Travel

by Leisandir , Virginia, USA, Thursday, April 11, 2013, 07:10 (4253 days ago) @ Axelrod vK

The whole time was reading your post, I was thinking "Hah! I'll respond and link Infinity!" Found it a year or two ago, and my goodness it makes me excited.

There have been some pretty significant advances in procedural generation of terrain; given that Infinity's built by some dude in his spare time, and is also several years old, I'd say a company like Bungie could probably wrangle something similar out of the 360 and PS3. It would be awesome, there's no debating that. The question, though, is: would it be worth it from Bungie's perspective? What does it add to gameplay that couldn't be achieved through less resource-intensive methods?

It would add a lot to the game's atmosphere and help to reinforce some of the themes they've suggested with their art and discussion about the game. The ability to simply wander off into the Martian wasteland would be pretty incredible, and since most of the game is instanced, there's no concern that large landscapes would cause problems with lag. It would give them some pretty awesome methods for hiding easter eggs, special items, and unique quests. It would give them ready-made environments into which they could deposit new content without any big hubub: instead of "oh, sweet, there's a new tab on the spaceport destination menu," you have "I just got a message saying that there have been reports of raiders out in the Martian wasteland, and there are rough coordinates included. Let's go!"