Why Randomly Generated Content Sucks

[nasteypenguin]

I learnt about this game from this site, but I don't know how widely known it is; Cult: Awakening of the Old Ones [http://cultrl.wordpress.com/about/].
The game is a (currently pre-alpha) text based roguelike that aims to procedurally generate a world, it's history, it's creatures, gods, the civilizations, their nations, their languages, their religions... and other things. I don't know if there is an overarching plotline, but still the amount of stuff that's just created from scratch to create a single playthrough sounds amazing and it's... sort of like what Yahtzee is suggesting, but not really but sort of, in some ways. You can download an early version of it's world generator from the site if anyone is interested.

 

[omicron1]

The idea of procedural actors would work well in a game context as well. Say, set up a village of fifty random individuals. Each has a personality, possessions, memories (of people, places, things, and events - the last of which is essential in bringing drama to life)), and opinions of all other actors.

Then you let the world run wild.
Say Tom is hungry. Being dishonest, he steals from his neighbor, George, who he's not all that fond of. George notices the theft when he returns, and starts asking around. Mary saw Tom leave George's house, but she likes Tom, so she tells George she saw Bob instead. George doesn't know better, so he kills Bob in a fit of violent revenge. Sue, Bob's wife, is heartbroken and angry. So she assembles a posse, including Tom, to go kill George.

Now for why this fits perfectly in a game context: Quests. Three interesting, automatically-generated quests: Find out who stole from George, get revenge on Bob (or Tom, if you find out the truth), and join the feud against George.

All of this sprang from deterministic data - the kind of thing computers are great at. Given these inputs, choose an output. And the best part? With everything having 4+ cores nowadays, finding processing power to run it is no longer a fool's errand.

So why not? Why shouldn't Elder Scrolls 6 feature things like this - the ultimate realization of the Radiant AI system?
If there's a good reason, I do not know it.

 

[w00tage]

I can think of one game where randomness was introduced and abandoned, but the playerbase still has support for it. Left 4 Dead 2. There's no point in randomizing characters so this is slightly off-topic, but randomizing the survivor's paths through the environments is considered to be a good thing by play-for-fun players and a bad thing by l33t rush-record players. Valve experimented with it and stopped after what I consider to be a failed testing environment (a park where the hedges blocked sight of landmarks and of course, hedges all look the same too).

 

[diamondsw]

The "random novel" concept almost perfectly describes the Japanese "game" known as the visual novel. Some are more firmly on rails than Final Fantasy 13 and have a great story (Fate/Stay Night), whereas others are extremely free-form and do indeed have huge amounts of replay ability based on character interactions, dynamic stats and relationships, etc. I'm not sure if they have any that have randomly generated characters - but given the enormous variety in that genre I wouldn't be surprised.

Some of those novels deserve the title - the English translation of Fate/Stay Night was longer than The Lord of the Rings - and there's still ungodly amounts of side material that's not in the game proper.

 

[RPGxMadness]

ok, then what about Minecraft? Doesn't it have the same problem as Diablo, but worse. The game and the level starts over every time you make a new world or when you start walking for an hour in a given direction, but you have the same exact objective with the same enemies(and I want you to forget about the mods for a minute), this means that the game has not that much of a value since it's a repeat of what you were trying to do, but with no direction, and as far as I know you love the game!...

 

[cricket chirps]

Very well written Mr.Croshaw *claps*

But on to the more pressing matter on my mind now-

YAY NEW BOOK can someone fill me in on whether its related to MOGWORLD or not?

 

[cricket chirps]

ok, then what about Minecraft? Doesn't it have the same problem as Diablo, but worse. The game and the level starts over every time you make a new world or when you start walking for an hour in a given direction, but you have the same exact objective with the same enemies(and I want you to forget about the mods for a minute), this means that the game has not that much of a value since it's a repeat of what you were trying to do, but with no direction, and as far as I know you love the game!...

Sorry for the double post here but this man ^ had a good point that ild like to agree with and rebut at the same time. ^^'

I love that point becuase its exactly what i think minecraft is. I cant play through the game at all without thinking "done this, done this, repeititveness," and yes that aspect of the game holds little value. But that isnt the point of the game is it? Anyone including yourself will tell you the point of minecraft is to build your ideas into the world. And THAT is what makes it fun. The randomly generated world is just a slight change in setting each time.
In essence, that is why diablo falls short because your just running and killing through the same random areas.

In other words- Diablo is minecraft without the building....while searching for better pants and at the end you kill the big creeper.

 

[cricket chirps]

sorry wow triple post ._. i feel bad now

 

[snave]

I think rearrangement works provided you're not playing the same rearranged level for five levels in a row. The most classic example of this is... Zelda. Wait, what?

Ok, so it wasn't random, but due to design limitations, the Master Quest mode of Ocarina of Time used the same basic rooms and simply rearranged them and their contents. Yes, the dungeon themes were the same, but the second playthrough felt like a second playthrough that kept the game fresh, rather than the second of two dull playthroughs. Mostly, the room contents (monsters, and more importantly, keys) forced a different order of the rooms (with verticality often making those played through in reverse very different) which drastically changed the flow of the dungeon, and even modified some puzzles.

I think this is the problem:

Content should only be permitted to repeat after the final boss is defeated.

In other words, actually make enough content for one full length 40 hour (is that the current norm?) game, and then and only then consider how to use random generation to expand it into optional replayability. So up until that point, room tiles can be shuffled around and still feel fresh, because each tile is still fresh. However, if you replay the game, it'll remain fresh (throw in a handful of alternate tiles to surprise players), especially if tiles are designed to play differently depending on their placement relative to others. So say, you have a tile with a bridge on it, a tile with a platform on it, and a tile with a tall gate and battlement on it. A playthrough where you a) clear the battlement b) clear the bridge and c) clear the platform will feel very different to a playthrough where you a) clear the bridge, b) clear the platform whilst enemies fire down from the battlements and c) finally nail those little bastards. Three tiles, two arrangments, two distinct gameplay styles.

 

[Mr Companion]

Boatmurdered is the funniest story I have ever read and that is mostly randomly generated.

 

[Formica Archonis]

What might be interesting here is that the whole thing with "let a bunch of writers all write a chapter" has already been done - it was a big prank on the whole romantic book genre, and it sold like hot cookies. The prediction of it making zero sense was rather accurate though.

<IMG SRC="http://cdn.themis-media.com/media/global/images/library/deriv/21/21214.png" align=left>

Ah, yes, Atlanta Nights [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Came_the_Stranger] (working title Naked Came the Badfic). I've read some of it, it's bad. Not Eye of Argon bad, mostly, but still bad.

Though both of those were deliberate attempts to make inconsistent and lame drivel. For a better example, some of the better round-robin fanfics are pretty good. And you can sense the glee of a writer putting the characters in a cliffhanger another writer has to resolve.

Unrelated: Best article preview icon ever.

 

[JarinArenos]

Yeah, Dwarf Fortress is the best example I can think of of what's being described here. The dwarves have lots of innate traits and interact with eachother based on those traits. Now, there's also a semi-omniscient Expedition Leader (player) directing large-scale orders, but the day-to-day interactions are still defined entirely by the dwarves, leading to... Fun [http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Fun].

 

[KamikazeSandwich]

It sucks... unless it's in Dwarf Fortress of course.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

You should check out If on a winter's night a traveller, Yahtzee. Every other chapter starts telling a different story, and the inbetween chapters involve the reader making directed choices, taking the reader of the book as a character in the book. It's about as close to a procedurally generated book as you can get without looking at fanfics.

 

[Kargathia]

What might be interesting here is that the whole thing with "let a bunch of writers all write a chapter" has already been done - it was a big prank on the whole romantic book genre, and it sold like hot cookies. The prediction of it making zero sense was rather accurate though.

If you mean Atlanta Nights [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights], that was actually done to expose a vanity press scam masquerading as a traditional publisher.

Actually I was referring to Naked Came the Stranger [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_came_the_stranger].

EDIT:

Ah, yes, Atlanta Nights [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Came_the_Stranger] (working title Naked Came the Badfic). I've read some of it, it's bad. Not Eye of Argon bad, mostly, but still bad.

Though both of those were deliberate attempts to make inconsistent and lame drivel. For a better example, some of the better round-robin fanfics are pretty good. And you can sense the glee of a writer putting the characters in a cliffhanger another writer has to resolve.

Unrelated: Best article preview icon ever.

Derp. I could've saved myself all of 15 minutes on Google trying to remember the name by waiting a few minutes.

FIFTEEN MINUTES!

 

[OldNewNewOld]

Well, some of the mindless automatic biases people think you have would be against:

AAA Titles
Nintendo
Japanese RPGs
First Person Shooters
Games with a multiplayer focus
Modern games in general
Games with quicktime events
Tolkienesque Fantasy
Long cutscenes

Did i forget anything?

RPG games that are like Skyrim
RPG games that aren't like Skyrim

And that's it I think. ^.^

 

[Morbira]

Something about this story telling style reminds me of the second Onimusha game, albeit this is an advancement of those ideas.

 

[KDR_11k]

Randomization can work but in Diablo 3 it feels too restricted (seems to piece together whole rooms in a square grid, previous Diablos generated all the walls and doors and whatnot randomly with a few predefined set-pieces in every area) and thus repetitive. I think that's the same issue people had with Hellgate London. These loot games simply aren't driven by level design, that's just a backdrop for you murdering tons of dudes. The variety of dudes and items is the real content by generating more combat scenarios. Contrast Borderlands which had a completely handmade map but very few dudes and little gun variety so the combat scenarios were extremely limited.

 

[Podunk]

Has anyone played Spelunky? Now that is a very good randomly generated game, since it's about exploration and exploring the same thing twice kind of defeats the purpose.

 

[Eternal_Lament]

As someone else said, a contained survival horror game can use randomly generated rooms/hallways well. A recent example is SCP: Containment Breach. While only in it's second Alpha I believe, the game takes place in a secure facility, with each playthrough changing up the environment. What may have led to a safe zone instead leads to more hallways, and what may led to a simple storage room instead leads out into a lab with important information. Supposedly, later builds are supposed to allow a system in which secret rooms which led to even more mysteries or horrors only appear in certain playthroughs, closing off one section while opening up another. From what I understand, enemies are also randomly generated, in that different playthroughs introduce different enemies.