Anti-Indie'ers are giving me cancer!

[Zanten]

Goatseye said:
That's amazing. However, wouldn't repetition and similarities abound in a project like that?
I have to agree that the reward and success of this game is likely to be sky high. The premises of this engine is unheard of... at least to me.

Well, that is the primary issue, yes; many procedurally generated games do suffer from repetition. However, it does look to be something they are actively trying to combat, because even though they already HAVE a game world, they are continuing to work on improving the engine, adding new elements and variables that increase the game universe's complexity. The trailers, from this year's E3 and last year's debut reveal, were taken in-game, in-universe. It wasn't a hand-crafted planet, the dev literally 'flew around in a ship until he found an interesting spot to record from,' and although he knew that a fleet would be passing through the system at a specific time, and naturally timed his recording to match, they didn't design a setpiece to MAKE the ships appear; they were just out on their usual convoy run. The universe is so massive, they have dozens of computer-controlled 'robots' flying around it, recording little animated gifs of planets so they can look for any terrible designs, (green sky, bright pink soil) that needs tweaking.

So yes, I think that things may be a little repetitive, but only in the way that a massive, galaxy-scale game could be; even if you, somehow, had developers 'hand painting' a setting that massive, instead of generating it randomly, you'd collide with repetition, because devs can only come up with so many unique-looking trees before going batshit crazy. xP It might actually end up being LESS repetitive, given the size of the universe, than anything a hand-crafting team of three hundred people could come up with in a similarly sized universe.