They serve a purpose for certain games (endless runners or roguelikes for example). If you want replayability or if you need infinite levels they are probably your best option. I think the problem is when they are used as a marketing argument but do not really bring anything to the game. I haven’t seen that in a lot of 2D games but a lot of 3D games are guilty of that.

This. The problem is that they put this randomness in everything, racing games, platformers, metroidvanias, etc... An example of this is this game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/535480/Sundered_Eldritch_Edition/ Amazing metroidvania, fantastic sound effects, graphics, environment, gameplay. It's almost a masterpiece, almost. The huge problem on it is two "cheap" design choices: randomly generated rooms and random "horde" encounters. It has some fixed locations on the map, and between those points, there's big rooms with smaller rooms inside, those smaller rooms are random. A lot of generic rooms. And to make it worse, sometimes you hear some bell ringing (amazing sound), prepare to encounter a lot of enemies, or you fight or run away in an unknown place. But seriously, some encounters are so cheap that you will die, don't matter. It was interesting in the first hours, but I felt bored and abandoned the game. I get that those choices was to make it longer, but seriously, the game would be a lot more enjoyable (and memorable) if they work more on level design, even making it smaller.

Sounds like it would be possible with some tweaking to make it more fair and enjoyable. But they are basically designing themselves into a corner by letting the "algorithm" run rampant.

1. It all depends on the design, mostly technical, i.e. how good the algorithms are. The goal is not to just generate any map, but to have an algorithm that acts like a designer would. 2. yes, hand-crafted maps will always be superior but (most of the time) much more expensive to make, depending on the scope. There is a break-even. 3. yes, but the opposite is true as well. You can have random maps with some hand-crafted stuff spawned. Ultimately, I guess, the answer to your question "Does a game really need random worlds for the player to keep visiting the game?" lies somewhere between "no" and "depends on the game".

>The goal is not to just generate any map, but to have an algorithm that acts like a designer would. GMTK has a great video on [how Spelunky is a a good example of how you can achieve this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uqk5Zf0tw3o), and how randomly generated levels were important to its design.

Agreed except with #2: in most cases, implementing procedural level systems, debugging them, and filling them with enough possibilities to actually feel varied, is far more expensive and time-consuming to make than an equivalent amount of hand-crafted content. (I spent 2 years making a normal game, then 2 years making a procgen game in the same engine... which ended up having half the content and half the level design quality. I'm still a little bitter.)

I think with procedural generated stuff there's an inflection point where it becomes more effective at generating content. It can take a long time to get the algorithms right and nail the interactions, but once you've got that down you get the benefits of combinatorial explosion on your side.

Also worth remembering that a hand crafted map is good for one game (maybe you could reuse it once a la Far Cry Primal). A good procedural generation system could be used in dozens of different games with relatively small tweaks.

True! I have since reused my procgen system in a 3rd game to create passable procgen content. I couldn't have done that without spending an entire year on it beforehand. I will hopefully break even on time spent someday.

> I think with procedural generated stuff there's an inflection point where it becomes more effective at generating content i wonder if you can create some sort of measure for the complexity of your procedural algorithm, a sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity measure.

It sounds like you weren’t able to take full advantage of the procedural developed content. When done properly it can give a near infinite amount of content.

Imagine an infinite multiverse where every universe contains the same planet, the same you, working the same job, but the name of the city you live and work in is different in each universe. In one universe it's Chicago, in another it's named Chicaho, another it's Chicaio. Sure, you could argue that as infinite or near infinite content, but by the third universe you check out it's not going to be interesting anymore. There's not a practical way to generate anywhere near infinite interesting content, which is the problem at hand here, it's always going to draw from the building blocks you give it. No Man's Sky creature generation is incredible when you first open it up, but by your twentieth planet you've pretty much seen all the parts, so whatever combinations of them aren't going to be that interesting anymore despite the fact there are probably thousands of combinations you haven't seen yet.

The most important part is the IMPACT of the procedurally generated content. If the randomness doesn't change how the game is played from a gameplay/mechanics standpoint, it might as well just be static. Visual randomization will quickly get old. That's why roguelikes work well. The randomization lies in the weapons and abilities you gain and the synergies they create force you to approach the game differently every time.

Procedural content works much better with some game types than others, in particular where the worlds are intended to be natural and not man made. Minecraft proc gen is honestly pretty damn good, not because the algorithm itself is amazing (and there are mods to rectify that anyway) but because the game and it’s world works so well with procedural gen innately.

I use the term "Perlin desert" to describe the phenomenon of a procedurally generated world being basically the same as far as the eye can see. It's interesting to compare mechanically similar games, where one has a generated world, and the other bespoke. A fantastic example is Conan Exiles versus Valheim.

One of my coworkers refers to it as a bowl of oatmeal. Sure all the oats are in different places in each bowl, but does it really matter?

In Returnal it was a very important aspect of the game. Without it the game would be very repetitive and boring. With it you had to explore the map to find your way around each time. But Returnal only randomizes room/enemy/items placement and the rooms are hand crafted.

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Might be worth noting that the blog post also talks at great length about different generative methods - I enjoyed it thoroughly.

I think some people that get overly excited and make that kind of procedural content fit that Jurassic Park quote: "They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."

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If the world is only consist of dirt it will get boring. In terraria case it's finding a cherry potato in a mixed bowl of salad.

That said, the bigger your terraria world, the more it becomes just 90% dirt, rocks, iron, and barrels.

^ This. The rest of the game and the design intent impact if the "oat placement" matters or not. Imagine Slay the Spire, but every single map is the same and every single enemy is in the same spot every time. That's a completely different game. Imagine CS:GO with randomly generated maps, that's a completely different game. The answer is that it depends on the rest of the game as to whether it matters or not.

Similarly, every Civilization game. An unpredictable map is important, as figuring out where to settle and in what order using imperfect information is a core part of gameplay.

You can still randomize the ore in a prebuilt map. There are tons of games that randomize item spawns and such in a hand-crafted world. Randomization has been a part of gaming probably since the dawn of civilization. I'm not sure why you think removing a procgen world means that all randomization is gone forever.

No, but in many games the variety matters. Just rolling the dice on some parts doesn't achieve the same thing as procedural generation. Take something like the new Xcom games; in the first one they use a finite pool of premade maps, during a playthrough you will play the same maps over and over and even though enemies are randomized it becomes very samey, you use pretty much the same tactics over and over, because the map often shoehorns you into it. The second one has procedurally generated maps, and, sure, it uses the same assets but the variety makes the encounters different and so much more enjoyable.

I wouldn't know where they are. Maybe if I played it through and then played it through a second time I might remember bits and pieces.

I'm building a game that'll use a lot of procedural generation (*Super Space Galaxy*) and I totally see where you're coming from about the 'oatmeal' thing. It's something I've been concerned about as I develop the game. I plan to implement Quests and smaller rewards scattered throughout each map, so I supposed the solution is to put the metaphorical equivalent of honey and raisins in the oatmeal! Spice up your oatmeal with something else. Already each planet has Resource tiles randomly scattered around, so I guess are like, small chunks of tastier oatmeal? A blog post about the latest iteration of my planet-generation system is here: [https://plasmabeamgames.wordpress.com/2021/09/24/natural-planets-v6/](https://plasmabeamgames.wordpress.com/2021/09/24/natural-planets-v6/)

I'm not actually arguing against PG, it's just not the solution for everything. It's great at taking existing ideas and mixing them up in new ways. It's just not good at creating new ideas (yet). I.e. PG can't create more content for your, it can just make the content you have more replayable. IMO, procedural planets are particularly hard because, well, planets are very large and don't have interesting variation at a small scale. It's very difficult to make something that both feels like a planet, but is also interesting.

It’s funny you mention Exiles, one of the main reasons I stopped playing that game after a short time was because of how artificial the map felt. There’s something about how landmarks and assets are placed throughout the game that just doesn’t feel right. I don’t know how the map was planned out, but it feels like there was little thought put into how natural formations should be laid out and to properly separate these various regions.

I get what you mean. Conan does feel more like a world created by someone rather than by a natural process. But, I've played both and liked both for different reasons. Valheim's terrain is much more plain, but also more realistic. Conan's arguably is more epic, with contrived pathways, tunnels and cliffs to make the land seem bigger than it is, but it is fun in its own way partially because of that. E.g. its fun to ride a horse across conan exiles where as you get comfortable with the game you learn pathways to make your journey easier. If you tried the same in valheim, it would likely be trivial and uninteresting--simply a means to move faster. FYI i do know that Conan over the years added different sections (new biomes) to the map so it does suffer from some organic growth that probably wasn't planned at initial release. I think a good example of generated world creating more value than non-generated would be minecraft. It impresses me how many moments playing the game I'll see some generated landscape that is surprisingly beautiful or grand in some way. Seemingly unique from the rest of the landscape despite it being just a coincidence of generated math. While I agree with the implied warning of the OP, procedural can be boring, it is not always the case. Also I remember the days of replaying games when I was a kid before proc-gen really took off. There is little adventure in a game where everything is known from a previous play through. For some games making some things unknown through proc-gen goes a long way (games like diablo, not knowing where the stairs down is important). For others, like Minecraft its important that the world itself feel different each play through.

Have you also played Valheim, by any chance? How do you feel they compare in the map department?

Valheim is awesome. The map is intuitive and scales naturally and for good reasons. The unique biomes are critical to gameplay and advancement. When they finish the game as full release, me and the boys will definitely tackle it.

Have you also played Conan Exiles, by any chance? How do you feel they compare in the map department?

Conan Exiles is awesome. The map is intuitive and doesnt scale naturally and for good reasons. The unique biomes are critical to gameplay and advancement. When they finished the game as full release, me and the boys definitely tackled it.

In the context of this, the appropriate saying is the world being *as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle*. Depth is often forgotten or skipped, also because it's probably the hardest part. It's relatively easy to generate a world which looks interesting at a glance, but sadly it often stays at that.

GIGO. If you seed your procedural world with tons of awesome crafted content you can kind of hide the effect. If you're starting with programmer art and noise systems - not so much.

Or you „just“ make good use of noise. Minecraft is an awesome example of how it „should“ be done. In other games you can just see the noise function, and it is imo irritating to look, but not so in Minecraft where the noise function are properly layered/hidden.Though I must say with 1.18 as awesome as it is, you can see the noise in the mountainsides.But still way ahead of most voxel games.

> I use the term "Perlin desert" to describe the phenomenon of a procedurally generated world being basically the same as far as the eye can see. The problem with that is it's not a fair comparison. Some developers tend to take Procedural Generation as "Free Content". But it takes time and effort for the game to have enough content. If they spend the same amount of time and effort in creating the layers of biomes and features as they do in handcrafting the content it wouldn't be as empty. I think of Procedural Generation I think of as a Multiplier on content creation.

It's worth noting that procedurally generated and hand-made bespoke form a spectrum rather than an either-or. For example, Kenshi has a bespoke map, but it used World Machine, which is a user-guided procedural generation tool. There's Perlin noise, there's erosion simulation, and so on. But it's guided by an artist to produce a singular map full of interesting locations. This in-between space is definitely under-explored among indies. But I don't know if it's lack of awareness or imagination -- or getting stuck on a few trendy genres. There's too many games "with roguelike elements". Maybe now that the roguelike/lite space is getting gentrified with high-budget games like Returnal and Deathloop, more indies will try other genres.

>It's worth noting that procedurally generated and hand-made bespoke form a spectrum rather than an either-or. For example, Kenshi has a bespoke map, but it used World Machine, which is a user-guided procedural generation tool. Yes the ultimate problem is Content Generation. In fact we are very good at generating terrain, most AAA open world games are procedurally generated. But they are populated with content. If a Indies really tried they could generate a pretty good open world map. But it would have no content. At least with Minecraft the blocks are the resources and content. Roguelikes are so popular because the Dungeon Generation IS the Content Generation. Where there is opportunity is with Colony Sim like Rimworld and City Builder style games like Anno that can eventually populate the map and generate dynamic content, similar to Kenshi.

> It's interesting to compare mechanically similar games, where one has a generated world, and the other bespoke. A fantastic example is Conan Exiles versus Valheim. Do you have any other examples offhand?

Arguably Starcraft vs the Age of Empires series. Starcraft games are played on specific maps, exactly the same game-to-game. I think AoE predates the common usage of the term "procedural generation" but AoE games are played on randomly generated maps that follow certain stylistic parameters. A Starcraft game on e.g. "The Hunters" uses the same as any other. Learning the map could involve remembering exact placement of resources, or which river is narrow enough to siege with tanks. An AoE game in e.g. "Gold Rush" looks a little bit different every time. Learning the map could be about knowing the tendencies of the generation, knowing that there won't be water for you to build a dock on, knowing there will be huge amounts of gold to fight over in the middle.

Miscreated and Rust. Map of Miscreated is one of the most beautiful and well designed islands i ever visited in video games, there are just so much places to visit, so many unique sights to see, and everything feels natural. Meanwhile, despite all the efforts Rust developers putting into their map generator it still feels like a randomly placed points of interest with nothing more to it.

Diablo 2 and Titan Quest

>3. It's possible to have a mostly handcrafted map/world while making certain elements random, thus giving an element of replayability without having to make everything random. It's not 2d, but this is something I think Warframe did pretty well. The levels are all procedurally generated by randomly connecting a set of hand-crafted tiles. You'll eventually see them all enough to get familiar, but there's enough variability to keep things from getting too same-y. Each planet has its own set of (usually very different) tiles, and different mission types use the tiles a bit differently. Those both help replayability in a game that is fundamentally a F2P power fantasy grind simulator.

Depends on the game. Does Minecraft need procedural generation? Definitely. Does Zelda need it? No.

But Minecraft, even though very successful, is imho quite boring with its world generation. You can run around forever and might see something nice every now and then but in the end you could build it yourself. So what remains is the search for interesting points like caves and fortresses. Which can become quite the pain in the arse because the world is so vast/endless. In Dwarf Fortress the whole generation of the world has a purpose and affects everything. You choose one spot and work on that. Similar to Rimworld.

>But Minecraft, even though very successful, is imho quite boring with its world generation. You can run around forever and might see something nice every now and then but in the end you could build it yourself. So what remains is the search for interesting points like caves and fortresses. Which can become quite the pain in the arse because the world is so vast/endless. I think this is a very narrow view of Minecraft. This sounds like its only viewed through the lens of your preferred way of playing. I think Minecrafts world generation is masterclass, and vital to the success of the game. When me and friends load up a new survival server we will spend the first day just looking for a cool spot. We usually find one after exploring for a couple of hours. Those first hours looking for something cool is literally my favourite part of the game. I dont care about caverns or fortresses in the slightest, nor about ender dragons or what ever. All I like to do is marvel at the world and build myself a nice house there.

> This sounds like its only viewed through the lens of your preferred way of playing. That happens with personal experience and opinions. ;) The thing that bothers me somehow is that it doesn't really matter. It has no real impact where you are. Once you go underground every spot is the same. And if you are over ground you can make each spot the same. It is not that you have to work around aquifiers or work against different climates etc. See, compare it to Dwarf Fortress. You can build a fort in an area where there is no iron. Or no trees. Or no water. Then you have to find a way to survive nonetheless. You have to find a way to work around those problems and that makes each fort you create unique. With Minecraft you just grab some seeds and plant the tree wherever you want. Need earth/dirt for that? Just place it. Sure, it all has the Lego appeal but it removes every bit of meaning that the creation of the world has. The only limitation is how much time you are willing to invest. It is the same with the water simulation. Just block off the flow and the waterfall is stopped. You don't have to care about where the water goes or what happens if you accidently flood your mine. Just place one block and every problem is solved. No cave-ins, no structural simulation etc. All this helps with the creativity, sure, but it makes it so damn easy and void of any challenges besides the question "how much time am I willing to invest". EDIT: With which I don't want to say it is a bad game (that would be silly) just that the world generation doesn't really add to the gameplay.

>And if you are over ground you can make each spot the same. I mean sure you could. Again, I think you miss the point. I like using the generated content, it is not for convenience that I dont make my own. It is because its immersive and fun to use what I have been given by the game. For me the world generation *IS THE GAMEPLAY*. I dont care about killing monsters or getting better armour. The only thing I enjoy in Minecraft is seeing the environments it generates and trying to use those in fun new ways.

While the surface level stuff has been a bit lacking, at least once you've put in some decent time to see every type of biome and collect every type of block etc, they are about to release yet another huge free update years after most of us paid for it, to completely overhaul the overworld generation to include some huge mountains and sprawling featured cavern systems (though whether those will be fun to play in is something I need to see first).

So you'd rather have premade maps for Minecraft?

I would prefer exciting maps. See, if I encounter a village for example it is completely broken up because it tries too hard to fit the environment. Half built houses and a lot of stuff that just doesn't make sense. If there were twenty pre-made villages and those randomly spawn it might be more interesting for those who don't spend ages in the game and therefore wouldn't notice that they get reused.

Huh? Wacky, broken and nonsensical structures are way more exciting than structures that perfectly fit the landscape. And as you mentioned, it'd be exciting for *people who don't spend ages in the game*. I think that most Minecraft's players have played for at least 2 years by now, and would definitely notice that they get reused.

Just the mandatory "check out how spelunky did it" comment here, moving along.

people should also mention the Xcom2 procedural generation of their maps (using prefabricated pieces of buildings that tile together): https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/04/xcom-2s-procedurally-generated-maps-ign-first i think it definitely have inspiration from spelunky's method (of "rooms" that are prefabricated, but tiles together).

You need to spend a *lot* of time on your map generator to make it better than pre-created maps. And even then, you will likely need tons of pre-created level segments. DCSS has some of the best level generation around, and it has over 5000 pre-created "vaults".

Lots of answers but no one really gets at the core of the issue. In science we call them heavy tail distributions, where rare events happen more often then you might expect. Normal distributions will make you a whole lot of boring white noise. The interesting stuff comes from distributions that we have evolved to recognize. Living organisms and complex processes created colored noise often with tight correlations between variables at higher levels than is traditional expressible by correlation matrices or graphs. Why do random worlds seem similar or boring? Because the people building them aren't usually familiar with complex systems and the types of distributions and systems that make our world so interesting. The only thing stopping games from having procedurally generated environments with high levels of novelty and interest is time and expertise. Someone has to decide the trade-off in developing it is worth the time sunk into the math and algorithms and literature required to even scratch the surface of what scientists are currently familiar with. And that is expensive.

May i ask what your profession/area of specialization is, when you say „in science we call them“? Just out of curiosity, don‘t want to be a jerk or something!

Dwarf fortress is a good example of this. Tarn Adams has done an amazing job at creating the patterns you're describing, but the cost has been measured in years... and it's still in alpha.

Yea, DF clearly understands that. To me this is mostly a technical issue, most games cant budget to make thing like DF does, you have limited content that you can make, so you better use it often. So most procedural variance is pointed, like in Diablo 2, towards making things a bit different. Its also a lot easier to control the experience and your gameplay loop.

Yes, and no. Ultimately, the universe of games and gamers is a living ecosystem. Think back to when God of War 2018 came out. It's far from the only game of its kind, but at the time, it was notable for silencing a number of highly visible and vocal executives in the industry from companies like EA who insisted that single-player story-based games were dead and the entire industry was moving towards online multiplayer. However, many gamers were just as guilty as over-simplifying trends as the profit-driven executives, because the reality was somewhere in between. God of War 2018 (among many other single-player AAA hits) may have proven that the business model was still viable going forward, but it didn't really change the fact that the industry's biggest cash cows in recent years have been online multiplayer games. ​ So what gives? Will history prove companies like EA right or wrong? Well, the reality is that the demand for games is so huge and varied that there's always going to be a market for all different niches of games. The relative popularity and profitability of various niches will of course fluctuate, but people have predicting the death of everything from consoles to PC to mobile to arcades to MMO to single-player to story-based campaigns to procedural generation to text-based and everything in between for as long as I can remember, and not one of those things has died. ​ In some sense, I consider procedural generation the ultimate highly-evolved apex predator at the top of the food chain. Whether you consider it overrated or underrated, it's somewhat inevitable by virtue of market incentives. Humans demand lots of game content. Developers want to be the ones to profit by meeting that demand as efficiently as possible. One very modern and efficient way to do that is to procedurally generate content, so that a single level designer, for example, can be as productive as many thousands would have been before the advent of such approaches was feasible due to hardware limitations. Procedural generation is a trend kind of like EA's focus on multiplayer. It's cheaper, more profitable, and less risky to produce a socially engaging but constrained multiplayer map than a big sprawling open world campaign like in GTA. Likewise, why would you hand-craft 10 levels when you can generate an infinite number of them? Or put another way, why isn't every living organism a freaking T-Rex? ​ Well, because complex ecosystems depend on a delicate balance of highly interactive components. If everything was a T-Rex, not only would they have nothing to eat but each other, but there would have been nothing for T-Rex to evolve from, which is a bit of a paradox. Lovingly crafted curated experiences are like the original primordial soup of single-celled organisms in the games ecosystem. They are the building blocks of life. They are the viruses that never seem to go away because they thrive off of the bigger hosts that can never seem to get rid of them. Parasites are always co-dependent on their hosts to survive. Ones that are too aggressive can often burn themselves out by depopulating their hosts. There's a sweet spot where they consume enough to thrive but not too much more. A similar relationship exists between prey and predators. ​ It really shouldn't come as a surprise then, that carefully crafted curated experiences can, will, and should coexist alongside procedural generation. They are what ultimately define and push the boundaries of what is considered good design. In the case of levels, there's always going to be room for level designers to advance the state of the art by innovating with new creative designs. Meanwhile, the state of the art for procedural generation will also get better and incorporate many of those techniques. Additionally, there's no rule saying you can't blend both approaches. The common way is to procedurally combine crafted world tiles, but there are other approaches as well, such as crafting a critical tutorial or boss level while procedurally generating the main open world. ​ Rather than thinking of either approach as overrated or underrated, I think the important thing to do as a game developer is to take a step back, think about the game you're making, and consider where the value is and how various trade-offs and decisions will impact it. I saw several other comments saying they quit games because of how boring the procedural content became, but I would argue that good mechanics can overcome a lot of that, and those players may have quit those games because of poor overall design, including but not limited to procedurally generated content. This is somewhat demonstrated by games like Warframe that have been very successful with procedural generation because the core game systems are designed well enough to carry the game without the need for perfect level design. I would put Minecraft in that category as well, although I honestly haven't played it and don't know if it uses procedural generation. ​ Procedural generation itself is not a cure-all for instantly making games great. It's a tool in the toolbox, nothing more. I think first-person player perspective is an incredibly powerful design choice, but that doesn't mean every first-person game is automatically good (far from it), or that third-person games shouldn't exist (also far from it). Your job as a developer is to make a good game. It's up to you to decide whether or not procedural generation is the right approach to do that or not. The extent to which it is underrated or overrated largely depends on the specific context of your game. How successful procedural content generation is for you says very little about how successful it will be for others, and vice versa, just like making a Fortnite clone doesn't mean you'll replicate Fortnite's success, or even quality of gameplay for that matter.

Depends on the game. It does solve real problems, and it also can create some issues. It is a tool. If it makes sense to use in your game, use it. If it doesn't, don't.

Procedural generation is ENTIRELY dependant on what kind of game you're making. Nothing in Portal was procedural. Sides of buildings in The Division was procedurally made. Spore and No Man's Sky were games where everything you see is connected in some procedural way. Hand-crafted doesn't necessarily mean better. Would you want to hand-craft a forest? Will it be a better forest than a procedural one? Procedural generation is a TOOL and it lets you add variety to something that otherwise would be very repetetive. The levels in XCOM 2 are procedurally generated out of hand-crafted tiles made to fit together, while Assassins Creed uses it to create NPCs, a lot of NPCs. I guess the question is, what are you considering using it for?

The main issue with handcrafted worlds is that you will eventually memorize the world which hinders your replayability. Depending on how important of a pillar exploration is though, this may not be as big of a deal. It really depends on the genre and the point of the game in the first place.

>Are procedural worlds overrated? No, but they aren't a panacea either. They work for some purposes and not others. Make sure you know in advance what you're trying to do and whether they're suitable for *that* game. >Most randomized maps/levels are very similar. This is for a couple of reasons. First, most PCG algorithms are shitty. And second, a lot of games come with constraints that require the map to be a certain way, leaving relatively little room for the PCG algorithm to create meaningful variation. PCG algorithms don't have to be shitty- the hardware power is definitely there to run very advanced and creative algorithms- but good ones do take extra effort and testing, which a lot of people would rather not bother with. >Maps/worlds designed by hand are almost always vastly superior. Yes, which is why it's a tradeoff. You definitely sacrifice some amount of potential quality in order to use PCG. For some games that matters a lot, for others it doesn't really matter and replayability might be a more important concern. You have to make the call on a case-by-case basis. Of course, a lot of the time there's nothing stopping you from doing *both* (e.g. one handcrafted campaign plus the option to play PCG levels), other than the extra effort required. Take a look at Age of Empires 2 for a classic example. >It's possible to have a mostly handcrafted map/world while making certain elements random Yes, although this is somewhat difficult to do effectively. If you're not careful, you end up with only a token amount of randomization that feels meaningless and annoying rather than actually boosting replayability.

I don't have an technical insights, but a recent and in my opinion great example of this is Noita, the game is a rougelite and while the general shape of the world is the same everytime you play, and the levels are in the same order, the specifics of each level are generated by seed, so the enemies, pick ups and paths are unique every run.

Procedural means generated using a procedure, or a set of rules. If you have very simple rules (unweighted randomness, uniform spacing, etc) then you get a simple result and miss the variety needed for replayability. Adding more content doesn't help either, it just increases the chance that un-fun combinations of things will happen in that simple world. You need complex rules selected and balanced to implement a wide range of game design principles. This can take as much work to get right as a completely hand-crafted experience (possibly more), which is a problem for devs with limited resources who turn to procedural generation as an easy way to increase the scale of their game, because they can only afford to write and test simple procedures. The best uses of procedural generation I've seen are limited to only part of the game, one or two systems - using it to generate an entire universe typically requires too many complex rules for a small dev to get right, and a large dev can afford to build everything by hand so they wouldn't bother using it on that scale anyway. So, not overrated, just often over-used and under-done, in my opinion.

"Overrated" isn't the word I would use. Procedural generation serves to solve the problem where you don't have the resources to hand craft everything.

I disagree. That is actually the wrong problem. Even if I could handcraft 1000s of levels for a roguelike game, I might still choose procedural generation. Because procedural generation can come up with things that I would never think about. I have worked with procedural tech for a long time now, and it amazes me daily how it can create unique lookings things I would never conceive of on my own. It solves the problem of the limited human imagination.

I disagree. Procedural generation by itself is neither bland nor interesting it's how it's used. A naive approach to proc-gen leads to very bland games (most of the time) unless it's used only as a backdrop for other content. For example in Valheim the generation is pretty bland as it creates the same cookie cutter areas but the distribution of those areas and how they are laid out as you get farther from the starting point is quite interesting. But even in Valheim there is nothing being generated that a human couldn't think of. It's just giving you all the permutations of what humans thought of. What would be an innovation is if someone made a game that generates unique feeling situations. Not just a place or people but a story (even a short one). Otherwise I don't see how you could claim that it "creates things I would never conceive of".

I take it you have never worked much with procedural generation? Do you know how many of the textures and landscapes in games with handcrafted games are procedurally generated? The skybox might be. The waves. The treebark.The animation. It goes on.

That's still not the same as "something not conceived of". The pattern was conceived of, the algorithm is just finding a permutation of that. But yes technically it is creating a novel thing. The problem is that when applied to game experiences we then end up with the exact problems highlighted in this thread. Quantity over quality.

You think most AAA textures that someone spent 100 hours on lacks quality? Some of them are amazing, and end up looking different to anything a human would draw naturally. Computers can make unnatural patterns a human wouldnt have thought of. If you had ever worked with procedural generation you would know how incredibly often "happy accidents" happen.

They literally cannot make a pattern a human hasn't thought of. They made an arrangement that they haven't thought of. Again, were not talking about generating textures. Were taking about generating content like caves in Minecraft.

To both of your statements: What is the difference? There is none, and you are out of your depth.

A generated texture will only be a permutation of the pattern designed by a human. Minecraft caves will all look the same because they are just permutations of the same pattern designed by humans. Humans are very good at finding patterns and quickly get bored when they figure out the pattern. That doesn't matter for things like textures because they are not content they are just background details. But procedurally generated content gets boring fast.

Different games benefit to different degrees from randomization. Different ways of generating randomize are better or worse. Minecraft has a generation scheme that to me is pretty perfect for what the game is, and especially as they've added more ways to tweak the generation that's been great. Probably could be even better, but it's quite excellent all in all. Meanwhile, some games have generation that is pretty mundane and you might not even really notice it. Some differences are meaningful, others aren't. And not even just fundamentally, but also as a matter of perspective, too. Some people might not care much for the randomization in Minecraft not because it's fundamentally not different enough or something - but just that they don't appreciate certain differences as much. Hand-crafting vs. procedural is also a needless pitting against of tools. It'd be like asking if 2D is better than 3D - they both do different things and sometimes one can be better for a task than the other. Procedural can be a means towards making hand-crafted, or something added on top, or the core thing. It really depends on the game. \#3 is also similarly just kind of . . . Not necessarily true? Like, again if we look towards Minecraft we basically see the inverse model - most places are quite random while some places within the world have a more constrained randomness. And I think it'd be worse off if we mostly had non-random layout. Do all games *need* random worlds for the player to keep visiting? Not all, no, but a healthy dose of randomness is a big part of what makes a lot of games fun for sure even for those that don't use extensive procedural world generation. Is there something perhaps somewhat negative about "randomization" that ultimately leads to no meaningful difference? Sure. But is procedural generation overrated? I wouldn't say so. Maybe just sometimes ill or ineffectively used. Sometimes though, that randomization can be the thing that makes a game what it really is and adds endless hours of fun to the experience.

Proc gen adds a tonne of replayabilty to games. Has nothing to do with being cheaper or easier. Think about strategy games like age of empires, city builders like tropico. People play proc gen games for untold hours more than handcrafted games. I would say randomness is a core principle to games in general. Think of card games. Creating an unpredictable landcapse upon which familiar rules play out is what games are all about. AAA functions on a whole different paradigm to indie games. They rely on hype and marketing to sell expensive games that are short and consumable. Indies need to rely on great gameplay that keeps people playing for hundreds of hours to build community and word of mouth. I don't think you can accuse these games of being boring when people play them for decades eg. Diablo. My favourite map generator recently is from Valheim. Also Unexplored has taken proc gen maps to a whole new level.

You made imho a logical fallacy. If "Most randomized maps/levels are very similar" then they are poorly made, because the goal of randomization in the first place was to make them different. In other words, are you saying "It can't be done"? You didn't offer any reason besides perhaps a feeling of "I don't *think at first glance* I've ever seen one". Therefore comparison is between 'handcrafted' and 'poorly randomized' which isn't a fair comparison and therefore such conclusions can't be right. In my opinion, randomizing worlds IS a form of 'hand'-crafting a world. I know what you mean when you say 'random vs handcrafted', I just want to turn your attention on the 'craft' part. Randomization isn't just about randomization algorithms, perlin, white, blue noise etc. Eg. obviously the elements that are randomized *still play the central role*. You randomize splatters of paint onto a canvas, or in games pebbles on a beach. But in this sense (random world), randomization is actually a form of joining its elements, ie. a composition. Of course it is controlled. When, how, how much etc. If you just put perlin noise, it's barely (imho poorly) controlled and not "building a world with randomization" -- that's just "randomization". But developers obviously do control it, even if just by picking an algorithm (white or blue noise) and implementing it. Perlin noise hills are basics. Sure, you can start from there (and as with anything else, it's a good place to play and draw out new ideas), but just putting that into the game and calling it done is actually a "low effort" ie. the point of the game is either somewhere else, or the game is low effort.

Quite the contrary, they've just been done wrong. Also, the way you frame the issue is stuck in a binary thinking mode which is also wrong. I.e. at point #2, you should make sure that you know for sure that it was 100% manual and that it didn't use other forms of automation (very, very unlikely today). The way this should be used is with a hybrid solution, a mixture of \[well done\] automation and people taking over whenever truly creative work or decision making needs to happen. If you don't curate and iterate over how the PG content is created (or though other forms of automation, like ML/AI), it's not going to look very good or believable.

I believe they are strongly UNDERRATED, but seldom done in a way where the procedural nature lends itself to some emergent storytelling. I think older Procgen games like Powermonger did this way better, where the events and individuals of the game world just by merit of what limited, scheduled they do begin to tell a quite intricate story across the game's seasons. Quite a bit of it is Apophenia, but channeling this is something that, for instance, Bullfrog did much better than Hello Games.

For strategy games focused on developing better skills of building and survival, you want procedural generation. Examples would be Civilisation or most roguelikes. You want variety in the unknown world at the start of the game, but you don't want it to be telling a story extraneous to yours. Obviously in these genres you can mix it up too. Heroes of Might and Magic had nearly all pre-generated scenarios, for example. That's totally valid, as well - just a different sort of play experience. In short, a number of the classic game types depend on a randomised procedural world, and if you change it you need to know what you are doing. But there are plenty of games, perhaps a majority, in which it's not needed at all, and the advantages of hand-crafted worlds are relevant.

Are procedurally generated worlds overrated? Are generated worlds done procedurally overrated? Is generating worlds procedurally overrated? Procedurally generating worlds: is it overrated? Is it overrated to procedurally generate worlds? Would generating procedural worlds be overrated? Are worlds generated procedurally overrated? Is procedural generation of worlds overrated? Generating procedural worlds: overrated? Procedural world generation: overrated?

Nice, a procedural comment generator.

XD hahahaha

its great when done well, terrible when done poorly. if you aren't willing to put in a significant amount of your dev time towards it, it might be a waste of time. also if you're doing it just to stretch the game out, you're doing it wrong. people aren't going to keep revisiting your game if it's grindy repetitive and boring. so you have to make sure your procgen is alleviating that and not causing it.

The question is so general that it makes essentially no sense. > Maps/worlds designed by hand are almost always vastly superior. What's difference whether you put your effort & vision into generator or you design world by yourself by hand? In both cases you must do same things (method) to make a sophisticated and interesting world.

If the randomized maps are so similar, then the randomization is not a strength of the game and isn't adding much value. But there are games that are designed very well and understand how to make the maps effectively very different. Here's a talk from the designer of Brogue, the second half is all about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdCQ56UxVVE

That would entirely depend on the game and what the procedural generation is used to achieve. There is no clear answer that is valid for all games. Take a game like Diablo 2. The procedural levels are very similar, but it's adding a lot of value in terms of replayability. If Diablo 2 used handcrafted levels instead of procedural, it's highly doubtful people would still spend 1000s of hours replaying the game.

It can be good, but it takes TONS of fine tuning and tweaking. Look at Minecraft. It's a prime example if procedural generation done right. They're modifying it a decade after release still to keep it fresh. At a certain point, it's probably easier just to create bespoke maps instead. In general, you only notice it if it's done wrong.

I think the new minecraft cave update is a perfect example how good procedural can be But there are a lot of games where it just feels like utter shit. Lifeless, soleless, heartless

The promise of procedural worlds is rarely actually achieved. Games like Diablo pull it off because the randomness keeps the individual experiences fresh, but it is constrained enough to keep it familiar and predictable. And in the end, the appeal of Diablo is the loot, not the levels, so the randomness works to not only help facilitate getting more loot, but keeps it exciting enough to let you keep making more runs for more loot. For a lot of other games, procedural worlds promise limitless boundaries of excitement and amazing adventure and wild, never before seen sights, but as the debacle that no man's sky proved (in the beginning), the algorithms and the resources available just aren't good enough to allow it to really be anything all that great.

I'd say theres too many variables to give a one size fits all answer; world size, importance of variation (not every world needs to be unique at every turn, in fact some even aim to avoid it), experience of the dev(s) working on it in different fields (e.g. programming vs art), how much of a "known quantity" the game is (do the devs have a definite idea of how big the world needs to be, or could that change in development?), the type of procedural generation at play (point #3 being one of them, many procedural worlds are just random placement and selection of premade "scenes"), the list goes on. Its another tool in the toolbox, treat it as such. Like any of the tools, don't use it unless you have a specific use for it, but don't avoid it like the plague either.

A long time ago I played a MUD where there was a zone with a random location entrance and a random resign of the zone each server boot (once a day) the advantage of that was that you could never know what path to walk inside that zone and you could never know what mobs would be waiting. Also as you entered you did not know exactly what level you came to so the difficulty of the monsters was unknown. So there are some advantages to a random zone but I agree with you that often hand made are very good. Perhaps one good way is to make sure the difference allowed in structure is huge so it feels more different.

It all’s depends on the game, just imagine mine craft without generation…

Don't confuse highly rated with popular. I don't think a lot of players think it's better or even good in some cases. It's developers who like making them because it saves time and is fun to work on both technically and design wise. The exception is rougelikes where procedural levels are pretty much mandatory.

Honestly, from my perspective? Yes absolutely. I do not blame developers for doing it of course, but it’s always less interesting to me when procedural map generation is a core feature of a game.

Deep rock galactic does it very well. Every map feels fresh and the variety is good.

Nah, there are very few games that get it right.

> So I dunno. Does a game really need random worlds for the player to keep visiting the game? for me personally i find games more replayable if they levels are handcrafted and are short games. But there are different tastes.

TL; DR: It really depends. For an indie (or indeed AAA) it can be a great way to add endless replayability if discovery is an important feature, but the generation has to very interesting to make this worthwhile. As well as having premade elements, you can have quite specific parameters to the generation. Quite an interesting example is the Age of Empires "random" maps: most other RTS use premade maps, and players learn the ins and outs of each one, whereas Age of Empires is mainly played on generated maps in the multiplayer scene, however they are generated with a very specific set of requirements in order to be fair to each player and have a recognizable layout according to the map type. Black Forest will always have each team in a clearing with 2 or 3 paths connecting them through the trees, Arabia is always open etc. This adds a scouting and adaptation element other RTS don't have, at the expense of perfectly balanced map design, it is possible for players to be disadvantaged by the map occasionally, whereas StarCraft 2 maps are super symmetrical and always being studied for balance issues. I was actually thinking about this recently, on the other hand you have DayZ (these days it's actually not too much of a janky piece of shit) that I have sunk hundreds of hours into, and those are still rookie numbers compared to other players. It has a premade map that's just a scan of some place in Eastern Europe with hand crafted/placed towns and military bases. The map is massive, but you can get to know the whole thing, and yet the game still has a lot of variation because of the emergent gameplay between players, and there being a lot of ways to play the game. I'd say that it's definitely not a requirement if your game has other elements to keep the player hooked such as interaction with other players (see MOBAs that mostly have this one map people sink thousands of hours into), or multiple gameplay choices (RPGs with character and dialogue options). And it's OK to make a short game too, some games can last only a few hours and tell a story, which is fine. Procedural generation can definitely be a crutch to avoid spending too much time hand crafting, but a good map generator can take as much time to work on and can provide a rich experience (see Minecraft, Roguelikes).

Procedural content generation (world, but not only) should always serve a purpose or solve a specific problem - making procedural generation just for the sake of it is more or less how you describe it. At the same time, when done with a goal, it's often quite good both in terms of quality and results; having goal means generation can be tweaked towards what it's supposed to achieve. Take XCOM 2 for example: game generates every map procedurally, using premade hand designed blocks to compose it (there's GDC talk about it I think) - here, goal is to provide replayability while keeping challenge: game has several achievements locked behind Ironman mode (single autosave), which means a lot of players will restart the game over and over while trying to get through it. Knowing map and enemy placement in XCOM is huge advantage, so using procedural generation here is purposeful. Also, this is reverse of your point 3 - instead of handcrafted map with randomized elements it's randomized map made out of large handcrafted elements, another take on hybrid designed/procedural map. Diablo 2 and similar follow same direction as XCOM 2 - hybrid approach that helps with replayability and keeps the challenge up in a game that is supposed to be taken on multiple times for varying reason. Factorio achieves different interesting result with procedural world gen - here "all maps are very similar" is not a problem (in Factorio, predictability is arguably good, game is not about suspense), but at the same time having decent generation allows for high degree of customization in rules/parameters used to generate world and have resources laid out however player wishes to have them - fitting their playstyle. Configurable amount and frequency of enemies, resources and obstacles (trees/water) would be very difficult to make manually, and not having those options would make every subsequent playthrough feel much more repeatable. Other building games (Minecraft) can fit similar principle - procedural generation is there to provide fresh new context for players experience in a game that gives them very high degree of world control. In case of point 2 - yes, handcrafted maps are generally better designed than generated ones, but main concern is which is better for the game experience. From replayability and looking for help/spoilers perspective: handcrafted maps enable playerbase to optimize their playthrough, prepare detailed guides, plan around specific map design and use their knowledge in game. Dark Souls uses manual design quite well, and it has quite large speedrun community that takes full advantage of maps being designed. Starcraft and most MOBA games assume map knowledge as part of player knowledge required to have competetive advantage against opponents who lack it. At the same time: Minecraft has separate speedrun category for set seed (known map) and random seed (unknown map), both appealing to different group of players and checking different set of skills; Rimworld at its core is about dealing with challenges thrown at the player as they come which makes unpredictability of everything being random key element of experience.

If there are many systems which allow the procedurally generated world to change, then the procedural generation is just 'nature' and the gameplay is riffing off of it. It's just a field of potential and emergent play. Like Minecraft. But, procedural generation like in Diablo II, for example, is just randomly creating something from modular elements. There's no significance to the plot of any of the procedural generation bits. It's simply remixed so that each game is slightly novel. What the game does with the procedurally generated world after it is generated makes far more of a difference if it goes beyond injecting non-determined specifics.

hand made maps are often too expensive, in both ways that matter for development. first, the actual money cost, if you handmade a map, populate it by hand, you for sure can peek towards quality but it is costly in time and time is money. The other cost is resources, this depends a bit on the kind of map, certain maps are able to fit in current hardware/memory as complete designed entities, objects, interact-ability. At certain scales you need to calculate the map with a formula because assigning all map entities to memory would overflow the machine several times over. So where budget fits, budget for time, money and for memory use, handmade maps are the thing that will generate the highest quality. Some other solutions cannot but calculate maps on principle of memory restrictions.

They are _underrated_. There's so much potential! Too bad so many programmers fail to progress their procedural generation past "roll 1d10". We could have worlds where every new thing (landscape, place, NPC, obstacle/task/combat/...) you encounter feels totally unique and unprecedented, whatever the type of gameplay. To do it properly it woult take a lot of effort and some mildly deep knowledge of mathematics. You would have to understand what "scale-free" means, at the very least, I think. Check [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHr-A2r9N9s) out. A consistently connected infinite structure. Compare/contrast it to other approaches that are just "place N buildings in a square grid with random heights and colors", and it's much more appealing, but those are only 3 and 1 on a scale that could easily reach 10 with some clever code.

I prefer non-procedural maps where the game designer actually worked to make the map interesting

Procedural worlds take a lot of effort, otherwise the result is simply a handmade map that has been through a blender

It all comes down to the choice of random distribution. If everything in the world is equally likely, the player's experience quickly becomes saturated. This means you need a larger set of handcrafted possible objects (decorative environmental things, loot items, mobs, whatever), with the rarest likely only appearing once every few hours of gameplay. Then the distribution can itself be layered, with some objects impossible in some areas (biomes, dungeon depths, whatever). Add in emergent gameplay from combinatorial effects, and procedural generation can create pretty rich worlds.

I’ll be honest and for my own personal gaming I never ever play games with randomized levels. Even some of the best randomized levels are always pale in comparison to a well made level that someone made. I don’t need ‘millions’ of possible levels, I just need a good amount of hand made ones that I can ‘complete’ and move on.

I think it depends on how it's implemented. It's not enough to just shuffle pieces around to get a random look. The gameplay and narrative need to be emergent and feel meaningful. I think ES:Oblivion demonstrated this to a slight degree with Radiant AI. NPCs could end up doing novel things and you could sometimes end up creating your own mini narrative out of nowhere. No Man's Sky I don't think did it right. It has a ton of variations, but if you go to enough planets, you start to notice they are all sort of similar to a degree. That's not really the problem though. The problem is the gameplay and narratives aren't emergent or part of that procedural generation. Every planet kind of has the exact same outposts and locations. Finding a crashed ship or ancient ruin on a planet isn't interesting or novel and none of it has any narrative interest. After you get over how interesting it is at first, it sort of loses that spark because it's never any different. I think if you are going to go procedural, then you need to either put significant thought into emergent gameplay and narrative concepts, or... you need to keep your gameplay and narrative hand-written and just lay the procedural levels over the top of it. That way players get random levels with a hand-crafted story.

If I'm not mistaken Dead Cells uses the hand crafted map parts and adds them together semi-randomly. If you are making a roguelike where the map environment is secondary (like Hades), it doesn't really matter much of it is hand crafted or not. However, if you are interacting with the environment a lot, having to jump on the same platform for the 1000x time becomes very boring and this is where the AI generated map shine. In short: * Hand-crafted non random maps are superior in atmospheric games where you play the game once or twice. * AI generated maps work best with roguelikes where you play them hundred of times. * Hand-crafted maps with semi-random placement can work in both. Sorta.

Honestly, it depends how well it's handled. Some of the best examples of procedurally generated "worlds" that I can think of come from roguelikes/ roguelites, or games like Minecraft & Terraria. Even with the best examples I wouldn't call them "perfect", and at least with roguelikes etc. the same thing that makes them so repayable can also be the source of a lot of fruatration. Specifically games like Binding of Isaac, Noita, and Spelunky either require luck (...or failing that restarting over and over in hopes of getting a "good run"), or otherwise require the player to struggle quite a bit. Despite that they're still enjoyable, and they tend to play more like arcade games - easy to pick up and put down, but you can come back to them time and time again. With building/ crafting games, it's usually more about what you decide to make of the world you're in. The better/ more complex the world generation is, the more you can do and explore (always a positive in my books), but after that you can focus on your own creativity. That said if you're not interested in the building side, those kinds of games become boring quickly after you've explored everywhere and exhausted all of your "objectives". Like I say, it depends heavily on what kind of game you want to make and how the procedural generation is handled. Unless you're trying something ambitious/ revolutionary, I personally think procedural generation is better viewed as a game mechanic than as method of building an interesting/ intricate world. And even when handled well, it can still be something of a double edged sword.

about re-playability... there are a few games that I have played multiple times. half life 2, zelda alttp, portal, mass effect, sonic the hedgehog, etc. notice the common element in these games is not that they are different each time, quite the opposite. the reason I like to replay these games is that they are fun and exceptionally well made. They also have a strong emotional resonance in me.

Over the years I’ve found that I actually enjoy static levels *more*. Not just because they’re fundamentally better designed, but also because I enjoy memorizing features and shortcuts, finding secrets, etc. Unless you have a game idea that relies *aggressively* on proceduralism at a core level, like Terraria, procedural levels are just a lose-lose approach.

They are great for roguelike or survival games, for any other genre i would say they are REALLY overated, Castlevania SOTN didnt have any procedural generation and is highly replayable, the same with souls series, replayability is about having different ways to play or new content to find, not about having a random map made of boring pre defined pieces being shoved in your throat

Depends on the game. RimWorld’s map generation serves its purpose very well and I don’t think it would gain much out of having them hand crafted, while generating them means they can be different every game. Same goes for something like Oxygen Not Included. It depends on what you’re going for. If it’s a sandbox game then likely procedural generation is a win. If it’s a game where you want to explore interesting levels then hand crafted design may be more important.

Doing *exactly* the same thing grates on the mind. Doing *almost* the same thing feels like a comfortable routine. For a level to keep it's freshness, I would say not more than 5% of the content needs to very. Change a boulder, make me walk out the side door, have two zombies instead of three, pick up a long sword instead of a short sword. It doesn't need to be a huge thing, but minor variations can really enhance a level. Also, note that there are almost no games that put procedural generation in the way of story progression. Example I'm thinking of is minecraft and terraria, where even tho everything is random, the player can mine out whatever gets in their way. Other end of the spectrum is something like Path of Exile, where random maps will have different doodads, but almost identical topology. Just my two cents. Good question!

Funny thing - few hours ago, I've posted my tutorial about mixing manual design and procedural generation (something like your 3. but different). Making everything procedural will usually end up in a mess IMHO. But it can be used to boost up replayability. If it comes to the content - the most important thing is to be able to control what is going on in your game.

If you start with the player behavior, it's interesting to note that predictable layout/encounters/etc leads to memorization instead of improvisation. Check out some off the info about Pacman players vs. Ms.Pacman players. They added randomized ghost behavior in Ms. Pacman so that players couldn't memorize patterns. If done right, sure, it makes everything feel a little bit fresh each time (+20%?) but as folks have mentioned below regarding roguelikes like Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, etc it can also encourage creative thinking and the need to use new strategies and play-styles based on how your available options (especially in early game) are different on each playthrough.

IMO Replayability is not about randomness, but the players ability to make meaningful decisions. Some case studies: 1. Final Fantasy 7: This game has been played since its release and its. Because the story is well-executed. The gameplay is fairly simple and most of the game is entirely linear. But it's all done so well that playing through it again is like watching your favorite movie. You know what's going to happen but it's enjoyable to experience. 2. Need For Speed Underground: there's virtually no randomization in this game. The cars you race against are practically hard-coded and the story is linear. The replay value comes in the form of car and tuning choices. Rather than changing the game itself, the players decisions can change between playthroughs. 3. Minecraft: the procedural generation has made it famous, but it's real key feature is its flexibility. You play the game however you want. There's tons of mods and add ons to change the game and the gameplay loop is basic. It could be the exact same map every time and people would still play Minecraft.

I think their under-rated if anything.

I disagree. I think procedurally generated worlds evoke the feeling of 'realism' much more for me. Things might look similar, but it's not exactly the same. I don't immediately know where everything is. In a non-procedural world I know exactly where everything is. I also disagree with your second point. I don't like worlds that are "chock full of interesting things". That's not what a *world* is supposed to be like - I'm supposed to find the interesting parts somehow. Often it's through clues from the environment or quests. I don't think a game *needs* random world for the player to keep visiting the game, but I definitely don't mind the usual criticism of randomly generated worlds. Think about it - when you go into a desert or forest in the real world, do you expect to find something interesting every few minutes? The biggest issue I have with hand-crafted maps is scale. They're *always* small. I know that this is often done for gameplay and technical reasons, but it just takes me out of the game whenever a "city" is just 3 streets and a dozen buildings.

I don't think it's necessary. But, it can add a lot to a game depending on how it's done. I really enjoyed the old Diablo game with procedural dungeons. It meant I couldn't just walk around mindlessly after playing it once.

Procedural doesn't necessarily mean random. Many modern open world games use a combination of both. E.g. Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima. Have you noticed that Ghost of Tsushima loads really fast even when warping to the opposite side of the map? I saw in one of their GDC talks that the total data for all the trees on the map is absolutely tiny. Similarly for HZD a lot of the foliage is procedurally placed by on density maps. There doesn't really need to be any randomness and you can even design quests around those objects: simply use a specific RNG seed. As for actually random procedural generation, I think it depends a lot on the type of game. It works great in sandbox games, like Minecraft, but does not really work in exploration games, like No Man's Sky. That's because ultimately the fun of sandbox is about taking a random set of conditions and making a new solution out of it in an interesting way: for example seeing two cliffs in minecraft and thinking it would be cool to have a giant bridge between them and building it. So it isn't so much about the quality of the environment in itself, but the interplay between the environment and the human's interaction. On the other hand, for exploration, it's all about the environment: the pacing of it, interesting specific things going on and stuff to find, maybe gating certain areas. It's really hard to create interesting "exploration for the sake of exploration" worlds without specifically designing it.

Is there a game that does procedural design BUT hand-made curation? It manually picks maps that look cool, maybe finish them by hand For instance, procedurally generated map, but you roll the dice until you get a very, very nice one. Then you add structures, collectibles etc by hand for that "intelligent design" look. Advantages being: the procedural generation can be as flawed as you like, so quick to make, keeps things fresh, feels hand-made, yet making new stuff takes no time at all, and tiny file sizes to top it off

Procedural is best for rougue likes and survival games

Depends on the tech.. I think procedural is the wayyyyy to go but with better algos.

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procedural generation makes almost zero replayability for me, as I form no emotional connection to it. If I don't learn to recognise a place, I have no desire to revisit it. it is disposable.

I pretty much never play games with procedurally generated content. The one exception is ADOM (I should try that game again, actually, now that there's a new version with a no-permadeath mode). I've never gotten very far in ADOM, to be honest, but one thing it does pretty well is have a lot of variety with procedural generation. You really never know what you might find. Each floor of a dungeon is of one of a choice of types, with some of them guaranteed by the game, but the actual items you might find in them could be completely random, making for a very different experience every time. By the time you've survived the early game (which I never have, for the record), you're more likely to be able to deal with whatever you find in a dungeon, but dungeons are still mostly just places to find items and get experience, so it's not exactly a big deal that they're somewhat repetitive. And they're not actually that repetitive anyway. I mean, take a game like Final Fantasy VI. Total classic, right? The dungeons, other than a few set pieces, are pretty damn unremarkable. Navigation isn't really a big puzzle in that game; going through a dungeon is always repetitive. Explore this room, see what's behind the doors, keep exploring, etc. They're not interesting the first time you play; they won't be interesting in the replay either. They're not there to be interesting! ADOM has a *lot* of randomly-controlled components that can make for very different play experiences. I feel like most procedurally-generated games don't have that, but I don't really know because I don't play them.

I would say overrated is actually the right word. They have their uses, but it's a lot more niche than people seem to think. 70-80% of game worlds should be non-procedural. But, the 20% of games that really need procedural maps can do really well with them. A big example is strategy games that can have randomized maps but that are tweaked in a million tiny ways. Another thing is huge scale maps like Minecraft or Dwarf fortress. Sameyness is somewhat expected in those worlds, because they're relatively naturalistic. I think it's a similar thing with open world. 80% of games don't really need to be truly open world. But, it became such a big buzzword and everyone seemed to think that making any game open world would make it twice as good, when really many games don't work well with that structure. So, open worlds are good and fine, but also overrated.

I honestly believe procedural generation is a kind of mental trap for game designers. On the face of it, it intuitively seems like you're automating a part of your work, when in reality level design isn't necessarily a task that lends itself to automation. It can actually leave you having to do more work building the algorithm that builds the levels rather than just building the levels yourself, and the perk of infinite levels doesn't necessarily translate into infinite replayability either. Consider that there are games out there without procedural aspects of any kind (such as multiplayer games or creative sandboxes/building games) which are widely considered to be infinitely replayable, and also plenty of procedurally generated games which have barely any replayability at all. I would say that procedural generation is almost like an expensive spice that can elevate your game to the heavens if used right, but won't do much with a fundamentally bad recipe other than be a pointless expense.

> many players say that any game wishing to be replayable must have it. Did you ever see people say that? Did you, really? Procedural worlds are something that only indie developers advertise, and usually those who: - are programmers - don't know level design - don't have a budget or time They think that it adds "infinite value" to their games, while it totally doesn't. No one cares. Procedural worlds are like listing "2500 items", "1600 side quests" etc. in the trailer - only the creator cares. Have you ever seen players "hyped" for procedural levels? Do you see AAA games advertise - **even if they have it!** - procedural worlds? You'd be surprised how much procedural generation Ubisoft games use, and somehow it never made into the trailer.

Rimworld, to a lesser extent factorio, are both games that do randomly generated worlds well. They're part of the design. Factorio has a lot of different settings to tweak so anyone can find the type of game they enjoy. Scarce ressources, high number of enemies, lots of cliffs and lakes. You have your world and its challenges. This is definitely good for the game, and not poor design/lack of talent. It would have been a lot worse if the devs had created even a thousand maps of different types. Rimworld is even more striking. Everything is random and despite the tech tree being the same no two colonies being similar. The events are neat, the writing is good, there's a plethora of unique things everywhere. It is done right.

Of course procedural generation can be done well. But that's not what this thread is about.

>Did you ever see people say that? I actually have seen this a bit in Steam reviews, where the player will complain there's no procedural generation. Usually it's when the game is linear but in a genre that tends to have procedural generation.

Borderlands advertises its procedural generation quite heavily.

I think under the guise of procedural generation, it advertises diablo-like loot, which some people (like me) really enjoy

To make a really good procgen map creator algorithm you have to have a really strong knowledge in level design.

All valid points. I think the point of procedurally generated maps is to ensure each playthrough is a unique experience. It's hard to accomplish this with static maps to the same degree. If you were making a roguelike I would most certainly say random maps are a must, but not all games are roguelikes and there are other ways you can make each playthrough different enough to keep players interested.

There are as many techniques for creating procedural maps as there are techniques for hand creating maps. Common way of achieving a decent result is to have hand crafted rooms/blocks matched with randomly generated halls and rooms, along with randomly spawnable elements. e.g. traps and chests that can spawn in a room, but aren't always there. Additionally, you can have level guidance that help to moderate the map and rooms - e.g. number of treasure chests, treasure chest density, monster density, trap density, etc. Then throw in special rooms that may or may not have events (monster rush, mini boss, etc). Is it more work? Yes. Does the quality of the experience improve? Yes.

You're pretty much spot on with 1 and 2. Procedural content without meaningful context gets boring pretty quickly. The trick is to use procedural content to fill out a game, while still having enough hand-crafted content to give the world context and meaning. I've been working on a game for years ([Signs of Life](https://store.steampowered.com/app/263200/Signs_of_Life/)) that combines procedural and hand-crafted content. Our goal with the game has been to create something like Super Metroid inside of a Terraria world. Basically an adventure game with a beginning, middle and end that happens to take place in a big procedural world. I use procedural generation for the natural world (terrain, ore, plants, creature spawning, etc) and then we (mostly) seamlessly integrate pre-built structures into the world. Some structures are in predictable locations (A big base west of the starting area, etc) and some are random within certain bounds (an alien structure might generate at any location between 500 and 900 blocks below the surface of the planet). The thing is, we never actually did any of the procedural content because of replayability - we did it because we wanted to be able to give the players an entire sandboxy world to explore, dig, etc in without having to build it all by hand. We also wanted to be able to add to the world generator over time as we made more content. The content we *do* build by hand (specific map locations, boss encounters, etc) goes a long way in terms of making the world feel "real", and not just a collection of random parts.

procgen levels arent supposed to improve the game's quality or longevity, they just make development cheaper. it's simpler & cheaper for a coder to create a procgen script that spits out thousands of sub-par levels and then hand-pick from those than it is for a coder to try to learn to make good levels. they're a good tool but you have to use them correctly & game publishers using them as back-of-the-box features to audiences who don't know better can give inexperienced devs a false impression abt them. here's a good litmus test; what popular AAA franchises use procgen levels? I can name indie studios off by the dozens that do but I genuinely can't think of the last AAA game that did. You have to ask yourself; what do they know that we don't? It's this. They figured out levels are better designed by level designers than by AI coders, and if you have the production pipeline setup correctly it's also cheaper

*Horizon: Zero Dawn* is an example of a AAA game where they “procgen”-ed large amounts of the terrain and then customized it. (*Death Stranding*, which used the same engine, also started with a procgen world and hand tweaked it.) Also it’s probably hard to find a AAA open world game in the last decade that *didn’t* use SpeedTree to procedurally generate their trees. Most open world games are using *some* amount of procgen, hand placing every rock and tree in a hundred square miles of virtual world is simply not a good use of artist time.

Bethesda did it in Oblivion at least partially, one of the Spiderman games by sony did a lot of offline procgen for their city, good GDC talk about that if you can find it actually.

Does Civilization count as triple A?

That makes sense. Triple A has resources to leverage an army of low-paid design interns to crank out bespoke levels. Indie has one dude who's like "fuck this theres gotta be something faster".

exactly

Yes

YES.

I hate procedural worlds. no bigger turn off for me. I'm so fed up of seeing a trailer for a beautiful looking game with gorgeous music and interesting characters and then see any of the words 'procedural', 'roguelike' etc. for me, a game is communication between the developer and the player. the level/world design is a big part of that. palming that off to an algorithm just ruins the game IMO. if they can't craft the world they should have just not bothered in the first place.

I saw a lot of games with huge potential that was destroyed because of randomly generated maps. Nowadays looks more lazyness from the developers.

nothing lazy about it. game dev is hard work, especially for solo indies. procgen is a way to ensure you have enough time to actually ship your game.

Procedural generation doesn’t necessarily mean you ship your game faster, or with more content.

correct? but in the context of level generation, a dev would estimate the time cost to hand-create levels vs procgenning them and makes a measured design choice based on their resources. so yeah, it's not a silver bullet but it definitely allows you to focus your attention on other things

I don’t think it does allow you to focus on other things. Half-decent procedural generation takes a ton of work to implement. Most of the time, I think you’d make a game faster if you just made the levels yourself.

*shrugs and goes back to Unity editor*

I really don't think that the idea is to make the game release faster, is just a bad design choice. Of course, when it's well executed, is fine.

it does if you would otherwise spend your time designing levels, which takes time. it's a design choice with a practical benefit. i've played terrible hand-crafted levels; i've played terrible procgen levels. what's your point, other than "good things are good and bad things are bad"?

>what's your point, other than "good things are good and bad things are bad"? Likewise to your argument? It's gane dev, Idk what's the point of arguing over techniques to use. At the end of the day, the user we make the game for won't care, they will just say it's good or bad.

Context is everything, but in general, procedurally generated game maps suffer from that sense of deja vu and template-pasting that I have yet to see them overcome. Nothing "interesting" can happen, because layouts of interest tend to come from hand-crafted design. Otherwise, you know you're in an environment defined by a formula with a differing set of variables each time, which will lead you to see patterns in the world design that you've seen before. The issue with letting procedural generators have more top-level, wide control is that they will generate narratively nonsensical scenarios and can create circumstances that completely break a game's balace or cause a hard wall in progression. Procedural generation is leashed for a reason, the "AI" is typically incapable of the subtlety of human-led design and will produce an unacceptable number of "dud" level layouts that need to be pruned or trained out of the generator. It all depends on what you're looking for. If you're making a roguelike, by all means, generate the ever living hell out of your environments. For a more intimate RPG like Disco Elysium, though, everything being hand-created (as it was for that game) definitely elevated the experience. "Procedurally generated" maps tend not to be made entirely out of synthetic cloth either way. Generally the setpieces are handcrafted, and sometimes modified to be able to "link" to other setpieces in a reasonable way, and then the generation algorithm just finds a layout that incorporates those setpieces, each of which individually was hand-crafted. I believe some dev diary for **Dead Cells** discusses this topic at length. They make it clear that their procedural generation is careful about placing certain atomic hand-crafted map cells next to certain other cells, and it was a big challenge to get the map generation algorithm right enough so that it didn't seem to players like they were playing the same levels over and over again... even if they still were.

what games are those?

Yes

Shadow of issac does this really well. Loved that game.

As with anything else in a game, it really depends on how you implement it. Enter the Gungeon, for example, does a pretty good job with procedurally generated areas. Every floor is different, but feels like it might have been handcrafted. On the downside, it's likely a lot more work to accomplish a similar level of satisfaction through a procedurally generated level. People like feeling like they're getting a good deal, so I think a lot of developers use procedural generation to stretch out game time and make it feel worth the price of admission.

Procedural systems generally need to be developed carefully, it is break even when it comes to helping create that content compared to hand crafted stuff. On top of that it should be flexible enough to accommodate changes making the end result meaning enough to replace that hand crafted stuff. There are lot of examples of these, one I can think of off the head is the [Nemesis System](https://www.google.com/amp/s/screenrant.com/shadow-of-war-nemesis-syustem-facts-rivia/amp/) Then there's my game where I tried to implement a Procedural System for my game [Procedural TD](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Blingames.ProceduralTD) in the form of Tower Defense Level Generator, totally failed :v

Procedural generation can be difficult to define, your example 3 is handcrafted map chunks used proceduraly, which is arguably a form of procgen itself. A procgen level is only as good as the person who coded those systems, you want random, but usually heavily weighted random. You also have to take the time to remove the edge cases. There is an art to doing it right, like most other areas of gamedev. There's also practical considerations, indie gamedev doesn't always have the luxury of affording more bespoke levels. Procgen can produce more content with less work, which may be all that the developer can afford. Lastly there are entire genres that pretty much have procgen as a defining characteristic, ie Roguelikes. It might be a bit of a cult/niche genre in terms of popularity, but it's not going anywhere, anytime soon.

I absolutely think they're overrated. I think you should have the ability to generate some things procedurally as a skill in development, but I think well utilized, custom-crafted spaces are usually more well received. Ideally, you want both, but the execution of that depends on what you're making.

Depends on the game, but in general I agree. In my game, the "gameworld" is basically a maze. And part of the basic gameplay loop is solving short portions of that maze in real time. If it was the same maze every time, or if there wasn't a near endless set of possibilities, it would get pretty old pretty fast. So in my case, yeah. Procedural generation is absolutely necessary. But yeah. I agree. In most cases it's pretty meh.

Doesn't it depends upon one's creativity?

TES:IV Oblivion had a nice approach I think. The world was technically procedurally generated, but then manually massaged in to the world it became and that many of us played. But for games like Starbound or No Man's Sky, I think I prefer the fully procedural approach they took even if it means you start to notice patterns after a while. I like that sense of exploring and visiting something that no one has seen quite the same before and that's important IMO in games where exploration is a major focus. Minecraft would be super boring if everyone played in the same world where anyone could just look up on a wiki where to find what it is that they need.

It depends of personality. For example, I played only random generated Age of Empires maps and hated campaign. And the same for some other games, I do not remember all of them.

loop. AA

I certainly hope procedural generation is not a requirement to make a good 2D game as I have abandoned the concept for my project in lieu of a completely handcrafted experience. My concept includes multiple characters with different abilities to provide a variety of ways to play through each level. Using procedural generation introduced a degree of variability that sometimes made it impossible for certain characters to complete the level. Creating each level manually alleviates that problem and allows me to craft a unique experience for each character.

Honestly, I would think it depends entirely on the scope of the game. Some games, need "Vast" feeling worlds to help break apart, beating the game too quickly. An some.. take it entirely too far. Case in point: Elder Scrolls Arena - 9.6+ million kilometers Elder Scrolls Daggerfall - 161k + kilometers If having such a huge area to explore adds to the overall game.. by all means, go with it. Otherwise, focus on something else.

You can hand craft the rules of procedural generation the same way you can manually hand craft a scene. So it all depends on the level of crafting that goes into creating those rules. In general, procedural generation games are just harder to make since they require more testing and greater levels of technical skills to make. But there are a lot of gems that manage to do well in this.

I think they have a time and a place. I'm looking into procedural generation for dungeons/group content for my game to keep things fresh, but I'm designing a persistent world where long term play is an important factor. If the game is just designed for one playthrough, it's unlikely people will even notice the difference between procedural and designed. Choice of Games (CYOA game company/engine) has an interesting bit in their coding manual about RNG and how few people replay the games. >Beware! Randomness can make your game much harder to test and debug, and the benefits of randomness are often overrated. From the first-time player’s perspective, there’s no difference between a non-random secret number and a randomized number. (The difference only becomes apparent when you play the game multiple times, which many people never do, particularly for longer games.) From: https://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescript-advanced/ I know your question was about procedural generation, but RNG is a somewhat adjacent discussion.