this super well yet in a complete AAA game. There's lots of work going into this area though. Everquest Next is (maybe) going to do this with it's AI and NPC systems. Procedural generation is the future. We already do this with google's "search AI" algorithm -- no person comes up with that, the computer figures it out. It's hard to do well. And it's not the complete picture, it's world building. Expect to see more and more of this as we progress beyond graphics boundaries and flesh out into other areas of game making.