Afternoon, Internet. You know, it barely matters whether galaxy-spanning sim Infinity ends up being the space game to end all space games, or whether it’s just vapourware. As long as they keep turning out incredible images, like the planets-from-space in this recent devblog, I will be happy. Seriously, go and have a look at the galleries and tell me that the game you extrapolate from those images isn’t a thing of wonder – whether representative of the real thing, or otherwise…
Thanks to Tom for reminding us that Infinity exists.
Very bad example, considering how hand-crafted and concise WoW is about its environments — if anything, it’s probably good example how less is actually more, and why you’d want to avoid extra filler in your game just for the sake of having “believable environment”. Since having it seems to maily make people bitch and demand you give them some means to fast-travel over it all to where the action is and where they want to be.
If I were going to design a space MMO, I’d start small:
3 or 4 colony ships escape Earth just before some kind of catastrophe destroys the planet. You’ve got 4 or 5 earthlike planets around various stars and a colony to start — get to building — mines, farms, etc– you have to deal with local flora and fauna. With the first expansion, you have alien contact, and from then on out, more alien technology is introduced with each expansion, starships, etc, until gradually, you’ve got a full-blown 4X galactic conquest game.
What I want from a space game is the feeling of vastness, that there are no barriers to the universe. Even if it is artificial (which it really has to be, obviously), the impression of scale is enormously important. When I played Elite on the Spectrum, I knew the programmer had seeded the game with specific events, ships and species, but when combined with the vast model of the galaxy it all felt limitless, and that won me over. These days I can see the wizard behind the curtain and it spoils the whole experience. With the detail of Infinity, however, I can imagine getting lost once more.
I’d second John Ts suggestion, start small, build big. Todays gamers expectations are for a much higher LoD both graphically and in terms of content than games like Elite remotely delivered, and shallow as that may seem it’s the reality of the market place. In order to make things stand out, you have to be purposeful in your design work.
Dwarf Fortress does very nice things with it’s procedural generation. It also demonstrates Kadayi’s point about starting small and building big. The key is tuning your generating systems well, which is hard and expensive, and better done iteratively so ‘customers’ can provide testing and feedback. The Sims got it mostly right while Fable 2 created a gesture/social-interaction system to produce interesting results that just mostly just produces ludicrous behaviors.
“Completely and utterly procedurally generated surface populated with entirely boring NPCs if i so choose. You will do your best to get off that rock.”
Note that the quickest way to get out of a boring game world is to stop playing and return the game for a refund.
As people have said, the engine is stunning, and should be used somehow. If the mechanics of the game are fun on their own, then they could complement it well, but equally barren rocks aren’t that interesting on their own.
Procedural generation can work very well if there’s user input into its creation, or indeed if it’s just designed well. For example, Sim City is very compelling and yet all the designers did was create the rules, not lead you by the hand – indeed, the designer-created scenarios were much less fun than making your own city.