sc94597 said:
Sure, but the assumptions in this thread were that there would be more than one planet in the scope of a game like No Man's Sky, Elite: Dangerous, and Star Citizen. I know how a generator works, use them often enough in computational physics. It depends greatly on which initial conditions and constants you choose. What you are describing is the equivalent of choosing a Skyrim preset and then modifying it to your liking. That works for one character, but let's say you know exactly how you want 60 characters to look. At that point you might as well just design the characters how you want them to look, and of course that would take just as much time and resources, while limiting your style to the generator's combinations. Hence, the issue with creating a universe or planet-sized game world for a game which depends on artificial assets and level design (like Starfox.) |
I understand what this thread is about perfectly.
What I'm describing isn't really akin to your Skyrim Character creation example, it's actually more about using development resources more wisely to do more with your time, but still make a focused title, with just as much core focus on quality, but with a lot more potential gameplay for the end player.
Ninja Theory's approach to game design still has a "hands on" approach, but the artists do more with their time, they aren't spending their time creating each speck of dust in a world, there's such a thing as too much attention to detail, especially when geometry and texture features of scenery can be randomized using a game engine to make every square millimetre of a world look different from the last, without an artist physically drawing all of that by hand.
My whole point is about developers just using their time more efficiently, not putting their focus into unimportant minutae that can be handled just as well by the game tools that modern developers have to hand.
NPCs can be handled in this way, as can vehicles.
Building a world or a bunch of them to be huge, using this kind of an approach doesn't mean you can't have design some features by hand down to the tiniest level of detail. Another point I'm making here is that developers have the options to use all of these things available too them.
If Hello Games wants to put some character focused elements, that they've designed by hand into No Mans Sky they can, even though their game's Universe was created using a procedural algorythm, these options are available any developer, especially Nintendo.
All of this depends entirely on the kind of game Nintendo wants Starfox too be, if they want this then it'll happen, if they want the game to be the classic style that Starfox games of old have always had then that's what it'll be.
