Starfield, lots of nothing.

A request for Was it Good - Terra Nova Strike Force Centauri

Tears of the Kingdom actually feels like this to me. Specifically the part about interesting points separated by boring areas. It really feels like the areas between major cities and story points was just randomly filled by dropping bokoblin camps throughout the map.

kinda like your content

I 100% agree with that. But to be honest… after Elden Ring, every game feels generated… ER exploring damaged gaming for me forever. Witcher 3 did the same thing but with questing/story (no boring side quest wasn't something I thought was possible till W3).

$R4inSpid3r my royalty fee is $5.00 for using "starfailed" that's my phrase I came up with that before the game was released. I called it

Seems like a good case for starfield being AI generated...

Starfield is one of the biggest disappointments in gaming history if you base it off of what we were promised. This game is BAD. The reviews are plummeting and the only people siding with the game being good are Xbox fanboys that literally have no hope in any other franchise Microsoft has.

I'm still very much impressed by procedural generation, but never in relation to AAA games. Games that are able to use it well are usually very small team, community driven games, like Dwarf Fortress or Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Both are games that deal with massive world of massive scale, one is able to generate entire worlds, the other a chunk of New England. To be able to achieve that, the procedural generation needs to be very carefully set up, so it can actually generate these worlds with the developer only adding lego pieces and tweaking the algorithm.

"hurr durr, better get on the starfield bashtrain!"

real fresh take bro!

Procedural generation sucked even in bloodborne

Luckily we can play 10 good games that last 10 hours each and not a mediocre one, like Starfield, for 100 hours...

Would say Diablo 1 and 2 had good procedural generation.

Starfield - a game in which I was promised exploration, but I was met with emptiness, pirates on every corner and characters so artificial that it's hard to believe. BG3 is like a miracle sent from heaven... I've been playing games since I was 15 and I'm already 40 and in all these years I haven't played a better game than BG3

I would like to say that an example of where procedural generated content works in an RPG is Wildermyth. Each world in a campaign is made from scratch, your characters can be as customized or random as you'd like, and beyond the overarching campaign storyline, everything that happens in between is randomly determined as you go. Obviously it's not 100% random, but each campaign promises to be a unique experience.

A counter-argument to your "dont fill the space between the good bits with a lot of nothing" -
you see, space is big. And most of it - is filled with nothing. Only once in a while there is stuff, like planets or moons or whatever.
But between earth and moon alone there is a three day's worth spaceflight of nothing, basically.
So Starfield is kinda realistic in that regard? ^^

I remember Soldier of Fortune.
I remember a campaign which I regarded as good (for my age back then).
I did not know sof had a procedurally generated mode.. was that added later via patch or something?

Spot on

Limitation breeding creativity. Oh yes. I work for a small company, and do some designing with the free version of Canva. Everyone I've ever told this had responded with "dude, just get photoshop" Without touching Adobe products' issues, I appreciate this because is limited, and also Free. Thanks for validating my stubbornness and refusal to pay for stuff. And thanks for your work.
EDIT: Got a typo alert, telling me to capitalize the p in photoshop.... I refuse.

Everyone knows Starfield becomes the best game ever after 12,000 hours. People who complain about crap sandwiches after 1 bite need to finish the entire thing b4 they can complain that it's raw sewage on a plate.

Playing Baldurs Gate 3 for 10 hours felt like 1 hour.
Playing Starfield for 1 hour felt like 10 hours.

Quality before quantity. I'd rather play an incredible 10 hour game than a mediocre 100 hour game. If a game is going to be big, it needs to justify that bigness.

constraints are the basis of art

Comparison between Terraria and Starbound comes to mind, both have procedural generation, the former is a well structured tier based character development game, the latter feels like explore for the sake of exploring and ended up being a boring mess.

Remnant 2 is what gets procedural right. its been their game style since Remnant 1 and they have done well to iron and temper it in the sequel and they want to keep tempering and refining it in future releases but know it has a limit.

Love the video. He does know Elden Ring was procedurally generated before they built it up, right?

The end of Holy Grail also works as both a cost saver, they avoid the production cost of a big battle by having the police arrest everyone beforehand but also ties into earlier in the film when the reporter is cut down, we see his widow with the police.

Bethesda released their 'bare bones" game. Now they'll wait for modders to actually finish making the game for them.

Video game development still has limitations, and the answer to those limits is crunch rather than ingenuity and creativity.

Ironic how I think Starfield's problem is the opposite: They spent too much money on all the wrong things. At some point, the numbers look too big, so they can't get approval from their boss, so they cut corners, but the execs want their marketing taglines, so they're forced to work on things that matter much less. They should have taken another two years to make/adapt a new engine, one that would be used on TES6 as well, but instead they skimped out on the most fundamental part of their game, and still somehow managed to make a product that looks like it was made by 2 people. It gives me government contract vibes, because their budget does not match the quality of the finished product. The game feels like they didn't even have a premium Zoom subscription, so the writers, quest designers, and dialogue writers never coordinated with each other.

i was never really impressed with procedural generation or anything like that, i have looked forward to games that had it though, thinking it'd be a game i would enjoy, then realizing it's just not my thing. wasn't due to the procedural generation though.

like no man's sky. it sounded like a game i might enjoy. then after playing it, and elite dangerous, and so on, i've come to realize i just don't enjoy ship combat, or "exploration" on a spacial scale.

i enjoy exploration in forest type places. The Forest. Sons of the Forest. that type of environment, is one i enjoy exploring. forests, connected to mountains, maybe with some plains.

valheim, grounded, smalland, all games i enjoy the exploration of.

i tried starfield, it's honestly the most bland game i've played in years. only one that came close was fallout 4.

after skyrim, bethesda seems to have just given up on actually trying. they know the modders will keep their games alive, so they don't bother to give it life themselves. and it's ruined their games.

i'm not looking forward to elder scrolls 6 anymore. because, as seen by their recent games, it's not going to have any effort. it's not going to be complete. it's probably not even going to be fun.

they will make it empty, and soulless, and expect the modders to make it playable. and the modders will. the fanboys will cream their pants over it.

but i'm just not gonna get it unless it's via torrenting. cause bethesda just isn't worth the money anymore. why would i buy their games, when i can just torrent them, and mod them into playability? when the mods have more effort, and soul, than the games themselves?

"eat into my work so did not install baldurs gate 3" - this spoke to me XD. I am doing the same. I so miss the days of 2011 when I could sink into a game and disappear (skyrim bros). Last time a game had my undivided attention was Elden Ring and that slowed my PhD by a month atleast/

Josh spends 20 minutes roasting Starfield....first advert break.. Starfield.


Procedural Generation has never appealed to me in story driven rpgs, it just feels like half arsed development with minimal effort.

I don’t have time for procedural generation. That said I have sunk thousands of hours into paradox games and total war warhammer so it’s not the time I spend that bugs me, it’s wasted time.

D4 is a great example of wasted time padded by procedurally generated crap.

on you procedural generation point; absolutely yes
the only good procedural generation I've enjoyed is Minecraft

I've been turned off from "procedual generation" since it became a thing. The only exception is minecraft. Because it means you literally get more Legos. But it took a friend to force me to try it. :p

Procedual generation is just like the idea of the metaverse.. NFTs.. crypto... it sounds great on paper especially for the suits and investors... but its basically an absolute trainwreck

Nothing wrong with procedural generation, and it can pull off most these things. The big issues is that it requires a large amount of investment in fleshing out that procedural system to do so, but it is too easy to just flesh out the bare minimum and still get a ton of quantity which a big game business especially would love to exploit. Devs would need to flesh out tons of different content for a procedural toolbox that it pulls from and uses. From smaller more general things, and all the way up to more hand crafted of content. Lets say for quests, you could mix in super hand crafted, semi hand crafted, and full generic content. A semi hand crafted may have a general theme randomly choses from other themes and then a selection of unique content exclusive to this theme of quest and randomly place it. This would give you unique variety to these quests that are more in line with what we would want, and yet not be too bad if you repeat another quest of that type of genre. Just adding in some narrative options and things in general that can be spiced in here and there to make it special each time. Then you have the full handcrafted, don't really need to explain that. Then the generic stuff of which is there to fill in the world and honestly just makes sense to have in. The type of stuff you don't want to run out of, but is more of a side task between the main stuff like full and semi handcrafted content.

Either way though, the problem is, you still need to put in tons of time and work to create and design all the content toolboxes that the procedural systems would take from to build the content. That is not just the models, but designing the story plots, and other unique touches like tracks on the floor and what ever else to make a more believably hand crafted feel. They seems to just do the bare minimum here though especially. I mean, They couldn't even be bothered to randomize the structure and placement of the points of interests and their spawns... Could have a structure that fits a theme like research facility for example, but the walls and rooms randomly are placed to make different variations of that type of that type of building. Instead, it is just the same exact place and creatures inside copy and pasted around the universe... procedural is great if you give it the time and effort needed to make it the tools and content it needs to properly do it's job, but they don't...

idk, I zoned out and over typed/ranted about my annoyance with it. Love procedural, sad it is used poorly. Same happens with open worlds, great way to have the game, but devs too lazy to fill it up with enough content to justify it.

I love No man's Sky but even there after awhile you notice the...sameness.

oh yeah procedural generated content turns me off big time

Suits listening to this: "So the key is to procedurally generated underground cities. We're going to be rich!"

The only example that really works with procedural generation is rouge likes, the game that does it best is the binding of isaac

BUT, they only work because there is a lot of work behind these games by people who spend a lot of time making the systems coherent and the procedurality go hand in hand, the progress you have when restarting a game, breaking the game in Isaac by taking the death certificate, like in the albino videos, getting broken items out of thin air, getting the fckng Rkey (knowing in depth how the systems work) those are incredible experiences.

Not only is it, like in Starfield, we already have our prehistoric engine with prehistoric limitations to make it work excellently (no joke here) but we have to fill it with stupid things like walking for 10 to 15 minutes with the possibility of the player scanning 3 or 5 things on the way to the next gravity anomaly... BORING!

it was an amazing twist in monty python and the holy grail when they get arrested. to realize that they are just some crazy people who think they are king arthur and the roundtable knights.

I feel like there's a BIG % of the audience that consume videogames that are not into the videogame world, if that makes sense? People that haven't played a lot of games, so they come home from work and maybe play Starfield, or fifa or GTA, they only want some entertainment for a couple hours maybe but that's it. I saw a comment of a user that was playing Diablo Immortal and asked the other players if they were excited for Diablo 4. They didn't even know there was a Diablo 4 coming out. That really made me realize there's huge ammount of people that play games just to kill time and don't really care about the content, which is fine btw, is just not their main hobby or interest in their lifes, but kinda explains why modern AAA games are for the most part bland.

Ah yes, Star Citizen. The most expensive game that'll never release.

Hard to care about your opinion when you haven't played it. I like the game so far. It's not the best game ever but pretty good

Damn, Josh is almost looking whiter than his shirt.

I agree with your sentiment. CP 2077, BG3, GTA5, FA:NV etc, are amazing and have at least 3-400 hours in them if you care to reroll and try other solutions to the stories after completing them once. But also stuff like Cloudpunk, Papers Please, GRIS, and VA-11 Hall-A are amazing shorter experiences. I'd rather play Cloudpunk again than set foot in Starfield. The last time I was impressed with procedural generation was Elite, Frontier: Elite II, and Dwarf Fortress.