Trunkin said:
Hmm. I didn't know that procedural generation was used in W3, but I guess it would be a necessity due to the massive scale of the game. Ryze does have a lot of prerendered video, but the quality doesn't seem all that great, with very noticeable artifacts, so I just assumed it couldn't be all that big. Could be that I'm wrong, though. I might check the game files to see what I can see. |
The Witcher doesn't. The word Procedural gets tossed around in open world game discussions more than "fascist" in a tense Presidential race and just like that word, few grasp what it means in its contexts.
When it comes to assets, very, very few games procedurally generate them. Especially high end games. In fact, FAST Racing Neo is the only one I can name off the top of my head. Procedural generation in most games serves one of two functions: level creation in real time (randomized dungeon crawlers, for example) and object placement as a stwp in the process of creating hand designed levels or as a means of placing certain assets in real time (grass, usually). The Witcher 3 falls in the latter category.
As for how it stays compact, most open world games liberally reuse prop assets, natural assets, clutter assets, and even building assets, thus keeping space saved, while other games will have an excess of unique assets for all manner of minor things. Also, things like texture resolutions and polycounts must necessarily be kept lower so that they don't eat up resources needed for other aspects of the game.
